METAPHOR AND SYMBOL IN MODERNIST PORTRAIT DESCRIPTIONS: FROM EPIPHANY TO MORTALITY
Keywords:
Symbol, metaphor, modernism, JoyceAbstract
While the modernist literary movement experiences layers of meanings rather than surfaces of meaning, in contrast a modernist literary movement develops characters by experience of layers of suffocation of the individual subjectivity in perceiving the formation of what it means to exist, rather than the more immediate experience of what is simply the present. James Joyce and Virginia Woolf create portraiture as the habitual form of not only accurate, descriptive accounts of details of appearance and the multiplicity of repeated images with similarly inferred meanings, but cultural, philosophical, and psychological meaning as well. Symbol representation, like birds, flowers, clocks, and light contain progress through its meanings of liberty in the character based networks of images attached to it that allowed characters and by extension audience to move beyond likeness to lived experience in the existence of who they could be.
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