how are modernist novels held together structurally?

Question

if modernist novels have little or no convevtional plot, how are they held together structually, and how do they hold the reader's interest?

Answer 1

They keep your interest by giving you provoking language, dialogue and situations and then YOU provide the structure, foward-thinking all the time as to what the structure is or might be. Faulkner is a PERFECT example of that.

Also the descriptions are so very palpable. Here is an excerpt:

""You, T. P." Mother said, clutching me. I could hear Queenie's feet and the bright shapes went smooth and steady on both sides, the shadows of them flowing across Queenie's back. They went on like the bright tops of wheels. Then those on one side stopped at the tall white post where the soldier was. But on the other side they went on smooth and steady, but a little slower."

Good luck!

Answer 2

They deny the reader any ethical guidance from an authoritative voice or valorizing metalanguage.

Have you read the South African Nobel Literature Prize winner, J.M. Coetzee?

read this well-written article and get the answers.

Whether Coetzee's work should be labeled "modernist" or "postmodernist" is a significant question only insofar as it raises further questions about the practice of formal innovation and disruption that begins in the modernist period (though of course it has antecedents and foreshadowings in earlier periods). My argument, briefly, is that what often gets called (and condemned as) the self-reflexiveness of modernist writing, its foregrounding of its own linguistic, figurative, and generic operations, its willed interference with the transparency of discourse, is, in its effects if not always in its intentions, allied to a new apprehension of the claims of otherness, of that which cannot be expressed in the discourse available to us--not because of an essential ineffability but because of the constraints imposed by that discourse, often in its very productivity and proliferation.7 Since the modernist period proper, there have continued to appear works with this kind of responsiveness to the demands of otherness, achieved by means which, whatever their specific differences, are clearly related to one another in their general strategies.

This modernism after modernism necessarily involves a reworking of modernism's methods, since nothing could be less modernist than a repetition of previous modes, however disruptive they were in their time. An instance of such a tendency to repeat would be the work of another contemporary South African novelist, André Brink, whose series of novels (fifteen at the time of writing) constitute an impressive record of engagement with the political conflicts of his native country, yet whose use of modernist (or postmodern) techniques contributes much less to the success of his fiction than the essentially realist storytelling they sometimes mediate.8 Thus Brink's 1982 novel A Chain of Voices utilizes the Faulknerian device of short personal narratives out of which a larger story gradually shapes itself, without the emergence of a totalizing and adjudicating central voice. It's a powerful novel, but its power derives not from an apprehension of otherness, as one might expect from its subject matter (a slave rebellion on a number of Boer farms in the Cape in 1825), but from the illusion of empathy and understanding that the intimate individual disclosures produce. States of Emergency (1988) is another novel by Brink that exploits the self-reflexivity characteristic of some modernist practice, staging very directly the conflict between political engagement and the exigencies of literary creation as the central character, a novelist, attempts, at a time of political crisis in South Africa, to write a love story, and life and fiction turn out to be mutually transformative. The overall effect, however, has a slight air of modernism-by-numbers, whatever the intensity of individual sections as representations of the impact of political urgencies on personal lives.


Read more from the link attached. Good luck.