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Theses Questions

Area I: The Victorian Era and British Modernism, Sections A & B: Historical Periods: The Victorian Era and British Modernism (Answer two questions in three hours.)

• 1. Despite the dominance of �realism� as a descriptive category for the Victorian novel�especially as a developmental history, in which the Victorian era appears as a time of the creation, codification, and growing dominance of realism�close attention to these works reveals a host of images, metaphors, and even events that fly in the face of realism’s scientific objectivity and representational verisimilitude. The Gothic, the improbable, the grotesque, the symbolic, the spiritual, and the mythological pervade the works of such �realist� powerhouses as Dickens, Eliot, and Bronte. How do the anti-realist strategies of such authors suggest a different role for the Victorian novel in the development of realism? With reference to at least three works of criticism, use at least three novels that trouble our understanding of realism to reevaluate its role in the Victorian novel.
  • Watt, Wellek, Mc Gowan?, Barthes
  • Pickwick, Eyre, Floss, Dracula
  • note: the latest Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel (2001) doesn’t even have a chapter on realism; its topics are the reading public, publishing, ideology, industry, gender, race, sexuality, detection, sensationalism, professionalism, and the UK-US divide. realism assumed to be known already; used in their chapters, but not discussed in and of itself. This is bad.
• 2. Fully aware of the Victorian era’s Janus-like nature (as a time of progress and of exploitation), Victorian sages, poets, and novelists hotly debated the �Condition of England Question,� usually underpinning their position with a theory of the proper relationship between the �two spheres.� Catherine Gallagher has asserted that while early-Victorian industrial novels suggest that the private sphere can compensate for the injustices of the public sphere, mid-Victorian artists reject this possibility and ignore the lower classes in favor of representing the bourgeois subject of the bildungsroman. But how does the �disappearance� of the working class subject reformulate, rather than merely abandon, the Condition of England Question and the theories of two spheres that authorize it? Use a variety of genres (non-fiction, fiction, and poetry) to explore the fate of the early-Victorian sociopolitical debate in the bildungsroman of the mid-Victorian period.
  • Barton, Shirley, Copperfield, Middlemarch
  • Carlyle, Arnold, Ruskin
  • Mill, Martineau
  • Barrett Browning
• 3. The development of techniques like indirect discourse and stream of consciousness during modernism highlights the modernists’ obsession with representing the texture of subjectivity. In his essay on Thomas Mann, J. P. Stern in Bradbury and Mc Farlane?’s Modernism argued that this focus on consciousness �weakens the nexus between private and social spheres.� Nietzsche too complains in The Gay Science, �All of us are no longer material for a society.� Indeed, modernist works burst at the seams with anti-social figures aware of the atomizing nature of modernity (e.g., Lewis’ Tarr, T. S. Eliot’s Prufrocks and typists), but at the same time, modernism is shot through with moments of interpersonal connection or social cohesion (e.g., Forster’s Italy and India, Woolf’s parties). What opportunities for meaningful engagement with the social are encouraged by modernism’s inward turn?
  • India, Women in Love, Dalloway, Harriet Hume
  • begin with Women in Love as the least modernist in style
  • then go to India, which like Love says that when you connect minds, you do so through some kind of universal medium: so that you contact people through strategies that get you to the universal medium
  • then go to Dalloway, which requires specifically modernist style to make connex among people, so that their connex depends on a mode of communication: it is actively made by that communication, rather than (like the previous two) only CONVEYED by it
  • end with Harrier Hume as the coming to consciousness of this theme
  • inward turn sources:
  • technique sources:
  • atomism/social connex sources:
• 4. When T. S. Eliot shored fragments against his ruin, Iris Murdoch took it as a sign of his �Totalitarian Man� �desire to have the form and clarity of something necessary, and not accidental.� Such figures fear �whatever is contingent, messy, boundless, infinitely particular, and endlessly still to be explained.� This obsession with the contingent is a commonly cited feature of modernists, who are often said to react against the chaos of modernity by using art to extract meaning out of the fragmentation, isolation, and perhaps even meaninglessness of experience. Discuss the relation between contingency and necessity in the modernism, discussing at least two poets and two novelists.
  • Rhys, Joyce, Woolf
  • Yeats, Eliot, Loy

Area 1, Section C: Special Authors: Henry James and Katherine Mansfield (Answer two questions in two hours.)

• 1. A few sentences below E. M. Forster’s famous send-off of Henry James and his incapacity to depict �round characters� in Aspects of the Novel (�their clothes will not take off�), Forster graciously describes what James actually permits his characters to do: �They can land at Europe, and they can look at works of art and each other, but that is all.� As James does not generally represent the Atlantic crossing, his characters only look, and only at two things: art and their fellow �flat� characters. A hyperbolic claim, Forster’s comment nonetheless illuminates a very significant theme in James’ work: the development of aesthetic judgment and its application not only to art, but also to the spectator’s fellow human beings. What do characters gain or lose by using, or by being the target of, this interpretive mode? In particular, how does this aesthetic judgment alter or replace traditional systems of moral judgment, and does James view this replacement with the euphoria, complacency, or anxiety? Using at least four works, discuss the role aesthetic judgment plays in James’ oeuvre.
  • Portrait, Poynton, Bowl, Ambassadors
• 2. As stylistic innovators who create new techniques to convey the inner lives of their characters, James and Mansfield represent two opposing impulses into modernism: James, a maximalism (consider Proust, Richardson, and Pound’s Cantos) whose endless qualifications and precise details magisterially inscribe meaning through an expansion of the sentence form; Mansfield, a minimalism (consider Rhys, Hemingway, and Imagism) whose impressionistic brush-strokes suggest meaning through association and connotation. Yet both authors seem to follow Woolf’s demand in �Modern Fiction� that the author record the �myriad impressions� and �incessant shower of innumerable atoms� that constitute consciousness. What can comparing the different results that James and Mansfield have while pursuing this common goal reveal about the hidden or less obvious choices and values involved in conceiving and representing consciousness (ones not covered by Woolf’s influential text)?
  • Portrait, Ambassadors, Golden Bowl; At the Bay, Je ne Parle, Ma Parker
• 3. Ever since Virginia Woolf’s cutting remark that when she met Katherine Mansfield, the latter, apparently wearing an excess of perfume, �stank like a civet cat that had taken to street-walking� to Wyndham Lewis’ dismissal of her as a mere �Mag.- writer,� Mansfield has been accused of cheap sentimentality, a glib, over-charged romanticism that embraces the trivial and vulgar just as easily as it does the profound and beautiful. Such accusers often point to her body of harder-edged stories as the more accomplished and truly modernist ones. Other than marginalizing the saccharine side of Mansfield by claiming that her satirical stories represent her �real� style, perhaps we can find another way to explain this strange, neglected side of Mansfield. What relationship does the grim view given by her tales of murder, exploitation, and abandonment have to the cozy, touching stories of optimism, love, and family life? What do her fellow modernists stand to gain from policing Mansfield and her cheapness, and what does this anxiety say about modernism?
  • An Ideal Family, Bliss, Prelude, At the Bay, Psychology, The Garden Party, The Canary, The Man Without a Temperament; The Fly, The Woman at the Store, Je Ne Parle Pas, Ol’ Underwood

Area II: Marxism and the Rise of Commodity Culture (Answer two questions in three hours.)

• 1. The basic tenets of Marx’s moral critique of capitalism as an alienating structure of systematic inequality are relatively simple to enumerate and have been documented extensively: the extraction of surplus value from underpaid labor, the transformation of the worker into a machine, the separation of the laborer from the products of his labor, etc. But what has received less attention is Marx’s formulation of this critique within a complex intellectual context involving theology, philosophy, political theory, political economy, and and natural history (science). Today we recognize this context as the debate over modernity�its assumptions, its promises, its achievements and its failures. Focusing partly on Marx’s critique of his own philosophical milieu and partly on the adaptation of Marx by his adherents, create an archival history of Marxism based on its intervention in debates about modernity.
  • Marx’s critique of P E (German Ideology, Capital, Notebooks), Ruskin, Engels, Wilde, Webb, Luxemburg, Lukacs, Benjamin, Adorno and Horkheimer, Weber, Arrighi, Bloch, Williams, Jameson, D & G; and contemporary modernist stuff
• 2. In light of the recent popularity of commodity culture as a topic of research in both Victorian and modernist studies, now is the time to refresh and perhaps revise our understanding of the commodity fetish. At the core of this concept lies the substitution of an object radiating self-evident value (the commodity) for the human and the social (i.e., the relationship of two producers)�for Marx, a troubling departure from the subject/object hierarchy of Cartesian rationality. Commodity fetishism, then, does not merely provide an etiology of the mysterious aura projected by commodities, but also suggests a new kind of subject/object relationship under capitalism. Making use of both literary criticism and economic theory, analyze the subject/object relationship implicit in the commodity fetish.
  • Thomas Richards, Robert Pippin, Jennifer Wicke
  • Marx, Lukacs, Veblen, Deleuze and Guattari
• 3. Given literary modernism’s well-documented tendency towards rebellion (i.e., Poggioli’s �culture of negation� and Lionel Trilling’s �adversary culture�), it is not surprising that critics have typically characterized modernism’s reaction to the rise of commodity culture as one of resistance. This Adornian belief in modernism’s privileged position outside of the materialism of bourgeois ideology has recently been countered by studies that suggest modernists’ �complicity� with capitalism as promoters of texts and literary movements or as bards of department stores and fl�nerie. Is there any way to reconcile these apparently irreconcilable views? What is at stake determining the relationship between capitalism and modernism? Discuss at least three works of criticism and three novels.
  • Women in Love, Jacob’s Room, Antic Hay, Under the Net
  • Mao, Wicke, Berman, Rainey

Area III: Leisure Spaces of Modernity (Answer three questions in three hours.)

• 1. The emergence of critical space theory in the 1960s radically changed the face of geography as an academic discipline, spurring a dramatic shift from traditional physical geography, focused on describing landmasses and creating maps, to a modern social science along the lines of anthropology and sociology, as an interdisciplinary field heavily inflected by poststructuralist epistemologies and by a sensitive awareness of the relationship between knowledge and power. Construct a genealogy of this new critical geography and its effects on the study of leisure spaces, referring both to the major space theorists influencing this switch (Lefebvre, Harvey, Bachelard, Soja) and to leisure space geographers (Aitchson, Urry, Walton, Crouch).
• Lefebvre, Harvey, Bachelard, Soja, Harvey, Harley; Aitchson, Urry, Walton, Crouch, Croutier, etc
• 2. Influenced by the early role of geographers as professional consultants for the creation of commercial leisure spaces (that is, in the choice of sites, recommendations for the layout of inns, roads, etc.), leisure space geographers have principally understood leisure spaces as planned, commercial environments intended for use by the general public as tourist destinations during the weekends, national holidays, and yearly vacations. Such a vision of leisure spaces is skewed heavily towards contemporary leisure practices (from the 1970s until the present day) and therefore has a limited application towards your project, the study of modern (19th and early 20th century) leisure spaces. What can contemporary leisure studies contribute to your work, and where does their definition of �leisure� and �leisure space� break down? What, in short, characterizes the modern leisure space?
  • Same people as the last half of above list.
• 3. This list attempts to revise the scholarly truism that modernism privileges time over space. As a literature of travelers, cosmopolitans, and exiles, and as a literature heavily focused on artists, free spirits, and rebels who generally avoid �home� as sedulously as they avoid the disciplined work-spaces of capitalism, modernism not infrequently takes place in leisure spaces: bars, caf�s, music-halls,clubs, hotels, tourist destinations, seaside resorts, baths, nursing homes, sporting fields, parks, museums, galleries, and cruise ships. Keeping in mind critical space theory’s central claim that space shapes human behavior, and extending this attitude towards literature�in the words of Franco Moretti, �geography is not an inert container, is not a box where cultural history �happens�, but an active force, that pervades the literary field and shapes it in depth��what is the �shape� of modernist narratives underwritten by leisure spaces? Using at least three modernist novels, explain how characteristically modernist aesthetics and values develop in concert with the leisure spaces these works feature.
  • Buddenbrooks, The Good Soldier, Crome Yellow, The Hotel
• 4. The cruise ship has been a key image in the representation of modern leisure spaces in spite of its being�or because it was�a newcomer to the game of leisure space production. Its status as a novelty, one celebrated not only as an escape from the hectic pace of modernity, but also as an example of the unparalleled ingenuity of modern science and technology, was from the beginning fraught with the same contradictions within modernity itself. Less than ten years after the sinking of the unsinkable cruise liner Titanic, Le Courbusier cited such liners as the paradigm for modern architecture, calling them the first concrete example of the aesthetic he champions in his utopian yet fascistic vision, Towards a New Architecture. Could one use the cruise ship as a lever into the current academic debate over the relationship between modernism and fascism? Using both fictional and non-fictional accounts, discuss the image of the cruise ship as simultaneously a site for discipline and death as well as for freedom and exploration, and suggest what this discussion could offer to the critical debate about fascism and modernism.
  • Caserino, Modernity at Sea; Ed Comentale, Modernism, Cultural Production, and the British Avant-Garde
  • Thackeray, Wallace
  • Night and Day, Brideshead Revisited, Death on the Nile
  • With glancing references to modernism and ships and water: Heart of Darkness, Passage to India, The Waves; and modernism and voyaging as abstract theme: To the North, Voyage in the Dark, “The Voyage” (KM), A Passage to India, even Ulysses; and modernism as travel, The Return of the Soldier, The Ambassadors

Principles

• 13 total questions
  • Area 1, part 1: 3 hours on Victorian and Modernism: 4 total (generate two for each period by itself) (answer two questions from four in three hours, 90 minutes each)
  • Area 1, part 2: 2 hours on Mansfield and James: 3 total (generate three questions) (answer two questions in two hours, 60 minutes each)
  • Area 2: 3 hours on Marxism: 3 questions (at least one just about “archival history of Marxism,” then another about relating to lit) (answer two questions in three hours, 90 minutes each)
  • Area 3: 3 hours on Leisure spaces: 4 questions (answer three questions in three hours, 60 minutes each)

The Questions

Area One

Victorian

• Question One: Realism
  • Best Texts: Dracula, Bronte, Dickens, Eliot, Trollope; Tennyson, Wordsworth, Rossetti, Arnold; Armstrong, Lukacs
  • Summarize history of realism definitions to trouble the ideal of verisimilitude. Talk about capacity of realism to “contain” alternative discourses, in both senses of the word.
    • Pickwick: the collapse of the picaresque; Jane Eyre: a milestone on containing the Gothic; Mill Floss: in the service of the nation-state; Dracula: a new kind of coupling of science and spirit
    • Critical References: Mc Gowan?, Wellek, Watt
• Question Two: Decadence, Aestheticism, and the boundary to early modernism
  • Best Texts: Wilde, Gissing, Huysmans, Lee, Schreiner; Hopkins, Housman; Pater, Ruskin; Calinescu
• Other ideas: Condition of England Question
  • Best Texts: Dickens, Gaskell; Browning; J. S. Mill; Gallagher, Lynch, Walkowitz
    • Mary Barton: as example of early version; Shirley: the middle classification; Copperfield: authorship and jobs; Middlemarch: intellectualization
    • Non-fiction references: Ruskin, Carlyle, Arnold, Mill, Martineau “Illustrations of Political Economy”
    • Critical references: Gallagher, Poovey
    • Barton and N&S;both use female forms of persuasion: religion and domestic love: to form alternative to capitalism (agreeing with Ruskin you see)...but later times we’ll try to trouble that easy division, change it internally

Modernism

• Question One: question about formal revolution and communicative possibility
  • Best Texts: Joyce, Woolf, Ford; Eliot, Pound, Loy; Bergson, Woolf’s criticism
• Question Two: contingency v necessity / chaos v order
  • Best Texts: Same, plus Yeats, Hulme; Eysteinnson
• Other Ideas: relation to modernity, relation to the social, the proper subject of representation, the downside of modernity, subject/object relations, tradition
  • Best Texts: Forster, Huxley, Waugh, Lawrence, West; Sassoon/Owen; Freud, Simmel, Woolf’s nonfic; Berman

James

• Question One: Periodization: what period is he from?
  • Prefaces; Washington Square or The American, Portrait, Ambassadors, Ivory Tower
• Question Two: People as objects AND life as art
  • Portrait, Poynton, Ambassadors, Golden Bowl
  • Use E. M. Forster’s stuff about James in Aspects of the Novel: look at the line under the famous clothes will not off line
• Other ideas: Life as art

Mansfield

• Question One: Development of short story (signif to m’ism)
  • Tiredness of Rosabel, In a German Pension, the Aloe cycle, The Fly/Je ne parle pas
• Question Two: The “outsider”/other of modernity (dame seule)
  • Miss Brill/The Little Governess, Daughters of the Late Colonel The Garden Party/The Life of Ma Parker, The Man without a Temperament/Ideal Family
• Other ideas: Childhood/loss of innocence/growing up; the family; travel
• km family, miming technique, adolescent, food/sex/desire, outsider, sexuality and imagination / adolescence / loss of innocence / sordid (cheap, beautiful): so worried it’s pained and yet this consciousness constitutes the art

Area Two: Marxism

• Question One: Development of Marxism (history)
• Question Two: Commodity fetish, intellectual development
• Question Three: Role of commodity in literature of capitalism
  • Eysteinnson: �The text registers the various objects of the characters� world, but in they way they are processed there is little or confused awareness of their temporal or spatial order and their place in a conventional hierarchy of values….One of the chief characteristics of modernism� (126) is this: the �elusive significance of mundane objects�the leveling of the relative hierarchy of thoughts and objects� (127)
• Question Four: witch-hunt of adversary v complicit in regard to current work on economics and literature.
  • What does Marx’s economic stuff do? Instead of denying the laws as such, he cushions them, surrounding them with the subjunctive: if, when, sometimes. He finds CONTEXTS for law, making him a critic of scientific rationalism within scientific rationalism. Now don’t think that’s bad or hypocritical: instead, it’s merely a common sense evaluation of understanding and reconciling yourself with the benefits or insights given to you by scientific rationalism. Think of the modernists “outside” modernism like Shaw and Wells who seem to accept more of scientific rationalism than other modernists; they’re less about the inside and more about the materialist outside Marx cared about. But Shaw and Wells weren’t mouthpieces for the Man, of course. Like Marx, they were trying to shift “laws” within “law” itself, just rejecting the assumptions and uses of the laws. Let’s talk about how this connex to the other modernists, specifically in the moments when they stop to examine capitalism. They create elaborate fantasies that take market value and laws of P E and change them; their flanerie doesn’t reject capitalism out of hand; instead, it subjects it to a series of re-evaluations, a hermeneutics of capitalism rather than a positivism of capitalism. Doesn’t mean they rejected capitalism completely, just like Shaw and Wells didn’t reject bourgeois scientific materialism either. It means that meaning is often found in the negotiations of something, not outhand rejection or acceptance. That way, we don’t OVERESTIMATE the adversarial culture of modernism, then get surprised when so-and-so is “secretly Fascist” or “secretly complicit” with capitalism or “secretly” snobbish. Our shock and surprise is a result of overestimating the adversarial nature of the bid to begin with.
• Question Four: Surplus; Marxism in lit…; bosses in literature (North and South, Shirley, Buddenbrooks, Women in Love)
• The recent surge in scholarly work on commodity culture in both Victorian and modernist studies seems to support Thomas Richards’ claim in The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle that during these two periods, the commodity was �the centerpiece of everyday life, the focal point of all representation, the dead center of the modern world.� Each of his chapters�for example, on Queen Victoria during her Jubilee being turned into an image conferring majesty on to the commodity it emblazons, and Gerty Mac Dowell? in Ulysses turned into a �seaside girl,� a trope popular in Edwardian advertisements�suggests what the new �center� of the modern world decenters: the subject.

Area Three: Modernist Leisure Spaces

• Question One: Significance of leisure spaces for modernist novel
  • Best Texts: Buddenbrooks, A Room with a View, The Hotel, The Good Soldier; Foucault
• Question Two: Concept of leisure
  • Best Texts: Women in Love; Adorno “Free Time;” Schiach
• Question Three: Space by itself, a history
  • Best Texts: Harvey, Lefebvre, Bachelard
• Question Four: The Cruise Ship
  • Best Texts: Christie (death), Woolf (frustrated opportunity), Waugh (a new start), Foster Wallace (death); Caserino

Early Ideas

Trace the evolution of the Victorian novel to the modernist novel.

• What the Victorians directly state through traditional forms and styles (whether derived from Sterne or Richardson), the modernists use as a formal aesthetic with which to craft the works.
  • Simply, content yields to form.

Explain the relationship between the development of formal methods used by modernists to explore consciousness (indirect discourse, stream-of-consciousness) and the changing concept and significance of plot in the novel.

• Such formal strategies destroy the pattern of bildung, replacing a narrative of telos with one of expansion, a gradual, endless building-up of theses and descriptions of certain areas of life.
  • Ex: Harriet Hume, the heroine of her eponymous novel, has these powers of the modernist writer, which ruin her focalizor’s ability to progress in the world along the lines of the Victorian realist novel (commercial, political, and social success).
• Episodic form develops

Definition of modernism?

• Dependent upon the canon you choose; therefore, we need to bring in the social, cultural, and historical background of the artists to make some sense of the diverse parade of art.

Relationship between contingency and necessity, particularly in the background of the perceived chaos of the sociopolitical context.

• Celebration or denunciation of contingency? Hulme isn’t the only perspective on this answer.
  • Does life already have form? Or does narrative give it the only form it can have?

Relationship of author or narrator to the outside world. (Subject/object relations; thinker/world relations)

Authors

Explain James’ position as a late-Victorianist and proto-Modernist in such a way that dramatizes this shift in fiction in general.

Commodity Culture

Explain how the growth of late capitalism found an outlet in the changing field of modernist aesthetics. (Capitalism as metaphor or tool.)

To what degree does modernist work try to create an opposition or escape from capitalism, and if so, to what degree does it succeed?

• Eysteinsson notes that later Lukacs claims that “in order to survive and reproduce itself, capitalist ideology requires a smooth surface, one which, in the process of its mediation, takes on the guise of a normal human condition.” This quotation assumes a relationship between capitalism and form: “smooth” is pro-capitalist, while the opposite (here, “tattered” 23)...will it be an escape from or protest against capitalism?

Relationship of commodities to narratives?

• Eysteinnson: “One of the chief characteristics of modernism” (126) is this: the “elusive significance of mundane objects…the leveling of the relative hierarchy of thoughts and objects” (127)

Leisure Spaces

Discuss the function of the leisure space in the novel.

• Leisure spaces such as seaside resort towns, baths, bars, coffeehouses, and restaurants act as a heterotopia in which impossible events are made possible.
• Just as a dramatist might stage the arrival of a stranger during Act 1, Scene 1 to give a natural excuse for providing expository information in the course of the characters’ interaction, leisure spaces expose modernist protagonists to the whole spectrum of sympathetic and unsympathetic “types,” causing them to trot out their aesthetics and philosophies of life, thus in a plausible fashion forcing them to recommit to or debate modernist values publically.
  • Exposes them to the public of the Daily Mail for example
• What’s the country house in relation?
  • A house party is when (nearly) the whole house is opened up as a leisure space
  • Well-to-do domestic spaces, incl the country house, include the entire melange of spaces available in the public sphere, thus recapitulating the variety of spaces found in Britain: work both manual (downstairs, the kitchen, approximating factories) and intellectual (the library or office), private spaces (bedrooms, which approximate the British home), eating and drinking spaces, guest quarters (inns), and leisure spaces (ballroom, drawing room, billiards room, smoking room).
  • The country house is a microcosm of Britain itself, thus an experimental space b/c far from London (this is not about urban ness), concentrated (you have a smaller tapestry to deal with), and limited (access is more strict that in country-wide example).
  • It’s why country houses are often seen as medieval: they’re a private fiefdom, an entire Little Britain in YOUR hands. The poor have smaller houses that can’t afford such sequestration (note how Engels is so upset that animals and people are all stuffed in the same room, or people in the same bed, not respecting boundaries).
• Cruise Ship
  • Use THACKERAY’s experience as the cruise activities director so to speak of the first cruise in 1844 for P & O
• Bruno Latour, actor-network theory
  • “hybrid actor, composed of gun and gunman”
  • gun is changed by the person
  • person is changed by the gun
  • diff from sociological or materialist idea of agency; says agents can be human or non-human: that is, an “actant” from semiological theory (infl by Greimas), w/figurative or non-figurative role; can have goals/functions
  • me: this is structuralist
  • “On Technical Mediation”