Max Saunders
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199579761
- eISBN:
- 9780191722882
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579761.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This book explores how writers from the 1870s to the 1930s experimented with forms of life‐writing — biography, autobiography, memoir, diary, journal — increasingly for the purposes of fiction. It ...
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This book explores how writers from the 1870s to the 1930s experimented with forms of life‐writing — biography, autobiography, memoir, diary, journal — increasingly for the purposes of fiction. It argues for an upsurge in new hybrid forms — identified in a surprisingly early essay of 1906 (which provides a key term) as ‘autobiografiction’. Examples include ‘Mark Rutherford’, Gissing, Samuel Butler, Gosse, and A. C. Benson. The book offers a taxonomy of their extraordinary variety, showing how they arose as the pressures of secularization and psychological theory disturbed the categories of biography and autobiography. It argues that a group of concepts, forms, and tropes regularly co‐exist: portraiture, imaginary portraits, collections of such portraits; and (because they are often of imaginary artists) imaginary works of art and literature. Autobiografiction also sheds strong light on modernism. Modernism is often characterized as a movement of ‘impersonality' — a rejection of auto/biography — but most of its major works engage in profound ways with questions of life‐writing. The second part looks at writers experimenting further with autobiografiction as impressionism turns into modernism, and consists of detailed readings of Joyce, Stein, Pound, Woolf, and others, and juxtaposing their work with contemporaries whose experiments with life‐writing forms are no less striking. It argues that connecting modernist games with auto/biography and the ‘New Biography’ with their turn‐of‐the‐century precursors allows them to be understood in a new way. A coda considers the after‐life of these experiments in postmodern fiction. A conclusion considers the theoretical implications developed throughout, and argues that ‘autobiografiction’ can also shed light on under‐theorized questions such as what we mean by ‘autobiographical’ and the relations between autobiography and fiction.Less
This book explores how writers from the 1870s to the 1930s experimented with forms of life‐writing — biography, autobiography, memoir, diary, journal — increasingly for the purposes of fiction. It argues for an upsurge in new hybrid forms — identified in a surprisingly early essay of 1906 (which provides a key term) as ‘autobiografiction’. Examples include ‘Mark Rutherford’, Gissing, Samuel Butler, Gosse, and A. C. Benson. The book offers a taxonomy of their extraordinary variety, showing how they arose as the pressures of secularization and psychological theory disturbed the categories of biography and autobiography. It argues that a group of concepts, forms, and tropes regularly co‐exist: portraiture, imaginary portraits, collections of such portraits; and (because they are often of imaginary artists) imaginary works of art and literature. Autobiografiction also sheds strong light on modernism. Modernism is often characterized as a movement of ‘impersonality' — a rejection of auto/biography — but most of its major works engage in profound ways with questions of life‐writing. The second part looks at writers experimenting further with autobiografiction as impressionism turns into modernism, and consists of detailed readings of Joyce, Stein, Pound, Woolf, and others, and juxtaposing their work with contemporaries whose experiments with life‐writing forms are no less striking. It argues that connecting modernist games with auto/biography and the ‘New Biography’ with their turn‐of‐the‐century precursors allows them to be understood in a new way. A coda considers the after‐life of these experiments in postmodern fiction. A conclusion considers the theoretical implications developed throughout, and argues that ‘autobiografiction’ can also shed light on under‐theorized questions such as what we mean by ‘autobiographical’ and the relations between autobiography and fiction.
Max Saunders
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199579761
- eISBN:
- 9780191722882
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579761.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter begins with Walter Pater as a key figure, representing a gateway from impressionism to modernism and beyond. It discusses the implications of Pater's impressionist aesthetics for ...
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This chapter begins with Walter Pater as a key figure, representing a gateway from impressionism to modernism and beyond. It discusses the implications of Pater's impressionist aesthetics for autobiography and for modernist writers; and explores his investment in the form of the ‘Imaginary Portrait’ in literature, arguing that while Imaginary Portraits can be found in earlier writing, they become increasingly important for modernist engagements with life‐writing. The relation between Paterian subjectivity and Victorian subjectivism is discussed, together with his scepticism about the boundary between fact and imagination.Less
This chapter begins with Walter Pater as a key figure, representing a gateway from impressionism to modernism and beyond. It discusses the implications of Pater's impressionist aesthetics for autobiography and for modernist writers; and explores his investment in the form of the ‘Imaginary Portrait’ in literature, arguing that while Imaginary Portraits can be found in earlier writing, they become increasingly important for modernist engagements with life‐writing. The relation between Paterian subjectivity and Victorian subjectivism is discussed, together with his scepticism about the boundary between fact and imagination.
Max Saunders
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199579761
- eISBN:
- 9780191722882
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579761.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter argues that the notion of ‘aesthetic autobiography’, attached by Suzanne Nalbantian to the modernist autobiographical Künstlerroman, in fact originates in the way earlier writers such as ...
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This chapter argues that the notion of ‘aesthetic autobiography’, attached by Suzanne Nalbantian to the modernist autobiographical Künstlerroman, in fact originates in the way earlier writers such as Ruskin and Gosse develop literary forms to construct their lives as aesthetically motivated. Ruskin's impressionist autobiography is investigated as a precursor of early twentieth‐century literary autobiographies by James, Conrad and Ford. Particular attention is paid to time, memory, impressions, and reading. The chapter proposes a changing view of ‘mediation’ through the period, arguing that Realism denies the mediation of reality by art; impressionism accepts the mediation of reality, but locates it in the process of perception and consciousness; modernism combines this interest in phenomenology with an awareness of how language or form mediates between the subject and the object; whereas postmodernism is founded on a denial, or suppression, of the objectivity of the object. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Proust (of all modernists the most indebted to Ruskin, and a sophisticated analyst of impressionism), from the rejection of biography in Contre Sainte‐Beuve to the fictionalization of autobiography in A la recherche. The essay on Ruskin, ‘On Reading’, is used to show how as for Ruskin autobiography is an act of reading, for Proust reading is an act of autobiography. Ruskinian impressionism is thus seen as also anticipating the modernist fictionalized auto/biography discussed in Part II.Less
This chapter argues that the notion of ‘aesthetic autobiography’, attached by Suzanne Nalbantian to the modernist autobiographical Künstlerroman, in fact originates in the way earlier writers such as Ruskin and Gosse develop literary forms to construct their lives as aesthetically motivated. Ruskin's impressionist autobiography is investigated as a precursor of early twentieth‐century literary autobiographies by James, Conrad and Ford. Particular attention is paid to time, memory, impressions, and reading. The chapter proposes a changing view of ‘mediation’ through the period, arguing that Realism denies the mediation of reality by art; impressionism accepts the mediation of reality, but locates it in the process of perception and consciousness; modernism combines this interest in phenomenology with an awareness of how language or form mediates between the subject and the object; whereas postmodernism is founded on a denial, or suppression, of the objectivity of the object. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Proust (of all modernists the most indebted to Ruskin, and a sophisticated analyst of impressionism), from the rejection of biography in Contre Sainte‐Beuve to the fictionalization of autobiography in A la recherche. The essay on Ruskin, ‘On Reading’, is used to show how as for Ruskin autobiography is an act of reading, for Proust reading is an act of autobiography. Ruskinian impressionism is thus seen as also anticipating the modernist fictionalized auto/biography discussed in Part II.
Max Saunders
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199579761
- eISBN:
- 9780191722882
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579761.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This shorter chapter is really a coda to the first half of the book, arguing that an alternative contemporary response to the disturbance in life‐writing is represented by the impressionist ...
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This shorter chapter is really a coda to the first half of the book, arguing that an alternative contemporary response to the disturbance in life‐writing is represented by the impressionist autobiographies of the novelists Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford. It discusses the recent rehabilitation of the concept of literary impressionism in theoretical studies of fiction. While its discussion of the impression looks back to the studies of Pater, Ruskin, and Proust, it also looks forward to the modernists discussed in Part II.Less
This shorter chapter is really a coda to the first half of the book, arguing that an alternative contemporary response to the disturbance in life‐writing is represented by the impressionist autobiographies of the novelists Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford. It discusses the recent rehabilitation of the concept of literary impressionism in theoretical studies of fiction. While its discussion of the impression looks back to the studies of Pater, Ruskin, and Proust, it also looks forward to the modernists discussed in Part II.
Jesse Matz
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780231164061
- eISBN:
- 9780231543057
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231164061.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
Impressionism captured the world's imagination in the late nineteenth century and remains with us today. Portraying the dynamic effects of modernity, impressionist artists revolutionized the arts and ...
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Impressionism captured the world's imagination in the late nineteenth century and remains with us today. Portraying the dynamic effects of modernity, impressionist artists revolutionized the arts and the wider culture. Impressionism transformed the very pattern of reality, introducing new ways to look at and think about the world and our experience of it. Its legacy has been felt in many major contributions to popular and high culture, from cubism and early cinema to the works of Zadie Smith and W. G. Sebald, from advertisements for Pepsi to the observations of Oliver Sacks and Malcolm Gladwell. Yet impressionism's persistence has also been a problem, a matter of inauthenticity, superficiality, and complicity in what is merely “impressionistic” about culture today. Jesse Matz considers these two legacies—the positive and the negative—to explain impressionism's true contemporary significance. As Lasting Impressions moves through contemporary literature, painting, and popular culture, Matz explains how the perceptual role, cultural effects, and social implications of impressionism continue to generate meaning and foster new forms of creativity, understanding, and public engagement.Less
Impressionism captured the world's imagination in the late nineteenth century and remains with us today. Portraying the dynamic effects of modernity, impressionist artists revolutionized the arts and the wider culture. Impressionism transformed the very pattern of reality, introducing new ways to look at and think about the world and our experience of it. Its legacy has been felt in many major contributions to popular and high culture, from cubism and early cinema to the works of Zadie Smith and W. G. Sebald, from advertisements for Pepsi to the observations of Oliver Sacks and Malcolm Gladwell. Yet impressionism's persistence has also been a problem, a matter of inauthenticity, superficiality, and complicity in what is merely “impressionistic” about culture today. Jesse Matz considers these two legacies—the positive and the negative—to explain impressionism's true contemporary significance. As Lasting Impressions moves through contemporary literature, painting, and popular culture, Matz explains how the perceptual role, cultural effects, and social implications of impressionism continue to generate meaning and foster new forms of creativity, understanding, and public engagement.
Joshua Landy
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195169393
- eISBN:
- 9780199787845
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195169393.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
This chapter lays out Proust's theory of knowledge, according to which the data of sense are first filtered through the intuition, where they suffer perspectival distortion of both a general and an ...
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This chapter lays out Proust's theory of knowledge, according to which the data of sense are first filtered through the intuition, where they suffer perspectival distortion of both a general and an individual nature; and then through the intellect, where, depending on the type of data in question, they are either rectified or further distorted. This theory explains the otherwise unaccountable importance given by Marcel to the enigmatic text he penned as a youth, a “prose poem” describing three steeples of Martinville. The prose poem, it turns out, shows both perspectival operations at work, the universal and individual; the paragraphs that frame it, meanwhile, testify to the subsequent work of the intellect. Of the images, some directly reflect Marcel's idiosyncratic network of associations, the way his mind uniquely organizes the data of experience, and others — those based on metonymic connections — indirectly reveal Marcel's continuing belief in the aura of places. Proust's view is not merely that perspective is momentous, inexorably conditioning an individual's experience of the world, as well as rendering that experience fundamentally incomprehensible to others; it is also that perspective is valuable. We may well begin by seeking accurate knowledge of the external world, and by repeatedly bumping up, in frustration, against the perennially curved and coloured glass of perspective. But if we are good Proustians, we will make the Copernican turn, realizing that what blocked our access to our ostensible goal was in fact that which was, all along, most worthy of being known. The secret to life consists of redirecting attention, in recognizing that an apparent liability is, in reality, our greatest asset.Less
This chapter lays out Proust's theory of knowledge, according to which the data of sense are first filtered through the intuition, where they suffer perspectival distortion of both a general and an individual nature; and then through the intellect, where, depending on the type of data in question, they are either rectified or further distorted. This theory explains the otherwise unaccountable importance given by Marcel to the enigmatic text he penned as a youth, a “prose poem” describing three steeples of Martinville. The prose poem, it turns out, shows both perspectival operations at work, the universal and individual; the paragraphs that frame it, meanwhile, testify to the subsequent work of the intellect. Of the images, some directly reflect Marcel's idiosyncratic network of associations, the way his mind uniquely organizes the data of experience, and others — those based on metonymic connections — indirectly reveal Marcel's continuing belief in the aura of places. Proust's view is not merely that perspective is momentous, inexorably conditioning an individual's experience of the world, as well as rendering that experience fundamentally incomprehensible to others; it is also that perspective is valuable. We may well begin by seeking accurate knowledge of the external world, and by repeatedly bumping up, in frustration, against the perennially curved and coloured glass of perspective. But if we are good Proustians, we will make the Copernican turn, realizing that what blocked our access to our ostensible goal was in fact that which was, all along, most worthy of being known. The secret to life consists of redirecting attention, in recognizing that an apparent liability is, in reality, our greatest asset.
William Oddie
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199582013
- eISBN:
- 9780191702303
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582013.003.0005
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Literature
This chapter focuses on Chesterton's life from 1894–9. Chesterton finally emerged from his periodic depressions two years after leaving St Paul's School. In the springtime of 1894 his mood was one of ...
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This chapter focuses on Chesterton's life from 1894–9. Chesterton finally emerged from his periodic depressions two years after leaving St Paul's School. In the springtime of 1894 his mood was one of determined optimism about the future. But after only one year at the Slade School of Art, Chesterton brought his studies there abruptly to an end, thus changing the direction, not only of his university years, but of his whole life. The decision to bring his time at the Slade so abruptly to an end was attributed to his desire to escape from the prevailing intellectual atmosphere there, and particularly from current theories of art — particularly those surrounding Impressionism — which he thought led ‘to the metaphysical suggestion that things only exist as we perceive them, or that things do not exist at all’; this was a notion which he unquestionably saw as contributing to the ‘mood of unreality and sterile isolation that settled at this time upon [him]’.Less
This chapter focuses on Chesterton's life from 1894–9. Chesterton finally emerged from his periodic depressions two years after leaving St Paul's School. In the springtime of 1894 his mood was one of determined optimism about the future. But after only one year at the Slade School of Art, Chesterton brought his studies there abruptly to an end, thus changing the direction, not only of his university years, but of his whole life. The decision to bring his time at the Slade so abruptly to an end was attributed to his desire to escape from the prevailing intellectual atmosphere there, and particularly from current theories of art — particularly those surrounding Impressionism — which he thought led ‘to the metaphysical suggestion that things only exist as we perceive them, or that things do not exist at all’; this was a notion which he unquestionably saw as contributing to the ‘mood of unreality and sterile isolation that settled at this time upon [him]’.
Fernihough Anne
- Published in print:
- 1993
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198112358
- eISBN:
- 9780191670770
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198112358.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
D. H. Lawrence and his Bloomsbury contemporaries shared many of the same concerns, and, in particular, they set out to dispel the myth of a naively mimetic art, seeing realism to be complicit with ...
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D. H. Lawrence and his Bloomsbury contemporaries shared many of the same concerns, and, in particular, they set out to dispel the myth of a naively mimetic art, seeing realism to be complicit with what would today be described as a logocentric model of language. It now seems that this idea of a naively mimetic realism was something of a shibboleth, and that Lawrence and the Bloomsbury critics deliberately presented it in crude and reductive terms. It is unlikely that unproblematic, one-to-one correspondence between elements of language and world was ever really assumed by realistic art, that art ever aspired to be the world, rendering itself curiously redundant, in the way that many modernist art theorists suggest. This is, however, what Lawrence and his Bloomsbury contemporaries tried to argue in order to further the cause of Post-Impressionism and other forms of modern art.Less
D. H. Lawrence and his Bloomsbury contemporaries shared many of the same concerns, and, in particular, they set out to dispel the myth of a naively mimetic art, seeing realism to be complicit with what would today be described as a logocentric model of language. It now seems that this idea of a naively mimetic realism was something of a shibboleth, and that Lawrence and the Bloomsbury critics deliberately presented it in crude and reductive terms. It is unlikely that unproblematic, one-to-one correspondence between elements of language and world was ever really assumed by realistic art, that art ever aspired to be the world, rendering itself curiously redundant, in the way that many modernist art theorists suggest. This is, however, what Lawrence and his Bloomsbury contemporaries tried to argue in order to further the cause of Post-Impressionism and other forms of modern art.
Roger Keys
- Published in print:
- 1996
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198151609
- eISBN:
- 9780191672767
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198151609.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, European Literature
This chapter examines briefly the development of the Russian realist novel genre and its significance in the eyes of both the reading public and of the writers themselves. It then examines the ...
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This chapter examines briefly the development of the Russian realist novel genre and its significance in the eyes of both the reading public and of the writers themselves. It then examines the development of new forms of creative expression in fiction, such as character ‘impressionism’ in Anton Pavlovich Chekhov's fictional works.Less
This chapter examines briefly the development of the Russian realist novel genre and its significance in the eyes of both the reading public and of the writers themselves. It then examines the development of new forms of creative expression in fiction, such as character ‘impressionism’ in Anton Pavlovich Chekhov's fictional works.
Roger Keys
- Published in print:
- 1996
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198151609
- eISBN:
- 9780191672767
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198151609.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, European Literature
The problem of evolving an adequate definition of literary impressionism has been investigated by J. W. Mains, who distinguishes two main areas in critical usage. The first corresponds to ‘unmediated ...
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The problem of evolving an adequate definition of literary impressionism has been investigated by J. W. Mains, who distinguishes two main areas in critical usage. The first corresponds to ‘unmediated lyricism’, where ‘the writer himself is the impressionist, and it is his sensibility, his perceptions that we get’. The second approach is referred to as ‘mediated lyricism’ and as Mains suggest, it has ‘little or no connection with the Impressionist movement in painting’. This chapter examines the attempts of Andrei Belyi and later critics to associate Chekhov's impressionism with unmediated lyricism.Less
The problem of evolving an adequate definition of literary impressionism has been investigated by J. W. Mains, who distinguishes two main areas in critical usage. The first corresponds to ‘unmediated lyricism’, where ‘the writer himself is the impressionist, and it is his sensibility, his perceptions that we get’. The second approach is referred to as ‘mediated lyricism’ and as Mains suggest, it has ‘little or no connection with the Impressionist movement in painting’. This chapter examines the attempts of Andrei Belyi and later critics to associate Chekhov's impressionism with unmediated lyricism.
Karolyn Steffens
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780748694266
- eISBN:
- 9781474412391
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748694266.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Foregrounding intersections between Ford and Freud, this chapter analyzes Ford’s Impressionism alongside Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Tracing the development of Ford’s Impressionism through ...
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Foregrounding intersections between Ford and Freud, this chapter analyzes Ford’s Impressionism alongside Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Tracing the development of Ford’s Impressionism through episodes from No Enemy, ‘True Love and a GCM’, and Parade’s End, the compositional evolution that emerges from this comparison displays how Ford’s Impressionism becomes an aesthetic of duality, mirroring Tietjens who becomes the paradigmatic homo duplex in the trenches. Instead of merely representing the violence of war (Thanatos), these three texts illustrate how both Eros and Thanatos become constitutive of the trauma of the Great War for Ford. His Impressionism evolves into one that defines traumatized consciousness as interpenetrated by both Eros and Thanatos, an aesthetic that illuminates the frequently overlooked intersections between sexuality and violence in Freud’s theories of trauma.Less
Foregrounding intersections between Ford and Freud, this chapter analyzes Ford’s Impressionism alongside Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Tracing the development of Ford’s Impressionism through episodes from No Enemy, ‘True Love and a GCM’, and Parade’s End, the compositional evolution that emerges from this comparison displays how Ford’s Impressionism becomes an aesthetic of duality, mirroring Tietjens who becomes the paradigmatic homo duplex in the trenches. Instead of merely representing the violence of war (Thanatos), these three texts illustrate how both Eros and Thanatos become constitutive of the trauma of the Great War for Ford. His Impressionism evolves into one that defines traumatized consciousness as interpenetrated by both Eros and Thanatos, an aesthetic that illuminates the frequently overlooked intersections between sexuality and violence in Freud’s theories of trauma.
Alexandra Becquet
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780748694266
- eISBN:
- 9781474412391
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748694266.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter examines the intermedial structure of Parade’s End, considering it as an art composition and Ford’s approach to ‘reflect’ and ‘reflect on’ the traumatic experience of the Great War. ...
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This chapter examines the intermedial structure of Parade’s End, considering it as an art composition and Ford’s approach to ‘reflect’ and ‘reflect on’ the traumatic experience of the Great War. While Impressionism is first shown as a fitting aesthetics to present the individual’s shattering experience of Armageddon through its subjective perception, the tetralogy’s sights and sounds are then studied for their translation into the text’s fabric and as they appeal to the readers’ senses and memory to immerse them into the narrative. The readers are indeed to synthesize a text stamped by the time-shift, an agent of both fragmentation and composition which relies on memory and on principles operating in music thus revealing the musical structure of Ford’s work. By means of the arts, Parade’s End exposes the trauma engendered by the war to transfer it onto its readers as the design of Ford’s intermedial composition depends on it.Less
This chapter examines the intermedial structure of Parade’s End, considering it as an art composition and Ford’s approach to ‘reflect’ and ‘reflect on’ the traumatic experience of the Great War. While Impressionism is first shown as a fitting aesthetics to present the individual’s shattering experience of Armageddon through its subjective perception, the tetralogy’s sights and sounds are then studied for their translation into the text’s fabric and as they appeal to the readers’ senses and memory to immerse them into the narrative. The readers are indeed to synthesize a text stamped by the time-shift, an agent of both fragmentation and composition which relies on memory and on principles operating in music thus revealing the musical structure of Ford’s work. By means of the arts, Parade’s End exposes the trauma engendered by the war to transfer it onto its readers as the design of Ford’s intermedial composition depends on it.
Adam Parkes
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195383812
- eISBN:
- 9780199896950
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195383812.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter considers the intricate relations between Woolf’s theory of the “moment of being,” issues of gender and sexuality, and tensions between Pater’s impressionist aesthetics and Roger Fry’s ...
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This chapter considers the intricate relations between Woolf’s theory of the “moment of being,” issues of gender and sexuality, and tensions between Pater’s impressionist aesthetics and Roger Fry’s post-impressionism. Woolf recognized the subversive aspects of Pater and his male heirs, but she suspected their homoerotic impressionisms of complicity with patriarchal social conventions. Instead of seeing Fry’s post-impressionism as a clean break from conservative aesthetic and political positions, however, she found disquieting continuities in his critical and theoretical practice with the Paterian tradition. Thus Woolf suggests that post-impressionism was an extension of impressionism rather than a rejection of it.Less
This chapter considers the intricate relations between Woolf’s theory of the “moment of being,” issues of gender and sexuality, and tensions between Pater’s impressionist aesthetics and Roger Fry’s post-impressionism. Woolf recognized the subversive aspects of Pater and his male heirs, but she suspected their homoerotic impressionisms of complicity with patriarchal social conventions. Instead of seeing Fry’s post-impressionism as a clean break from conservative aesthetic and political positions, however, she found disquieting continuities in his critical and theoretical practice with the Paterian tradition. Thus Woolf suggests that post-impressionism was an extension of impressionism rather than a rejection of it.
Allison Schachter
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199812639
- eISBN:
- 9780199919413
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199812639.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature, European Literature
This chapter examines Leah Goldberg’s 1946 modernist Hebrew novel Ve-hu ha-’or (And That Is the Light). Goldberg’s novel portrays the tensions between Jewish and European literary culture through her ...
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This chapter examines Leah Goldberg’s 1946 modernist Hebrew novel Ve-hu ha-’or (And That Is the Light). Goldberg’s novel portrays the tensions between Jewish and European literary culture through her female protagonist, Nora. Although Goldberg wrote the novel after immigrating to Palestine in 1935, she highlights the gender politics of Jewish culture in interwar Europe. The novel grapples with the triangulation of Hebrew, Yiddish, and European modernist traditions and cultures and foregrounds the ways that the modernist aesthetics of diaspora signal the changing gender system of Jewish culture. In the novel, Hebrew is a deterritorialized language for modernist expression, one that must embrace both Jewish and European literary culture.Less
This chapter examines Leah Goldberg’s 1946 modernist Hebrew novel Ve-hu ha-’or (And That Is the Light). Goldberg’s novel portrays the tensions between Jewish and European literary culture through her female protagonist, Nora. Although Goldberg wrote the novel after immigrating to Palestine in 1935, she highlights the gender politics of Jewish culture in interwar Europe. The novel grapples with the triangulation of Hebrew, Yiddish, and European modernist traditions and cultures and foregrounds the ways that the modernist aesthetics of diaspora signal the changing gender system of Jewish culture. In the novel, Hebrew is a deterritorialized language for modernist expression, one that must embrace both Jewish and European literary culture.
Keith Lehrer
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780195304985
- eISBN:
- 9780199918164
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195304985.003.0003
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Aesthetics, General
To understand the exemplar representation of conscious exemplars, we need to examine the character of consciousness. I begin with a theory of the epistemology of consciousness. There are certain ...
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To understand the exemplar representation of conscious exemplars, we need to examine the character of consciousness. I begin with a theory of the epistemology of consciousness. There are certain conscious states, those that most attract our attention, that are immediately known to us. Not all conscious states are immediately known, but all conscious states can be immediately known when attention is directed to them. Aesthetic experience directs attention to the sensory character of experience, to what the artwork is like, effecting exemplar representation. Aesthetic attention makes the conscious state an exhibit of what the artwork is like in exemplarization. The conscious state then becomes part and parcel, vehicle and exhibit, of the content of exemplar representation. The point of art is to absorb your attention in the immediacy of consciousness to obtain the insight and autonomy to remake your world and yourself out of exemplars.Less
To understand the exemplar representation of conscious exemplars, we need to examine the character of consciousness. I begin with a theory of the epistemology of consciousness. There are certain conscious states, those that most attract our attention, that are immediately known to us. Not all conscious states are immediately known, but all conscious states can be immediately known when attention is directed to them. Aesthetic experience directs attention to the sensory character of experience, to what the artwork is like, effecting exemplar representation. Aesthetic attention makes the conscious state an exhibit of what the artwork is like in exemplarization. The conscious state then becomes part and parcel, vehicle and exhibit, of the content of exemplar representation. The point of art is to absorb your attention in the immediacy of consciousness to obtain the insight and autonomy to remake your world and yourself out of exemplars.
Sydney Janet Kaplan
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748641482
- eISBN:
- 9780748671595
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748641482.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter is concerned with the growing success of both Mansfield and Murry. It shows how Mansfield's critical practice parallels Murry's in their mutual concern about the change in consciousness ...
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This chapter is concerned with the growing success of both Mansfield and Murry. It shows how Mansfield's critical practice parallels Murry's in their mutual concern about the change in consciousness brought about by the Great War, and their disdain for post-war complacency and hypocrisy. Their cautious reaction to modernist innovations is considered in connection with a general progression of their thought towards a consolidation of modernist principles instead of an automatic reaction against traditional literary conventions. The chapter discusses their critiques of literary impressionism, their interest in the concept of impersonality, and their further interactions with Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot. Mansfield's tuberculosis continues to affect her marriage to Murry, and she interprets this dilemma in her story, ‘The Man Without a Temperament.’Less
This chapter is concerned with the growing success of both Mansfield and Murry. It shows how Mansfield's critical practice parallels Murry's in their mutual concern about the change in consciousness brought about by the Great War, and their disdain for post-war complacency and hypocrisy. Their cautious reaction to modernist innovations is considered in connection with a general progression of their thought towards a consolidation of modernist principles instead of an automatic reaction against traditional literary conventions. The chapter discusses their critiques of literary impressionism, their interest in the concept of impersonality, and their further interactions with Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot. Mansfield's tuberculosis continues to affect her marriage to Murry, and she interprets this dilemma in her story, ‘The Man Without a Temperament.’
Jerome Boyd Maunsell
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- December 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198789369
- eISBN:
- 9780191831232
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198789369.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Prose (inc. letters, diaries), 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Portraits from Life examines the ways in which a group of major Modernist writers—Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, Wyndham Lewis, Gertrude Stein, H. G. Wells, and Edith Wharton—depicted ...
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Portraits from Life examines the ways in which a group of major Modernist writers—Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, Wyndham Lewis, Gertrude Stein, H. G. Wells, and Edith Wharton—depicted themselves and each other in their memoirs and autobiographies, rather than in their fiction. In a series of reconstructions of biographical contexts, it reveals how each of these novelists approached the task of writing their own lives, and how they experimented with the form and style of autobiography. Memoirs and autobiographies, as this book argues, are often just as artful as novels. Showing how it is impossible to understand any author’s autobiography without an understanding of their life, this book offers a group portrait examining the temptations, difficulties, and benefits which the project of writing their lives brought these novelists. The act of writing autobiography is a central focus, and many recurring themes are analyzed: how autobiography is often a collaborative act; how the time of the writing of autobiography often has a major influence; how fact and fiction, biography and autobiography, interact; how autobiography is always mediated by memory. This book argues that autobiography is as much an act of group portraiture as of self-analysis. It shows how the keeping of biographical secrets acts to protect others rather than oneself; and it explores the ethical issues at stake in autobiography when dealing with real, rather than invented, people. It also opens up a rich network of Modernist encounters, examining how these seven writers’ memoirs interrelate.Less
Portraits from Life examines the ways in which a group of major Modernist writers—Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, Wyndham Lewis, Gertrude Stein, H. G. Wells, and Edith Wharton—depicted themselves and each other in their memoirs and autobiographies, rather than in their fiction. In a series of reconstructions of biographical contexts, it reveals how each of these novelists approached the task of writing their own lives, and how they experimented with the form and style of autobiography. Memoirs and autobiographies, as this book argues, are often just as artful as novels. Showing how it is impossible to understand any author’s autobiography without an understanding of their life, this book offers a group portrait examining the temptations, difficulties, and benefits which the project of writing their lives brought these novelists. The act of writing autobiography is a central focus, and many recurring themes are analyzed: how autobiography is often a collaborative act; how the time of the writing of autobiography often has a major influence; how fact and fiction, biography and autobiography, interact; how autobiography is always mediated by memory. This book argues that autobiography is as much an act of group portraiture as of self-analysis. It shows how the keeping of biographical secrets acts to protect others rather than oneself; and it explores the ethical issues at stake in autobiography when dealing with real, rather than invented, people. It also opens up a rich network of Modernist encounters, examining how these seven writers’ memoirs interrelate.
Adam Parkes
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195383812
- eISBN:
- 9780199896950
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195383812.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This book argues that literary impressionism was historical. Considering a range of modern British writers from the 1870s to the 1930s, the book shows how impressionism was shaped by active ...
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This book argues that literary impressionism was historical. Considering a range of modern British writers from the 1870s to the 1930s, the book shows how impressionism was shaped by active engagement with larger cultural phenomena that defined the modern age: anarchism and terrorism, homosexuality and feminism, nationalism and war, economic depression and the new global media. The book begins with Henry James’s response to the Ruskin-Whistler dispute, examines the controversies of Walter Pater’s circle, George Moore’s heterodox responses to nationalism in Britain and Ireland, Joseph Conrad’s representations of terrorism, Virginia Woolf’s treatment of the shocks of patriarchy, and Ford Madox Ford’s fictional account of the Great Depression, and concludes with an Epilogue on the impact of the Blitz on Elizabeth Bowen’s spy fiction. Each of these chapters illustrates Parkes’s central thesis that the formal and stylistic practices of literary impressionism emerged from dynamic and often provocative interactions between aesthetic and historical factors. Thus the book suggests how impressionism’s widely attested psychological and philosophical dimensions were inextricable from its public, historical dimensions.Less
This book argues that literary impressionism was historical. Considering a range of modern British writers from the 1870s to the 1930s, the book shows how impressionism was shaped by active engagement with larger cultural phenomena that defined the modern age: anarchism and terrorism, homosexuality and feminism, nationalism and war, economic depression and the new global media. The book begins with Henry James’s response to the Ruskin-Whistler dispute, examines the controversies of Walter Pater’s circle, George Moore’s heterodox responses to nationalism in Britain and Ireland, Joseph Conrad’s representations of terrorism, Virginia Woolf’s treatment of the shocks of patriarchy, and Ford Madox Ford’s fictional account of the Great Depression, and concludes with an Epilogue on the impact of the Blitz on Elizabeth Bowen’s spy fiction. Each of these chapters illustrates Parkes’s central thesis that the formal and stylistic practices of literary impressionism emerged from dynamic and often provocative interactions between aesthetic and historical factors. Thus the book suggests how impressionism’s widely attested psychological and philosophical dimensions were inextricable from its public, historical dimensions.
Thomas F. Haddox
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- March 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823225217
- eISBN:
- 9780823236947
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fso/9780823225217.003.0004
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Literature
As a literary-historical phenomenon, decadence is notoriously difficult to define. Not only do many of its characteristics overlap with those of other contemporary terms, ...
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As a literary-historical phenomenon, decadence is notoriously difficult to define. Not only do many of its characteristics overlap with those of other contemporary terms, including Symbolism, Impressionism, and la belle époque, its writers and theorists used the word in a variety of senses. Even so, according to critical consensus, decadence first emerged as a widespread phenomenon in France in the mid-nineteenth century, eventually making its way to England, where it flourishes in the “yellow decade” of the 1890s, and finally coming to color a great deal of western art and literature by the turn of the century, so that in retrospect it seems a harbinger of the emerging Modernist sensibility. From the beginning, decadence has had a contradictory aspect. Such contradictions point toward the fraught historical context from which decadence emerges in France.Less
As a literary-historical phenomenon, decadence is notoriously difficult to define. Not only do many of its characteristics overlap with those of other contemporary terms, including Symbolism, Impressionism, and la belle époque, its writers and theorists used the word in a variety of senses. Even so, according to critical consensus, decadence first emerged as a widespread phenomenon in France in the mid-nineteenth century, eventually making its way to England, where it flourishes in the “yellow decade” of the 1890s, and finally coming to color a great deal of western art and literature by the turn of the century, so that in retrospect it seems a harbinger of the emerging Modernist sensibility. From the beginning, decadence has had a contradictory aspect. Such contradictions point toward the fraught historical context from which decadence emerges in France.
Sara Haslam
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719060557
- eISBN:
- 9781781700099
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719060557.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The enriching and rewarding aspects of modernism (such as myth and self-discovery), as presented in Ford Madox Ford's positive fictions, were the subject of the previous two chapters. This chapter ...
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The enriching and rewarding aspects of modernism (such as myth and self-discovery), as presented in Ford Madox Ford's positive fictions, were the subject of the previous two chapters. This chapter examines which aspects of modernism are manifested in Ford's faith in the act of writing itself – the regenerative or the terrible – and considers Ford's creative dynamic, his techniques and his literary rules for the writing of prose. Using a range of Ford's writing, it addresses the question of which aspects of modernism ultimately hold sway in Ford's oeuvre. The chapter also analyses Ford's theoretical, modernist stances and considers impressionism as well as Ford's position in the modernist subjectivity versus objectivity debate. Concluding with an analysis of memory and its role in the modernist quest, it also returns the book to its beginnings, and a writer who believed in pictures of the past, and the present, and sought to write them, however difficult.Less
The enriching and rewarding aspects of modernism (such as myth and self-discovery), as presented in Ford Madox Ford's positive fictions, were the subject of the previous two chapters. This chapter examines which aspects of modernism are manifested in Ford's faith in the act of writing itself – the regenerative or the terrible – and considers Ford's creative dynamic, his techniques and his literary rules for the writing of prose. Using a range of Ford's writing, it addresses the question of which aspects of modernism ultimately hold sway in Ford's oeuvre. The chapter also analyses Ford's theoretical, modernist stances and considers impressionism as well as Ford's position in the modernist subjectivity versus objectivity debate. Concluding with an analysis of memory and its role in the modernist quest, it also returns the book to its beginnings, and a writer who believed in pictures of the past, and the present, and sought to write them, however difficult.
