苏大在职研究生 英国文学作业

Q:What are the similarities and differences between Modernist and Postmodernist writing? Select typical British Modernist and Postmodernist Writers (esp. those covered in this course) to illustrate your point. 1.Definition Before we have a clear idea about the similarities and differences between Modernist and Postmodernist, first of all, it’s important to know the definition of Modernism and Postmodernism. Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. Modernism doesn’t advocate to recover the real life, it advocate to write something based on the personal feelings, expressing to pressure that life drops on people. What is the Postmodernism? The term postmodernism is used to refer to different something contradictory concepts describing large-scale changes in intellectual thought, cultural production, and global societies beginning in the mid 20th century. 2.Characteristic Modernism As David Forgacs said, Modernism has six main qualities as follows: 1) novelty. Break from tradition (Realism, Romanticism) 2)envisage political change in terms of radical and often violent break. 3) elitist. Cut from mass culture. ) an art of depth not of surface. Abstract. ) subject to political critique by feminism and anti-racism. ) status as the most significant tradition, the leading-edge movement is contested. Except mentioned above, Modernism also has other features, such as: )Pessimism. ) Hostile towards developments in contemporary science and technology. ) Masculinization of art. ) social—and even existential—fragmentation. ) Alienation. ) Question of one’s identity. Postmodernism The term Postmodernism is used to describe certain tendencies in post-World War Ⅱliterature. It is both a continuation of the experimentation championed by writers of the modernist period(relying heavily, for example, on fragmentation, paradox, questionable narrators, etc.) and a reaction against Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist literature. Barnes, as a typical postmodern writer, his work transcends genres of history, literary theory and fiction, thus establishing Barnes as an interdisciplinary intellectual, postmodern in his questioning of the grand narratives of modernism, and his transgression and admixture of theoretical boundaries, literary conventions, and narrative structures. He has the love of art yet lacking ‘the religion of art’; he fancied its rituals, the vestments and the incense, but did not finally believe in its revealed truths. Besides, in Barnes’s view of history, history isn’t what happened, it is just what 1 historians tell us. Postmodernism, we also can describe its characteristic as follows: satire, defamiliarization, intextuality, parody, pastiche, collage, justposition, playfulness and fragmentation. In Julian Barnes’s , from insect’s perspective, Postmodernism’s characteristic has been demonstrated from a micro perspective. 3.STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS Stream of consciousness is a narrative mode that seeks to portray an individual's point of view by giving the written equivalent of the character's thought processes, either in a loose interior monologue, or in connection to his or her actions. The term “Stream of Consciousness”was taken from the book The Principles of Psychology (written by William James and published in 1890). What a lark! What a plunge! For so it always seemed to me when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which I can hear now, I burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet(for a girl of eighteen as then was) sol- emn, feeling as I did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen... Fromwritten by Virginia Woolf and published in 1925 Virginia Woolf has smuggled some of her own lyrical eloquence into Mrs Dalloway’s stream of consciousness without its being obvious. 4.INTERIOR MONOLOGUE Interior monologue is one particular kind of stream of consciousness writing. Stream of consciousness writing aims to provide a textual equivalent to the imagined stream of consciousness in the mind of a fictional character. Writers wanted to display for readers’inspection, in a way that is impossible in real life, their characters’private inner lives. These were imagined as containing many different kinds of “mind stuff”(as it was called by William James, the psychologist who coined the term “stream of consciousness”): verbalised thoughts, subliminal thoughts, perceptions, images, sensations and so on. They came down the steps from Leahy’s terrace prudently, Frauenzimmer and down the shelving shore flabbily their splayed feet sinking in the silted sand. Like me, like Algy, coming down to our mighty mother. Number one swung lourdily her midwife’s bag, the other’s gamp poked in the beach. From the liberties, out for the day. Mrs Florence MacCabe, relict of the late Patk MacCabe, deeply larnented, of Bride Street. Fromwritten by James Joyce and published in 1922 Joyce did not write the whole of Ulysses in the stream-of-consciousness form.Having taken psychological realism as far as it would go, he turned, in later chapters of his novel, to various kinds of stylization, pastiche and parody: it is a linguistic epic, as well as a psychological one. But he ended it with the most famous of all interior monologues. 2