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NOVEL II LECTURE 2. Novel: The Genera. SYNOPSIS. MODERNISM AND REALISM` A DETAILD TALK 1. Elements of Novel 2. How the novel has evolved… How Novel is defined… 3. Unique form of Novel Novel Compared to the Story 4 . History of the Novel 5. Birth of the Novel
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NOVEL IILECTURE 2 Novel: The Genera
SYNOPSIS MODERNISM AND REALISM` A DETAILD TALK 1. Elements of Novel 2. How the novel has evolved… • How Novel is defined… 3. Unique form of Novel • Novel Compared to the Story 4. History of the Novel 5. Birth of the Novel 6. Focus of Modern Novel
SYNOPSIS 7. Types of Modern Novel • THE EPIC • NARRATIVE VS. FICTION • IRONY • ALLUSION • Picaresque Novel • REALISM • MODERNISM • POSTMODERNISM • NATURALISM • NONPARTICIPANT NARRATORS
SYNOPSIS 8. James Joyce (1882-1941) • Modernism and James Joyce - A bit in detail… • Modernism • The Rise • Characteristics 9. A Review of James’ famous works
Concept of Modernism Modernism and Modern Novel
modernism • The term modernism refers to the radical shift in aesthetic and cultural sensibilities evident in the art and literature of the post-World War One period. • The ordered, stable and inherently meaningful world view of the nineteenth century could not, wrote T.S. Eliot, accord with "the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history."
Modernism thus marks a distinctive break with Victorian bourgeois morality; rejecting nineteenth-century optimism, they presented a profoundly pessimistic picture of a culture in disarray. • This despair often results in an apparent apathy and moral relativism.
In literature, the movement is associated with the works of (among others) Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Franz Kafka and Knut Hamsun. • In their attempt to throw off the aesthetic burden of the realist novel, these writers introduced a variety of literary tactics and devices:
Modernism is often derided for abandoning the social world in favour of its narcissistic interest in language and its processes. • Recognizing the failure of language to ever fully communicate meaning ("That's not it at all, that's not what I meant at all" laments Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock), the modernists generally downplayed content in favour of an investigation of form. • The fragmented, non-chronological, poetic forms utilized by Eliot and Pound revolutionized poetic language.
Modernist formalism, however, was not without its political cost. Many of the chief Modernists either flirted with fascism or openly espoused it (Eliot, Yeats, Hamsun and Pound). • This should not be surprising: modernism is markedly non-egalitarian; its disregard for the shared conventions of meaning make many of its supreme accomplishments (eg. Eliot's "The Wasteland," Pound's "Cantos," Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Woolf's The Waves) largely inaccessible to the common reader. • For Eliot, such obscurantism was necessary to halt the erosion of art in the age of commodity circulation and a literature adjusted to the lowest common denominator.
In looking to carry on many of the aesthetic goals of the Modernist project, hypertext fiction must confront again the politics of its achievements in order to position itself anew with regard to reader. • With its reliance on expensive technology and its interest in re-thinking the linear nature of The Book, hypertext fiction may find itself accused of the same elitism as its modernist predecessors.
Reality Novel Modernism and Modern Novel
Realism • Realism is an aesthetic mode which broke with the classical demands of art to show life as it should be in order to show life "as it is." • The work of realist art tends to eschew the elevated subject matter of tragedy in favour of the quotidian; the average, the commonplace, the middle classes and their daily struggles with the mean verities of everyday existence--these are the typical subject matters of realism.
The attempt, however, to render life as it is, to use language as a kind of undistorting mirror of, or perfectly transparent window to, the "real" is fraught with contradictions. Realism in this simplified sense must assume a one-to-one relationship between the signifier (the word, "tree" for example) and the thing it represents (the actual arboreal object typically found in forests).
Realism must, in effect, disguise its own status as artifice, must try and force language into transparency through an appeal to our ideologically constructed sense of the real. • The reader must be addressed in such a way that he or she is always, in some way, saying, "Yes. That's it, that's how it really is."
Realism can never fully offer up the world in all its complexity, its irreducible plenitude. Its verisimilitude is an effect achieved through the deployment of certain literary and ideological conventions which have been invested with a kind of truth value. • The use of an omniscient narrator who gives us access to a character's thoughts, feelings and motivations, for example, is a highly formalized convention that produces a sense of psychological depth; the characters seem to have "lives" independent of the text itself.
They, of course, do not; the sense that they do is achieved entirely by the fact that both the author and the reader share these codes of the real. • The consensual nature of such codes is so deep that we forget that we are in the presence of fiction. As Terry Eagleton notes,
The sign as "reflection," "expression" or "representation" denies the productive character of language: it suppresses the fact that what we only have a "world" at all because we have language to signify it. (136)
The realist novel first developed in the nineteenth century and is the form we associate with the work of writers such as Austen, Balzac, George Eliot and Tolstoy. • According to Barthes, the narrative or plot of a realist novel is structured around an opening enigma which throws the conventional cultural and signifying practices into disarray. In a detective novel, for example, the opening enigma is usually a murder, or a theft.
The event throws the world into a paranoid state of suspicion; the reader and the protagonist can no longer trust anyone because signs--people, objects, words--no longer have the obvious meaning they had before the event. • But the story must move inevitably towards closure, which in the realist novel involves some dissolution or resolution of the enigma: the murderer is caught, the case is solved, the hero marries the girl.
The realist novel drives toward the final re-establishment of harmony and thus re-assures the reader that the value system of signs and cultural practices which he or she shares with the author is not in danger. • The political affiliation of the realist novel is thus evident; in trying to show us the world as it is, it often reaffirms, in the last instance, the way things are.
As Catherine Belsey notes, classic realism is "still the dominant popular mode in literature, film, and television drama" (67). • It has been denounced as the crudest from of the readerlly text, and its conventions subverted and parodied by the modern novel, the new novel and postmodern novel. • However, the form, like the capitalist mode of production with which it is historically coincident, has shown remarkable resiliency. • It will no doubt continue to function, if only anti-thetically, as one of the chief influences on the development of hypertext fiction.
Elements of Novel Novel: The Genera
How the novel has evolved… • Since its first appearance in the mid-1700s-novel started as a way to preserve oral stories of various cultures and grew to include epics and romances. • In the 1700s, novels were actually used to spread gossip and other allegations of scandalous behavior. • The authors changed names and claimed the writing was fiction in order to betray secrets while escaping legal consequences.
DEFINITIONS… “A book length story in prose, whose author tries to create a sense that, while we read, we experience actual life.” By X. J. Kennedy “An imaginary work in prose of a considerable length, which presents as real certain characters living in a given environment and describes their attitudes, fate, and adventures.” By Percy Lubbock “An extended fictional narrative, usually written in prose.” Anonymous “The novel is like a symphony In that the closing movement Echoes and resounds with all that has gone before…”’By John Gardner
The novel has four unique qualities that set it apart from other types of prose.
1. Length is generally 100 pages or more • The first quality of a novel is its length. Although there are no definite rules on the subject of length, it is generally agreed among writers and publishers that the length of the narrative must be 100 pages or more. • If it is less than that, it is usually referred to as a novella, such as Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Harper Lee’s classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird, for example, contains more than 250 pages.
2. Emphasis is on the character • The second quality of a novel is its emphasis on the character or characters in the story. • Unlike the short story, the length of a novel allows the author to give the reader a much fuller description of the characters and to introduce more than one conflict. • Therefore, the reader can better understand the character’s motives for action or inaction, relationships with others, and their own personal feelings, dreams and fears.
3.Allows for more than one theme, conflict, point of view or plot • The third quality of a novel is its ability to include more than one theme, conflict, point of view and plot. • The novel’s length allows the author to explore various themes
4. Plot explores characters in conflict to understand our own humanity • The fourth quality of a novel is the complexity of plot. • Unlike the short story, a novel will often have more than one major conflict within the plot. • Often the author is interested in developing a plot in which the main goal is for the character to better understand his or her own humanity or place in society.
Novel Compared to the Short Story NOVEL • 50,000 words or more • Many characters • Complex story • Deeper understanding of life or individuals SHORT STORY • 5,000 words or less • Few or one character • Focuses on one event • Better understanding of an event or character
History of the Novel • Oral telling of myths, history, and stories • Written storytelling in the form of the epic • Written prose fiction concerned with adventure known as the romance. (The French word for the novel is roman) • Written prose fiction concerned with reality or actual life. (The English word for new is novel) 1700s
The Industrial Revolution • These social and economic changes occurred as a result of the Industrial Revolution. • The colonization of the Americas gave England an abundance of raw materials, which led to the creation of a merchant class, members of which sought their success in the profit made from trading goods. • Further, a series of technological changes, such as new machinery, defined what we now call the Industrial Revolution.
The Industrial Revolution • With it came the growth of cities and a change in the entire social, political and economic structure in England. • From the creation of industry, a new social and economic class of people emerged—the middle class. • They gained their wealth through the ownership of factories and the institutions that supported them.
Birth of the Novel New market for the novel by 1700s! Spending money available for entertainment Increase in the number of people able to read More leisure time available Creation Of The Middle Class
Focus of Modern Novel The Middle Class Concerned with real problems and real situations!
Pope Richardson Early Beginnings–1700s • “The proper study of mankind is man.” —Alexander Pope • Samuel Richardson • Henry Fielding
Defoe The Founder of the Modern English Novel • Daniel Defoe • Wrote Robinson Crusoe (1719) • Moll Flanders (1722) • Born 1660 • Died 1731 • Established a “middle class” perspective • Basic elements: Plot, Character , Setting, Point of View, Theme
Types of novels Novel: The Genera
THE EPIC Stories and songs emerged as an oral means of communication and preserving the past: tales of heroic battles or struggles, myths, or religious beliefs. In a time before mass communication, the oral tradition enabled people to pass down stories, most often in the form of rhyming poems.
Thus, the earliest forms of fiction were in fact poetry. • Eventually written down, these extended narratives developed into epics, which were long narrative poems about heroic figures whose actions determine the fate of a nation or entire race. What other stories or films do you know of that follow this common theme?
NARRATIVE VS. FICTION A work of FICTION is a narrative that, for the most part, originates in the imagination of the author rather than in history or fact. The word “fiction” comes from the Latin “fictio”, which means “a shaping, a counterfeiting” A NARRATIVE tells a story by presenting events in some logical or orderly way.
IRONY Verbal Irony: when the character says the opposite of what is really meant. Examples? Dramatic Irony: when the reader or audience knows something that the character has yet to realize. Examples? Situational Irony: when something is about to happen to a character or characters who expect the opposite.
ALLUSION An Allusion is a reference in a text to a person, place, or thing—fictitious or real. These references are often to literature, history, mythology, or the Bible.
