Modernism Defined

Abrams offers T. S. Eliot as an example of a modernist poet. When reviewing James Joyce's Ulysses in 1923, Eliot argued that the traditional and inherited mode of arranging a literary work assumed a relatively coherent and stable social order that could not harmonize with "the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history" (Abrams 108). Abrams notes that Eliot experimented with new forms and styles that, like Joyce and Ezra Pound, often contrasted contemporary disorder to the lost order, which had been based on the religion and myths of the Western cultural past (Abrams 108).

Abrams includes among major works of modernist fiction Joyce's Ulysses (1922) and, what Abrams calls "his even more radical Finnegan's Wake" (1939). Abr

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s it is an apt name for Beckett's slothful hero. Shuah is from two biblical sources: Shuah, the grandfather of Onan and in Hebrew, Shuach, son of Abraham and Ketura. Ben-Zvi argues the name offers the attendant narcissistic and masturbatory associations of onanism but also provides other indications of Belacqua's personality. "Shuah" means to be abrasive, to be discouraged and in despair, and to bow down, bend, or sink. All these definitions fit Belacqua (Ben-Zvi 36). Finally, the novel's title is a parody of the praise of good women offered by Geoffrey Chaucer in "The Legend of Good Women" and by Alfred Lord Tennyson in "Dream of Fair Women (Ben-Zvi 36). Dream of Fair to Middling Women is divided into three parts. Part 1 begins when Belacqua leaves his home in Dublin (Ben-Zvi 37). He travels to Vienna to meet his love, Smeraldina Rima (the little Emerald). However, sex for Belacqua "was a bloody business" and he courts Smerry until she rapes him. "Then everything went kaputt." Belacqua retreats from her advances, no longer able to keep their relations "pewer and above bawd" (Ben-Zvi 37). In Part 2, Belacqua has traveled to Paris to distance himself from Smerry. However, there he encounters the even more voracious Syra-Cusa and,
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Approximate Word count = 3682
Approximate Pages = 15 (250 words per page)

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