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Modernism, Philip M. Weinstein

English Literature Faculty Works

This article examines the impact of modernism on philosophy and literature. It proposes two defining dimensions of modernist texts: their initial difficulty and their experimental departure from earlier conventions of thinking. It considers in some detail the practice of novelists Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, and William Faulkner with the aim of shedding light on central strategies and powers of modernism. It shows that the formal practices of my novelists enact a philosophic stance through their particular way of deploying materials.