NOVEL, ITS EVOLUTION AND

FEATURES OF MODERN NOVEL

 WHAT IS NOVEL?
Novel is the sole genre that continues to
develop, that is as yet uncompletedThe
generic skeleton of the novel is still far from
having hardened, and we cannot foresee all
its plastic possibilities. Bakhtin
It is an anti-genre. Terry Eagleton.
 For Bakhtin all the other genres like (Epic and
Tragedy) have long since completed their
development. The reason why the genres like Epic
and Tragedy reached saturation point was
because of having a canon. Studying these
genres, for Bakhtin, is analogues to studying dead
languages.
Novel continues to develop because it has no
canon.
 For Bakhtin novel is a Parasite.
For Eagleton novel is a cannibal.
 The novel parodies other genres, it
exposes the conventionality of their
formsit squeezes out some genres
and incorporates others into its own
peculiar structure, reformulating and
re-accentuating them. Bakhtin
 Novel consistently parodied the
dominant or fashionable genres like
Epic, Tragedy, Romance, Baroque and
the Sentimental. Thus, through
parody, novel not only expands its
own structure but also renews the
decadent forms of literature.
 It cannibalizes other literary modes and
mixes the bits and pieces promiscuously
together. You can find poetry and dramatic in
the novel, along with epic, pastoral, satire,
history, elegy, tragedy and number of other
literary modes. Eagleton
Novel is characterised by indeterminacy and
semantic open-endedness. Bakhtin
NOVEL IS A CHIMERA
 18TH CENTURY THEORY OF NOVEL
theory based on a series of new novels starting with Fieldings Tom
Jones , Wielands Agathon and Blackenburgs essay The Roman Trial.
1. Novel should not be poetic.
2. The hero of a novel should not be heroic. He should combine in
himself negative as well as positive features, low as well lofty,
ridiculous as well serious.
3. The hero should not be portrayed as an already completed and
unchanging person.
4. The novel should become for the contemporary world what the epic
was for the ancient world.
MODERNISM
1890-1930
The emptiest of all the cultural notions Perry
Anderson

Unlike the terms, Renaissance, Gothic, Romantic or Neo-

Classical, it does not describe any system.

Underneath the crust of modernism is concealed a

variety of aesthetic practices: Symbolism,
Expressionism, Surrealism, Imagism, Impressionism etc.

Modernism is defined through its attitudes and various

visual, cultural and literary movements.
 Modernism: Aesthetic modernity
Modernity: Technological and social
sphere
The difference was emphasized through
aesthetic manifestos and essays.
 Modernism is synonymous with crisis. It is a
literature of crisis caused by crisis.
Darwin
Marx
Freud
Nietzsche
Saussure
Einstein
 The inaugurating problem of Modernism
is the issue of the status and possibility
of imaginative and ethical consciousness
in a culture dominated by capitalism.
Andrew Brighten
MARJORIE PERLOFFS 12 FEATURES
OF MODERNISM
 (1) Modernist literature depicts modern life,
especially urban life, and shows ambivalence
towards it. In depicting modern life, modernist
literature appears to be addressing the
fundamental problem of the justification of art in
the modern world. In so far as urban life was not
conventionally deemed beautiful, the depiction of
it also implicitly answers the question of what
makes a work of art valuable: if the value of
Dubliners or The Waste Land does not inhere in the
subject matter, it must lie in the form or
treatment. Many reviewers, felt that there was
value in neither, and roundly condemned such
works on both aesthetic and moral grounds. To
some it seemed that modernism (in all media) was
 (2) It is difficult: it makes use of a wide and
sometimes unexpected range of reference
(literary, cultural, and linguistic); it removes
many of the devices that would conventionally
have helped the reader to make sense of the
text; it is verbally ambiguous and paradoxical. In
consequence, the modernist text appears
fragmentary.
(3) It contrasts an orderly past with a chaotic
present. This characteristic of modernism was
articulated early in its critical history: Stephen
Spender wrote in 1935 that writers after Henry
James are all conscious of the present as chaotic
[] and of the past as an altogether more solid
ground.18 The contrast emerges not only in
direct depictions of the past, but also in allusions
to its literature.
 (4) Where modernist literature displays the
pessimistic contrast seen above, it often also
includes the compensatory idea that art can
transcend the disorder of the present. Yeatss
poetry offers many clear examples. A variant
on this characteristic is the idea that art is
superior to nature: nature is inherently
messy; art is orderly.
 (5) It experiments with time, implying a larger
philosophy in which time is non-linear. As a
self-conscious display of formal mastery, it
again implicitly states that what makes a
work of art valuable is its form rather than its
subject matter. The idea that all moments are
simultaneously present also implies a grand
narrative of history in which there is neither
progress nor decline, but simply eternal
recurrence.
(6) It employs mythic allusion and mythic patterning as
an organizing structure.20 This characteristic was
articulated early by T. S. Eliot, in Ulysses, Order and
Myth (1923).
In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel
between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr Joyce is
pursuing a method which others must pursue after him.
[] It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of
giving a shape and a significance to the immense
panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary
history. It is a method already adumbrated by Mr Yeats,
and of the need for which I believe Mr Yeats to have
been the first contemporary to be conscious. []
Instead of narrative method, we may now use the
mythical method. Eliot
(7) Modernist literature (and modernist art
more generally) often takes man in his
primitive state as a point of reference.

In colonial narratives of Europeans going

native Heart of Darkness being the best-
known example the primitive state is feared.
Elsewhere, most notably in D. H. Lawrences
writing, the primitive is welcomed as offering
relief from enervating rationality.
the complexity of the mind and the self. It is
aware of the fluidity of consciousness, of the
force of the unconscious, and of a division
between the social and the personal self,
between conduct and consciousness. It
embodies this awareness through the use of free
direct or free indirect discourse, and through the
employment of multiple linguistic registers to
signal different levels or centers of
mass is commonly a feature of modernist literature;
another version is a contrast between the elite and the
masses. John Careys The Intellectuals and the Masses
(1992) provides the most extensive account of these
structures.

Carey argues that the difficulty of modernist literature

came about because modernist writers wished to exclude
mass audiences. I would argue that they did not wish to
exclude the mass audience, but wished to escape the
homogenization and trivialization of literature that
empathy, often claiming to prefer the former. In the novel,
the means by which earlier generations of writers would have
allowed readers to identify with a character are eschewed or
radically revised; in poetry, the identifiable speaking voice of
lyric poetry is avoided, or is framed in unfamiliar contexts.
For example, in narrative, the use of complex time schemes
tends to disrupt continuity and thus disrupt our identification
with a character. If events which belong late in the
chronological sequence are presented earlier in the
narrative, then the reader views the chronologically earlier
events with ironic detachment, knowing more than the
(11) The subject matter of modernist texts is
sometimes controversial. It is possible to
overstate this aspect, given that only a small
minority of modernist writers suffered the effects
of censorship. Nevertheless, the texts officially
censored include two that have become central
to the canon, The Rainbow (1915) and Ulysses
(1922), as well as Wyndham Lewiss Cantlemans
Spring Mate (1917).
 Modernists found themselves in trouble with
the censors because they wished to
represent the body and sexuality as fully as
possible, and, more generally, wished to
depict the full range of human behaviour
without having to place it in a moral frame.
 (12) Modernism is international.
 IHAB HASSANS MODERNISM VS
POSTMODERNISM TABLE

Modernism Postmodernism
Romanticism / Symbolism Pataphysics / Dadaism
Form (conjunctive, closed) Antiform (disjunctive / open)
Purpose Play
Design Chance
Hierarchy Anarchy
Mastery / Logos Exhaustion / Silence
Art Object / Finished Work Process / Performance /
Happening
Creation / Totalization Decreation / Deconstruction
 Modernism mirrors the chaos of the society through
literature. Hence a new mode of representation was
required to accommodate the fragmentary and crisis
ridden society. Realism, with its narrative authority,
reliability and fixity of human character, would not be
able to capture the flux inside and outside-both in
individuals and society.
Impressionism
Expressionism
Symbolism
MONETS IMPRESSION:
SUNRISE
 impressionism saw all phenomena filtering through
the medium of consciousness at a particular time
and place, thereby representing knowledge as an
individual rather than a universal experience. This
emphasis on the way phenomena are received by an
individual consciousness was, if not the
philosophical grounding, then at least the
conceptual underpinning of Impressionist art as
well.
 one of the most vital characteristics of
Impressionism . . . is the emphasis on aconceptual
sensation. . . . This instantaneous first impression
involves the reaction which is experienced before
the intellect has had time to intervene and interpret
things in conventional, rational, causal terms.
The Impressionist artist renders his subject as a
visual illusion perceived during the split second of
this first impression and not as it actually is
according to his knowledge of its permanent color
and form.
 the impressionist does not analyse
form but only receives the light
reflected from that form onto the
retina of his eye and seeks to
reproduce the effect of that light,
rather than the form of the object
reflecting it.
 Presenting things in the order in which we
perceive them, rather than first explaining
them in terms of their causes was therefore
very definitely a defining feature of literary
impressionism, one that distinguished it
from previous styles.
EDVARD MUNCHS THE
SCREAM