TOEFL Experts Reading Practice 22
At the dawn of the twentieth century, European painting, which was then a far more influential art form than it is now, underwent a vast aesthetic revolution, shattering conventions that predated the Renaissance. Cubism, an innovative movement that would influence artists throughout the century, rejected the previous norm of realistic portrayals in favor of an abstract approach combining multiple perspectives. This radical departure, commonly thought to have been led by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, captivated the art world. It also inspired writers and musicians to infuse the same abstract quality into their works.
James Joyce and John Dos Passos were two renowned authors whose major works employed this nonlinear framework derived from Cubism, the writers applying words to paper in the same fractured manner that artists used when applying paint to canvas. Scholars have termed this literary style “stream-of-consciousness” writing. This technique constructs an inner monologue that creates a whole from dissociated parts and theoretically portrays the nonlinear patterns inherent in human thoughts.
Like Picasso and Braque, Joyce and Dos Passos enjoyed great artistic success, and their stylistic explorations profoundly influenced the generations of writers that followed them. Both men were interested in smashing established boundaries in the service of accurately displaying the emotional truth of human thoughts and feelings. James Joyce (1882–1941) was reared in a downwardly mobile Irish middle-class family but received a relatively elite education because of his intellect and talents. He resided in Europe for almost all of his adult life and eked out a living through various short-lived ventures, his art, and the generosity of patrons. His literary work largely remained anchored to his native Dublin. John Dos Passos (1896–1970) was the illegitimate son of John Randolph Dos Passos, who refused to accept his son until he was nearly an adult. However, his father’s wealth allowed him to obtain a privileged education and undertake an educational tour of Europe. He then volunteered with an ambulance corps during the First World War, an experience that profoundly impacted him, as it did many of his generation. During his literary prime, Dos Passos was also an outspoken political progressive, but in the final third of his life he embraced very conservative causes.
Joyce’s most renowned work, Ulysses, was published in 1922; however, in the United States, it was banned under an obscenity statute for more than 10 years. In this seminal work, Joyce transplants the plot and characters of Homer’s Greek epic The Odyssey to early twentieth-century Dublin and condenses the timeline to a single day. In service of the stream-of-consciousness aesthetic, each chapter employs a different literary style, although all reject linear conventions, much as Cubist painting did. Furthermore, each chapter has a thematic association unrelated to the plot or source material. Because of its difficult vocabulary, its assumption that the reader is familiar with a vast array of historical and literary references, and its complex, metaphorical prose, Ulysses is not widely read. However, its fame and place in the literary canon far exceed its sales, as scholarly opinion considers it the fountainhead of literary modernism.
By contrast, John Dos Passos’s work, also considered unique and innovative, proved far more accessible and popular, but it is now thought to be less important than Ulysses. His opus was a trilogy entitled U.S.A., completed in 1938. This work chronicles the evolution of the United States from an agrarian, isolationist nation as the twentieth century began to the urban world power it became within a few decades. Dos Passos sought to reflect the feelings and consciousness of those times by employing what critics have called a “collage technique”: newspaper clippings are inserted sporadically, and his disparate characters and plots intersect at seemingly random intervals.
The literary influence of Joyce, Dos Passos, and their peers remains pervasive to this day. In that sense, it can be argued that the movement that they spearheaded in the literary world was more momentous in the long run than the parallel revolution in the artistic world. While Cubism predated the stream-of-consciousness movement, it is now seen as more of a period in art than a guiding light, whereas the stream-of-consciousness style remains current in literature.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, European painting, which was then a far more influential art form than it is now, underwent a vast aesthetic revolution, shattering conventions that predated the Renaissance. Cubism, an innovative movement that would influence artists throughout the century, rejected the previous norm of realistic portrayals in favor of an abstract approach combining multiple perspectives. This radical departure, commonly thought to have been led by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, captivated the art world. It also inspired writers and musicians to infuse the same abstract quality into their works.
James Joyce and John Dos Passos were two renowned authors whose major works employed this nonlinear framework derived from Cubism, the writers applying words to paper in the same fractured manner that artists used when applying paint to canvas. Scholars have termed this literary style “stream-of-consciousness” writing. This technique constructs an inner monologue that creates a whole from dissociated parts and theoretically portrays the nonlinear patterns inherent in human thoughts.
Like Picasso and Braque, Joyce and Dos Passos enjoyed great artistic success, and their stylistic explorations profoundly influenced the generations of writers that followed them. Both men were interested in smashing established boundaries in the service of accurately displaying the emotional truth of human thoughts and feelings. James Joyce (1882–1941) was reared in a downwardly mobile Irish middle-class family but received a relatively elite education because of his intellect and talents. He resided in Europe for almost all of his adult life and eked out a living through various short-lived ventures, his art, and the generosity of patrons. His literary work largely remained anchored to his native Dublin. John Dos Passos (1896–1970) was the illegitimate son of John Randolph Dos Passos, who refused to accept his son until he was nearly an adult. However, his father’s wealth allowed him to obtain a privileged education and undertake an educational tour of Europe. He then volunteered with an ambulance corps during the First World War, an experience that profoundly impacted him, as it did many of his generation. During his literary prime, Dos Passos was also an outspoken political progressive, but in the final third of his life he embraced very conservative causes.
Joyce’s most renowned work, Ulysses, was published in 1922; however, in the United States, it was banned under an obscenity statute for more than 10 years. In this seminal work, Joyce transplants the plot and characters of Homer’s Greek epic The Odyssey to early twentieth-century Dublin and condenses the timeline to a single day. In service of the stream-of-consciousness aesthetic, each chapter employs a different literary style, although all reject linear conventions, much as Cubist painting did. Furthermore, each chapter has a thematic association unrelated to the plot or source material. Because of its difficult vocabulary, its assumption that the reader is familiar with a vast array of historical and literary references, and its complex, metaphorical prose, Ulysses is not widely read. However, its fame and place in the literary canon far exceed its sales, as scholarly opinion considers it the fountainhead of literary modernism.
By contrast, John Dos Passos’s work, also considered unique and innovative, proved far more accessible and popular, but it is now thought to be less important than Ulysses. His opus was a trilogy entitled U.S.A., completed in 1938. This work chronicles the evolution of the United States from an agrarian, isolationist nation as the twentieth century began to the urban world power it became within a few decades. Dos Passos sought to reflect the feelings and consciousness of those times by employing what critics have called a “collage technique”: newspaper clippings are inserted sporadically, and his disparate characters and plots intersect at seemingly random intervals.
The literary influence of Joyce, Dos Passos, and their peers remains pervasive to this day. In that sense, it can be argued that the movement that they spearheaded in the literary world was more momentous in the long run than the parallel revolution in the artistic world. While Cubism predated the stream-of-consciousness movement, it is now seen as more of a period in art than a guiding light, whereas the stream-of-consciousness style remains current in literature.
→(P6) [A] The literary influence of Joyce, Dos Passos, and their peers remains pervasive to this day.[B] In that sense, it can be argued that the movement that they spearheaded in the literary world was more momentous in the long run than the parallel revolution in the artistic world.[C] While Cubism predated the stream-of-consciousness movement, it is now seen as more of a period in art than a guiding light, whereas the stream-of-consciousness style remains current in literature.[D]
- Cubism, an early twentieth-century revolution in art, also influenced the course of literature by inspiring prominent authors to infuse its principles into their works.