Characteristic features of modernist fiction

Perspectivism: the locating of meaning from the viewpoint of the individual (narrators
position important); realist novel > omniscient narrator > knows everything >
background, thoughts, wishes, reasons for actions, more than human, Modernist narrator
> gives his/her point of view, emotions, subjective, limited

Impressionism: an emphasis on the process of perception and knowing:

the use of devices (formal, linguistic, representational), to present more
closely the texture or process or structure of knowing and perceiving. A
re-structuring of literature and the experience of reality it re-presents.

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning to the end. Is it not the task of the
novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever
aberration or complexity it may display; with as little mixture of the alien and external as
possible?

A break with the sequential, developmental, cause-and-effect presentation

of the 'reality' of realist fiction >
presentation of experience as layered, allusive, discontinuous; the use, to
these ends, of fragmentation and juxtaposition, motif, symbol, allusion.

Language is seen as a complex, nuanced site of our construction of the

'real'; language is 'thick', its multiple meanings and varied connotative
forces are essential to our elusive, multiple, complex sense of and cultural
construction of reality.

Experimentation in form in order to present differently, afresh, the

structure, the connections, and the experience of life; an emphasis on
cohesion, interrelatedness and depth in the structure of the aesthetic object
and of experience (motif, juxtaposition, significant parallels, different
voices, shifts and overlays in time and place and perspective)

A sense of art as artifact, art as 'other' than diurnal reality

The (re)presentation of inner (psychological) reality, including the 'flow' of

experience, through devices such as stream of consciousness.

Stream of consciousness: the continuous flow of sense perceptions, thoughts, feelings,

and memories in the human mind; or a literary method of representing such a blending
of mental processes in fictional characters, usually in an unpunctuated or disjointed
form of interior monologue. Stream of consciousness is a special style of interior
monologue that without the apparent intervention of a summarizing and selecting

narrator, mingles the thoughts of the character with impressions and perceptions, often
violating the norms of grammar, syntax, and logic.
Example of stream of consciousness: Joyces Ulysses
Pineapple rock, lemon platt, butter scotch. A sugar-sticky girl shoveling scoopfuls of
creams for a christian brother. Some school great. Bad for their tummies. Lozenge and
comfit manufacturer to His Majesty the King. God. Save. Our. Sitting on his throne,
sucking red jujubes white.

The use of interior or symbolic landscape: the world is moved 'inside',

structured symbolically or metaphorically;

Time becomes psychological time (time as innerly experienced) or

symbolic time (time or measures of time as symbols, or time as it
accommodates a symbolic rather than a historical reality), not the
'historical' or railway time of realism.

A turn to 'open' or ambiguous endings, again seen to be more

representative of 'reality' -- as opposed to 'closed' endings, in which matters
are resolved.

The search for symbolic ground or an ontological or epistemic ground for

reality, especially through the device of 'epiphany' (Joyce), 'inscape'
(Hopkins), 'moment of being' (Woolf), 'Jetztzeit' (Benjamin) (no, evidently
not the source of 'jet-set') -- the moment of revelation of a reality beneath
and grounding appearances. This relates as well to the move to tighten up
form, to move experience inwards, and to explore the structural aspects of
experience.

If my life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fillsthen my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory. It is of lying half asleep, half
awake, in bed in the nursery at St. Ives. It is of hearing the waves breaking one, two,
one, two, and sending a splash of water over the beach; and then breaking, one, two,
one, two, behind a yellow blind... It is of lying and hearing this splash and seeing this
light, and of feeling, it is almost impossible that I should be here; of feeling the purest
ecstasy I can conceive... the feeling, as I describe it sometimes to myself, of lying in a
grape and seeing through a film of semi-transparent yellow."

The appearance of various typical themes:

reality of experience itself, experience of reality = what is it?
the search for a ground of meaning in a world without God > w. without
guidance, rules, clear distinction between good and bad, without a hope for
redemption > modernist redemption > art
critique of the traditional values of culture

Modernist poetry
Modernist poetry in English started in the early years of the 20th century with the
appearance of the Imagists. In common with many other modernists, these poets wrote in
reaction to the perceived excesses of Victorian poetry, with its emphasis on traditional
formalism and ornate diction. In many respects, their criticism echoes what William
Wordsworth wrote in Preface to Lyrical Ballads to instigate the Romantic movement in
British poetry over a century earlier, criticising the gauche and pompous school which then
pervaded, and seeking to bring poetry to the layman.
Much of early modernist poetry took the form of short, compact lyrics. As it developed,
however, longer poems came to the foreground. These represent the of the modernist
movement to the 20th-century English poetic canon.
The most famous English-language modernist work arising out of this post-war
disillusionment is T. S. Eliot's epic "The Waste Land"
The modernist 'revolution of the word' was not universally welcomed, either by
readers or writers. Certainly by the 1930s, a new generation of poets had emerged who looked
to more formally conservative poets like Thomas Hardy and W.B. Yeats as models and these
writers struck a chord with a readership who were uncomfortable with the experimentation
and uncertainty preferred by the modernists. Nothwithstanding, Modern poetry cannot be
positively characterised, there is no mainstream or dominant mode.

POSTMODERNISM IN POETRY
Postmodernism began in the sixties, when there developed on both sides of the Atlantic a
feeling that poetry had become too ossified, backward-looking and restrained. The old avant
garde had become respectable, replacing one orthodoxy by another. The poetry commended
by the New Criticism - and indeed written by its teachers - was self-contained, coherent and
paradoxical. Certainly it was clever, with striking imagery, symbolism and structural
economy, but it was also far too predictable.

Contemporary British Fiction

Contemporary British fiction is preoccupied with scenarios of violence, trauma and loss:
destruction, guilt, traumatic experiences and apocalyptic anxieties are prevalent thematic and
aesthetic concerns that seem to be related to incisive and far-reaching political events. This
conference seeks to examine this thematic focus and its narrative realisation, as well as their
implications for a critical understanding of contemporary culture.

Postcolonial literature
It is sometimes easier to use the label post-colonial literature than to state exactly what is
meant by it. This is not just because post-colonial means different things to different people,
but because of the range of writing to which the label can be applied. It can be applied to
sonnets written by a 19th-century Indian female poet, to a novel depicting life in Nigeria
before the arrival of the British, to the productions of theatre workshops in South Africa and
to the reggae and dub beats of black British poetry.
All the above writing has arisen out of experiences which result from contact with the British
empire. In this sense, post-colonial literature is writing which reflects, in a great variety of
ways, the effects of colonialism.

Fabulism or Magical Realism.

As a reaction against the demands of mainstream verisimilar fiction, writers of fabulism or
magical realism have sought to reinvent or reinvigorate or reconceive traditional realism by
infusing it with the characteristics of older forms such as the fable (hence the name), the tale,
the legend, the myth, as well as allegory and parable.
Events or characters in such works are not expected to obey or conform to the conventions of
realism: carpets may fly, animals may talk, etc
Works in this mode tend toward the ornate, the Gothic, the subjective, the dream-like, the
surreal. In Jose Saramagos novel Blindness, for example, a mysterious illness causes
everyone in the world to go blind within a matter of days.
Some other characteristics:

emphasis on idea or theme

settings in other times, places, but not necessarily "historical"
exoticism: the extraordinary over the ordinary, the unusual over the usual.

The postwar dilemma : Innovation vs Tradition

It is almost a hundred years since T.S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land and we now stand in a temporal
relationship to him as he did to Byron, Shelley and Keats. One wonders if they sounded as
challenging to his ears as he still sounds to ours. The Waste Land, first published in 1922, is a
watershed in English Literature, standing out from everything that came before and everything that
came after. But it did not appear ex nihilo; it was, like all literature, a product of its age and of Eliot's
influences, however far he was able to go beyond those influences.
Eliot stood at the crux of a world of shifting ideas. He had grown up in the world of mechanistic
idealism - even writing his doctoral thesis on F. H. Bradley, the leading proponent of British
Idealism - and had seen the basis of all he held dear swept away by science, materialism and war. He
wasn't the only one this happened to, but he put it into words better than anyone else. Whether The
Waste Land is a poem of hopeless despair or a start at rebuilding a shattered world is something that
each reader must feel within themselves.