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LITERATURA INGLESA II
Lesson6 - Modernism Disintegration 1: Virginia Woolf’s impressionism and Aldous Huxley’s ironic novel
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Lesson6 - Modernism Disintegration 1
LITERATURA INGLESA II
Class content:
•main features of Modernism .
•the main features of the works of Virginia Woolf.
•the main features of the works of Aldous Huxley. 
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Lesson6 - Modernism Disintegration 1
LITERATURA INGLESA II
MODERNISM
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Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes a set of cultural tendencies and movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The term encompasses the activities and output of those who felt the "traditional" forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were becoming outdated in the new economic, social and political conditions of an emerging fully industrialized world.  
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The first half of the 20th century is then normally referred to in literary histories as ‘Modernism’, a very general term used to talk about a series of different movements and tendencies (impressionism, expressionism, imagism, futurism, dadaism, surrealism...) that tried to break with old tradition and the realistic concept of art. Modernism challenged the assumption that there is a common phenomenal world that can be reliably described.  
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Psychoanalysis, Darwinism, Nietzche and Marxism questioned traditional assumptions and so did World War I and the skeptical spirit it brought about. They all helped to shatter traditional beliefs 
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The artistic response to all these changes took place both in the realm of form and content. From the point of view of content, the horrors of WW I and the arrival of the ideas mentioned before brought about a general spirit of pessimism, disillusionment and skepticism 
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Artists were looking for a new form of expression, in literature writers were trying to experiment and find a new vocabulary and new techniques. Poets dislocated grammar and punctuation looking for new images and ways of expression, and novelists experimented with new points of view and a different conception of time and plot to try to reflect the hidden consciousness of the characters. The term ‘HIGH MODERNISM’ is sometimes used to describe a group of writers particularly interested in this formal revolution 
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FORMAL INNOVATIONS introduced by these writers:
In poetry, the concept of ‘image’ (Imagism): the writer’s response to a visual object or scene.
Obscurity, opacity. The reader is required to make an effort to understand the works. In Eliot’s and Pound’s poetry, for example, there are all kinds of cultural references the reader must work hard to understand.
Time is not presented in chronological order. Flashbacks and flash-forwards are used instead.
Fragmented plots, sometimes without a beginning or an end are also frequent.
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Disappearance of the traditional omniscient narrator in the novel. In their search for different ways to represent reality, they replaced this narrator by partial points of view or by interior monologues or soliloquies that try to reproduce the ‘stream of consciousness’ of the characters. A few theoretical considerations will probably be welcome: bearing in mind the distinction between focalization and narration (‘who sees?’ versus ‘who speaks?’), we can establish different kinds of narrators:irst person narrator (major participant, as in Huck Finn; minor, as in The Great Gatsby; or even non-participant, as in The Scarlet Letter). In some cases, the narrator is unreliable, and therefore everything that s/he tells is suspect and must be interpreted by the reader (for example, children telling stories where adults do things they don’t really understand. Huck Finnmight be a good example). 
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Third person narrator. When the narration is in the third person, the focalization becomes extremely important. We can then talk about
an omniscient point of view (typical of 19thcentury realist novels. The voice that tells the story is in total control, knows everything and has authoritative value),
a dramatic or objective point of view (Hemingway’s short stories: the narrator is like the lens of a camera that simply records what s/he sees), or
a selected or limited point of view (also called ‘Jamesian’ after Henry James: a character is the ‘focus’ or ‘center of consciousness’, and the reader sees the action through the focus of that character).
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Modernist fiction became extremely interested in characters’ psychology and the concept of ‘stream of consciousness’ that psychologist. This term refers to the thoughts, memories and feelings that exist in our mind in what he called the Pre-Speech level. They are not censored, rationally controlled or logically ordered. Modernist writers tried to show the hidden aspects of a character’s personality through the representation of this level of consciousness:
Description: the narrator describes with his/her own language the hidden thoughts of a character.
Interior Monologue: reproduction of these thoughts Soliloquy: Its purpose is not only to communicate psychic identity (like the interior monologue), but also to advance the plot. It communicates ideas and emotions which are related to plot and action.
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LITERATURA INGLESA II
VIRGINIA WOOLF
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Considered one of the best of the Modernist writers, Virginia Woolf's personal life is almost as intriguing as her fiction. Troubled by mental instability for most of her life, Virginia composed her great works in bursts of manic energy and with the support of her brilliant friends and family. However, upon completion of a book, Virginia fell into a dangerously dark depression in anticipation of the world's reaction to her work. Despite her personal difficulties, Virginia Woolf's fiction represented a shift in both structure and style. The world was changing; literature needed to change too, if it was to properly and honestly convey the new realities. 
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It is evident that Woolf believes in the potency of images and symbols; they occur throughout her works with the regularity of ‘waves hammering on the shore’. However Woolf challenges the direct relationship between the symbol and the signified object and also subverts the authority of a symbol to act as a signifier. 
In her novels, Woolf repeatedly sets the individual life against human life in perpetual change while the indifferent clock of time ticks away the life of this individual. Her characterization portrays a need of awareness of the "inner life," that flow of consciousness that only the individual can understand. In the inner life, chronological time is irrelevant; however, we are beings living in a society driven by the ticking of a clock's hands. 
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In orderto overcome this perceived limitation, Woolf constructed a literary world in which chronological time was secondary to the time dictated by the inner life. In this world, which takes place in the mind, time is a fluid, wild creature with no adherence to a structured paradigm. Woolf had to imitate this freedom within her narrative and portray the inner life only within the boundaries of a freely flowing entity, able to move in any way, at whatever pace, the mind dictated. The synthetic structure applied to human life is stripped away in this sense, and is vigorously replaced with a blatant questioning of order within disorder. A chronological narrative is eschewed for a more temporal, spatial framework in which the inner life, given cues only from emotion and true consciousness, 
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Her characters are introspective, sensitive, intelligent, searching, and in need--of something almost inexpressible, something like comfort: a sort of psychological and emotional equilibrium. Her protagonists include women as well men, adults and children, and even, in Orlando, a shifting man-woman, floating across years, forcing the reader to question preconceived notions of gender. 
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Virginia Woolf’s Impressionism
The term Impressionism is also used to describe works of literature in which just add a few details to establish the sensory impressions of an incident or scene. Impressionist literature is closely related to symbolism, among its best examples we can find: Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud and Verlaine. Authors such as Virginia Woolf and Joseph Conrad have written works Impressionists so that instead of interpreting, they describe the impressions, sensations and emotions that constitute a character's mental life.
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In the modern novel, ‘Impressionism frequently refers to the technique of centering on the mental life of the chief character rather than on the chief character rather than on the reality around him. Writers such as Proust, Joyce and Virginia Woolf dwell on their character’s memories, associations, and inner emotional reactions. In ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, for example, Joyce presents Stephen Dedalus’ unarticulated feelings but little of physical surroundings. 
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In Mrs Dalloway, all of the action, aside from the flashbacks, takes place on a day in June. It is an example of stream of consciousness storytelling: every scene closely tracks the momentary thoughts of a particular character. Woolf blurs the distinction between direct and indirect speech throughout the novel, freely alternating her mode of narration between omniscient description, indirect interior monologue, and soliloquy. 
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Themes
Mental illness
Existential issues
Feminism
Homosexuality
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ALDOUS HUXLEY
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STYLE
Although Huxley's writing style makes him easy to read, his complex ideas make readers think. Even if you're not familiar with his vocabulary or philosophy, you can see that, as the critic Laurence Brander says, "The prose was witty and ran clearly and nimbly."
Huxley's witty, clear, nimble prose is very much an upper-class tradition. Brave New World- like all of Huxley's novels- is a novel of ideas, which means that the characters must have ideas and must be able to express them eloquently and cleverly. This demands that the author have considerable knowledge. In pre-World War II England such novels were more likely to have been written by members of the upper class, simply because they had much greater access to good education. Huxley, we remember, attended Eton and Oxford.
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LITERATURA INGLESA II
 ALDOUS HUXLEY – BRAVE NEW WORD
This novel is about a Utopia, an ideal state- a bad ideal state. It is therefore a novel about ideas, and its themes are as important as its plot. They will be studied in depth in the chapter-by-chapter discussion of the book. Most are expressed as fundamental principles of the Utopia, the brave new world. Some come to light when one character, a Savage raised on an Indian reservation, confronts that world. As you find the themes, try to think not only about what they say about Huxley's Utopia, but also about Huxley's real world- and your own. 
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1. COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY- VERSUS INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM
It lists the Utopia's prime goals. Community is in part a result of identity and stability. It is also achieved through a religion that satirizes Christianity- a religion that encourages people to reach solidarity through sexual orgy. And it is achieved by organizing life so that a person is almost never alone. Identity is in large part the result of genetic engineering. Society is divided into five classes or castes, hereditary social groups. In the lower three classes, people are cloned in order to produce up to 96 identical "twins." Identity is also achieved by teaching everyone to conform, so that someone who has or feels more than a minimum of individuality is made to feel different, odd, almost an outcast.
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Stability is the third of the three goals, but it is the one the characters mention most often- the reason for designing society this way. The desire for stability, for instance, requires the production of large numbers of genetically identical "individuals," because people who are exactly the same are less likely to come into conflict. Stability means minimizing conflict, risk, and change.
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2. SCIENCE AS A MEANS OF CONTROL
Brave New World is not only a Utopian book, it is also a science-fiction novel. But it does not predict much about science in general. Its theme "is the advancement of science as it affects human individuals," Huxley said in the Foreword he wrote in 1946, 15 years after he wrote the book. He did not focus on physical sciences like nuclear physics, though even in 1931 he knew that the production of nuclear energy (and weapons) was probable. He was more worried about dangers that appeared more obvious at that time- the possible misuse of biology, physiology, and psychology to achieve community, identity, and stability. Ironically, it becomes clear at the end of the book that the World State's complete control over human activity destroys even the scientific progress that gained it such control.
 
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3. THE THREAT OF GENETIC ENGINEERING
Genetic engineering is a term that has come into use in recent years as scientists have learned to manipulate RNA and DNA, the proteins in every cell that determine the basic inherited characteristics of life. Huxley didn't use the phrase but he describes genetic engineering when he explains how his new world breeds prescribed numbers of humans artificially for specified qualities.
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4. THE MISUSE OF PSYCHOLOGICAL CONDITIONING
Every human being in the new world is conditioned to fit society's needs- to like the work he will have to do. Human embryos do not grow inside their mothers' wombs but in bottles. Biological or physiological conditioning consists of adding chemicals or spinning thebottles to prepare the embryos for the levels of strength, intelligence, and aptitude required for given jobs. After they are "decanted" from the bottles, people are psychologically conditioned, You might say that at every stage the society brainwashes its citizens.
5. THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS CARRIED TO AN EXTREME
A society can achieve stability only when everyone is happy, and the brave new world tries hard to ensure that every person is happy. It does its best to eliminate any emotion.
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7. THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS THROUGH DRUGS
Soma is a drug used by everyone in the brave new world. It calms people and gets them high at the same time, but without hangovers or nasty side effects. The rulers of the brave new world had put 2000 pharmacologists and biochemists to work long before the action of the novel begins; in six years they had perfected the drug. Huxley believed in the possibility of a drug that would enable people to escape from themselves and help them achieve knowledge of God, but he made soma a parody and degradation of that possibility.
 
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8. THE THREAT OF MINDLESS CONSUMPTION AND MINDLESS DIVERSIONS
This society offers its members distractions that they must enjoy in common- never alone- because solitude breeds instability. Huxley mentions but never explains sports that use complex equipment whose manufacture keeps the economy rolling- sports called Obstacle Golf and Centrifugal Bumble-puppy. But the chief emblem of Brave New World is the Feelies- movies that feature not only sight and sound but also the sensation of touch, so that when people watch a couple making love on a bearskin rug, they can feel every hair of the bear on their own bodies.
 
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LITERATURA INGLESA II
9. THE DESTRUCTION OF THE FAMILY
The combination of genetic engineering, bottle-birth, and sexual promiscuity means there is no monogamy, marriage, or family. "Mother" and "father" are obscene words that may be used scientifically on rare, carefully chosen occasions to label ancient sources of psychological problems.
11. THE OPPRESSION OF INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES
Some characters in Brave New World differ from the norm. Because of this they are banned from this bestial society. Refugees living in hiding or selling a chance of keeping their personality preserved for power and wealth. 
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LITERATURA INGLESA II
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