What is the significance of memory for and in literary modernism?
According to Poplawski (2003, p vii), modernism continues to be widely acknowledged as probably the most important and influential artistic-cultural phenomenon of the twentieth century. Poplawski further notes, that modernism is characterised by an avant-garde experimentalism and its concern for radical innovation in artistic form, style, content and method. Intellectual and artistic movements within the 19th century, such as impressionism, imagism, symbolism, futurism, and expressionism, paved the way for the emergence of literary modernism. Indeed, this influential paradigm demonstrated a profound concern with themes of alienation, fragmentation, and the loss of shared values and meanings Poplawski (2003, ix).
As an example of impressionistic fiction, Ford Madox Ford’s seminal work The Good Soldier (1914), emphasises the role of memory and association, Poplawski (2003 p. 196), rather than the previously accepted reliance upon external reality, to mediate human experience. Ford’s text places individual human consciousness, at the centre of being and existence. Since literary modernism acknowledges the dynamic and fluid nature of human perception, the human memory plays a critical role in the quest for personal and social identity. In the case of The Good Soldier, the reader is confronted with the social fissures of pre-World War 1 Europe. This is done through the fractured narrative viewpoint of John Dowell, a seasoned American expatriate, living abroad, spending numerous summers in Germany with his cuckolding wife Florence; and ostensibly their friends, Edward Ashburnham, (the good soldier) and his wife Leonora.
Poplawski observes, (2003, p 196) that in literary modernism, disjunct moments flow together, displaying a mind in the process of choosing or evaluating its acts. Impressionist techniques break up outlines of story and character, with juxtaposed fragments creating a more suggestive impression than fully constructed units would. This characteristic is clearly evident through the confused, cynical, socially oblivious retrospective narration of John Dowell. Dowell all…
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Tags: economic repression, modernism, modernist writers, Poplawski, sexual repression, Virginia Woolf
