On the evening of December 17, Professor Lu Jiande, chair professor of CFLC and professor of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, presented the seventh of this series lectures on British literature, entitled “From Conrad to Eliot”.

In this lecture, Professor Lu talked about the grand theme of modernist literature, focusing on the literary achievements of British modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot and Joseph Conrad. His lecture gave the audience of a deeper understanding of the artistic techniques and ideological connotation of modernist literature.

According to Professor Lu, modernism, at its most basic, was an avant-garde movement in literature and art that sought to break away from ordinary social values, commercialism, and the “genteel” literary tradition that preceded it. Modernists challenged traditional ways of thinking, something that defined the individualism of the Modernist movement. Modernism’s pessimism was in part the product of the devastation of World War I, which many writers experienced personally on the battlefield. Much modernist literature is actually antimodern, registering modernity as an experience of loss. The modernist artist was a critic of the art that came before him/her as well as the culture of which he/she was a part. At the heart of modernist art was the belief that the previously sustaining elements of human life, like religious beliefs, social mores, and artistic convictions, had been destroyed or proven false or fragile. This sense of fragmentation led to a literature built out of fragments of myth, history, personal experience, or earlier art.

Professor Lu elaborated on “A Room of One’s Own”, an extended essay by Virginia Woolf, first published in September 1929. An important feminist text, the essay is noted in its argument for both a literal and figurative space for women’s writers within a literary tradition dominated by men. Virginia Woolf is renowned for the pioneering stream-of-consciousness style she immortalized in novels like “To the Lighthouse” and “Mrs. Dalloway” — but her fame has never been solely based on her work, as her personal life has long been the subject of fascination. Her involvement in the influential intellectual circle known as the Bloomsbury Group brought her attention, and “A Room of One’s Own” did the same for her feminist ideas.

In his lecture, Professor Lu also touched upon D. H. Lawrence. The English writer’s prolific and diverse output included novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations and literary criticism. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialization. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, human sexuality and instinct. After a brief foray into formal poetics in his early years, his later poems embrace organic attempts to capture emotion through free verse.

Professor Lu went on to expound the themes and styles of T.S. Eliot’s works. T.S. Eliot ranks with William Butler Yeats as the greatest English-language poet of the 20th Century and was certainly the most influential. Starting in 1910, his poetry took on themes associated with the modernism movement in art and literature. Modernism focused on the negative aspects of humanity and rejected most themes that were popular in the 1800s, like optimism, progress, beauty, morality, personal strength, and freedom of choice. The characters in many of Eliot’s poems were lonely, disconnected from other people, and overly concerned about their own unfulfilled wants and needs, as opposed to being selfless and focusing on the greater good of the community. Many poems were set in the present and paid little attention to past traditions. Instead of optimism and progress, many of his characters felt stuck in difficult situations they were powerless to escape. Eliot’s poems usually stressed the darker side of human nature. 

Finally, Professor Lu expounded the representative works of Joseph Conrad. His literary work bridges the gap between the realist literary tradition of writers such as Charles Dickens and the emergent modernist schools of writing. Interestingly, he despised Dostoevsky, and Russian writers as a rule, possibly due to his political inclinations, making an exception only for Ivan Turgenev. Conrad is now best known for the novella “Heart of Darkness”, which has been seen as a scathing indictment of colonialism. Chinua Achebe, however, has argued that Conrad's language and imagery is inescapably racist. Some would claim that these can both be true.