Modern Literature (1910-2015)

Front 1

GREEN's view of the effect of modernism upon writers afterwards?

Back 1

'There's no one to follow them. They're like cats which have licked the plate clean. You've got to dream up another dish if you're to be a writer.'

Front 2

ORWELL SUMMING UP 20s and 30s WRITING

Back 2

20s = 'tragic sense of life'

30s = 'serious purpose'

Front 3

GREEN's summing up of the effect of the two-war generation

Back 3

'We, that is the thin blooded, who have been in two wars, have not much left. We had starvation in the first and bombardment in the second'

Front 4

SOMERSET MAUGHAM's summary of 50s writers?

Back 4

'white-collar proletariat'

Front 5

According to D.J. Taylor, what is the main theme of the post-war novel?

Back 5

'If the post-war English novel has a public theme, that theme is decline'

Front 6

WOOLF on the moment of importance

Back 6

'Is it not possible that the accent falls a little differently, that the moment of importance came before or after[...]?'

Front 7

GEORG LUKACS' vision of the stream

Back 7

'Every person or event, emerging momentarily from the stream and vanishing again, is given a specific weight, a definite position, in the pattern of the whole'

Front 8

Euthanasia and GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Back 8

'[I]f we desire a certain type of civilisation and culture, we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit in'

Front 9

1913 important act passed?

Back 9

Mental Deficiency Act 1913

Front 10

YEATS' rude statements about the plebs

Back 10

'multiplication of the uneducatable masses'

'drilled and docile masses'

Front 11

Humanity and destruction according to GREGORY CLAEYS

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'Enlightenment optimism respecting the progress of reason and science was now displaced by a sense of the incapacity of humanity to restrain its newly created destructive powers'

Front 12

RICHARD HORNBY on offstage and onstage

Back 12

'before the modern era there is rarely an offstage event of must importance occurring while we are watching something else onstage'

Front 13

Why Ayckbourn's plays are special according to HORNBY

Back 13

'breathtaking conquest of space'

Front 14

Self-consciousness and ALEXANDER LEGGATT

Back 14

'theatrical self-consciousness as we admire the versatility of the performers'

Front 15

Dying of boredom and T.S. ELIOT

Back 15

'it will not be surprising if the population of the entire civilised world rapidly follows the fate of the Melanesians [...] dying from pure boredom'

Front 16

Excluding masses from culture (PROF. JOHN CAREY)

Back 16

'The early twentieth century saw a determined effort on the part of the European intelligentsia to exclude the masses from culture. In England, this movement has become known as modernism.'

Front 17

WALTER STEVENS on the arts

Back 17

'the arts in general, are, in their measure, a compensation for what has been lost'

Front 18

Cool fact about Penguin books?

Back 18

They were designed to fit into a uniform's pocket

'a tower of strength' 1915

Front 19

POLLY LOW AND GRAHAM OLIVER on commemoration culture

Back 19

'Although the experience of commemorative culture might be more acute if personal memories are evoked it is likely that all can engage at some level in most forms of commemoration'

Front 20

G.K. CHESTERTON on the dead

Back 20

'For dead things cannot die'

Front 21

Post romantic definition of culture according HERBERT MARCUSE

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b) 'the realm of aesthetic values and self-contained ends in opposition to the world of social utility and means'

Front 22

D.H. LAWRENCE on 1915?

Back 22

'It was in 1915 the old world ended... No man who has really consciously lived through this can believe again absolutely in democracy'

Front 23

Freedom in LISTENER

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'we must forgo our freedom to be free' (1940)

Front 24

ROLAND BARTHES on the goal of literary work

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'the goal of literary work [...] is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text'

Front 25

FRANCIS FUKUYAMA's optimistic view from early 90s

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'what we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War [...] but the end of history as such [...] the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government'

Front 26

IAN MCEWAN on the 90s in 'Saturday'

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'The nineties are looking like an innocent decade, and who would have thought that at the time?'

Front 27

Luck and accident in 'The Children Act' (MCEWAN)

Back 27

'Blind luck, to arrive in the world with your properly formed parts in the right place, to be born to parents who were loving, not cruel, or to escape, by geographical or social accident, war or poverty. And therefore find it so much easier to be virtuous'.

Front 28

CHARLOTTE PERKINS-GILMAN in 'Old Water'

Back 28

'I don't like those foolish old stories about people who never did anything useful, and hadn't an idea in their heads except being in love and killing somebody.'

Front 29

GEORG LUKACS on commodity culture

Back 29

'the dehumanised and dehumanising function of the commodity relation'

Front 30

Description of John Self by MARTIN AMIS

Back 30

'consumed by consumerism'

Front 31

According to ERIC KORN what is Self's fame based on?

Back 31

'his fame is based on an unflinching use of flesh to sell'

Front 32

Theory of complicity in AMIS is by who?

Back 32

KIERNAN RYAN

Front 33

Accusing the author in 'Money'

Back 33

"Is there a moral philosophy of fiction? When I create a character and put him or her through certain ordeals, what am I up to - morally? Am I accountable"

Front 34

Readers as believers in 'Money'

Back 34

"readers are natural believers. They too have something of the authorial power to create life and - "

Front 35

Sex in 'Disgrace' (2 quotes)

J.M. COETZEE

Back 35

"For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well"

"I manage love too well"

Front 36

Holland in 'Disgrace'

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"Holland may not be the most exciting of places to live, but at least it doesn't breed nightmares"

Front 37

PAMELA COOPER on the central problem of 'Disgrace'

Back 37

"how to desist and withdraw without violence, resurrection, or revisitation"

Front 38

COOPER on desire in 'Disgrace'

Back 38

"desire and sexuality unveil whiteness as alienated and the native white man as internal exile"

Front 39

DAILY TELEGRAPH praise for 'Saturday'

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"a detailed portrait of an age, of how we live now"

Front 40

Fall of civilisation in 'Saturday'

Back 40

"When this civilisation falls, when the Romans, whoever they are this time round, have finally left and the new dark ages begin"

Front 41

Dangers of long-term thinking in 'Saturday'

Back 41

"If everyone is sure to end up happy for ever, what crime can it be to slaughter a million or two now?"

Front 42

Betrayal in MURIEL SPARK 'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie'

Back 42

"It's only possible to betray where loyalty is due"

Front 43

Institutions in SPARK

Back 43

"Your loyalty is due to the school rather than to any one individual"

Front 44

What does JUDY SUH see as the appeal of the Brodie set?

Back 44

'It is not merely the departure from sedimentation that attracts the students to Miss Brodie, but also the promise of security that her mode of rebellion implies'

Front 45

ANDREW SHAIL on montage in 'Mrs Dalloway'

Back 45

'baton-changes of focalisation'

Front 46

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT on 'Mrs Dalloway'

Back 46

'the cinema-like speed of the picture'

Front 47

MAGGIE HUMM on communal symbols

Back 47

'the communality is not in single meaning but in the free access to meaning'

Front 48

Difference between city and country according to EZRA POUND

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'The life of a village is a narrative... in the city the visual impressions succeed each other, overlap, overcross, they are cinematographic'

Front 49

WOOLF in 'The Cinema' on visibility

Back 49

'literally rendering the thought visible, through its connection to some external object'

Front 50

...and again WOOLF on life

Back 50

'we see life as it is when we have no part in it'

Front 51

WOOLF on Septimus

Back 51

'only real in so far as she sees him'

Front 52

What is 'The Waste Land' trying to do according to WALTER BENJAMIN?

Back 52

'wrest tradition away from conformism that is about to overwhelm it'

Front 53

MICHAEL GRANT on the literary past

Back 53

'Mr Eliot's sense of the literary past has become so overmastering as to constitute the motive of the work'

Front 54

DANIEL ALBRIGHT on Yeats' paradise

Back 54

'paradise will turn cold and sterile unless it contains human pain and death as well'