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

structure of a ladder 
self in relation to social world

art of adventures 
realism 
humanized representation 

mimetic 
material realism

closed form
resolution


centrally coherent focus
formal, moral or theological absolutes
metaphysical truth
fable; myth

Modernist

structure of a cobweb 
private self as generative source of fictions

art of figures 
game or 
delightful fraud 

autotelic 
introversion

open form
endlessness; flux of experience

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. Allan 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 1972), pp. 414-46. 

2. Jose Ortega Y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art andOther Essays (London 1972)

3. John Fletcher and Malcolm Bradbury, "The Introverted Novel," Modernism 1890-1930, Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, eds., (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), pp. 394-415 

4. Allan Warren Friedman, The Turn of the Novel (1966)

5. James Gindin, Harvest of a Quiet Eye: The Novel of Compassion (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1971)  

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