Practice question · True or false
The disproportion between story time and discourse time in these novels is a technical flaw rather than a deliberate device.
Hints
- Ask what a 730-page account of one day is asserting.
- The ratio is the claim, not an accident of length.
Show the answer
False
Why
False. The disproportion is the content. Rendering one day at 730 pages asserts that a day contains that much, and Proust’s inverse move, decades passing in a clause while a mouthful of tea takes dozens of pages, makes the same claim about which moments actually hold a life.
Practise Ruptures: Proust, Joyce and Woolf
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More questions on Ruptures: Proust, Joyce and Woolf
- Why is stream of consciousness better described as a representation than as a transcript?
- Which are true of Mrs Dalloway’s narration?
- The Homeric parallel in Ulysses is described as a structural scaffold rather than a message. What follows…
- Match each writer to the technique most associated with them in this lesson.
- How many pages, approximately to the nearest fifty, does Ulysses take to narrate its single day?
- Complete the account of the two clocks.
- Woolf’s "Modern Fiction" argues that novelists should record an ordinary mind on an ordinary day.