Impact of Britain and US in WWI: Society & Literature, Sintesi del corso di Inglese

Scarica Impact of Britain and US in WWI: Society & Literature e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! 20th century GREAT BRITAIN The death of queen Victoria in 1901 marked the end of a long era of stability. Edward VII was already 59 when he succeeded his mother Victoria as Britain’s monarch. His reign was a period of social change and reform. The Liberal Party won the General Election of 1906, after which 29 members of the new Labour Party were elected, and the Party remained in power from that till May 1915. But only the 60% of men could vote (over the age of 21) and no women could do it, so at the beginning of the 20th century women’s destiny was still to marry young, stay at home and have children. But now the peaceful campaigning was replaced by a more aggressive approach. The Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) was formed in Manchester in 1903 by a small group of women, known as “suffragettes”, led by Emmeline Pankhurst. These women demanded the right to vote and to take full part in the democratic process. They were prepared to use any militant means. Emily Wilding was the martyr of the movement; she died in 1913 throwing herself in front of the king’s horse at the Epsom Derby. The WSPU called of their militant action during the Great War and finally escaped from their domestic confines, started to work in agriculture, transport and industry to support the war effort while many men were fighting in Europe. Immediately after the war The representation of the People Act in 1918 granted voting rights to all women over 30 who were property owners. In 1928 the franchise was extended to women over 21, on the same terms as those for men. At the beginning of the new century Britain included the whole island of Ireland. Southern Ireland did not become independent until 1922. Ireland had suffered a condition of subservience towards Britain for a long time, until finally the British government promised them the “Home rule” in the early years of the new century. But as Britain postponed it with the beginning of the war, a group of rebels led by Eamon de Valera and the Sinn Féin national party took decisive actions. On Easter Monday 1916 they staged the “Easter Rising” in Dublin. The rebels took control of some of the central buildings in the capital city and unilaterally proclaimed the “Irish Republic”. After a week of fighting and destruction the rebellion were calmed but the continuous merciless treatment (comportamento spietato) of the rebel leaders, many of whom were executed, brought to years of bloody conflict between the Irish and the British. These led to the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922 and to the “partition” of the island as the six counties of Ulster with its capital city in Belfast, that remained part of the United Kingdom. THE FIRST WORLD WAR The causes that led to the first world war involved: - Rivalry between Austria and Russia for influence in the Balkans - Rivalry between Britain and Germany for commercial and naval supremacy - The animosity between France and Germany after the Franco-German War of 1870 France strength an alliance with Russia, and German strength the triple alliance with Italy and Austria-Hungary. Britain instead prided herself for the “Splendid Isolation”, but then when German Emperor began to build up his own navy, the Prime Minister, Balfour, negotiated an Entente Cordiale with France. The Entente Cordiale was an agreement by which each country would support the other in case of attack by a third party. This became the Triple Entente in 1907 when Russia joined in. Kind Edward VII died in 1910 and was succeeded by his son George V, who was king until his death in 1936. The immediate cause of the Great War was the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo by Jugoslav nationalist Gavrilo Prinzip in June 1914. German’s invasion of neutral Belgium and Luxembourg, its march on France, obliged Britain to defend Belgium and so king George V declared war on Germany on 28 July 1914. Italy entered the war on May 24, 1915, siding with the Triple Entente, although it has previously sided with the Triple Alliance. (many of the war poets were among the victims of this war) The United States joined the war in April 1917 and Germany was defeated one year later. At 11 o’clock in the morning, on the eleventh day of the eleventh month (11 november 1918), six hours after the Armistice was signed, a ceasefire was announced. This was followed by the Treaty of Versailles (Peace Treaty) signed in Paris on 28 June 1919. Remembrance day (armistice day) marked the end of the First World War. At 11 a.m. on 11th November every year two minutes of silence is observed to remember all the dead between 1914-18. The annual tradition was introduced on 1919 by King George V. In view of the anti-German atmosphere of the 1WW, George V also proclaimed in 1917 that all English monarchs would adopt the surname Windsor. A constitutional crisis occurred in 1936 as the new king, Edward VIII (son of George V) announced his decision to marry an American divorcee, Wallis Simpson. He was force to abdicate in favour of his young brother, George VI, who reigned until his death in 1952. AFTER THE WAR After the war Britain fell into economic and industrial decline. One of the most affected sector was the mining industry (coal). Aviation, modern industrial processed and the cinema industry born and all developed rapidly. So what is particular remarkable is the economic progress and the development of what will become the modern industrial system. However much of this progress was achieved at the cost of corruption and exploitation of workers. President Theodore Roosevelt, elected in 1901, passed legislation to limit the power of monopolies and trusts, protected natural wealth by establishing a lot of national parks and regulated the railroads. After his recognition of the new Republic of Panama, US was able to construct the connection between the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean, the Panama Canal. The Progressive Movement brought a series of reforms: - 16th and 17th amendments to the constitution (1913) established the first national income tax and direct election of US senators to Congress. - 19th amendment to the constitution (1920) gave women the right to vote. Not everybody shared in the civil rights and in the opportunities that America offered. In theory African-American men had been given the right to vote by the 15th amendment in 1870 but in reality, due to discrimination, for them was impossible to vote, especially in the Southern States. This question was finally solved in 1965 when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Voting Rights Act, which guaranteed this democratic right THE FIRST WORLD WAR President Woodrow Wilson, elected in 1912, led America through the first world war. Initially, he tried to keep Us neutral, but after Germany closed the seas to American ships, in 1917 Wilson called on Congress to declare war on Germany. After the war, he helped to negotiate a peace treaty that included a plan for the creation of a League of Nations, the aim of which was to maintain peace and cooperation between the nations of the world. Although the Senate rejected US membership in the League, Wilson received the Nobel Prize for his peace-making efforts. THE YEARS OF OPTIMISM AND PROSPERITY After the war America experienced a massive economic boom and became the wealthiest county in the world. Americans enjoyed a period of carefree wealth, partying, music and dancing, known as the “Roaring Twenties” or “The Jazz Age”. When the Republican Herbert Hoover became President in 1929, there was a great optimism about the future. The motor industry was growing rapidly and mass consumerism was becoming widespread. People spent money on commodities such as the radio and home appliances, travel, holidays and entertainment. The cinema industry was also developing fast. The major movie companies (Paramount, Warner Brothers and MGM) chose Hollywood as the perfect location for outdoor filming because it was near Los Angeles, California, a part of America where it was always sunny and dry. THE GREAT DEPRESSION The progress, optimism and prosperity of the first decades of 20th stopped with the Wall Street Crash in 1929, marking the beginning of a worldwide Great Depression that was to last ten years. Economists give various causes for the Depression: - overproduction of goods, - bank failures, - bank speculation and consumer debts. Around 11,000 banks failed, leaving many without savings (risparmi). Around 300,000 companies went out of business. Thousands became unemployed and homeless because they couldn’t pay their loans and were evicted (sfrattati) from their homes. Last but not least, a series of dust storms (tempeste di sabia) that damaged agriculture forced agricultural labourers to migrate from the Dust Bowl, region of the Midwest, directed to California. The election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 brought an upturn in the American economy. His policy of intervention of the state in the private and public sectors helped improve things: this ‘New Deal’ policy: - placed regulations (regolamenti) on the stock market, banks and business. - created employment in public works, - offered assistance to the poor, the unemployed and farmers - abrogated the Prohibition Act of 1920 a law that had prohibited a particular goods, that hadn’t disappear but became the first … of bootlegger. It made the production, sale and consumption of alcoholic drinks illegal. Prohibition had not been a great success. In part it had encouraged the criminal activity of ‘bootlegging’ (illegal sale of imported alcoholic drinks) and it had also deprived the treasury of tax revenues from the sale of such drinks. After the great depression started a new age that brought an increasing in life style, overcame the crisis of the time. Didn’t solve all the problems. WAR POETS RUPERT BROOKE Brooke was born in Warwickshire in 1887, studied in Cambridge, where soon started writing poems. His early poetic writing were characterised by the tendency to represent an idyllic view of the English countryside. After a serious nervous breakdown he travelled a lot and was then commissioned into the Royal Naval Division after the outbreak of the !WW. He published his first collection of poems in 1912 with the title of “Georgian Poetry”. Due to this title it could be suggested that he belonged to the group of writers and poets “Georgian Poets”, who rejected the didactic style of Victorian poetry and dealt with humble themes with a melancholic and elegiac tone. His most famous poetic work is the sonnet collection entitled “1914 & other poems” published In 1915, year of his death. This collection express an idealistic and enthusiastic praise for war. Brooke didn’t have a long experience of war as he contracted blood poisoning and was sent to the hospital. This fact prevented him from experiencing the most terrible aspects of war and explains much of his exaltation and exultation over the experience of war, which he idealised as a purifying experience for people and nations. Brooke’s war poetry lacks the elements of tragedy and loss which characterised poems by Owen, Rosenberg or Sassoon. In fact the soldier’s experience was seen by Brooke as a sacrifice for the nation and war is glorified as a triumph of patriotism and heroism. Most critics judged him as too sentimental and superficial. THE SOLDIER If I should die, think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England's, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and Se dovessi morire, pensa solo questo di me: che c’è un angolo di una terra straniera che sarà per sempre Inghilterra. Ci sarà in quella ricca terra straniera una polvere nascosta ancora più ricca; Una polvere che l’Inghilterra generò, che ha formato e reso consapevole, che diede, una volta, i suoi fiori da amare, le sue strade da percorrere, un corpo inglese, che respira aria inglese, bagnato dai fiumi, benedetto dal sole di casa. E pensa che, questo cuore, liberatosi dal male, come un pulpito nella mente Eterna, non di meno restituisce i pensieri donati dall’Inghilterra, i suoi sospiri e suoni; sogni felici come il suo giorno; e risate imparate dagli amici; e gentilezza, So artists decided that they had to propose and analyse other possibilities; if they were painters they decided that colour had different values in art (Mondrian or Picasso for example). The same process happened in literature, poetry and prose. The language is a code that has been created to establish communication. Piaget was a pedagogist who studied the development of mental process in children, he made a series of experiments to fix the succession of the development of language and thought, trying to investigate which came first: was language a direct process of thought or thought needed language to be created? This is something that had interested thinkers for a long time, Piaget analyse learning of for example the spacial dimension making experiment with children and seeing how they elaborated what they were made to see. Thought and language are strictly connected: now every intellectual and literary being could ignore the mass of ideas and doubt that accompanied mankind before. The effect of Darwin, Einstein or whoever have created a particular kind of literary language. The leader of this innovation was Thomas Stearns Eliot. Eliot is a complex author, such an outstanding protagonist of his period. He was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1888. He studied in Paris at the Sorbonne and in 1915 he unhappily married a British ballet dancer. He is considered an avant-garde poet, that is a synonym for the experimentism, the new forms of literature and art, that were introduced in the 20th century, period of avant-garde. In 1922 he published the Waste Land, between the period before and after the conversion. In the second part of his life became British taking the British citizen and joining to the Church of England, we are now nearby 1927. In 1925 became a director for the publishers Faber & Faber and in 1948 he received the Nobel prize for literature. Then died in 1965. As we have seen his life can be divided into 2 parts: - Before the conversion pessimistic vision of the world In this period he wrote: Prufrock and Other observations The Waste land: it is said to be the single most influential poetic work of the 20th century The Hollow men: a sequel to the waste land - After the conversion the keywords of the works were: purification, hope and joy. In this period he wrote: Ash Wednesday Murder in the cathedral: a drama in verse The family reunion Four quartets ELIOT’S MODERN WORLD AND VICTORIAN AGE. THE ROLE OF THE ARTISTS. In Victorian age the idea of the world was order, meaning clear connection between different parts, modern world lacks this, there is chaos, impossibility of forces exploded, destroying everything in the past. Victorian world was meaningful, so you need to know what you’re referring to, and oppositely Eliot modern world was futile. It’s like a contrast between something that was necessary directed to goal, with something that hadn’t any kind of aim  In fact this brought to a contrast between optimistic in the 19th century and pessimistic in the 20th century The modern world is unstable: which represent something that is moving related to the lack of stability that was caused by the evolving faith: in fact any kind of faith is now lost, nothing is worth believing in and everything need to be restored. Morality and values in Victorian age were really strict, quite excessive, in the 20th all these values failed and collapse. In all these confusion was quite impossible understand who you are, your individual. Individual felt that he couldn’t refer to any other and that he had to recreate morality and his own values. This was also caused by the psychoanalytic studies that enlarged the concept of identity, which was an inner world that needed to be penetrate in its inner part to understand our total identity. The role of the artist was to propose new thing, having different skills, but not being superior. He has to separate his own experience from what he want to propose IMPERSONALITY, it doesn’t mean represent something out of us, but it means using an objective and impersonal method to represent what is extremely personal. This combination brought this new kind of literature. The missing point was the talent, it was up to the artist to understand what was temporary, superficial and eternal. Artists is part of the past, and connect it to the present, that’s why he is impersonal, he is in the story, the past and the present, but without being blinded by his feelings and thought. He penetrate another reality. He is not observing or studying. Eliot is one of the most important voices of America and gave a better view of it. The losses that the World War provoked was general alienation, represented in all kind of art and Eliot’s poetry is a really good example. He was an American man that has left Harvard to go to Europe. He acquires the British citizenship looking for traditions, which were the key to a new future. Eliot was a dramatist, essayist, a poet, he wrote in different films. - DRAMATIST connected to Canterbury tale, when we studied Chaucer, 14th century, we mentioned what canterbury meant for British people: pilgrimage, a way to purify souls, rebirth of souls that was necessary. Eliot took inspiration from this pilgrimage and wrote Murder in the Cathedral, (end of Thomas Becket murdered by Henry II, his friend who became king and appointed Thomas becket as archbishop in order to control the role of the church that he wanted to limit in confront of the role of the state, but just a few later he became an enemies for Henry II. Some who wanted to make a pleasure to the king, in the name of Henry, killed Thomas Becket without any request of the king. This created a crisis and from this moment Becket became a martyr and pilgrims started to visit his tomb.) The approach that Elliot gave to this drama, is more psychological, he enter in the minds, mainly in the women who represented a chorus around the drama. Revisit with a modern approach, murder in the cathedral follows Thomas becket in a different place. An example of his being dramatist. Eliot was reminded as the major modernity, who represented the fragmentally reality of 20th century and desperate looking for a new language to be used and finding a solution. - ESSAISThas gave him a great fame worldwide, he had studied world literature, not only French and Italian, but also middle-east literature, eastern literatures, Hebrew. He so had an immense culture. He used a vocabulary various and sometimes could be hard to understand, also due to his lot of references. (Technique of modernist was to juxtapose language, that meant that I need to connect…? ) A very beautiful essay he wrote was the “Waste Land”, dedicate to Ezra Pound (American artist, leader of the imagist movement), which is the crudest representation of the world after the 1st World War. This common and terrible description of its effects: there were no winners, everything was destructed, it affected life of mankindalienation, despair (desolazione), lack of values Waste land’s translation is « la terra desolata », it is about this land without water and perspective of future and life, there’s no fertility, it’s sterile. [(Natural elements are repeated pillar of life are used) sympathy is something that is similar to empathy, is compassion the original meaning of sharing passion] Waste land is an autobiography written in a moment of crisis in the poet’s life. It consists of five sections: I. The burial of the deadit is settled in London and is about the opposition between fertility and sterility, life and death. There is the contrast between past and present: the Punic wars between Rome and Carthage and the clashes of important images a reader should pay attention to are those related to Heaven, or a place like it, and a vaguely defined shadowy presence. The poem begins with the speaker, who is really a group, describing how their lives as “The Hollow Men.” They are, or they are like a group of scarecrows. The men are exiting somewhere between life and death, in a world, they have no agency in. It becomes clear as the poem progresses that they are unable to enter into true death. There is no money for them to cross the river. Instead, they have to wait for something to change. At the end of the poem, the men are described as dancing around a cactus and singing. Even in this context, they are unable to finish the song or their prayers to God. The poem ends with the speaker stating that the world is going to end anticlimactically. There will be no big explosion, instead, it will go out with a whisper. Epigraph Mistah Kurtz-he dead A penny for the Old Guy - The poem begins with an epigraph, or a written statement after the death of Mistah Kurtz, an ivory trader (commerciante di avorio) from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. His connection to the poem likely comes from a quote describing him as being hollow. He does not have a moral compass to guide him or the instincts of a decent human being. - The second epigraph is more complicated and is connected to the historical figure Guy Fawkes and his plot to blow up Parliament in the early 1600s. The phrase “penny for the guy” is connected to asking for money on November the fifth, or Guy Fawkes Day. One should also consider other connections between death and a penny or coin. The most important is Charon, the ferryman who is responsible for guiding the newly dead across the River Styx. Without a coin to pay him, one would become stuck. This is partially the situation that the Hollow Men are in. ESERCIZI PAG 214 1 1. The speaker are the Hollow Men 2. He is addressing to human kind 3. They’re likened to stuffed man, scarecrows (spaventapasseri) 4. The voices are like: “wind in dry glass, or rats' feet over broken glass” vv.8-9 5. I would associate dryness with sterility (a) 6. The paradox is “Shape without form, shade without colour/ paralysed force, gesture without motion” 7. . 8. Heaven 9. The kingdom of the hollow men is like “the dead and the cactus land” 10. Men in this barren land (terra arida) worship (adorano) the stone images 11. It is a juxtaposition of images 12. Similes and metaphors 13. men landscape Empty Cactus Hallow dead Gesture without motion Twinkle of fading star THE BURIAL OF THE DEATH THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS The first half of the 20th century was a period were authors experimented with styles, technique and words to express their reaction against the 19th century tradition and their desire to give voice to a new concept of human consciousness and of human life. To start this new revolution authors passed through a new technique: the stream of consciousness. This refers to a highly varied narrative technique used by authors to write their books. The aim was to render the free flux of thoughts of the characters on the page without any intervention of the author. It was achieved through a series of devices: - The fragmentation of the character’s perspective - The breaking of syntactic and grammar rules - The overlapping of past and present events The stream of consciousness was the result to the interactions of a series of important factors: - The influence of the theories of Freud and the revaluation of the role of the unconscious. Freud said that human consciousness is a multi-layered entity and most of it is unknown. The “mysterious” part of the mind is called the “unconscious”: it is the realm of the irrational, of the subjective and of the primordial impulses and cant’ be explained or described in rational terms. - The theorisation of the difference between objective and subjective made by Bergson. He revolutionised the concept of time itself by introducing the revolutionary idea that time is structured as a constant flow. - A new conception of human consciousness described by William James in his essay “The principles of psychology”. He defined the human consciousness, and his definition is something revolutionary: subjective life is not a chain or a train, so it can’t be organised in a rational way and can’t be described objectively.