Modern novels, the disruption of form, the incorporation of space

grantor: University of TorontoThis dissertation seeks a new perspective on the urgency with which many modern writers regarded their task of formal experimentation. The "aesthetic emotion" that T. S. Eliot and Hulme claimed to be striving for is a rather opaque concept and not sufficiently explanatory. A close look at the experience of change suggests that a new experience of space played a crucial role and may be a way of connecting a range of artistic experimentation in the modern period. So much modernist poetry (H. D., Eliot, Lawrence, Williams, Hopkins) as well as post-impressionist painting and sculpture was inspired by the sensation of space, and the nature of this sensation as well as a sense of its profound importance to these artists can be appreciated when this work is gathered together in a phenomenological analysis, in sections called 'Rose' and 'Jar'. The connection between the sensation of space and a range of modern developments, from urbanization to imperialism, can emerge in the study of novels by Hardy, Conrad, Forster, Rhys, Woolf, and Joyce. An analysis of the chronotopes of novels which I have called transitional reveals the crucial role that "spatial" scenes play in the breakdown of a traditional, predominantly linear form of narrative. The concept of life as a road heading towards an ultimate perfection is shown to pervade human behaviour, both institutionalized and not, and is described in these novels as blinding people to their environment--since they used it to measure their progress--with devastating consequences. Seeking for the genesis of formal experimentation in what is a simultaneous crisis of form and content in these early novels helps to explain the situation of later writers. In the wake of a disillusionment with progress, new chronotopes--the room, waves (of sound, of light, of the ocean), and trees--represented new ways of conceiving of life's motion, forms in time and space which did not divide people along lines of relative power but evoked above all their coexistence.Ph.D