The Crisis of the Mind in the Modern Age and Its Poetic Consequences. Examples from Texts by Joyce, Zamiatin and Pessoa

Abstract

This paper interrogates some of the utopian and dystopian characteristics found in three key modernist texts by Joyce, Zamyatin and Pessoa, the literary effects of which have been strongly influenced by the crisis of narrative selfrepresentation and the allegorical demythification of totalitarian social and political experiments. Two distinct perspectives are deployed in order to achieve this: Paul Valéry’s dystopian culturalphilosophical reflections on the intellectual crisis of Western civilisation as presented in his 1919 essay “The Crisis of the Mind”; and Frank Kermode’s essay on the contradictory nature of modernism, “The Modern”, published in 1965–1966.

Keywords

• modernism
• crisis
• paul valéry
• james joyce
• yevgeny zamiatin
• fernando pessoa