Oh, you, with your fancy book learning and big words.
Heeeee. Modernism is the ~literature of my soul~; I can't help myself from referencing it all the damn time. ;)
(Seriously though - what does that mean? I was a film major, LOL.)
Henry James (who's more a proto-Modernist than a real one, but we'll let that slide) coined the term, and for him and most of the people who followed in the next forty-some years, it meant portraying a consciousness on a page by allowing the reader unfiltered access to all the random thoughts in that character's head. The defining features are not so much that the writing is full of long, dreamy, run-on sentences--though that is one of the usual effects--as the collapse of the narrator into the character (at least for part of the narrative, if not all of it, and not necessarily with the use of first-person POV), and the relative lack of structure. Like, Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses both take place over one pretty ordinary day--Mrs. Dalloway prepares for and gives a party; Leopold Bloom wanders around Dublin, attends a funeral, and meets Stephen Dedalus--but the point is that they give us a true picture of these characters' inner lives, with all of the random thoughts that flit through their heads during the day. Memories are presented in little flashes, as we really do remember them, rather than as fleshed-out flashbacks.
My fic does pretty much collapse the narrator into the character (Fraser from due South), but it has a pretty relentless structure; Fraser is going over what he's observed/read from her dossier/learned from talking to her about Meg Thatcher over the past several months, making some conclusions, and thinking of several questions he'd like the answers to, all of which would necessitate a much closer relationship than they have. (Uhhhh, I'm hoping it's not nearly as boring as that summary makes it sound. I'm playing on Fraser's super!Mountie penchant for observation and the enforced distance they have because of their ranks.)
However, I also find that sometimes that can be a good indicator of when I'm just recounting information in a passive way instead of actually dramatizing a scene, so.
Yep, I run into that too, and I find it is good to dump as many of them as possible for precisely that reason. I got rid of a few in this fic, especially in the more flashbacky sections, but the conceit I've set up requires all too many of them. *sigh*
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2011-01-21 05:00 pm (UTC)Heeeee. Modernism is the ~literature of my soul~; I can't help myself from referencing it all the damn time. ;)
(Seriously though - what does that mean? I was a film major, LOL.)
Henry James (who's more a proto-Modernist than a real one, but we'll let that slide) coined the term, and for him and most of the people who followed in the next forty-some years, it meant portraying a consciousness on a page by allowing the reader unfiltered access to all the random thoughts in that character's head. The defining features are not so much that the writing is full of long, dreamy, run-on sentences--though that is one of the usual effects--as the collapse of the narrator into the character (at least for part of the narrative, if not all of it, and not necessarily with the use of first-person POV), and the relative lack of structure. Like, Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses both take place over one pretty ordinary day--Mrs. Dalloway prepares for and gives a party; Leopold Bloom wanders around Dublin, attends a funeral, and meets Stephen Dedalus--but the point is that they give us a true picture of these characters' inner lives, with all of the random thoughts that flit through their heads during the day. Memories are presented in little flashes, as we really do remember them, rather than as fleshed-out flashbacks.
My fic does pretty much collapse the narrator into the character (Fraser from due South), but it has a pretty relentless structure; Fraser is going over what he's observed/read from her dossier/learned from talking to her about Meg Thatcher over the past several months, making some conclusions, and thinking of several questions he'd like the answers to, all of which would necessitate a much closer relationship than they have. (Uhhhh, I'm hoping it's not nearly as boring as that summary makes it sound. I'm playing on Fraser's super!Mountie penchant for observation and the enforced distance they have because of their ranks.)
However, I also find that sometimes that can be a good indicator of when I'm just recounting information in a passive way instead of actually dramatizing a scene, so.
Yep, I run into that too, and I find it is good to dump as many of them as possible for precisely that reason. I got rid of a few in this fic, especially in the more flashbacky sections, but the conceit I've set up requires all too many of them. *sigh*