• English & American cultural studies
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.127-157
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• 2014

Among many literary isms, impressionism is often regarded as the most frank expression of personality. As a masterpiece of modernism, Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier is a celebration of the subjectivity which reflects the writer's experiential reality. For Madox Ford, art is not to achieve the true objectivity of human society, but to seize the momentary perception in personal life. As the beginning of modernism, Madox Ford's impressionaism was mostly devoted to give fictive life to subjective impressions. And his heroes are usually the egoless person who can absorb the intense rapidity of consciousness without any prejudice. However, the innocent mind's receptions of myriad impressions, like those of the protagonist John Dowell or his idealized version of Major Ashburnham in The Good Solidier, were described as the enjoyable yet deceptive ones in Madox Ford's works. To engrave more sold perceptive impressions into life, Madox Ford often contrasts or mixes truth with deception, life with death as he did in his real life. Speicially as the result of thick application of real-life subject matters to his writings, Madox Ford's literary works get more vivid colors and penetrating forms. Thus, his literary impressionism based upon his harsh and passionate realities overcomes the limitations of shifting moments of senses, demolishing the boundaries between what is objective and what is subjective, like post-impressionism or expressionism. Namely, as Walter Lowenfels said, Madox Ford did not follow the impossible objectivity passively, yet instead "knew how to invent the truth."

• Lingua Humanitatis
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.91-104
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• 2001

Ford Madox Ford, the early twentieth-century writer most famous for his novel The Good Soldier, perceived his "business in life [as an] ... attempt to discover and to try to let you see where you stand." With this grand purpose in mind, Ford disregarded distinctions of genre in his prolific output of what we would consider novels, memoirs, literary criticism, travel writing, and history. Claiming that "the Novelist ... [is a] historian of his own time," Ford sought his own version of the "truth," a truth that was more faithful to his own subjective impressions than to verifiable "fact." Among these works that depict his age are a series of "memoirs" or "reminiscences," works published from the 1910s to the 1930s which carry out his Impressionistic purpose. What lies behind these memoirs is Ford′s view that his own individual history can be understood as his contemporary society′s collective history. This article explores Ford′s experimentation with boundaries of fact and fiction, and history and narrative, as he employs and expands the memoir form. In particular, 1 focus on two works, Memories and Impressions (1911) and It Was the Nightingale (1933), and Ford′s techniques in these memoirs, such as 1) the adoption of fictional personae from which to comment on his society at large and 2) the use of emblematic "parables" to encapsulate larger lessons of life within the minutiae of existence. Current theorists on the memoir form share interests in these questions of genre and of the social role of the memoir Nancy Miller, for instance, terms the memoir "the record of an experience in search of a community." This article engages these current discussions of the memoir genre by examining Ford′s early twentieth-century examples as innovative experiments that play with the boundaries between fiction and history, and personal impressions and collective truth.