Academic literature on the topic 'Forster, Edward Morgan (1879-1970) – ˜A œpassage to India'

Nombre de lectures de l’oeuvre romanesque de E. M. Forster s’accordent sur la qualité « visuelle » de l’écriture, empruntant au registre du pictural pour évoquer celle-ci. Pourtant, les critiques évacuent souvent les complexités de l’insertion de l’image dans le texte qui, pour beaucoup, rejetterait la peinture pour lui préférer la musique. La lecture de la picturalité dans trois romans phare qui posent la question du rapport du lisible au visible (A Room with a View, Howards End, A Passage to India) trace le cheminement d’un texte qui se situe entre la convention et la recherche de nouvelles formes. Si le traitement critique de la référence « interpicturale » opéré par Forster montre bien que toute image ne fait pas « voir » dans le texte, certaines descriptions portent les traces d’une picturalité plus diffuse qui souligne que l’écriture se renouvelle et dépasse le modèle imposé pour « peindre » dans ses propres termes. Les oscillations qui caractérisent ces ouvertures au visible font écho au concept forsterien de rythme qui éclaire les modulations du pictural et permet à l’image de se détacher du cadre référentiel. Cette démarche dévoile en outre une réflexion sur la représentation et ses limites, lorsque celle-ci paraît mise en péril par les effets délétères de la modernité sur le visible, tels qu’ils apparaissent dans les derniers textes. L’écriture, qui donne une place grandissante à l’obscurité et à l’indicible, trouve pourtant dans ces nouvelles modalités du voir que sont le plat photographique et la description négative de nouveaux dispositifs qui font apparaître le visible dans les creux du texte. Plus qu’un aveu de l’échec du littéraire à écrire le voir, l’image fait du roman forsterien le laboratoire de sa modernité
Many readings of E. M. Forster’s novels agree on the “visual” quality of his writing, using words borrowed from painting to describe it. However, critics have rarely concentrated on the complex nature of its appearance within the text of the novels which, as many have claimed, tend to reject painting in favour of music. Analysing the pictorial images in three key novels addressing the connection between the verbal and the visual (A Room with a View, Howards End, A Passage to India) highlights the progression of a text wavering between convention and the search for new forms. While the critical treatment of the “interpictorial” reference reveals that some images fail to achieve visibility in the text, some descriptions displaying a more allusive pictorial dimension demonstrates that the text can renew its methods and exceed the imposed frame of reference to “paint” in its own terms. Such variations echo the Forsterian concept of rhythm and allow the consideration of the image beyond the sole reference to art. This progression further discloses a questioning of representation in the texts, when the destructive effects of modernity that are displayed in the later novels challenge its very standards. The writing of E. M. Forster, which increasingly values the invisible and the unspeakable, finds new ways of producing the visible in the very modes of modern visibility offered by the photographic and the negative description, through the gaps and fissures of the text. More than the sign of a failure of the literary to write the visible, the image reveals the Forsterian novel as the testing ground for its own modernity

Dans les romans de E. M. Forster, la représentation du corps révèle une ambiguïté désenchantée dans l’approche du monde et la conception de la littérature. Les figures corporelles sont a priori absentes de cette œuvre qui, par une esthétique de l’invisible et du silence, fait souvent l’économie de la description et préfère suggérer à travers le non-dit. Dans A Room with a View, Howards End et Maurice, il s’agit d’abord de donner à lire sans donner à voir, de commenter l’événement sans le raconter. L’œil et la voix renvoient alors au secret et aux différentes logiques de rétention du texte. Puis ces trois romans s’ouvrent à l’écriture du sensible pour laisser apparaître un corps d’essence idéaliste, qui se voit et se touche dans toute son immédiateté, qui devient l’objet et l’origine d’une voix au cœur d’une nécessaire complémentarité, presque phénoménologique, entre vision et visibilité. Le roman forstérien privilégierait alors la représentation dans l’espace au détriment du récit chronologique, témoignant d’une certaine modernité esthétique. C’est ce que les trois adaptations de James Ivory confirment par leurs propres figures de l’œil et de la voix, et leur questionnement de la narration cinématographique. Bien que ces films semblent d’abord passer sous silence la voix forstérienne, ils apportent aux romans un nouvel éclairage que vient encore modifier A Passage to India, où Forster renonce au corps comme à l’écriture, tous deux incapables de montrer ou de dire le monde
In E. M. Forster’s novels the representation of the body reveals an ambiguous view of the world and a disillusioned concept of literature. At first reading there appears to be no trace of the human body in Forster’s works, which focus on silence and the invisible, and prefer to suggest rather than describe. In A Room with a View, Howards End and Maurice, the event is commented upon without really being narrated, and the reader has to read between the lines. Here the eye and the voice point up a process of secret and retention in the text. The three novels then open out to write the senses and display an idealist body, that can be seen and touched in its immediacy, and is both the object and origin of a voice linking vision and visibility in a necessary, almost phenomenological, complementarity. The Forsterian novel would thus favour representation in space over chronological narration, showing some form of aesthetic modernity which is actually confirmed in the three film adaptations by James Ivory through their insistence on the eye and the voice, and the way they call into question narration on screen. Although the films first seem to silence the Forsterian voice, they shed new light on the novels. Forster’s last choices in A Passage to India invalidate these dynamics as the writer eventually renounces the body and writing itself, both equally unsuited to show or tell the world

This study discusses the extent to which Charles Sturridge's Where Angels Fear to Tread, Merchant Ivory's Howards End, and David Lean's A Passage to India have aimed at, and succeeded in, exploring the thematic concerns of E.M. Forster's novels. A brief introductory chapter explains the motivation behind this research, and the choice of critical methodologies used. It concludes with an outline of some of the problems confronting film-makers wishing to explore the concerns of novels. The first chapter, which is devoted to Where Angels Fear to Tread, reveals that while Sturridge is "faithful" to Forster's novel at a superficial level, basing most of his scenes on, and taking most of his dialogue directly from, the text, he does not explore Forster's themes. The facility with which film tells stories proves to be a treacherous trap for Sturridge. His version of Where Angels Fear to Tread is totally vacuous because he failed to develop anything beyond the story -- Forster's "tapeworm" of time (Aspects of the NoyeI41). The causality that Forster calls plot seemed beyond Sturridge's comprehension, leaving his film little more than an endless progression of "and then[s]" (Forster, Aspects 87). Characters are not given their full weight; symbols and leitmotifs are overlooked; the allegorical elements he did recognize, he failed to understand, and thus misplaced, so that the epiphanic moments of the novel are lost. There is no possibility of thematic concerns emerging from a film in which plot, characterization, symbol and rhythm are ignored. Sturridge's apparent inability to understand his source is in stark contrast to Merchant Ivory's sensitivity to Howards End, and their evident familiarity with literary criticism on the work. Chapter two explores the way in which their adaptation smooths out putative flaws in characterization and plot, and uses filmic rhythm and camera work to suggest comments made by the novel's narrator. Almost wholly successful in developing the novel's themes, Merchant Ivory's Howards End does not, however, successfully explore the spiritual dimensions of Forster's novel. Film is a medium capable of great subtlety, but its strength lies in its ability to capture the seen; the unseen tends to evade its grasp. It is in dealing with the unseen that Lean's A Passage to India misses greatness, for in virtually every other respect his version of Forster's masterpiece is superb. Chapter three explores Lean's creative and flexible approach to adaptation, his acute sensitivity to the differing demands of film and novel, and his confident technical mastery. It also explores, however, the emptiness at the heart of his film, an emptiness that is the result of his trivialization of the spiritual concerns of Forster's novel.

This dissertation traces imperialist ideology as it functions in the texts of two radical Liberal critics of imperialism, Leonard Woolf and E. M. Forster. In chapters two and three respectively, I read Woolf's autobiographical account Growing and his novel The Village in the Jungle to examine connections between "nonfictional" and "fictional" writing on colonialism. The autobiography's fictive texture compromises its claims to facticity and throws into relief the problematic nature of notions of truth and fact in colonialist epistemology and discursive systems.

by Carrie Yuk-ching Kwan.
Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1990.
Bibliography: leaves 137-149.
Acknowledgement
Chapter
Chapter I. --- Introduction --- p.1
Chapter II. --- The Mother Archetype --- p.9
Chapter III. --- "An Archetypal Analysis of ""Death in Chicago""" --- p.28
Chapter IV. --- "An Archetypal Analysis of A Passage to India ´ؤ with a Brief Comparison with ""Death in Chicago""" --- p.73
Chapter V. --- Conclusion --- p.117
Notes --- p.126
Bibliography --- p.137