From: "Earl E. Stevens" <eestms-AT-frii.com>
Subject: Re: a problem with E.M. Forster
Date: Wed, 22 May 2002 10:36:25 -0600


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I do not think that the proposals that Forster is to be "considered old guard Modernist, Edwardian, neo-Victorian, or just . . . . Or merely trying to play the learned sage and promote his name" are adequate or just. Forster's take is sound and ,yes, there have been various experiments with time but the ultimate question is whether or not any of them have and remain successful. Earl E. Stevens.
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Jerdevinjohnson-AT-aol.com
  To: modernism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
  Sent: Wednesday, May 22, 2002 1:13 AM
  Subject: a problem with E.M. Forster


  E. M. Forster, in his book, "Aspects of the Novel" says of G. Stein, "Well, there is one novelist who has tried to abolish time, and her failure is instructive: Gertrude Stein. Going much further than Emily Bronte, Sterne or Proust, Gertrude Stein has smashed up and pulverized her clock and scattered its fragments over the world like the limbs of Osiris, and she has done this not from naughtiness but from a noble motive: she has hoped to emancipate fiction from the tyranny of time and to express in it the life by values only. She fails, because as soon as fiction is completely delivered from time it cannot express anything at all, and in her later writing we can see the slope down which she is slipping. ... There is nothing to ridicule in such an experiment as hers. It is much more important to play about like this than to rewrite the Waverley Novels. Yet the experiment is doom! ed to failure. " His point is there is a way to tell a story that is set. Yet cyberpunk and beats and Woolfians defied this ethos of "the novel tells a story" merely through use of Time. That is what moderns were about: BUSTING UP TIME. Making new time. Ezra Pound does this, too, with The Cantos. Marvelously! So is Forster to be considered old guard Modernist, Edwardian, neo-Victorian, or just out of step with the most radical folks in Early Modernism? Or just merely trying to play the learned sage and promote his name?

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----- Original Message -----

From: Jerdevinjohnson-AT-aol.com

To: modernism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu

Sent: Wednesday, May 22, 2002 1:13 AM

Subject: a problem with E.M. Forster

E. M. Forster, in his book, "Aspects of the Novel" says of G. Stein, "Well, there is one novelist who has tried to abolish time, and her failure is instructive: Gertrude Stein. Going much further than Emily Bronte, Sterne or Proust, Gertrude Stein has smashed up and pulverized her clock and scattered its fragments over the world like the limbs of Osiris, and she has done this not from naughtiness but from a noble motive: she has hoped to emancipate fiction from the tyranny of time and to express in it the life by values only. She fails, because as soon as fiction is completely delivered from time it cannot express anything at all, and in her later writing we can see the slope down which she is slipping. ... There is nothing to ridicule in such an experiment as hers. It is much more important to play about like this than to rewrite the Waverley Novels. Yet the experiment is doom! ed to failure. " His point is there is a way to tell a story that is set. Yet cyberpunk and beats and Woolfians defied this ethos of "the novel tells a story" merely through use of Time. That is what moderns were about: BUSTING UP TIME. Making new time. Ezra Pound does this, too, with The Cantos. Marvelously! So is Forster to be considered old guard Modernist, Edwardian, neo-Victorian, or just out of step with the most radical folks in Early Modernism? Or just merely trying to play the learned sage and promote his name?