Summer Reading: Modernists

[JustAnotherModernGuy]

We have quite a few great reading lists already started for other disciplines (queer literature, Victorian, etc.) and I think it is about time the Modernists united. What modernist authors are we reading this summer?

This summer I'm trying to brush up on my canonical British male Modernists (in addition to be sexist I am fairly comfortable with the canonical British female Modernists). I've survived Joyce and Lawrence and have just moved on to rereading (and enjoying) my Forster. Here's my list so far:

J. Joyce

Dubliners

A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man

Ulysses (I first reread a prose translation of the Odyssey to prepare)

D. H. Lawrence

Sons and Lovers

The Rainbow

Women in Love

[jasper.milvain]

I just finished reading Forster's The Longest Journey and I'm not sure what to think of him. On the one hand, he picks up on a lot of strands that I'm interested in (materiality and how it interacts with politics, representations of authorship and how it interacts with labour, bad marriage stories, etc). On the other, it seems oddly rushed and juvenile. People have their deaths announced out of the blue in one sentence, and are forgotten in the next. The whole plot is filled with romantic parallels that are supposed to be laden with deep meaning, but just seem kind of heavy handed. I found myself wishing it was twice as long just so that he could take the time to talk through things more. I think that I'll have to move to Passage to India next...

I fully support your avoidance of Finnegan's Wake and The Waves. But then again, my proposed dissertation is something along the lines of Eat Me, Modernists: Why Virginia Woolf was wrong and exactly how much more complex and compelling than her the late Victorians were.

[Minnesotan]

Eat Me, Modernists: Why Virginia Woolf was wrong and exactly how much more complex and compelling than her the late Victorians were.

I'd be willing to read a draft of that, when you've produced some pages. =)

[JustAnotherModernGuy]

I just finished reading Forster's The Longest Journey and I'm not sure what to think of him. On the one hand, he picks up on a lot of strands that I'm interested in (materiality and how it interacts with politics, representations of authorship and how it interacts with labour, bad marriage stories, etc). On the other, it seems oddly rushed and juvenile. People have their deaths announced out of the blue in one sentence, and are forgotten in the next.

A while back I added The Longest Journey (as well as Where Angels Fear to Tread) to my reading list and ordered copies. While the books have yet to come, in the meantime I've finished A Room with a View and also Howards End. I really enjoyed the narrative structure of A Room with a View, particularly the jump between part one and part two of the novel with the missing gap of Charlotte and Lucy's travels in Rome (and the original proposals for marriage in Rome). I laughed quite loudly when I came to the lines (in part two of the novel) which reads "Cecil entered. Appearing thus late in the story, Cecil must be at once described" (Forster 81). Piecing together "what happened" in Rome was quite intriguing, particularly with the help of Forster's playful narrator (who, only a few pages later, quickly dismisses a minor character on a few different levels: "Sir Harry Otway--who need not be described--came to the carriage..."). This Rome gap reminds me of the gap in "Time Passes" in Woolf's To The Lighthouse and the confusion over the Marabar cave incident in his A Passage to India (which I'll start rereading soon).

I seem to find that Forster usually has a good reason for his peculiar way of telling a story (ultimately Cecil and Rome are not as important as George and Florence to Lucy), sometimes questioning perspective and priorities (perhaps Cecil is as trivial as Sir Harry Otway, but one certainly needs to describe Cecil to properly tell Lucy

[yank in the M20]

Very old thread, but I liked it and hoped to revive it. Anyone have some fave modernists they'd like to share? I'm a big fan of Ford Madox Ford. Read the Good Soldier for a really interesting play with temporality and unreliable narration or, my favorite, Parade's End for the Condition of England novel that, again, has this really interesting structure that manages to twist reader's perceptions by jumping around in time. It's really subtle so that you might read whole swathes of the novel and not find it much different from a Victorian realist novel, style-wise, but then he cuts and pastes together various experiences the characters have and you're left wondering what's going on. And the miniseries is coming to BBC this year. Can't wait!