TRANSITION IN SOME MODERN NOVELS: GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, GEORGE MOORE AND VIRGINIA WOOLF.
Item
-
Title
-
TRANSITION IN SOME MODERN NOVELS: GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, GEORGE MOORE AND VIRGINIA WOOLF.
-
Identifier
-
AAI8119759
-
identifier
-
8119759
-
Creator
-
WEINBERGER, SYLVIA ZINA.
-
Date
-
1981
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Literature, Comparative
-
Abstract
-
Before Flaubert, writers often eliminated transitions. La Fontaine used style indirect libre, and the device appeared earlier in La Chanson de Roland. Richardson eliminated speaker identification when indicating the thoughts of a character, as did Jane Austen when presenting the dialogue of her characters. Instances such as these were merely incidental. It was Flaubert who consciously used or eliminated transitions in accordance with his theory of the novel.;Flaubert's theory of impersonality dispensed with the intrusive commenting narrator, which had been the convention in the standard novel. A devotion to art led Flaubert to combine form and content in Madame Bovary (1857). Style became the perfect way of expressing a subject: the harmony of the whole and the fusion of the parts through economy and continuity.;While often substituting images, conjunctions, repetition and associations for conventional transitions, Flaubert also, in some cases, eliminated transitions, thereby producing irony and simultaneity. Dispensing with speaker identification, Flaubert perfected style indirect libre duplicating the thought or speech of his characters while continuing his narration.;George Moore learned about the perfection of craft from Flaubert, but at the beginning of his career Moore sought to combine Zola's Naturalism with Flaubert's strict attachment to truth and form. Despite the emphasis on realistic details in A Mummer's Wife (1885), and the concentration on transitions that promote the cause and effect of Naturalism, even here Moore attempts to create a smooth flow between chapters and to use style indirect libre.;The influence of Pater and Dujardin and an interlude in Ireland helped Moore cultivate a melodic line. Through this device the rhythm moves smoothly from paragraph to paragraph, from chapter to chapter, and from speech to thought to narrated action. Even in the first version of The Lake (1905) conjunctions, present participles and repetition rhythmically connect all aspects of the novel. In the revised version (1921) Moore used the leit motif and stresses the oral quality of the work.;Combined interests in dictation and story telling result in a combination of narrated action, thought and speech in Heloise and Abelard (1921). In the unending flow of prose there are no indentations for speech, no quotation marks. Speaker identification is either eliminated or postponed, necessitating rapid reading. Fusion is accomplished primarily through a rhythmic use of conjunctions, repetition and present participles. The continuity of the story takes precedence over everything.;Perhaps Moore's cadence which Woolf admired influenced her, but his combination of autobiography and fiction represented everything that she wanted to get away from. Her effort to put aesthetic distance between herself and the young heroine Rachel Vinrace can be traced through the drafts of The Voyage Out. (1915).;Transitions which achieve simultaneity and rhythm and take on such importance in Woolf's later work are already present in The Voyage Out. Moreover, she uses devices such as parentheses, dashes, style indirect libre and repetition to duplicate lived experience.;With Mrs Dalloway (1925) Woolf threw conventional plot overboard and presented a new kind of "life." As she explored the mind in movement, she allowed her characters to experience moments of being which combine present impressions with feelings and thoughts of the past. She broadens previously used transitions but achieves innovation in the exploration of time and space through simultaneity, irony, rhythm and repetition as motif. Woolf shares an appreciation for the effects achieved through the elimination of transitions with Flaubert rather than with Moore, her contemporary.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
-
Program
-
Comparative Literature
