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

Obsession with narration and language, however, is a quality common to modernist
narrative texts, notably those of Conrad, Joyce, and Faulkner. The fragmentation of
the narrator of In Transit is, on the other hand, a second-half occurrence.
Fragmentation, too, is a common modernist trope. It is the realization of these
modernist concerns in the novel’s second half as transformations in the story world
and the rules that govern its functioning as well as its narration that marks the
transition between epistemological and ontological. This shift is worthy of
investigation in its own right, as a technical device and a structural feature of
Brophy’s novel. It is also worthy of investigation as it relates to how we read the
nove’’s themes of gender and language: for it posits a fundamental disjunction
between the language of the self and its construction of gender, and the languages of
the world and their very different constructions of gender. While In Transit suggests
that the lines between the ontological and epistemological are porous, it also
establishes that they exist. In In Transit, there is both and essential self with a
coherent identity and limited knowledge, and multiple social selves—and it is the
anxiety of transmission between the two, particularly in regards to gender, which
fuels the novel.
In Transit uses music as inspiration to mark itself as a complete work of art
formed of disparate parts. In Transit is divided into four sections, plus a brief
CODETTA. All five have a primary title and a subtitle; the former is thematic, while
the latter always a typical title of a movement of a classical symphony or sonata. The
four main sections also have a supertitle, indicating (often playfully) the section
number. The five titles, with typographical elements roughly transcribed, are:
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