James Joyce (1882-1941)

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

MODERNIST FICTIONAL INNOVATIONS

- the ‘aggregation method’: images following one after the other, no logical narrative sequence
- TIME – represented as SPATIAL PLOTS in the flow of consciousness: the discovery of
unexpected transitions and suppositions, images rather than statements (see Ezra Pound’s
imagistic poems), fragmented syntax, allusions; the characters discover the plots of their own
lives, shape their own experience by means of associations, fantasies or present perceptions 
Joycean EPIPHANIES (found in the most commonplace experience of sudden revelation) or
Woolf’s LIVING MOMENTS resulting in automatic writing, in voluntary responses dictated by
consciousness;

CONSCIOUSNESS – represented in two ways:

o Stream-of-consciousness: thoughts reported in the third person singular, the use of past
tense simple > impression of intimate access, but without surrendering authorial
participation
o The interior monologue: an eye narrative, the grammatical subject; the characters
verbalise their thoughts, reflections, questions, memories, fantasies, impressions triggered
by physical sensations and associations of ideas
o fusion of external (sensuous) reality with inner reality (Woolf)  two types of time:
internal, which can be viewed vertically in the character’s consciousness, memories
actuated by various stimuli; external/clock time > meant to give unity achieved by the
concrete background, though reflected in the character’s mind
o reality filtered through man’s subjectivity at the level of mind and body: different
symptomologies of neurasthenia, spleen, etc. [Modernism concerned with the insight into
the atmosphere of the mind]

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) – a Joycean autobiography portraying the author’s
discontent with traditional Irish culture
- similar to Yeats & Eliot in terms of meanness of modern society and its evils (Dublin =
prototype of all cities; a city of stasis and paralysis)
- Joyce as a urban socialist, rejecting the idealisation of a Celtic past; the Catholic Church
perceived as disabling (The Faith of the Fathers had neither a patriotic nor a strategic regard for
Joyce) >> a mixture of sentimentality and cold irony; hate for British Imperialism in Ireland

PA - the first writing to use the stream-of-consciousness technique associated with selective omniscience;
it is the second version of the manuscript called Stephen Hero (the reader = 1st person singular vs. 3rd
person singular > creator of irony = opposition of each ending of a chapter with the beginning of the next;
the ending of chapters marked by enthusiasm dampened because of the oppressive institutions of the
family, church, homeland.
- TITLE: development of Stephen Dedalus from childhood through to university before leaving for
Paris; chooses art as his new homeland; the artist = the supreme hero; he rejects his physical
father, choosing a spiritual one (the mythical figure of Daedalus, a craftsman); surrounded by a
labyrinth (close to Dedalus’s son Icarus) >> symbolic view of himself, defying everything in his
flight; an ironical allusion to the fall of Icarus); creating ambition (huge ambitions ‘in the smithy
of his soul’); his name symbolic of choosing art, not faith

Shaping the modernist individual’s consciousness

- moments of growth that are marked by a change in narrative voice and perspective
- blindness in his childhood > naïve and lacking insight into the world around him  the
limitations placed upon the artist by church, nationalism, and personal limitations
 - words – ultimate fascination for Stephen and conducive to his art, despite the disheartening
world around him; as an artist, Stephen reflects the Modernist fascination with language and the
inner world of emotions  no traces of Victorian and Edwardian realism and fidelity to plot;
BUT exploration of the associative qualities of language that attempts to capture the fluid quality
of individual consciousness
- isolation < his father’s failures (alcohol and poverty, nationalist drives), the Church (false piety of
priesthood he rejects) and his failure to hope for companionship > visions of flight and escape:
Dedalus, is a “prophecy.” It is a prophecy of “the end he had been born to serve ... a symbol of the
artist forging anew in his workshop of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable,
imperishable being”-mythological language (183); turning life into art through writing; a mythic
fate like Dedalus’s
- “the artist” - an abstract concept and an actual person  awareness that he has chosen the hardest
path, the path that is not chosen by many  he calls his mythic father to stand him in “good
stead” as he seeks to do no less than forge “the uncreated conscience” of his race- swaps away his
mother, father, Dublin, he does not believe in this radicalism
- intellectualised Stephen (disciple of Wilde’s ‘art for art’s sake’) - the novel culminates in an
aesthetic system based on Thomas Aquinas’s definition of beauty completed by phases of artistic
apprehension: INTEGRITAS, CONSONANTIA/HARMONY AND CLARITAS- le utilizeaza ij
privinta arhitecturii bisericii.

Style
- a modernist/unconventional version of Bildungsroman (development through
breaks/inconsistencies of the mind prone to the sensuous – Emma  his theory of art/formative
experiences), Kunstleroman (novel about the artist)
- stream of consciousness - the thoughts and comments of the central character, Stephen Dedalus
mixed with free indirect discourse which makes it hard to make out who tells the story  tension
and conflicting/multiple voices with which Stephen struggles
- secularised Catholic vocabulary (“profane joy”)- aceste detalii devin modus operandi

Mrs. Dalloway (1925) – a new, experimental type of novel opposed to the Edwardian novel abounding
in exaggerated descriptions and characterizations; promoter of the Georgian style – a radically new
approach to the post-war world
- social changes of post-war England, exploration of interwoven individual lives
- like Joyce’s Ulysses (she was reading when writing MD), the events occur in a single day - one
June day in 1923 in the life of Clarissa Dalloway and her “double,” Septimus Warren Smith (two
sides of the same consciousness)
- upper-class Clarissa, like Septimus – victims of the social system; she fears her death and is
sensitive to the criticism that she has nothing to offer the world, a criticism leveled by Doris
Kilman (although never spoken directly to Clarissa Dalloway); memories of her youth, rejection
of her marriage to Peter Walsh and marriage to the kind yet conservative Richard Dalloway 
C’s limitations of class and gender vs. Peter’s idealism, romance and impulse for social change;
C as a political wife
- Woolf: “I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticize the social system, and
to show it at work, at its most intense” (Diary, Vol. II, 248) > by creating a double for her in the
character of Septimus Warren Smith, Woolf was able to achieve her goal of showing both “life
and death, sanity and insanity”; Clarissa is sane, Septimus (war veteran) is insane and commits
suicide by the end of the novel
- Exploration of life, death, aging, war, isolation, sanity, insanity by carefully controlling what VW
sees as an essential dualism in life; the themes of isolation (Septimus) and (social)
connectedness (Clarissa), fear of death, and the roots of war in patriarchal society  Clarissa,
Septimus, and Peter are all isolated and lonely most of time >> Woolf’s criticism of the isolating
nature of the modern world (anonymity in the crowd) caused by WWI
- Death - Clarissa’s reflection on the “well of tears” in the world’s late age = a link between the
subject of death in the novel with World War I; further conveyed through Septimus and his
 struggle with the death he witnessed in the war; C as “virginal and nun-like” – her value is
reduced at the age of 52 < doubts about her choices made in life; the “forcing the soul” motif
related to death – C sees S’s suicide as a refusal to abide by the bullying patriarchal power
exemplified by Dr Bradshaw and Holmes
- Military monuments in England that glorify the values of Britain as they have been passed on
from the Victorians: heroism, self-sacrifice; Peter’s sense of imperial pride, actually connected
with isolation; Septimus’s choice to go into battle was based on this pride, trumped up by illusions
of Empire and the duty of an English man to serve his country
- Trees and birds – symbol of connectedness in life, of their insights about life; birds of prey –
allusion to Holmes and Bradshaw as abominable characters

Style
- shifting point of view between characters; connected consciousnesses – “I am writing to a rhythm,
not to a plot”
- experiencing the immediate perceptions and associations of the characters without the intrusion of
an omniscient narrator; the reader can gain knowledge of the consciousness of the characters as
they experience their world

T S Eliot
What eliot borrowed from botlaire is simbolism ans synestasia plus musicality which we have in Eliot
poetry. Through irony we understand paradoxes. A drmatic monlogue is a narrtaive consitsting in a
invisible present to whom you prettend to adress in order to express our feelings. Irony, intertextulity,
ilusion, drmatize meditation are all ment to pintto an experience of dezintegrisation, deraliazition.
Agregotae method- we have a sucesion of an ilogicalal conncetions, sentaces- instability. Fot Eliot history
is equivalent with fertility.
When it comes James Joyce- Dublin. He comes as an experiental novelist (in high modernism) in 1922.
Unlike Yeats, he s transfer all the political thinghs in fiction, transformig Dublin in a horror town.
Parataxis- the lack of conjuctions, justa a continue flow, no coordinations or suboridinations.
The concept of epofanny which is ud=sed oin a snese of a sudden discovery. This type is highly secular.
It means the most common place experienced i=which trigger a revelation. Joyce associate this epifany
with phisical.
Living moments in Virginia Wolf – este ancorata in fenomenologie, the lived experience The city is not
justt a mirror, is all the time responsible and present in the story of the characters.
Stream of consicooness(flashback)- thoughts are reported in 1st pers sg, in past tense, gives us the
impresson that we have acces to the intimacy triggerd by the emotions of an specific character. The
interiour monologue is when the person talks to himself, and it blends external feelongs. It uses 2 times,
the internal time (of our conciouses) and external time. Our mind became the plot of the novel.
In a modenrist backround, relity is filtred through subjectivity. Initialli caled Stefan the Hero, it is a
autobiography portaing Joyces discontent with irish. He sees an avil sociatity, disliking his family,
politics, and Dublin. He cannot be integrated. It s A portarit of a poet becuase is one of the many. He is
amixture of irony and sentimantality and he hated brithish periods.
Finigans wake- blends word from dif lang with dif roots.
Aparat from using stream of concinouses , selective.. ? Creates a modernist type of buiildoom- consitst
in fluctuations of the personality.

Societate seculara-fara interventia bisericii. Language will play a fundamental role in Stephan perosnlity.
Despite the hostile world arouund him he has a fascinations for the language and the inner language of
emotions. He becomes obssed with this associative form of language, being the biggest change in his
mentality as he grow.
Traduecre by antoaneta Galian si Oameni din Dublin
Waalter Painter was the mentor of Oscar wilde. Art for art sake- fara rol moralizator, nu este propananda
si trebuie sa transmkta doar frumusete pura. Acest romna nu poate sa fie un roman clasim un bildung
deoarece personajul se scritica mereu.
Kustler roman. The object of art must be seen as it really is (WP).