SUBIECT I:

1) Define Modernism and comment upon conditions under which it is produced as

considered by Matei Calinescu in Five Faces of Modernity. [2.50];
2) What is metafiction? [1.50]
3) Discuss the contemporary use of historiographic metafiction starting from

the text bellow[2.50]:

But theres another theory of reality, children, quite different from that which found its way into
my fraught after-school meeting with Lewis. Realitys not strange, not unexpected. Reality
doesnt reside in the sudden hallucination of events. Reality is uneventfulness, vacancy, flatness.
Reality is that nothing happens. How many of the events of history have occurred, ask
yourselves, for this and for that reason, but for no other reason, fundamentally, than the desire to
make things happen? I present to you History, the fabrication, the diversion, the reality-obscuring
drama. History, and its near relative, Histrionics . (Graham Swift, Waterland).

SUBIECT II:
1. Discuss Modernist conventions of Realism in Lord Jim by Joseph
Conrad. [2.50]
2. Define postmodern sensibility [1.50]
2. Comment on modernist writers views of the project of modernity starting
from the excerpt below (D.H. Lawrences The Rainbow)[2.50]:
She saw the stiffened bodies of the colliers, which seemed already enclosed in a coffin, she
saw their unchanging eyes, the eyes of those who are buried alive: she saw the hard, cutting
edges of the new houses, which seemed to spread over the hillside in their insentient triumph,
the triumph of horrible, amorphous angles and straight lines, the expression of corruption
triumphant and unopposed, corruption so pure that it is hard and brittle: she saw the dun
atmosphere over the blackened hills opposite, the dark blotches of houses, slate roofed and
amorphous, the old churchtower standing up in hideous obsoleteness above raw new houses
on the crest of the hill, the amorphous, brittle, hard edged new houses advancing from
Beldover to meet the corrupt new houses from Lethley, the houses of Lethley advancing to
mix with the houses of Hainor, a dry, brittle, terrible corruption spreading over the face of the
land, and she was sick with a nausea so deep that she perished as she sat. And then, in the
blowing clouds, she saw a band of faint iridescence colouring in faint colours a portion of the
hill. And forgetting, startled, she looked for the hovering colour and saw a rainbow forming
itself[] She saw in the rainbow the earths new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of
houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting the
over-arching heaven.