Sustained collision: Modernist fictions as forms of attention (Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Ireland)

Modernist novels challenge their readers to pay attention, to resist despair, and to try and make sense of what does not easily make sense. The difficulty of reading them lies as much in this test as in our ability to justify taking it. Such justifications can be found in the way these works tell us about class, history, culture, and canons. In my dissertation I offer another justification both for difficult modernist aesthetics and for taking up the challenge of reading them. I argue that many modernist authors grapple in experimental ways with fictional form and language as a way to confront pressing, modern variations of questions about ethics and identity, meaning and nonsense---and that it is by their persistent efforts to work through literary aesthetics towards clarity that their works can be called triumphs of artistic innovation. The value of attentively reading these works comes in the way that they can compel us to interrogate, alongside them, how we resolve such questions for ourselves, whether our own language and stories take us into greater darkness or light as we try to work out of confusion towards clarity.; My project in the dissertation has been threefold: to produce a better description of the questions motivating the style and content of certain modernist texts; to challenge the success of epiphanies as the single redemptive trope in modernist fictions; and to reassess modernist experimental writing as a modified epiphany. Modernist writing as a stylistic form of attention revises epiphanic attention, I argue, by ridding it of its blinding and then bubble-bursting effects. Woolf, Ford, Conrad, and Joyce temper their narrative visions into increasingly sustained aesthetic attention by pitting intuitive metaphors and epiphanies against complex stories and lives. Such attention to the world and to ourselves, shown as a careful attention to our language, metaphors and stories, does not promise a perfectly happy life or even a perfectly sensible one---as their stories insist. Such attention does promise, however, a life that holds the possibility of progress, towards goodness and towards sustained presence.