This thesis argues that the popular characterization of high modernist fiction as esoteric, elitist, uncommunicative, and far too difficult for the common reader obscures the democratic principles at the heart of modernist experimentation and its poetics of difficulty. Recent theories of embodied cognition when applied to representative examples of high modernist novels help dispel the myth of inaccessibility and reveal the many ways in which these works actually accommodate the common reader. Once the stigma of inaccessibility is removed from the study of modernist novels, it becomes possible to see how their formal experiments with language as well as the themes and issues they contain operate for readers and writers alike as a means of exploring everyday cognitive activities and responses. To this end, the concept of cognitive dissonance provides a heuristic device for understanding what lies behind the motivations of writers who aestheticise experiences of dissonance in their texts and the responses of readers who confront these texts. This cognitive approach to modern literature challenges assumptions about high modernism's "uncompromising intellectuality" and replaces them with a view of modernism that is more accessible and inclusive without diminishing its radical difficulty. It also paves the way for new readings of highly canonical modernist fiction. For instance, I examine how James Joyce places "inscribed" readers into Ulysses to guide actual readers through some of the difficulties of the novel. I then read William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury as a novel that both thematises and formally resists the modern threat of behaviouristic human conditioning. Finally, I look at how the theme and form of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway reinforce the embodied equation of dissonance with illness and incompletion.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.36895 |
| Date | January 2000 |
| Creators | Clissold, Bradley. |
| Contributors | Wihl, Gary (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of English.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001805797, proquestno: NQ69988, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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