A Brownian Model for Literary Crowds

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Crossland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Brownian Motion ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Molecular Physics ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Brownian Model ◽  
Night And Day

Chapter 6 applies the ideas explored in Chapter 5 to a range of early twentieth-century literary texts, especially those by Woolf and Lawrence. The focus here is on crowd and city scenes, including the modernist figures of the flâneur and the passante. The chapter as a whole argues for the relevance of contemporary ideas on molecular physics, especially Brownian motion, to portrayals of individual characters in relation to crowds, drawing on a range of texts including Woolf’s Night and Day and Mrs Dalloway, Lawrence’s The Trespasser and The White Peacock, and texts by Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and H. G. Wells. Together with Chapter 5, this chapter demonstrates how ideas, language, and imagery were shared across disciplines in the early twentieth century, and argues that considering different disciplines together can help us to recapture a sense of the ways in which particular issues were experienced at the time.

The Obligation to Choose

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Crossland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
The Past ◽  
Light Quanta ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Wave Particle Duality ◽  
Night And Day ◽  
Scientific Ideas

Chapter 1 explores Woolf’s writings up to the end of 1925 in relation to scientific ideas on wave-particle duality, providing the ‘retrospect of Woolf’s earlier novels’ which Michael Whitworth has suggested shows that she was working ‘in anticipation of the physicists’. The chapter as a whole challenges this idea of anticipation, showing that Woolf was actually working in parallel with physicists, philosophers, and artists in the early twentieth century, all of whom were starting to question dualistic models and instead beginning to develop complementary ones. A retrospect on wave-particle duality is also provided, making reference to Max Planck’s work on quanta and Albert Einstein’s development of light quanta. This chapter pays close attention to Woolf’s writing of light and her use of conjunctions, suggesting that Woolf was increasingly looking to write ‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or’. Among other texts, it considers Night and Day, Mrs Dalloway, and ‘Sketch of the Past’.

scholarly journals Tracing the lexical features of Marko Kropyvnytskyi’s works

Linguistics ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 47-56
Author(s):  
Mykola Verbovyi ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Quantitative Composition ◽  
Semantic Features ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Lexical Composition

The article analyzes the most important lexical features of Marko Kropyvnytskyi’s works of art. The researcher concludes that the playwright in his texts used words or individual forms characteristic of the steppe subdialects of the late nineteenth – early twentieth century. The analysis of words is made with the involvement of a wide range of factual material extracted from various lexicographical, ethnographic sources, as well as artistic texts of other authors. It has been established that the lexical composition of Marko Kropyvnytskyi’s works reveals organic connections with the vocabulary of the adjacent Poltava and Podil dialects, and more broadly with the eastern and western dialects of the Ukrainian language. It is also noted that the analyzed words show a significant influence on the steppe subdialects and on the Ukrainian language in general Polish, Russian and Romanian. Thus, the study suggests that the playwright’s literary texts recorded and preserved the original local phonetic, word-forming or semantic derivatives that complement and deepen our knowledge of general trends in the lexical systems of Eastern Ukrainian dialects and the Ukrainian literary language. Consideration of only a small number of words (approximately 20 nouns) that function in the works of Marko Kropyvnytskyi, determines the prospects for further research to establish the quantitative composition of such names and a systematic description of phonetic, word-forming or semantic features in connection with other dialects and literary language. It follows from the above that the texts of M. Kropyvnytskyi are an important source for the study of linguistic features and steppe subdialects, and the Ukrainian literary language of the early twentieth century.

scholarly journals Literary Figures of ‘New Women’ in the Early Twentieth Century

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Tomiche ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
New Women ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Status ◽  
Night And Day

Based on a comparative reading of Virginia Woolf’s second novel, Night and Day (1919), where one of the main characters is a suffragist, and of Victor Margueritte’s La Garçonne (1922), whose title explicitly indicates the status of the protagonist as a flapper, this article explores figures of “new women” insofar as they are literary representations of social realities and insofar as such representations draw from a collective imaginary which they also contribute to forge. I

Modernist Physics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Crossland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Albert Einstein ◽  
Literature And Science ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Molecular Physics ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Scientific Papers ◽  
Crowd Psychology

Modernist Physics takes as its focus the ideas associated with three scientific papers published by Albert Einstein in 1905, considering the dissemination of those ideas both within and beyond the scientific field, and exploring the manifestation of similar ideas in the literary works of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. Drawing on Gillian Beer’s suggestion that literature and science ‘share the moment’s discourse’, Modernist Physics seeks both to combine and to distinguish between the two standard approaches within the field of literature and science: direct influence and the zeitgeist. The book is divided into three parts, each of which focuses on the ideas associated with one of Einstein’s papers. Part I considers Woolf in relation to Einstein’s paper on light quanta, arguing that questions of duality and complementarity had a wider cultural significance in the early twentieth century than has yet been acknowledged, and suggesting that Woolf can usefully be considered a complementary, rather than a dualistic, writer. Part II looks at Lawrence’s reading of at least one book on relativity in 1921, and his subsequent suggestion in Fantasia of the Unconscious that ‘we are in sad need of a theory of human relativity’—a theory which is shown to be relevant to Lawrence’s writing of relationships both before and after 1921. Part III considers Woolf and Lawrence together alongside late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discussions of molecular physics and crowd psychology, suggesting that Einstein’s work on Brownian motion provides a useful model for thinking about individual literary characters.

Resisting Colonialism in the Uzbek Historical Novel Kecha va Kunduz (Night and Day), 1936

Inner Asia ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-192
Author(s):  
Shawn T. Lyons
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Soviet Government ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Central Asian ◽  
Asian History ◽  
Night And Day

AbstractIn this essay on the Uzbek author and poet Abdulhamid Sulayman Cholpon (1897–1938), his novel Kecha va Kunduz (Night and Day) is examined as a bold critique of both Russian and Soviet colonialism in early twentieth century Central Asia. Despite increasing censorship and previous arrests by Soviet authorities, Cholpon subtly employs a variety of techniques including satire and farce to undermine the legitimacy of the Soviet government that was being established around him. Bitterly portraying the hypocrisy and collusion of jadid reformists, Muslim clerics and local Russian officials, this unfinished novel, which was halted by the author’s execution in 1938, remains as one of the darkest comments on Soviet Central Asian history in the Uzbek language.

scholarly journals Choreographic Re-embodiment between Text and Dance

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Jones
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Samuel Beckett ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Emotional State ◽  
The Body ◽  
Mechanical Function ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Body Rhythm ◽  
Look Back ◽  
Modernist Fiction

This chapter explores the aesthetics of the experimental modernist fiction of Joseph Conrad and Samuel Beckett to open up debates about reenactment of dance in the twentieth century. Using the theories of Gabriele Brandstetter and Paul Ricoeur to explore correspondences in dance and literary skepticism about narrative, the discussion shows how both writers interpolate their stories with fleeting passages of gesture or movement phrases that syncopate and undermine the teleological flow of narrative. This discussion suggests a choreographic re-embodiment between dance and text that focuses on communication beyond words. The similarity of Conrad and Beckett lies in their uses of gesture, but while Conrad’s movement phrases re-embody early twentieth-century expressivism, Beckett’s look back to early twentieth-century innovations in abstraction which examine the mechanical function of the body, rhythm in time and space. Beckett does not reference a mental (or emotional) state, whereas Conrad’s gestures are affective, identifying an emotional interiority.

Applying Cluster Analysis to Scots Prose

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Bann ◽  
John Corbett
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cluster Analysis ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Suitable Material ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

In this chapter, we apply cluster analysis of the graphemic realisations to prose that contains a substantial element of Scots. We worked with a slightly smaller number of texts for the prose samples, owing to the limitations of suitable material in our broader corpus. The Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing contains a considerable amount of prose material, but the use of Scots in prose largely begins with fiction of the early nineteenth century, and extends to the present day. Our chosen texts illustrate a range of nineteenth-and early twentieth-century literary texts that are at least in part in Scots prose.

National Languages and Neutral Idioms

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tekla Mecsnóber
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Political Resistance ◽  
Language Play ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
National Languages

This essay considers laws governing display and use of languages in locales present to James Joyce—early twentieth-century Trieste, Zurich, and the British Empire—as well as attempts in the 1920s to have certain languages officially recognized by the League of Nations. Tekla Mecsnóber argues that these developments and statutes contribute to the polyglot sensibility of Joyce's work and the implications of political resistance in his language play.

Implications of vocabulary density for poetry: Reading T. S. Eliot’s poetry through computational methods

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seonghoon Kim ◽  
Jin-young Tak ◽  
Eun Joo Kwak ◽  
Tae Yun Lim ◽  
Shin Haeng Lee
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Computational Methods ◽  
Modern Human ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Distant Reading ◽  
Quantitative And Qualitative Research ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Poetic Diction

Abstract By incorporating computational methods into reading literary texts, this study examines the literary implications of the ‘vocabulary density’ and frequency of nouns and adjectives in T. S. Eliot’s poetry. This study analyzes 4,689,655 words from forty-seven poets available on Project Gutenberg, a catalog spanning from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. The data illustrate both the continuity and discontinuity found in English and American poetry dependent on conventional divisions between literary movements: eighteenth century, Romanticism, Imagism, and Modernism. The findings shed light on the similarities and differences between Eliot’s poetry and others’, particularly in terms of Franco Moretti’s concept of ‘modern epic’ and his methodology of ‘distant reading’. Through this combined quantitative and qualitative research, this article ultimately upholds the notion that the linguistic distinction of Eliot’s high modernist poetry lies, by and large, in his use of invented and equivocal words that reflects and represents an artistic response to modern human, cultural, social conditions, and experiment with poetic diction and polyphonic voice in the early twentieth century.

Moonlighting

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Waddell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Ludwig Van Beethoven ◽  
Experimental Writing ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Aldous Huxley ◽  
Rebecca West ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Many

How and why did the life and music of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) matter to experimental writers in the early twentieth century? Previous answers to this question have tended to focus on structural analogies between musical works and literary texts, charting the many different ways in which poetry and prose resemble Beethoven’s compositions. This book takes a different approach. It focuses on how early twentieth-century writers—chief among them E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, Wyndham Lewis, Dorothy Richardson, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf—profited from the representational conventions associated in the nineteenth century and beyond with Beethovenian culture. The emphasis of Moonlighting falls for the most part on how modernist writers made use of Beethovenian legend. It is concerned neither with formal similarities between Beethoven’s music and modernist writing nor with the music of Beethoven per se, but with certain ways of understanding Beethoven’s music which had long before 1900 taken shape as habit, myth, cliché, and fantasy, and with the influence they had on experimental writing up to 1930. Moonlighting suggests that the modernists drew knowingly and creatively on the conventional. It proposes that many of the most experimental works of modernist literature were shaped by a knowing reliance on Beethovenian consensus; in short, that the literary modernists knew Beethovenian legend when they saw it, and that they were eager to profit from it.

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