...,The Presentation of male and female sexuality in Nabokov’s ‘Lolita’, Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ and Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry anthology ‘The World’s Wife’ The themes of sex and sexuality have always remained somewhat hidden by society, concealing a darker unspoken reality which has power to threaten the pure and romantic values of marriage and intimate relationships as well as established gender roles. Despite the alleviation of religious and moral restrictions, sex embodies the warped animal reflection of the exclusively human concept of love, exposing primal desires and ensuring its continued belonging to the realms of the shocking and distasteful, while inadvertently strengthening its power. It is this power that lies at the heart of much modernist literature. The illicit imagery serves as a physical subversion of the dated foundations the writings oppose. Prominent in early modernist work was the theoretical influence of Sigmund Freud, most notably in the case of contemporary writer James Joyce whose literary techniques, such as the stream of consciousness writing in Ulysses, have come to epitomize modernist fiction. Ulysses not only challenges the censors’ attitude to sex, but also what were considered the sexual norms for men and women in pre-war Catholic society. Similarly, Vladimir Nabokov uses sexual deviancy to protest the theoretical ideas implicit in modernist literature through characteristics derived from post-World War II civilisation. The absence of structure or...
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...Narrative A narrative is a sequence of events that a narrator tells in story form. A narrator is a storyteller of any kind, whether the authorial voice in a novel or a friend telling you about last night’s party. Point of View The point of view is the perspective that a narrative takes toward the events it describes. First-person narration: A narrative in which the narrator tells the story from his/her own point of view and refers to him/herself as “I.” The narrator may be an active participant in the story or just an observer. When the point of view represented is specifically the author’s, and not a fictional narrator’s, the story is autobiographical and may be nonfictional (see Common Literary Forms and Genres below). Third-person narration: The narrator remains outside the story and describes the characters in the story using proper names and the third-person pronouns “he,” “she,” “it,” and “they.” • Omniscient narration: The narrator knows all of the actions, feelings, and motivations of all of the characters. For example, the narrator of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina seems to know everything about all the characters and events in the story. • Limited omniscient narration: The narrator knows the actions, feelings, and motivations of only one or a handful of characters. For example, the narrator of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has full knowledge of only Alice. • Free indirect discourse: The narrator conveys a character’s inner thoughts...
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