Modern Literature

MODERN LITERATURE MODERN LITERATURE The Great War of 1914-18 and the huge number of deaths it caused shattered people's faith in society and its institutions. This was a reason for Modernist to analyze the unique experience of the individual by exploring the inner world of the individual himself. The Modernist novel shattered most of the previous conventions, and they wrote as there was an absence of values given by a sense of emptiness and ambiguity. In every novel, there is a direct presentation of characters' thoughts, feelings, and memories. Moreover, the plot is not linear anymore. This kind of structure gives the sense of `duration' of the narration. The development of the Modernist novel was deeply influenced by the new theories of Freud who proposed the theory of human consciousness multi-layered, involving different level of experience and memory. Therefore, perception of reality is fundamentally subjective. The technique of free association and wordplay forms an important part of James Joyce's Ulysses. In addition to this, a French philosopher, Bergson, also influenced the Modernist movement. He elaborated a philosophical position in contrast with the scientific materialism and positivism. He also argued that time could not be measured because it is a flow, a `duration' and not a series of points. Important during this period is the use of the `stream of consciousness' introduced by William James and which deeply influenced the narrative method. Consciousness is something that flows and it comprehends the entire range of an individual's mental activity. Therefore, they could introduce new techniques of writing: Direct interior monologue which refers to the direct presentation of character's stream of consciousness without the guiding of a narrator or author; Indirect interior monologue that refers to the indirect presentation of a character's thoughts filtered through the voice of an anonymous third-person narrator. Woolf and Joyce differ in their approaches to the question of how to represent stream of consciousness. Joyce is fundamentally concerned with the possibilities, and limitations, of language in all its modes and forms. James JOYCE James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882, and having an extraordinary academic ability he went to Paris to study medicine. But he changed his mind and he started writing poems and prose. Then he met Nora Barnacle and he moved with her first to Pola and and to Trieste. Joyce became English teacher and he first published a collection of poetry. In 1914 he published Dubliners. During WWI, he moved to Switzerland with his family and wrote A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, his first autobiographical novel, in 1916, and later in 1918 he wrote Exiles which was declared obscene and banned in Britain and in America but it was published in Paris. During this period he always wrote Ulysses, his masterpiece. Finnegans Wake was the novel in which he truly developed his own polylinguistic vocabulary and got