James Joyce & Modernism
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Irish novelist and poet James Joyce was the most influential novelist of the 20th Century bringing a new approach and sensibility to the art of the Western novel that has not been surpassed since the publication of Ulysses in 1922. His technical innovations and use of language are largely responsible for the modern novel that represents a break with the traditional naturalistic novels of the 18th and 19th centuries of Henry Fielding, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert and Daniel Defoe among many others. In 19th century novels, "even in (Henry) James and (Joseph) Conrad, the novelist figured as reporter or historian, recounting a sequence of actions ended before the reader takes up the novel to read. But with Joyceà.readers, areàat the cutting edge of the characters' minds; we share the continuous present of their consciousness. There is, obviously, an immense gain in intimacy and immediacy" (Allen 416). Modernism was a revolt against traditional literary forms and subjects that manifested itself strongly after the destruction of World War I "shook men's faith in the foundations and continuity of Western civilization and culture" (Abrams 108). As another early modernist, poet T.S. Eliot, wrote in his 1923 review of Joyce's Ulysses, 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).
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s thoroughness and amazing resources of genius, he carries this principle to its logical extreme" (Muller 294). Muller argues that in this novel, Joyce "is adding a kind of Einsteinian fourth dimension," carrying the realistic method further and departing from it more radically than any other novelist" (Muller 295).
A book review of Ulysses published in the New York Times calls the novel "the most important contribution that has been made to fictional literature in the twentieth centuryà.It is likely that there is no one writing English today that could parallel Joyce's feat, and it is also likely that few would care to do it if they were capable." The review of Finnegans Wake called it "a book which even a cursory examination shows to be unprecedentedà.We have novels that give us greatly a three dimensional world: here is a narrative that gives a new dimension"(Featured Author: James Joyce).
This new dimension is what T.S. Eliot was referring to in his essay "Ulysses, Order and Myth," in which he wrote that Joyce's book "has the importance of a scientific discovery. No one else has built a novel on such a foundation before." Eliot went on to say that the traditional 19th century novel was "a form which will no longer serveà.T
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1281
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
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