Modernist Panarchies: Woolf, Joyce, and Rhythm

Abstract

In this chapter, I argue that stylistically experimental texts of the high modernist period were characterized by their embrace of the rhythmic disharmonies at the heart of modern spaces. Self-reflexively rendering apparent the rhythmic textures of their own art form, modernist writers make apparent the temporal densities of unique places and locations. In their prose, writers like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce mediate between the rhythms of micro- and macro-structures, moving from the biorhythms of the individual body or even sensory organ to the rhythms of the planetary. In this way, modernist style shapes temporal processes into what contemporary ecologists have called “panarchies”: nested, non-hierarchical cycles within cycles that undergo adaptive transformations, making up the resilience of a larger ecosystem.