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Modernism: by Garrett Ewald modernism - Coggle Diagram

- - - - As a product of Woolf’s literary form, she reproduces a fractured and fragmented effects through her short and discrete clauses, but then sews them back together through her use of semicolons and nearly interminable sentence structures. Through this, Woolf is able to create a leveling effect which equates and equalizes what was a fractured sense of time, space, and knowledge.
      - "Also the sea tosses itself and breaks itself, and should any sleeper fancying that he might find on the beach an answer to his doubts, a sharer of his solitude, throw off his bedclothes and go down by himself to walk on the sand, no image with semblance of serving and divine promptitude comes readily to hand bringing the night to order and making the world reflect the compass of the soul"
    - - "It merges the distant future / with most distant antiquity, / states economically / in a simple dream-equation / the most profound philosophy, / discloses the alchemist's secret / and follows the Mage / in the desert" (HD).
      - While HD’s poem certainly also reckons with fragments of space and time in a world which has been somewhat leveled and equalized by destruction, she also uniquely attempts to piece back together knowledge which has been fragmented, deemed separate, and hierarchized by Enlightenment sentiments. She shows all knowledge to be one in the same, and she argues that knowledge is a constructive mode which builds on itself throughout time, and that it is fruitless and backwards to do violence to knowledge by instead trying to demarcate what should and should not be considered true in a rational empirical sense.
    - - The entire poem borrows from history to layer things on top of one another to achieve a mimesis of the contemporaneous moment of destruction and fragmentation
      - "Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves / waited for rain, while the black clouds / Gathered far distant over Himavant" (Eliot).
  - - - "She never had. The whole difficulty was to prove anything. How did one prove things, how could one? Suppose Kate had stood in front of her and deliberately made a face. Mightn't she very well have been in pain? Wasn't it impossible, at any rate, to ask Kate if she was making a face at her?"
      - Throughout the text, characters are constantly bumping up against thresholds and barriers that dictate their capacities for knowing. Characters are locked out of communicating with each other in a way which would allow them to truly perceive and come to know each other’s internality.
    - - Stella Rodney lives an apartment that is systematically standardized and is the same as all other apartments. Through this, there is a certain equalization of her physical space that renders it an absence and a negation that lacks anything through which she can understand her own identity and presence in relation to the world around her. There is a certain incongruence here because the spaces don’t match up with the people who are inhabiting them. This can all be seen as related to piecing a fragmented reality back together, but at the same time the complete opposite of such. This is a physical reality that is pieced together so perfectly and smoothed over to such an extent that it looses all capacity to reflect an understanding of reality. With this space, one must slightly fragment it, reveal the seams, or produce texture to eradicate the empty homogeneity of the space and allow for a conception of reality to begin to be constructed through it.
  - - - Secondly, as they become enjoined, Yeats expresses a moment of fragmented pieces being pieced together in a brutal and nonconsensual way. As opposed to everything else in the "Fragmentation" category, the act of piecing fragments together is the very act of violence and destruction: "And how can body, laid in that white rush, / But feel the strange heart beating where it lies? (Yeats).
      - Thirdly, the poem ends by pondering what transformation will come from this act. Will it serve as the precipice for shifting class and gender relations of power? "Did she put on his knowledge with his power / Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?" (Yeats).
      - Firstly, the scene is a tragic moment of suspension and paralysis as the woman cannot escape the assault: "How can those terrified vague fingers push / The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?" (Yeats).
- - - - Towards the end of the text, thinking about the death of her ex-husband, Greta falls into a state of suspension. Consequently, Gabriel also is locked in a state of liminality and paralysis as he copes with what it might mean that Greta is still attached to her ex-husband through mourning.
      - "She stopped, choking with sobs, and, overcome by emotion, flung herself face downward on the bed, sobbing in the quilt" (Joyce).
      - "A vague terror seized Gabriel at this answer, as if, at that hour when he had hoped to triumph, some impalpable and vindictive being was coming against him, gathering forces against him in its vague world" (Joyce).
- - - - There is a marked stillness and changeless within the characters and their actions. There is no avenue for change or transformation, and consequently, the characters are locked in a state pf paralysis: "In a steamer chair, under a Manuka tree that grew in the middle of the front grass patch, Linda Burnell dreamed the morning away. She did nothing" (Mansfield"
      - Even the imagery of the setting is imbued with lacking an avenue for change: "The sun had not yet risen...Big drops hung on the bushes and just did not fall" (Mansfield).
      - Even in moments of epiphany, the only thing the epiphany produces is more stillness and suspension: "Then the cloud sailed away, and the sound of the sea was a vague murmur, as though it waked out of a dark dream. All was still" (Mansfield).
  - - - In the second, he imagines that something must have to come along to save us from our own destruction, to give us a way to salvage ourselves and our realities: "Surely some revelation is at hand. Surely the Second Coming is at hand" (Yeats).
      - However, while he insists that something like that must be coming, it is not necessarily hopeful, and it is shown that this force could be a force of reckoning which puts the pieces back together through some sort of erasure of humanity: "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" (Yeats).
      - In the first stanza of the poem, he is recognizing that everything in the world is fragmented, and that we have lost a way of putting the pieces back together: "Things fall apart, the center cannot hold" (Yeats).
- - - - The speaker comes to an epiphany that exposes to him how naive he had truly been throughout the entire story. Throughout the story, he was hopeful that he could reach beyond the small life he had known to access something foreign to him. However, he is faced with the realization that all of this was a delusion. The hope he felt throughout the story was nothing more than a lie he was telling himself. Rather than the epiphany revealing something that pushes him further, he only realizes all of the things that he isn’t, and in realizing such, he potentially even regresses.
      - “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger” (Joyce)