the High Modernists

"They had talked at her and round her for so many years, that she hardly heard them at all."
D. H. Lawrence's "The Horse Dealer's Daughter" (1922)

Points of Reflection

1. consider the tone of Hardy's "The Ruined Maid" (1866; 1901), and that of "The Convergence of the Twain" (1912; 1912, 1914).

2. Woolf claims that most memoir writers "leave out the person to whom things happened" because it is so utterly difficult to capture what a person is like, what motivates them, what they really felt, etc. (Norton 2219). In the Norton excerpt from "A Sketch of the Past," does she manage to accurately capture herself?

3. to what degree do the doctor (Ferguson) and horse dealer's daughter (Mabel) connect by the short story's end? Do they understand one another? Is this tale romantic or tragic? Typical or indiosyncratic?

4. what audience does Lawrence have in mind as he writes the essay "Why the Novel Matters"? Who is he trying to shock, and what kind of evidence does he use in his attempt to make a point?

5. discuss the tensions in Yeats's poem "Sailing to Byzantium" (1926; 1927), those between action and reflection, youth and the elderly, Nature and artifice, the present and eternity.

6. identify the probable tone of Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts" (Dec. 1938; 1940).

"Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" (c.1558)
Bruegel, Pieter the Elder

Paul Marchbanks
marchban@email.unc.edu