ENG 4339 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Stratus Cloud, Daniel Defoe, The Technique
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UNIT 1
THE DISCOURSE BETWEEN OR THE NEED “TO MAKE IT NEW”: LITERATURE IN AN EVER
CHANGING WORD.
We consider the modern period in literature runs from the sixteenth century onwards. The period
studied is between 1880 and the WWII.
If one single word could summarise the period, it would be change. After the industrialisation and the
mechanisation of the nation, it begun the challenge of Victorian values and morals. Around 1880, a crisis in the
power and ideals of Victorianism came, and confidence in society’s institutions and authority faltered.
1.1. The Crisis of Victorian Positivism.
In 1851, the Great Exhibition took place in London, and the following three decades were considered
the zenith of Victorianism.
At the turn of the century, with the Tories in the Government, a need was felt for social and political
reform. There was also a movement from an economy based on land ownership to a modern urban economy,
based on trade and manufacturing.
It was the time when women gained the right to vote (universal suffrage for both sexes was achieved in
1928), and for reforms to increase education and to improve working conditions and health. At this time the
most common form of entertainment was reading aloud. The advent of universal compulsory education after
1839 meant larger audiences for literature, and the emergence of an unsophisticated reading public. Literature
was divided between “high art” and “low art”.
This was also the age of the “Irish Question” (whether or not the Irish should be allowed to rule
themselves). The cultural renaissance that took place in Ireland around the turn of the century was lead by a
group of Anglo Irish writers including Yeats. They wrote in English about Irish nationalism, myth and legend.
Yeats, with Lady Gregory and Edward Martin founded the Irish Literacy Theatre in 1898.
The Irish Literary Revival stimulated Irish nationalism and gave Ireland a place in the international stage.
Sinn Féin (meaning “ourselves alone”) was the most important political movement to emerge from the cultural
renaissance, founded in 1905. They were convinced the 1800 Act of Union was the root of most of Ireland’s
problems.
A land reform in Ireland has been taking place since 1870, but severe poverty was widespread. There
was little industry, and living conditions were infamous in Dublin. By 1913, a series of strikes took place, and
the strikers were supported by many of the Irish literary and artistic community. They wanted better working
conditions, and revolution was in the air. Home Rule was to became a law in September 1914, but the begin of
the WWI in august, suspended it. The war dragged on, and after some rebellious outbreaks, in December 1918,
Sinn Féinn won the elections, establishing an independent government in Dublin. This lead to an Anglo-Irish
conflict known as the War of Independence. In august 1919, IRA was founded. In December 1921, Britain
retained 3 Irish ports, but the rest of the 26 counties were to be called Irish Free State. A provisional
government was set up under Michael Collins, to transfer power to the Irish in January 1922, but different
opinions lead to a Civil War, which had more impact than the Independence War.
During this time, Britain took control of key ports and islands around the word, The British Empire still
expanding. The prevailing attitude in Britain was that colonialism was good for everyone, and around the turn
of the century, the colonies evolved into the “dominions” of the Commonwealth.
The need for raw materials gained through colonial expansion and exploitation is one of the
consequences of the so-called Industrial Revolution. There are several reasons for Industrial Revolution:
a. The technological innovations in the production of textiles, iron and coal of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries.
b. The previous agricultural revolution that made Britain able to feed a larger population that
increased the demand of manufactured goods.
c. The innovations in transport that helped spread the economic development.
This gave birth to the notion of “leisure”, encouraging the creation of “seaside resorts”. As the Industrial
revolution progressed, working ours decreased, and Bank Holidays were introduced.
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There was an economic movement from landownership to a modern urban economy based on trade
and manufacturing. This accelerated the migration of the population from the countryside to the cities, and
was a stimulus to the development of “city” professions such as law, accountancy and management. Another
result of the movement of the population to the cities was the growth of horrifying slums in overcrowded
cities. The poorer lived in the inner city, giving way to the growth of middle-class suburbs, made possible by the
expansion of suburban rail transport.
Technological developments such as printing presses helped to spread literacy. Parallel changes
occurred in culture and art, such as steam power, telegraph, intercontinental cable, or the discovery of
anaesthetics. The Industrial Revolution also meant that the balance of power shifted from the aristocracy,
whose position and wealth was based on land, the newly rich business leaders. The new aristocracy became
one of wealth, not land.
Artist felt alienated and expressed disdain for the general moral and tastes. Wilde followed the Art for
Art’s Sake doctrine: pursue beauty and pleasure as ends in themselves. They desired to shock and challenge
Victorian values, and the figure of the dandy and the effeminate man appeared. Many of the Aesthetes showed
an excess of hedonism, and disengaged art from any purposeful meaning I society. From the 1880 to the start
of the WWI, the Aesthetic movement liberated art from pragmatism.
The philosophy of Art as an End in itself was born in France with advocates as Charles Baudelaire and
Gautier, the Aesthetic movement inspired by the philosophical views of Kant in relation to aesthetics and
pleasure. In his Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, he argued that a pure aesthetic experience is the
contemplation of an object that provokes pleasure for its own sake. In other words, art is useless and it should
be contemplated for its value in terms of pleasure only. The views of French Aesthetics, were introduced in
England by Walter Pater, an expressed by writers as Swingburne or Oscar Wilde.
Aesthetic values lived to the full brought of a different movement: The Decadent Movement. Decadents
followed a way of live based on the ideas of the Aesthetic movement, viewing art as totally opposed to
“nature”, both in biological sense and in “natural” norms of morality and sexual behaviour. The art of the
Decadents was artificial, ant the “decadence” in their personal lives, was expressed in the search for a strange
“unnatural” sensations which in many cases involved the use of drugs or experimental sexual behaviour. Oscar
Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and the play Salomé, are representative literary productions of
Decadent literature.
This sophistication and artificiality of the Decadents will reappear with variations in the 1950s site the
“Beats” poets. The independence and self-suffiencienty of art stressed by the Aesthetes, and the Decadents, as
well as the concept of a poem as an end in itself will strongly influence writers of the inter-war period such as
T. S. Elliot, Yeats, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.
At the turn of the century artist, writers and play writers, were highly critical of Victorian achievements
and beliefs. They mocked and challenged middle-class values, and the very notion of art. A most telling
example is Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest.
1.2. The interpretation of an Ever-changing World.
In 1859, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection by Charles Darwin was published. Among
other things, stated that the production of more offspring that can possibly survive implies competition, and
the survival of the fittest. The hypothesis of gradual transformation of the species was abhorrent to Victorian
mentality, and contrary to Christian belief.
Nevertheless, terms such “evolution” and “degeneration” started to be manifold. “Evolution” served to
justify the empire and colonialism, since non-European societies were seen as underdeveloped. “Degeneracy”
referred to the phenomenon that the social status quo was under threat from the freer values of the younger
generation, sceptical about the traditional values of morality, custom and proprieties, unsettling the assumed
stability of Victorian society.
Issues of human development, degeneration and depravity were presented in the popular literature
produced in the late 1880s and 1890s. Among this we count Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Oscar Wilde’s The
Picture of Dorian Gray, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde. They could all be read as cautions
against the rise of promiscuity and its associated evils such as prostitution, syphilis and adultery, and also
accuse many of the pillars of Victorian society (came to be named “Victorian hypocrisy” especially with regard
to sexual matters”. “Degeneration” was taken as the break from traditional forms of expression.
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The term “agnostic” was coined in the 1870s, meaning the impossibility for the empirical mind to either
believe or not believe. According to D.H. Lawrence, the world was as varied as the individuals observing it,
contrasting with the principles of Realism which presupposed a perception of the world shared by all members
of society. The theological search for God had been replaced by an epistemological quest for self-knowledge,
which found expression in the word of Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathrustra, with its “God is dead”. He was the
first philosopher to consider extensively human responsibility and freedom in a universe without God.
Writers such as Eliot, Joyce, Woolf and Yeats incorporate myth and classical models destined to give
meaning to the alienated modern individual for whom Christian religion had ceased to be the answer.
Nietzsche’s theory of superman referred to a new creative being who would transcend religion, morality and
ordinary society and would satisfy his own will. His motto will be “be what you are”. He insisted on the
necessity to approach all values from a new different perspective. He is also the theorist of nihilism, “active
nihilism” or increased power of the spirit, and “passive nihilism”, or power of the spirit recessive, implying
futility, resignation and cynicism. He believed the duty of the modern individual to create a future of new
values, implying an act of destructive genesis and a total break with the past. He also developed the concept of
“eternal recurrence”, the idea that experience is eternally repeated.
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), start and finish with the same
letter, both contain a circular structure that breaks the linear progression of the narrative. In “eternal
recurrence” the concept of cyclical time is present in the idea of repetition or recurrence, which repetition will
happen for ever.
The theory of relativity expressed by Einstein (1879-1955) states that in objects travelling at speed near
of that of light, matter transforms in energy. The possibility of a change in matter implies the crumble of the
principle of permanence of Newton. A Newtonian universe found expression in the realist novel, where a
reliable narrator renders observations of a world consistent with empirical laws and progress according to a
chronological pattern of lineal time. We find in modern narratives flashbacks, time arcs, jumps, repetitions,
leaps and swerves. These are narrative devices allowing for the representation of the subjective perception of
time.
The ambiguity and flexibility implied by this theory allowed the expression of the ambiguity and
flexibility in language. Modern writing plays with the notion that language can never be fixed, and implies that
language, and not the story, is the most important feature in literature.
Saussure in his Course in General Linguistics (1916) is the first linguist to question the goal of the study
of linguistic. He explored the language as a social phenomenon. Before him literature used language as a tool
that would enable to portray reality as it should be physically observed, language was a window to the world.
According to him, language is made up of signs owing their signification not to the world but to the difference
to each other, so, the meaning of a sign is not fixed, but depends on its opposition. In other words, language is
socially constructed and therefore subject to changes in meaning.
According to Wittgensetein, language has limitations, and he considered it not as a mere system of
representation of the world, but a social a communicative reality. Language stops being a transparent, reliable
tool and becomes an issue in itself. Language is mutable, ambiguous and unfixed in meaning. In Time and
Freewill, Henri Bergson discusses the mind’s particular understanding of time. He opposes linear time against
what he calls “duration” which refers to the way the mind perceives the length of an experience according to
the respective subject.
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway which was going to be called “The Hours” is a good example. It contains
pages of an experience being considered by a character while only a second has elapsed. The event of an
aeroplane writing in the sky lasts different lengths of subject time for different characters.
In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud developed his views on the importance of infantile
sexuality for the development of the psyche. He argued that dreams are the expression of repressed desires
(unconscious), and discovered its importance. Because this unconscious drives the subject, the conscious is
made of multiple selves that emerge depending on which part of the unconscious becomes conscious. The
unconscious implies a part of the mind that can never be totally known by the subject. The idea that the
individual is totally in control of his actions has to be abandoned since there is a part of the mind that, because
it is not conscious, cannot be controlled by the subject.
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Document Summary
The di cou e between o the need (cid:862)to make it new(cid:863): lite atu e in an eve . We consider the modern period in literature runs from the sixteenth century onwards. The period studied is between 1880 and the wwii. If one single word could summarise the period, it would be change. After the industrialisation and the mechanisation of the nation, it begun the challenge of victorian values and morals. Around 1880, a crisis in the power and ideals of victorianism came, and confidence in so(cid:272)iet(cid:455)(cid:859)s institutions and authority faltered. In 1851, the great exhibition took place in london, and the following three decades were considered the zenith of victorianism. At the turn of the century, with the tories in the government, a need was felt for social and political reform. There was also a movement from an economy based on land ownership to a modern urban economy, based on trade and manufacturing.
