Heeeeeeeey...it's criticism time!

All right, so, I dove right in to that convenient "Approaches" book I was graced with; it's a fortunate little thing, because not only are the articles relatively short, but the writer's aren't swimming in the ether trying to explain their concepts.

The article I read is called "The Proper Stuff of Fiction: Virginia Woolf and the Meaning of the Modern," by Lecia Rosenthal. As an "approach to teaching" book, its main focus is to provide teachers with ways to run a class on "Mrs. Dalloway." Specifically, Rosenthal explicates various methods on explaining, discussing, and interpreting the unique style of modernism in Mrs. Dalloway,while reflecting on modernism importance and its contributions to modern literature. She outright states that modernism's "ostensible incoherence, obscurity, and resistance to accepted norms of comprehensibility, constitute one of [its] most enduring and important legacies." (33, emphasis mine) I find this quote interesting because of its inversion of expected norms. She's arguing that the very things people disdain modernism for, and confuse even those of us who like the style, are, in fact, its most profound and affecting attributes.

I also like how she really defines what modernism is in a concise yet functioning way. It's difficult to really get at the point of why all this stream-of-consciousness and psychology matters, but Rosenthal identifies modernism's "self-referentiality, discontinuous temporalities, refusal of discreet and reliable omniscience, and pervasive irony that privileges ambiguity over certainty." (34) Especially interesting in this quote is the ideas of discontinuous temporalities--specifically the morphing function of time in Mrs. Dalloway, and the omniscience idea, when a third-person narrator seems omniscient but is, in fact, sometimes just as wrong as the reader or the characters are.

Most of the rest of the articles deals with things already covered: she goes into Woolf's essays, "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" being the forward one, and how those relate to modernism, and then ends on wondering what the "great age of literature" reference in Mrs. Brown entails, and whether or not we're living in it. Overall, it's interesting to read because by sheer necessity a teacher has to be able to sort of define and explain modernism in a palatable way, for the students to understand why everything appears fragmented and unstable. So by doing so here, Rosenthal gives some pretty good definitions and commentary on the deeper side of modernism, like what it contributed, its functions and its relevance today.