Ezra Pound summed up modernism in three short words: “Make it new.” It was an imperative that his fellow writers applied to their own works, breaking with the realists, whose concepts of narrative were less radical and more convivial. Whether consciously or not, writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf carried out Pound's dictate by breaking with convention and applying various innovative techniques. Two of the most revealing methods are among those described by the postmodernist writer John Barth, who noted "the radical disruption of the linear flow of narrative" and "the frustration of conventional expectations regarding the unity and coherence of plot and characters” (278). Both of Barth's descriptions apply to Joyce's Ulysses and the stories of the Dubliners, as well as Woolf's "Mark on the Wall" from her Monday or Tuesday collection. The radical disruptions of chronological time are amply on display in the famous – and frustrating – Ulysses, but nowhere more so than in episode 18, an extended stream-of-consciousness piece from Molly Bloom's point of view. Almost any excerpt from the section is enough to demonstrate Bloom's observation about the modernists, as Molly's thoughts jump radically from topics as disparate as cooking, sex, and religion in a long diatribe marked by only eight cuts of sentences in forty-two pages. Barth's point of view is proven by these final lines of the novel: ...he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought as well of him as of any other and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me if I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and I pulled him towards me so he could smell my fragrant breasts yes and his heart was going like crazy and yes I said yes I will Yes....... middle of paper......They also conform to Pound's precepts of "making something new" . However, writer Michael North notes that, ironically, Pound's famous synthesis is not new in itself, but rather dates back to ancient Chinese philosophy, a subject in which Pound was considerably interested. The expression is therefore like modernism itself – difficult to classify and too reduced by a simplistic summary. Works Cited Barth, John. “The literature of reconstruction”. The essentials of the theory of fiction. Ed. Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.273-285. Print. Joyce, James. Dubliners. New York: Dover Publications, 1991. Print.---. Ulysses. London: Wordsworth Classics, 2010. Print. North, Michael. “The realization of “making something new”.” Guernica. August 15, 2013. The web. August 5, 2014.Woolf, Virginia. Monday or Tuesday: Eight stories. New York: Dover Publications, 1997.Print.