University of Toronto
Graduate Department of English
ENG5520Y: Narrative, Narratology , and Modernist Fiction
Instructor: Melba Cuddy-Keane
An exercise in relational definition:
Early comparisons between the Victorian novel and the modernist novel set up the following binaries: (Compare the later binary oppositions posited between the modernism and postmodernism. How does the nature of the modernist novel "flip," depending on the form to which it is being compared?)
| Victorian/Edwardian | Modernist |
|---|---|
| Alan Friedman: structure of a ladder self in relation to social world |
structure of a cobweb private self as generative source of fictions |
| José Ortega Y Gasset: art of adventures realism humanized representation |
art of figures game or delightful fraud |
| John Fletcher and Malcolm Bradbury: mimetic material realism |
autotelic introversion |
| Alan Friedman: closed form resolution |
open form endlessness; ongoing flux of experience |
| James Gindin: centrally coherent focus formal, moral or theological absolutes metaphysical truth fable; myth |
tradition of compassion (1875- ) inconclusive; partially conclusive denial of formal, moral, or theological absolutes sense of history or social process rather than metaphysical truth fiction negotiates with experience of reader |
References:
1. Alan Friedman, "The Novel," The Twentieth-Century Mind: History, Ideas, and Literature in Britain, 1: 1900-1918, ed. C.B. Cox and A.E. Dyson (London: Oxford University Press, 1972). 414-46.
2. José Ortega Y Gasset, "Notes on the Novel," The Dehumanization of Art and Notes on the Novel, trans. Helen Weyl (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1948). 57-103.
3. John Fletcher and Malcolm Bradbury, "The Introverted Novel," Modernism 1890-1930, eds. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, (Harmondsworth; New York: Penguin, 1976). 394-415.
4. Alan Friedman, The Turn of the Novel (London: Oxford University Press, 1966).
5. James Gindin, Harvest of a Quiet Eye: The Novel of Compassion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971).