ulvir posted:

started swann’s way, and loving it thus far.

Mrenda posted:

My wondering is if using the forms of modernism as a function to tackle not just the change in the person, but directly the inability to comprehend a society (from the perspective of the society being broken/scattered/disjointed) is enough to bring us into postmodernism.

quote:

The Old Kent Road was very crowded on Thursday, the eleventh of October 1928. People spilt off the pavement. There were women with shopping bags. Children ran out. There were sales at drapers’ shops. Streets widened and narrowed. Long vistas steadily shrunk together. Here was a market. Here a funeral. Here a procession with banners upon which was written ‘Ra — Un’, but what else? Meat was very red. Butchers stood at the door. Women almost had their heels sliced off. Amor Vin — that was over a porch. A woman looked out of a bedroom window, profoundly contemplative, and very still. Applejohn and Applebed, Undert —. Nothing could be seen whole or read from start to finish. What was seen begun — like two friends starting to meet each other across the street — was never seen ended. After twenty minutes the body and mind were like scraps of torn paper tumbling from a sack and, indeed, the process of motoring fast out of London so much resembles the chopping up small of identity which precedes unconsciousness and perhaps death itself that it is an open question in what sense Orlando can be said to have existed at the present moment. Indeed we should have given her over for a person entirely disassembled were it not that here, at last, one green screen was held out on the right, against which the little bits of paper fell more slowly; and then another was held out on the left so that one could see the separate scraps now turning over by themselves in the air; and then green screens were held continuously on either side, so that her mind regained the illusion of holding things within itself and she saw a cottage, a farmyard and four cows, all precisely life-size.

When this happened, Orlando heaved a sigh of relief, lit a cigarette, and puffed for a minute or two in silence. Then she called hesitatingly, as if the person she wanted might not be there, ‘Orlando? For if there are (at a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the mind at once, how many different people are there not — Heaven help us — all having lodgment at one time or another in the human spirit? Some say two thousand and fifty-two. So that it is the most usual thing in the world for a person to call, directly they are alone, Orlando? (if that is one’s name) meaning by that, Come, come! I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another.

Foul Fowl posted:

(a lot of the different kinds of) modernism(s) were very deeply concerned with the depiction of consciousness in the modern world. so you have bits of virginia woolf's orlando that depicts driving down the road like this:


post-modernism, to me, (in part) signalled the overriding failure of (some) modernism(s) to depict consciousness in the modern world without breaking the internal cohesion of a work of fiction (there's a word for it but it's not coming to me right now). ulysses spent a thousand words describing a single day, radically advancing the expressive and formal powers of literature in english, but still comes nowhere close to actually representing 'real life'. in fact joyce tried so hard to do it that the book is unreadable to most casual readers.

Boatswain posted:

Would you say that it is impossible to represent real life at all — or at least in its totality?

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

Is this thread for "real life"? Or is it just fantasy?

Boatswain posted:

I was genuinely not trying to be antagonistic

Foul Fowl posted:

(a lot of the different kinds of) modernism(s) were very deeply concerned with the depiction of consciousness in the modern world. so you have bits of virginia woolf's orlando that depicts driving down the road like this:


post-modernism, to me, (in part) signalled the overriding failure of (some) modernism(s) to depict consciousness in the modern world without breaking the internal cohesion of a work of fiction (there's a word for it but it's not coming to me right now). ulysses spent a thousand words describing a single day, radically advancing the expressive and formal powers of literature in english, but still comes nowhere close to actually representing 'real life'. in fact joyce tried so hard to do it that the book is unreadable to most casual readers.

Nckdictator posted:

Foul Fowl posted:

(a lot of the different kinds of) modernism(s) were very deeply concerned with the depiction of consciousness in the modern world. so you have bits of virginia woolf's orlando that depicts driving down the road like this:


post-modernism, to me, (in part) signalled the overriding failure of (some) modernism(s) to depict consciousness in the modern world without breaking the internal cohesion of a work of fiction (there's a word for it but it's not coming to me right now). ulysses spent a thousand words describing a single day, radically advancing the expressive and formal powers of literature in english, but still comes nowhere close to actually representing 'real life'. in fact joyce tried so hard to do it that the book is unreadable to most casual readers.

Lil Mama Im Sorry posted:

what edition of Swann's Way should I get? i downloaded a 99 cent copy on kindle and its a weird translation and doesnt really flow well.

A human heart posted:

I don't think it's even vaguely possible to represent reality in writing and I think a lot of the modernists were probably at least vaguely aware of that.

Bandiet posted:

Ulysses didn't "radically advance" anything. Art doesn't advance !

Heath posted:

Lydia Davis. Be warned that the other parts in the Penguin releases are translated by different people

Foul Fowl posted:

i don't think that's true at all. i also don't think it necessarily makes literature better to be more complex (or whichever term you prefer) but modernism was a very inventive time for english literature, and lots of new ways to write (and read) were discovered and developed. compare, idk, contemporary queer fiction to e.m. forster's maurice. he spends so much of that novel guiding the reader into a new mode of reading. there were no pre-established semiotics recognizable to his reading public that he could use, discard, invert, be sincere or insincere with, etc. etc.

Bandiet posted:

I think advancement pretty clearly implies "better." Change isn't progress. Readers in the last century may find stream of consciousness or whatever more expressive because it's different from what they're used to, but not any more than literally any other turning point in style, from the Dolce Stil Novo to the Hellenistic bucolics.

Foul Fowl posted:

i'm not gonna try to convince you if you've made your mind up already. which it sounds like you have since you didn't really respond to my post.

A human heart posted:

I don't think it's even vaguely possible to represent reality in writing and I think a lot of the modernists were probably at least vaguely aware of that.

Borges posted:

. . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

bandiet posted:

Ulysses didn't "radically advance" anything. Art doesn't advance !

TheGreatEvilKing posted:

Just finished The Ambassadors, any Henry James fans in the thread?

Doctor Faustine posted:

I’m reading The Aspern Papers right now, but I’m having a bit of a hard time getting into it. The book I have also has Turn of the Screw in it, though, which I’m looking forward to. One of my good friends recommended it to me and she and I have nearly identical taste in literature.

derp posted:

Now I'm reading zeno's conscious, and it's really funny just in the first pages, think I could love it.