ABSTRACT Title of Document: BRITISH MODERNIST ... - DRUM

of meaning and knowledge—are perhaps most evident in the gap between story and
discourse—between what happens in the story and the rules of the world in which it
takes place, and the medium through which the reader gains knowledge and
perspective on the story. Many prominent modernist texts, from authors such as
Joyce, Woolf, Mansfield, and Proust, adhere to certain level of stability,
verisimilitude, and even a sense of the ordinary or undramatic when it comes to the
story. That is, the events narrated in Ulysses or Mrs. Dalloway take place in a stable
world resembling our own. However, the discourse, through techniques such as
focalization, symbolic structures, and particular attention to the consciousnesses of
characters, rather than outward events, tends to disrupt, limit, and multiply ways that
the story is understood and interpreted. However, in modernist texts, the story itself
remains singular and stable. In popular detective fiction, by contrast, the story of
detection itself is rendered mostly unproblematically in the discourse—the
epistemological problems are confined primarily to the story. In postmodernist
fiction, on the other hand, the story itself becomes problematic and unstable. It is not
simply that we do not know precisely what happens in a postmodern narrative, or are
confronted with multiple or conflicted meanings for the same events, but instead
these events and the worlds in which they occur may be multiple or unstable. An
examination of modernist middles, then, is an examination of middles that pose
epistemological questions primarily through their discourse.
This study will explore the epistemological poetics of modernism as it is
found and altered in various modernist narrative middles. Located near the center of
the text, modernist narrative middles may, as in the gap between Molloy and Moran’s
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