The Challenge of the New
As members of the Year 7 Scholars group pondered the meaning of A Carafe that is a Blind Glass by Gertrude Stein, from her anthology Tender Buttons published in 1914, they were facing, as contemporaries had done, the challenge of the new.
Comparing it with Robert Browning’s “Home Thoughts from Abroad”, they were easily able to see not only the differences in structure, but also, more tantalisingly, the location of meaning. Their responses to both texts were impressive indeed.
When they return to this topic later in the course, they will encounter the towering figure of Literary Modernism, Virginia Woolf, and it will become clearer the extent to which Modernist writers were subverting so many traditional features of literature, especially the novel. No longer one clear narrative voice, clear characterisation and sense of time: Joyce’s Ulysses takes place in a day, and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway centres around the preparation for a party. In poetry and drama respectively, T. S. Eliot and Luigi Pirandello abandon traditional forms, whilst Kafka imagines waking up as a beetle! Much as the Six Characters in Pirandello’s play were in search of an author, many readers at the time may have been searching for reassuring forms and messages.
Much to look forward to.
