Conclusion

Abstract

If the last drafts of Pound’s Cantos carried the Modernist project into the 1970s, the main impetus of the movement had spent itself by the mid-thirties. The discourse of self-fragmentation was well established by then, and a new generation of writers was emerging whose interests were in social rather than personal issues. The selfhood of an ‘unknown citizen’ was more a matter for sociological analysis than psychological investigation. At the same time, it is difficult to see what, in that decade, the new generation could have added to such radical presentations as ‘Tiresias’, Leopold Bloom or Mrs Dalloway. Joyce’s contemporaneous ‘Work in Progress’ served to indicate how strait the road might be for those who wished to continue Modernist experimentation, and Beckett, who did, contributed nothing distinctive to its discourse until the fifties. Although Auden, in particular, assimilated much of the mood, and some of the mode, of Modernism, thirties writing, overall, appears something of a reaction against the preoccupations and textual complexities of the previous movement. The ‘I’ that becomes ‘a camera’ has suppressed the problems of selfhood and its representation to focus on the realities of the social nexus.