Interior Monologue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Herman
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
Direct Discourse ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Alfred Döblin ◽  
Italo Svevo ◽  
The Right

One of the hallmarks of modernist style, interior monologue affords a prime opportunity for studying how writers ranging from James Joyce and Dorothy Richardson to Italo Svevo and Alfred Döblin innovated on conventions for speech and thought presentation to create effects of psychological immediacy. Gerald Prince, building on Dorrit Cohn’s foundational account of techniques for presenting fictional minds, defines interior monologue as "the nonmediated presentation of a character’s thoughts and impressions or perceptions" (2003: 45). In this usage, interior monologue is a cover term that applies to more or less extended passages of free direct discourse—in other words, discourse that, though stripped of quotation marks and tag phrases such as she reflected or he wondered, can be assumed to correspond to or quote the unvocalized thoughts of a character. The "Penelope" episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses is often taken to be a prototypical instance of the form, though Joyce deploys interior monologue in less extended stretches throughout his novel, nowhere more movingly than at the end of the "Lestrygonians" episode. Here the text cross-cuts between reports of Leopold Bloom’s outward conduct as he attempts to avoid Blazes Boylan and passages that can be taken as offering an unfiltered presentation of Bloom’s perceptions and thoughts when he encounters his wife’s lover (italics mark instances of interior monologue): His heart quopped softly. To the right. Museum. Goddesses. He swerved to the right. Is it? Almost certain. Won’t look. Wine in my face. Why did I? Too heady. Yes, it is. The walk. Not see. Get on. (Joyce 1986: 150)

Modernist Dante

2021 ◽  
pp. 633-650
Author(s):  
Daniela Caselli
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
First Century ◽  
Djuna Barnes ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Anglophone Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

This chapter traces a history of Dante’s reception in anglophone literature between the 1870s and the 1950s. It acknowledges his importance in Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce, but engages more closely with Samuel Beckett, Djuna Barnes, and Virginia Woolf. It shows that the modernist Dante that emerges from these authors’ work is both a formal and political one: recruited as an anti-authoritarian voice from the past and seen anew from feminist and queer perspectives, this is not a twenty-first century Dante forced against his will to virtue-signal, however; on the contrary, this is a Dante anachronistically familiar with key ‘vices’ of twentieth-century authors, readers and commentators. Focusing on sullenness, resistance, and fatigue, the chapter argues for a new understanding of modernist experiments with Dante’s political and formal complexity that refuse to use him as a ‘code or a weapon […] to crush someone’, as Dorothy Richardson put it.

8. Autobiographies, autobiographical novels, and autofictions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Marcus
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Personal Essay ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Secondary Importance ◽  
Autobiographical Writing ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Journal Entries

Few of the great modernist writers produced explicit or fully fledged autobiographies, but the expansion of the ‘life-writing’ category has made visible the prevalence of autobiographical novels, including works by Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Dorothy Richardson, and Virginia Woolf. ‘Autobiographies, autobiographical novels, and autofictions’ explains that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries there was an increasingly ‘aesthetic’ approach to autobiography. New genres arose that blended life-writing and fiction, such as the personal essay, the ‘imaginary portrait’, and novels which incorporated authentic letters and journal entries. Since the 1980s, it is argued, the novel has been eclipsed by autobiographical narrative, reversing the earlier sense that autobiographical writing was of secondary importance.

James Joyce and Italo Svevo

Italica ◽  
1963 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 334
Author(s):  
Thomas F. Staley
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
Italo Svevo

scholarly journals Beckett, Minimalism, and the Question of Postmodernism

2020 ◽  
pp. 16-32
Author(s):  
Duncan McColl Chesney
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
Marcel Proust ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Republic Of Ireland ◽  
Simple Question ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Right ◽  
Crucial Test

This article addresses a simple question: Is Beckett a postmodernist writer? Of course, the question is not so simple at all, for it begs a number of other tricky questions that get only more complicated as we address them: How am I defining modernism and postmodernism? What does the post in postmodernism signify? And in any case, Beckett's work does not suffer from not fitting easily into either of these categories or periodizations, so who really cares? Yet all the same, it seems that if postmodernism has any analytical value as a category, a style, or a "cultural dominant" applied to literature (in Fredric Jameson's appropriation of Raymond Williams's term), then Beckett is a crucial test case: He follows perhaps the most exemplary of prose modernists, James Joyce, and produces a body of work which is very much unlike that of his famous predecessor and compatriot/co-exile, as well as that of the subject of his youthful scholarly interest (another quintessential prose modernist), Marcel Proust. Beckett clearly, and not just temporally, comes after these modernists and their moment. His defining war is the Second, not the First. His childhood was not that of the fin-de-si?cle; his abandoned homeland was the Republic of Ireland; his exile was so famously marked by the change of language in order to achieve what he called "the right weakening effect" [2] in a clear attempt to escape the style of Joyce in the language of Proust, and thus attain a style all his own. If post simply means after, then Beckett is perhaps the first great postmodernist. But we all know it is not so simple.

scholarly journals Friends in Exile: Italo Svevo & James Joyce by Brian Moloney

2020 ◽  
Vol 57 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 445-448
Author(s):  
John McCourt
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
Italo Svevo
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