Literary Modernism (1890 to 1930) Group at eNotes

I have to agree on Hemingway. It's not always fashionable to love...

Thu, 6 Nov 2008 19:27:15 PST

I have to agree on Hemingway. It's not always fashionable to love Hemingway, but I do anyway. I'll throw in Faulkner as well.If I cheat and go past 1930, I have to cast a vote for Nathanael West's comic and grostesque portraits of American life. Certainly "The Day of the Locust" is "The Wasteland" realized Hollywood style.

I agree with Bates that Ulysses marks the end of the novel as a form....

Tue, 4 Nov 2008 11:55:40 PST

I agree with Bates that Ulysses marks the end of the novel as a form. The primary reason, I think, is the medium we are using right now, the word processor. Because society is so inundated with information, and writing has been made so technically easy through technology, society is more focused on the expansion of new mediums. I took a Postcolonial Theory class in which we read "Salam Pax: A Diary of and Ordinary Iraqi". The book...

I adore Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. I find Wagh's satire worderfully...

Tue, 4 Nov 2008 11:49:56 PST

I adore Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. I find Wagh's satire worderfully esoteric. I am almost done with his complete works, and I find myself putting off reading the ones that are left so that I can keep looking forward to them. They are both so disturbing and hilarious.

I'll add Hemingway and Eliot.

Mon, 13 Aug 2007 13:24:42 PST

I'll add Hemingway and Eliot.

Yes, content really is the sticky point here: postcolonial themes,...

Mon, 13 Aug 2007 12:55:26 PST

Yes, content really is the sticky point here: postcolonial themes, characters, and settings have pretty much dominated serious literature since 1970 (and even earlier if you consider the boom in Latin American literature to be postcolonial). So in that case, absolutely: the novel is reborn, refreshed, renewed practically every minute with something new--a way of seeing or a way of knowing that is seemingly "other" than our own.But I...

Favorite Authors in This Period

Mon, 13 Aug 2007 12:36:36 PST

Who do you think are the best authors writing in the literary modernist period?

I would say my favorites are:

James Joyce
Franz Kafka
Ezra Pound

I guess it depends on what you consider "new". Certainly,...

Mon, 13 Aug 2007 11:36:44 PST

I guess it depends on what you consider "new". Certainly, technically speaking, it would be tough to truly innovate in terms of form post-Ulysses.However, new emotions, stories, ideas, etc. have been produced in the novel form every year since 1922 at an astonishing clip. It's this potential that makes the novel such a great form, it's always new, even if it hasn't been technically updated for a long time. If there was one genre or...

The death of the new

Mon, 13 Aug 2007 11:25:52 PST

"Nothing new in the novel has happened since 1922." Or so says critic Anton Bates. He was referring to the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses, a novel which in effect exhausted the possibility of the novel. Do you think Bates was right? Save for Joyce's own Finnegans Wake (which really doesn't qualify as a book except that it's printed on pages and has a cover), I can't think of anything that's "new"...