Abstract

Beci Carver identifies the heir of literary naturalism in the "granular" modernism of Joseph Conrad, Evelyn Waugh, William Gerhardie, Henry Green, W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett. Characterized by the performance of plotlessness, arbitrariness, miscellaneousness, and futility, "granular" modernism is seen to make a virtue of naturalism's tendency towards amorphousness and irrelevance. Finding cognates in early twentieth-century photography, Carver discloses a modernist literary tradition which—unlike the modernism of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, and others—refuses to generate meaning from inconsequent detail. Incipient in the work of Conrad, this tradition is seen to reach its zenith in the midcentury fiction of Beckett.

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