ENGL2035: Modernism
Essay topics

These topics are suitable for any of the texts we are examining in this course:

1. "One of the principal characteristics of Modernism was the compulsive attempt to ... liberate the present and future from the sense of inevitability which history as conceived by the Nineteenth Century seemed to impose on the present". (David H. Malone, "Toward a History of Modernism", Comparative Literature Studies XV 1, PN851.C63).
   Choose one of the writers we are dealing with in this course. To what extent do you think that set text involves an attempt to rethink the very category of history?
    
2. In "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Eliot suggests that writing is a quite impersonal process which has nothing to do with self-expression:

   The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.... The point of view which I am struggling to attack is perhaps related to the metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul: for my meaning is, that the poet has, not a "personality" to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. (Norton Anthology, 2398-99)

   Is this a general point we could make about modernist writing? Discuss it with respect to one of the writers on the course, with specific reference to the set text(s).
   (You should pay careful attention here to the distinction Eliot makes between emotion, which is what an individual experiences, and feeling, which is what a poem produces out of materials which belong strictly to the poem and not to whatever experiences it may be describing or the individual who originally experienced them.)

1. The Age of Innocence traces out a complex interplay of characterization (what we see), narration (where we're told it from) and focalization (where we see it from), in ways which are more characteristic of the modernist fiction Wharton disliked than of the nineteenth-century realist novel in whose tradition she saw herself as writing. Discuss
    
2. For all that Newland Archer dominates every page of The Age of Innocence, the last chapters unexpectedly show that it has in a sense been been a novel about women all along. Discuss.
    
3. What do you think the title means? What is the "Age of Innocence"? Examine what Newland and the novel's narration say about innocence, and the roles it plays in this social class.

1. Yeats is the poet of antinomies, not of harmonies. Discuss.
    
   
2. "As he develops as a poet, Yeats's poetry moves from a lush simplicity to an austere complexity." Discuss this with reference to a number of his poems. What do you think may be some of the reasons behind this, and some of its implications?
    
3. What is the relevance of a study of Yeats's political position and its development, to an understanding or evaluation of his poetry? (In your answer you should refer to particular poems in detail, and relate the political views to both the matter and the form of these poems.)
    

1. "What is so elusive about [Conrad] is that he is always promising to make some general philosophic statement about the universe, and then refraining with a gruff disclaimer.... Is there not also a central obscurity, something noble, heroic, beautiful, inspiring half-a-dozen great books, but obscure, obscure?... [He] is misty in the middle as well as at the edges, ... the secret casket of his genius contains a vapour rather than a jewel..." (E.M. Forster, Abinger Harvest)
   Why might there be this obscurity? Is it possible to read Conrad not as a series of failures to make a profound moral statement, but as a writing which generates other ways of meaning? What might they be?
    
2. For all that he is the central character, Jim remains a hazy figure whose innermost processes remain deeply unfathomable to virtually everyone else in the novel--including, it would seem, himself. Is Lord Jim thus to some extent a rethinking of the concept of literary character? Of human character in general?
    
3. "Conrad raises the significance of Jim's action to a metaphysical level and in his portrayal of Jim's spiritual Odyssey explores the theme of guilt and atonement." (Jocelyn Baines, Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography)
   Terms like guilt and atonement lay a claim to universality and generality. On the other hand, the things Jim or Marlow might have cause to feel guilty about or a need to atone for are also tied quite strongly to a very specific history, that of late European colonialism. To what extent is this a book about colonialism? (And then--as a possibility for further exploration--to what extent might Jim, Marlow, and indeed perhaps also Conrad and many of his commentators, be mystifying this precisely by speaking in such general terms?)

1. Eliot has said that poetry can communicate before it is understood. What meaning can you give to this and how would you apply it to some of his own work? 
    
2. "If The Waste Land is about formlessness and the threat of chaos, the risk it runs is of being formless and chaotic poem." If it has some sort of coherence, what gives it that?
    
3. How does Eliot use allusion in his work? Discuss its effects, and its relationship to other technical features of his poetry.
   

1. It has often been argued that when Lawrence writes about "sexuality", what he really means is "masculinity". Much of his writing is about "the need to eradicate a certain system of values designated 'female' and based on 'love', and to institute a new system designated 'male' and based on 'power'" (Hilary Simpson, D.H. Lawrence and Feminism 115). How do these pairings of male and female, power and love work in Women in Love? Are they sustained? Can Women in Love be read as a radical critique of "love"? If so, is it a coherent critique?
    
2. Lawrence wrote: "Again I say, don't look for the development of the novel to follow the lines of certain characters; the characters fall into the form of some other rhythmic form, as when one draws a fiddle-bow across a fine tray delicately sanded, the sand takes lines unknown." Discuss with reference to Women in Love.
    
3. A rich theme in Women in Love is the connection of knowledge and sensuality. There is more than one meaning given to each of these terms by different characters. Show how these connections are embodied in the work.

1. "Poetry makes nothing happen ..." (Auden, "In Memory of W.B. Yeats")
   What relationships might there be between this statement and the very clear political and social concerns of much of Auden's own poetry?
    
2. "Poetry is not magic. In so far as poetry, or any other of the arts, can be said to have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate." Does this comment of Auden's apply to his own poems?
    
3. How might Auden's poetry be seen as a reaction to the political and aesthetic stances of the high modernism of Eliot or Yeats?
    

1. "I meant nothing by the lighthouse. One has to have a central line down the middle of the book to hold the design together." (Woolf, in a letter to Roger Fry)
   Could To the Lighthouse be described as an anti-symbolist novel?
    
2. "In the ideology of our culture women are objects described, not speaking subjects. Women as women, as incarnations of the myth of Woman, do not produce culture. Woman was never considered to be actually nonspeaking. Talking constantly, women emitted chatter, gossip and foolishness." (Jane Gallop, Thinking Through the Body)
   In its insistence on the domestic, the small-scale and the mundane, Woolf's writing can be seen as a project of valorising those areas of women's experience which have always and easily been overlooked or denigrated. How might this work in To the Lighthouse?
    
3. Mrs Ramsay is often seen as an "Angel in the House": an epitome of the domestic or feminine virtues, loved by all, and the real centre of a family which its nominal head, Mr Ramsay, is continually unable to understand. Do you think this accurately describes the situation in To the Lighthouse? If so, how does Mrs Ramsay differ from the sentimental ideal of femininity endorsed by, say, a Victorian novel? If not, how do you read the situation?

1. "We converse as we live--by repeating, by combining and recombining a few elements over and over again just as nature does when of elementary particles it builds a world. Gertrude Stein has a wonderful ear and she listened ... not so she could simply reproduce the talk, that sort of thing was never her intention, but so she could discover the patterns in speech, the forms of repetition, and exploit them." (William H. Gass, "Gertrude Stein and the Geography of the Sentence", The World within the Word.)
   What does Stein do with repetition? (You will find Stein's lectures in Look at Me Now and Here I Am invaluable here, as well as Gass's essay. You may want to concentrate on particular Stein texts: the "cubism" of the portraits, say, or the rearrangement of narrative elements in Ida.)
    
2. "Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that and doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. … Poetry is essentially the discovery, the love, the passion for the name of anything." (Stein, "Poetry and Grammar", 138, 140)
   What light might this passion for the name shed on the procedures of Stein's writing, particularly Tender Buttons and "Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded"?
    
3. Rose is a Rose is a rose is a rose.
   Discuss, discuss. Discuss Discuss.
   

1. The Gilbert schema traces through the hours of the day and the locations of the action, and suggests connections with Homer's Odyssey. But most of the schema's categories--Symbol, Organ, Colour, Art, Technic--are profoundly non-narrative (they don't advance the story), non-psychologistic (they don't tell us much about Bloom, Stephen or Molly), and non-moralistic (they don't suggest Ulysses has a message to teach us). So what are some of the implications of the schema for reading Ulysses?
    
   
2. "Ulysses is not held together by a plot but by a number of other things. It is thus the beginning of serious modern fiction capable of dealing with the real contemporary world."
   Discuss.
    
3. "Ulysses is a comic, not a tragic work." Discuss.