Student Introduction

Interview, in groups of three, one of your classmates and prepare to report the following information to the rest of the class:

Course goals for The Modern European Novel: Authoring the Experimental Self

- Focus on the development of the novel (genre) during the period of European “modernism”


- Topic of the “self”—how many ways can one experiment with that?


- Unit I:  Rebelling against . . . (Hesse, Gide)


- Unit II: Caught between Wars and Traditional Gender Stereotypes (Gide, Woolf)


- Unit III: The Modern Prison (Kafka, Kundera)


- How does the European novel inform notions of “modern identity” and vice versa?


- How did the modernist novel influence the contemporary novel?


What is the novel?






What is modernity? 


- Etymology: Late Latin modernus, from Latin modo (just now), from modus (measure)


- 1900-1939 (before WWII)


- Modernism: self-conscious break with the past and a search for new forms of expression


- IN CLASS WRITING: What is modern about the early 21st century? What cultural objects and practices define modernity now?


1. "Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at least a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure." -- Paul De Man (1919–1983), Belgian-born U.S. literary critic.


2. “'Modernity' signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable." Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), French poet, critic.


3. "By Modernism I mean the positive rejection of the past and the blind belief in the process of change, in novelty for its own sake, in the idea that progress through time equates with cultural progress; in the cult of individuality, originality and self-expression." -- Dan Cruickshank (b. 1949), British architectural critic.

Review of Lecture 1


What is the modern European novel?


1. Modernism

2. European

3. Novel

Fairy tale references (obtaining the Treatise)

- the figure of the wolf (sexuality, loner, bestiality)
- the old man/Magic Theater
- crossing the threshold between the adult (bourgeois) world and the young (rebellious) underground

What does the Treatise on Steppenwolf reveal about Harry Haller and his alter ego?

- Being a/the Steppenwolf is an “experiment and a transition” (61)
- A/the Steppenwolf has few options: either to become wholly man or wolf, to die tragically (suicide), or to take the “road of Buddha” (64)
- Being a/the Steppenwolf is the consequence of genius and the life of the artist

Lingering Questions not Answered in Lecture (Possible Essay Questions)

- To what extent can we “trust” the Treatise as a representation of Harry Haller?
- Who are other Steppenwolves (and how do they differ from Harry Haller)?

Review of L. 4

1. Goethe / Haller

- Authors in search of the sublime and immortality
- What is Germanic culture?
- How do artists live in their times and beyond?

2. Faust / Steppenwolf

- Figures striving / yearning obsessively (Sehnsucht)
- Travel the road of physical perdition
- What is the sum of human existence?
- How many times can one experiment with the self without losing the self?

3. Reality / Imaginary World

- Deliberate narrative technique
- Juxtaposition of two worlds can be read through recurring symbols and motifs
- Theme of duality in the novel

___________________________

Groups of Symbols / Motifs in Steppenwolf

Man-made

Natural

  • Doorways

  • Electric light

  • Narcotics

  • Literature, Music

  • Alchemy / Magic

  • Water

  • Stars

  • Flowers

  • Trees

  • Birds



____________________________

Dance and Sexuality:
Review of L. 6

Immortals

- Goethe, Novalis, Beethoven, Mozart and all great artistic geniuses whose works transcend their earthly body
- Spirit of the Steppenwolf
- Record of (non-material) human striving

Mozart

- Playful, socially-misunderstood genius
- Music and power to express the ineffable
- Power of laughter

Doors of perception

- War and what is it good for
- Search for knowledge in woman
- Loss of the self


Journal: Write on either one or both of the following topics:

1. What major questions about the self and modern identity does Steppenwolf pose?

2. Does Steppenwolf learn anything from his journey through the Magic Theater?
Review of L. 7

Unit I Essay: Rebelling Against . . .

- Expectations: Original, close literary analysis, argumentative and upper-division-level writing
- Topics: Encourage development of own topic or choose one of two suggested ones
- Timeline: Contact instructor by Wed. regarding working thesis statement/introductory paragraph; final due 9 Oct.

Narration in Gide’s Counterfeiters

- Semi-omniscient third person narrator (expressed in 2nd-narrator style, i.e., “I”)
- Shift in perspective between chorus of major protagonists
- Experimental focus on how to narrate a novel

The Mirror-Effect in Counterfeiters

- Literature: Almost all major characters in the novel are writers themselves contemplating experimental forms
- Society: Secrets, Liaisons, and the Hypocrisy of Bourgeois Family Life


Group Discussion:

1. What does the novel’s title—The Counterfeiters—mean in relation to the novel’s themes?

2. What apparent (psychological) traumas have the major characters experienced?

Review of L. 9

Reflections on the novel

1. Robert Passavant: fad-seeker

2. Vincent: naturalist/biologist --> a 'real' way to see

3. Edouard's theory of the novel

Journal #4: What role does literature play in The Counterfeiters? How does this differ from / compare to the role literature plays in Steppenwolf?

Review of L. 10

The Experimental Self in Counterfeiters

- Bernard: "I felt myself becoming an anarchist. Now, on the contrary, I think I'm veering toward conservatism" (Gide 201; cf. 220).

- Edouard (acc. to narrator) is engaged in "constant experimentalizing" with others' lives (Gide 219).

- Olivier lets himself be molded by Passavant.

Lingering Questions

- Has Bernard really ceased his "division of the personality" because he fell in love (Gide 271)?

- Who is the more 'authoritative' narrator in this book--Gide or Edouard?

- Which is the more 'authentic' or 'genuine' novel--the one we're reading or the one imagined by the characters within it?


Review of L. 11

I. Lost in Translation

A. La Fontaine--p. 261 (cf. Journal 422)

Papillon du Parnasse, et semblable aux abeilles
A qui le bon Platon compare nos merveilles,
Je suis chose légère et vole a tout sujet,
Je vais de fleur en fleur et d’objet en objet.

Butterfly of the Parnassus, and similar to the bees
To which the good Plato compares our wonders,
I am a light thing and steal some from every subject,
I go from flower to flower and object to object.

B. Jean de La Fontaine

Fables (17th century)– from Aesop; critique Louis 14th without offending him

C. Meaning in Gide?

- Epigraph p. 260 =  "One should not take, if I am not mistaken, from the flower of each object. . . "

- cf. p. 422

- Counterfeiting (literal, others’ literary works, others’ ideas)
- Sexuality and innocence

II. Issues in Male-male (homosocial) Relations in Gide

1. Different types of gangs enforce the male honor code

- Education: Counterfeit / high school gang
- Literary (Argonauts, literary review/circle)
- Law: Examining Magistrates (M. Profitendieu, M. Molinier)
- Church: Vedel-Azaïs family

Significance of word Argonauts

- Like other groups in novel, a group of men on a quest
- Legion of kids
- Society of lawyers/judges
- ‡ Cruel objects

2. Couples (homosexuality)

3. False fathers

III. A Portrait of Female Choice

Lilian:

- Free, unattached
- Might have a husband somewhere
- Expatriot
- Not part of ‘bourgeois society’
- Chooses her men and leaves them

Laura

- Same fate as Marguerite Profitendieu
- Escaped loveless marriage in an affair and had to return to husband
- More complicated—Object of adoration for other men

Rachel Vedel (235)

- Not married and therefore tied to family
- Has to work for family
- 285: Armand says she’s going blind, etc.

Sarah Vedel

- Does not want to be either Laura or Rachel and rebels by embracing bohemian lifestyle

Review of L. 12

Gide and Modernism:

- Literature: Critique of literary pretentiousness, the impossibility of maintaining a genuine avant-garde
- Transformation of character never happens because the point is that the JOURNEY, not the destination, of life matters

- Education: Hypocrisy, Social Rules and Practices
- Law: Social Status, Bourgeois Conspiracy
- International World: France, England, America, Poland, Russia, Switzerland, and Africa connected by individual experiments

Emerging Qualities of the Modern European Novel

- Open-ended
- Multiple narrative perspectives, unreliable narrators 
- Experimental use of space and time
- Skeptical about and apt to write ironically about “sincerity” and “authenticity” in art
- Use of dream, trance, and fantasy to express the ineffable (limits of language)
- Demands a critical eye/I from the reader (and a good sense of humor)
- Subject matter: the construction of the self, suicide, love and infidelity 

Lingering Questions not answered by discussion (i.e., essay topics)

- How does Gide manage, despite his experimental narrative techniques, to develop character in his novel?
- What role do paternity and maternity play in shaping the individual?
- Is homosexuality an allegory for . . . ?


Journal #5: Write a review of The Counterfeiters for the Montclarion, The Village Voice, or another periodical you regularly read.

L. 14.  T 10/21

Review of L. 11
Journal #6
Discussion

Review of L. 13

Gide and Writing (the Literary Review)

~ Gide’s Journal: Act of creation reveals more about the unconscious than the final product, which was written to please readers.

~ What prompts these characters to want to commit suicide? (L. V.)

~ Why do these characters fail to commit suicide?

* Hesse: An act of will, a statement about the defiled world
* Gide: Expression of defiance, freedom, rebellion; manly strength 

Virginia Woolf:

- Leslie Stephen, father, wrote Dictionary of National Biography
- Literary reviewer for the Times
- Center of the Bloomsbury group, through which she meets her short-term lover, Vita Sackville-West

Narrative perspective

- Preface: Mock acknowledgment of novelists
- cf. mock index
- 3rd-person biographer

“no doubt of his sex” (13)

- Queen Elizabeth
- Fluidity of self
- Motherhood, birth (biographer/novelist)

L. 15

Review
Unit II Essay
Gender and Narration in Orlando

Review L. 14

1. What is biography?

- A story of a notable person’s life when he or she has died
- A way of commemorating great persons
- 20th century: a way of weaving fact and fiction, or truth and personality

2. Orlando as Biography

- Comment on the ‘new biography’ (Strachey, Nicholson)
- History of Vita Sackville West’s family
- How can one narrate the journey and history of the self?

3. Orlando and literature

- A stab at immortality
- // Gide: a pretentious society
- A discovery of the self

Details

- Trance: Unconsciousness; rebirth (spring); fairy tale sleep (L. Schwartz)

- Nicholas Greene: Poet at Queen Elizabeth’s banquet in ch. 1; modeled on Robert Greene, contemporary of Shakespeare’s; appears in A Room of One’s Own (cf. n. 81/p. 323 in OUP); significance of green? 

-  Woolf / biographer: Mask that the writer assumes occasionally

Review of L. 15


Orlando’s Sex Change


- Follows a trance, a love affair, and neglect of (military) duty


- Part of Woolf’s definition of gender as non-essential and socially constructed


Orlando and Foreignness:


- Sex change occurs after Orlando embraces a foreign culture


- Literature informs concept of ‘national identity’


Similarity to Hesse and Gide: “Transformation” of character occurs midway through the novel yet reveals only aspects of identity that the reader (though perhaps not the protagonist) already perceives.

Review of L. 16

1) Literature: While Addison and Pope may treat her as an overgrown child, supporting their work is the only way she can be part of the literary world.

2) Class: Why do the protagonists in Modernist novels fetishize the life of the lower classes, on the one hand, but firmly belong to the upper classes?

3) Time

- 19th century: the “Angel in the house” (“Professions for Women”): woman as wife, mother, and sister; cult of domesticity in the Victorian era

- Timelessness: Modern European novel clearly tries to escape the pressures of the modern world (war) and create a world without definitive time (Einstein/relativity).

Review  L.  18

1. Gender and marriage

- Superficial change
- Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine: atypical man (just as Orlando is an atypical woman)
- Gender still decided by law, biology

2. Multiplicity of selves
- Orlando less resistant to multiple selves than Steppenwolf
- Multiple selves = demands on the modern individual, renewal/transformation of the self (out of adolescence, at middle age), non-essential interpretation of humanity

3. The goose?

- Gander
- Feisty
- Migration / transformation


Journal #7: What is the object of the literary criticism essay? What kinds of questions can/should one ask? What’s the purpose of it?


Review of L. 19

The Literary Criticism Essay

How does literature defy and/or conform to “tradition”?
What does the novel want the reader to take out of it?
What’s at stake in my interpretation?
How does the author define being human?
What is literature? What does it do?

Women in The Trial: Helpers, seducers, and confidantes

Threshold / Labyrinth

- Joseph K. does not recognize his own “self” and travels through endless corridors to find it
- Paranoia: all characters are implicated in his trial
- Who gives the Examining Magistrates their power?

Frau = woman, Mrs.
Fräulein = young woman, Ms.
Herr = man, Mr.
Montag = Monday
Lanz = lance
Bürstner = (similar to) brush
Kafka = crow in Czech

Review of L. 20


Joseph K.’s “Guilt”

- In some ways irrelevant because he is already accused
- Shameful to women
- Disrespectful and detached from family
- A callous bureaucrat
- An accuser and punisher himself (Franz and Willem)

Work and the Trial

- Joseph K. is “almost a lawyer” in his own work (137)
- Blurring of boundaries between so-called ‘real’ world of work and surreal world of trial
- Were there ever distinct boundaries (colleagues present at initial interrogation, whipping scene on work premise, uncle’s arrival, client’s knowledge of Chief Clerk’s predicament)

Political Issues in Kafka: Pre-existing values for fascism?

- complicity with persecution: To what extent do ‘ordinary’ citizens participate in condemning others? 
- deference to authority: How does authority gain its power?
- faceless bureaucracy: How does bureaucracy empower persecution?
- overwhelming sense of duty
- result: dizziness, vertigo

Journal #8: 

Orlando (the movie): Do you think the movie version of Orlando does a good or bad job of conveying the novel’s central themes? What would you change or keep? How are the genres of film and novel similar and/or different?

Review of L. 22

Leni:

- Like usher’s wife and Fr. Bürstner Leni guards the door; is not herself accused; has connections to the court; represents an affront to the Courts; represents false salvation; is not “his” alone; and promises help but just entangles him further in the trial. 

- Unlike the other women Leni satisfies his bestial needs; literally initiates him into Court life; is an object of intense jealousy; and is detested by his uncle.

Kafka fires Huld because:

- it represents an act of “rebellion” (62, 70).

- it negates the ‘reality’ of his trial.
 
- his lawyer wasn’t doing any good.
 
- it represents some type of empowerment.

- he's punishing himself?

Review of L. 23

"Before the Law"

- Parables—Old Testament story archetype that assumes an elder has ineffable knowledge to pass on

- Old man before the door gives authority to the doorkeeper by waiting and engaging in the process

- There are two types of law: the written and unwritten. Neither has mercy. 

- Is the Highest Court in Heaven?

Joseph K.’s Death

- Complicity in his own death
 
- Punishment is his sense of “shame” and dying like a “dog”

The Trial as Modern European Novel

- Where or who is the narrator?

- Is the modern world really all that “progressive”?

- The banality of evil . . .

Review of L. 24

Kundera and the Communists

- Post-1945 literature (Horkheimer and Adorno): Is poetry possible after Auschwitz? (cf. p. 4: “Hitler’s concentration camps”)

- Backdrop of the novel: Prague Spring (Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia)

- Narrative voice surreptitiously controls interpretation 

Kundera and the Novel

- Anti-Realism (19th-century novel): no character “descriptions” or attempt at “fiction”

- “The quest for the self has always ended, and always will end, in a paradoxical dissatisfaction” (Art of the Novel)

- Each character has an “existential code.”

Kundera and Fate

- Tereza meeting Tomas, Tomas returning to Tereza

- Seemingly mundane observation (fate, destiny)

- Code for exploring the “self,” which, in a Communist context, is revolutionary


Review of L. 25

Profession and Each Character’s “Existential Code”

- Sabina/betrayal: artist, technique of “double exposure” (22, 63), art by mistake

- Tomas/lightness and weight: doctor, cures and attracts women

- Tereza/weight: photographer, carries a “mechanical eye” and weighed down by her body, duality of body but not self

- Franz/parades: professor, longs for the antithesis of his cerebral life


Love as Allegory

- Tomas the polygamist: Tarries between Switzerland and Czechoslovakia with ease

- Tereza the loyal wife: Drawn back to her country

- Sabina the casual lover: Moves between multiple countries and betrays her own

- Franz the conflicted bourgeois husband: Fascinated with persecuted countries


Kundera and the (Post)modern Novel

- Kafka: “living in truth” and the pressures of totalitarian society

- Gide and Woolf: critique of the “novelistic” (52)

- Self-reflexive: literature within literature

- Non-linear character development

Review of L. 26

Death in the Novel

- In Gide and Hesse: Self-willed = freedom
- Context of Eastern Europe: Decadence of body, uniformity of bodies
- Related to issue of the “self”

Kundera and Gender

- Context of Eastern Europe in the 1960s
- How much is gender identity related to the construction of the ‘self’? (Woolf)

Review of L. 27

The unbearable lightness of being?

- Paradoxical
- Loss of control
- Too many choices
- The freedom and burden of love
- Consciousness of arbitrariness of self and the world


Similarities to Kafka

- Oedipal relations

- Narration?