Download Mrs. Dalloway

As we discuss the conclusion to
Mrs. Dalloway, let’s also ask:
• What makes this text “modernist,” and how
might we understand it better by thinking of it
in that context?
• What kinds of annotations should readers
make on literary texts?
We’ll start with the second question and use it
to work back to the first.
Which of these kinds of annotations
will prove most likely to deepen your
analysis of the text?
• Notes that express your opinion;
• Notes that summarize the plot; or
• Notes that observe a stylistic choice the
author makes.
Consider these terms:
• Modern (adjective): Related to the historical
period that begins in the West with the Renaissance,
around the turn of the 16th century; characterized by the
rise of the nation-state as well as science and rational
thought.
• Modernity (noun): The set of cultural,
philosophical, and economic norms that arose in the
modern period: a growing emphasis on individualism, for
example; the rise of participatory democracy and
capitalism.
• Modernism (noun): A set of artistic and
philosophical movements that arose in the U.S. and
Europe at the turn of the twentieth century.
Let’s recall what I told you about modernism as we
began Mrs. Dalloway.
We can think about how Woolf innovates the literary
representation of:
• Character: What makes an individual distinct from the
people around her? How is she connected to them but also
unique?
• Time: How does the novel give its reader an experience of
beginning, middle, end?
• Space: How does the novel divide the space it represents
between public (the city) and private (the house)?
• [And how does this spatial division parallel the divisions
among individual characters, taking us back to the top of
the list?]
Remember: Instead of portraying the surface
appearance of their subjects, modernist painters
captured how their subjects reflected light at a
single moment in time. (This is Picasso, 1907.)
New skepticism about humans’ ability to see the world as
it really is spread throughout Western culture.
When a German physicist discovered the Heisenberg
Uncertainty Principle in 1927, The New York Times
reported that,
“In the new mathematical universe events are more
important than substances, and energy more important
than matter. All mental pictures we have formed of
bodies moving through space are thrown into confusion.
So simple a conception as a baseball flying from the
pitcher to the batter turns out to be obscure, doubtful
and even ridiculous.”
Try this: Use your annotations to consider how Woolf
innovates the literary representation of:
• Character: What makes an individual distinct
from the people around her? How is she
connected to them but also unique?
• Time: How does the novel give its reader an
experience of beginning, middle, end?
• Space: How does the novel divide the space it
represents between public (the city) and private
(the house)?
• [And how does this spatial division parallel the
divisions among individual characters, taking us
back to the top of the list?]
Now think of The River Between.
How is it different– in terms of:
• Character,
• Time, and
• Space?