Modernist European Literary Fiction
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The purpose of this research is to examine the development of the artistic self as revealed in the creators of selected modernist European literary fiction and in their characters. The plan of the research will be to set forth a frame of investigation by means of which all the works can be interpretatively linked, and to discuss the connections among the ideas and perceptions in the various works, with a view toward suggesting a theory of the nexus of creators and creations that can be located in a serious artist's method of reaching meaning about the nature and quality of the modern universe in general and of the human condition within that universe in particular. Seven novels, four plays, and two philosophical treatises that are widely considered watersheds of modernist European literature will be the principal focus of research, as follows: Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust, The Immoralist by Andre Gide, The Conquerors by Andre Malraux, The Burrow by Franz Kafka, The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, and The Stranger by Albert Camus; Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello, Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, The Bald Soprano by Eugene Ionesco, and The Maids by Jean Genet; Sickness Unto Death by Soren Kierkegaard and Being and Nothingness by Jean Paul Sartre. Although it may be acknowledged that each of these is a dramatically influential work of its kind, to draw generalizations from more or
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ch shows how chaotic and indeterminate the world is or can be, becomes, willy nilly, an argument for reason, form, or a means of understanding or appreciation. The work is a challenge to death and life, and specifically to what Martin Luther King, Jr. in another context called "the bleakness of nagging despair."4 These artists may write about heroes who doggedly withdraw from the vulgar trivialities of accidental life; this does not mean that the artists withdraw from life itself, or there would be no novel, no treatise, no play. Still less does it mean that they view the potentialities of life as trivial. A problem therefore becomes how a literary output laden with the manifestations of despair and bleakness can achieve the status of art, which by definition aims to provide aesthetic pleasure. Order or the wish for it, meaning or the wish for it, beauty or the wish for it thus impose their requirements on the literary form and hence on the search for the selfhood of the literary artist. The creative artist, moreover, relies on his culture to provide him with fodder for insightful expression, and if the artist did not at some level believe there were value in addressing the very anguish that putatively paralyzes him, he would retr
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King Jr, Hegel Marx, Pozzo Lucky, Magic Mountain, Hans Castorp, Camus's Meursault, Remembrance Past, Musil's Qualities, , Collateral Campaign, remembrance past, york harper, scott moncrief terence, vintage random house 1982, ck scott, york vintage random, trans ck, vols york, vols york vintage random, past trans, 3 vols york, house 1982, moncrief terence kilmartin, 3 vols, vintage random house,
Approximate Word count = 4591
Approximate Pages = 18 (250 words per page)
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