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ENGL 179B: Modernism - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Katherine Mansfield
        "The Garden Party"
        
        "'Stop the garden-party? My dear Laura, don't be so absurd. Of course we can't do anything of the kind. Nobody expects us to. Don't be so extravagant'
        'But we can't possibly have a garden-party with a man dead just outside the front gate.'"
        - p. 7
        
        Mansfield tackles the issue which many people were facing in the outbreak of the first war: how do you respond to death that you cannot see, but that you know is happening? Especially when it doesn't affect you or your ability to continue living on. Despite the mass tragedy and casualties happening day-to-day that the whole world was aware of, life kept going, including celebrations. This is further significant because it highlights that only certain groups are able to choose to continue on after something tragic occurs, and even chooses to make others continue on even if they have been affected as well.
      - Katherine Mansfield
        "The Daughter of the Late Colonel"
        
        "Josephine could only glare. She had the most extraordinary feeling that she had just escaped something simply awful. But how could she explain to Constantia that father was in the chest of drawers? He was in the top drawer with his handkerchiefs and neckties, or in the next with his shirts and pyjamas, or in the lowest of all with his suits. He was watching there, hidden away - just behind the door-handle - ready to spring.
        She pulled a funny old-fashioned face at Constantia, just as she used to in the old days when she was going to cry.
        'I can't open,' she nearly wailed.
        'No, don't, Jug," whispered Constantia earnestly. "It's much better not to. Don't let's open anything. At any rate, not for a long time.'"
        - p. 7
        
        In this passage, Josephine expresses a desire to leave everything as it was in the room after her father dies. Much like "The Garden Party" there is a desire for stillness in order to grieve. However, Josephine also seems to display a different perspective on death, suggesting that her father is still there, inhabiting the space around them which requires the room remaining still and unchanged. The stillness becomes a vehicle for grappling with her father's death and perhaps even allowing him a life after death
      - T.S. Eliot
        "The Waste Land"
        
        "Unreal City,
        Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
        A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
        I had not thought death had undone so many.
        Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled.
        - I. Burial of the Dead, lines 60-64
        
        In many modernist works, Winter becomes a symbol of death and stillness. However, this moment in the poem is unique because it depicts a different form of death in which it is possible to be dead and yet still living. The crowd itself serves as an image of death, a condition of modernism which forces the life out of living bodies. Additionally, the fog alludes to the ongoing WWII and the chemical warfare which made air itself — a requirement to live — a weapon, or a vehicle of death.
      - James Joyce
        "The Dead"
        
        "Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."
        - p. 225
        
        This passage brings together themes of death and nationalism, with the weather uniting all of Ireland while also suggesting that the news is doing the work of creating unity across the country. Further, the dead is significant because as the snow falls, it unites both the living and dead, making them indistinguishable from one another.
  - - - "'I am in bed with influenza' — but what does that convey of the great experience; how the world has changed its shape; the tools of business grown remote; the sounds of festival become romantic like a merry-go-round heard across far fields; and friends have changed, some putting on a strange beauty. others deformed to the squatness of toads"
        - p. 3
      - "Now, become as the leaf or the daisy, lying recumbent, staring straight up, the sky is discovered to be something so different from this that really it is a little shocking. This then has been going on all the time without our knowing it!"
        - p. 6
      - Woolf uses her own illness to describe the transformational qualities that being bed-bound provides. Being forced to remain still due to her disability allows one to see the world from a new perspective which they would never have seen if they had never fallen ill. Much like "The Tiredness of Rosabel," stillness gives way to epiphany or revelation
- - - - Smith highlights an extraordinary moment in which a divided nation in the aftermath of a Brexit vote is simultaneously united in their division. They are united by the circumstances, the historical moment, the lack of knowledge, and they are even united simply by the fact that they are all divided. Not only is their national identity being shifted and broken down, but a new identity is emerging
      - "All across the country, the country split in pieces. All across the country, the countries cut adrift. All across the country, the country was divided, a fence here, a wall there, a line drawn here, a line crossed there."
        - p. 61
      - "All across the country, people felt it was the wrong thing. All across the country, people felt it was the right thing. All across the countrym people felt they'd really lost. All across the country, people felt they'd really won. All across the country, people felt they'd done the right thing and other people had done the wrong thing. All across the country, people looked up Google: what is EU?"
        - p. 59
    - - H.D.'s poem "The Walls Do Not Fall" is interested in exploring the role and purpose of humans in history, both as individuals and as a collective. This passage reveals an attempt to define a relationship from on person to the next, as if trying to forge a new identity in which minds and thoughts are shared between each person. Additionally, the emphasis on a "search for historical parallels" give the sense of trying to find a place in history to belong and relate to, as well as creating an identity from past history and current events. Further, it establishes an idea of cyclicality; that history has a sense of ongoingness and will never be complete.
      - "This search for historical parallels,
        research into psychic affinities,
        has been done to death before,
        will be done again;
        no comment can alter spiritual realities
        (you say) or again,
        what new light can you possibly
        throw upon them?
        my mind (yours),
        your way of thought (mine),
  - - - Stella is navigating her own national alliances by deciding whether or not to help Harrison spy on Robert, while also holding valuable information which she can choose to give or not to give to whomever she wishes. She is faced with the crucial decision of choosing either her relationship or her allegiance to her country. This passage displays Stella's power of being able to access information and choosing who else has access to it, or who she will give it to. In reading the note and tearing it up, she claims ownership of the information and knowledge. Her choice not to divulge the contents of the note further displays that power.
      - "Rapidly she had unfolded the sheet of paper: now she was glancing through what was written on it in a semi-abstracted, calm, quite business-like way. 'Nothing at all,' she said, 'as we might have known.' Idly, she tore it across once, still more idly tore it across again, then stood up to brush the pieces from her dress to the floor."
        - p. 68