Rhythm and Modernity: The Concept of Dynamic Unity in Literature of the Early 20 th Century Metropolis
Citation:
Alexandra Iris Nica, 'Rhythm and Modernity: The Concept of Dynamic Unity in Literature of the Early 20th Century Metropolis', Trinity College Dublin, School of English, 2019Download Item:
Abstract:
This dissertation explores the way in which a number of key modernist writers, including Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, and the group of artists commonly known as ‘the Rhythmists,’ used rhythm as a framework for both understanding and responding to the phenomenon of modernity. For these writers, the concept of rhythm was not merely a function of prosody, but provided instead a way of apprehending and structuring all aspects of human experience based on the interplay between similarity and difference, repetition and variation. Understood in this way, rhythm enabled moderns to develop a principle of coherence in an ever-changing and seemingly fragmented world and, with it, a means of accounting for the multifaceted relationship between observer and phenomenon observed, self and other, and part and whole of an all-encompassing scheme.
My thesis aims to show the prominence of this approach by surveying a range of fictional and non-fictional works published between the early 1900s and the mid-1930s in London. Beginning with Ford Madox Ford’s Soul of London, which outlines the challenges of modernity and develops a symphonic metaphor in response to them, my analysis proceeds chronologically through the varied writings of Rhythmists such as John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield, Frederick Goodyear, and Gilbert Cannan, to Virginia Woolf’s essays and, in the final chapter, to her novel The Years (1937), which illustrates and embodies the changing rhythms of London between 1880 and 1936. This survey places diverse writers in conversation with one another and shows how rhythm helped moderns connect individual experiences of the early 20th century metropolis with the idea of community, while also providing them with a mechanism for grasping the interplay of past, present, and future on the scale of human history.
The theoretical framework for my dissertation draws inspiration from Henri Lefebvre’s practice of rhythmanalysis, which he outlines in the posthumously published work Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life (1992). This work is especially pertinent to the study of modernism because it is primarily concerned with schematising the set of conditions that define modernity and with outlining the scope of rhythmic interactions present within it. Rhythmanalysis therefore elucidates what many modernist writers sought to accomplish through their own works and, as such, serves as the background for the analysis I undertake throughout my dissertation, offering insight into the status of the work of art and the role of the artist with respect to both understanding and generating the rhythms of a society.
My dissertation as a whole shows that viewing modernity through a rhythmic lens enabled early 20th century writers to find coherence in their historical moment and to devise, through the medium of literature, strategies for navigating the future. By guiding readers to discover this principle of coherence in literary works, writers such as Ford, Woolf, and the Rhythmists offered their contemporaries a means of positioning themselves in relation to the physical and social spaces of the modernist metropolis, of which London serves as the paradigmatic example.
Author: Nica, Alexandra Iris
Advisor:
Patten, EveType of material:
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