industrial society, sublime, romanticism, British empire, world war 1, modernist writers, Sintesi del corso di Inglese

Scarica industrial society, sublime, romanticism, British empire, world war 1, modernist writers e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! Revolution, industrial society The last decades of the 18th century were marked by great evolution:The agrarian, Industrial Revolution and French Revolution, especially this one spread ideas of freedom and equality all over Europe. Britain changed from a mainly farming country into industrial, This change was cursed by a great increase in population, which meant a greater demand for pots, beer and clothes. the times become willy quicker and more efficient. The Industrial Revolution implied new technology and inventions, the development of the factory system, new sources of power and of transport. At first most of the power used to drive machinery came from water. In 1775 James Watt patented a steam engine that was more powerful and wasted less fuel than its predecessors. As a result of the introduction new factories were built on the coal and iron fields.These new factories allowed Britain to manufacture cloth more cheaply, but also put many people out of work. Goods became cheaper as transport was made more efficient (Fast road travel and cheap transport ). During the 18th century, there was a shifting of population from the agricultural and commercial areas of the south to the north, where new factories were built near the coal fields which provided them with fuel. Small towns, the so-called 'mushroom towns' . were constructed to house the workers, lacked elementary public services; the air and water were polluted by smoke and filth; the houses, built in endless rows, were overcrowded. Women and children were increasingiy employed because they could be easier to control, to blackmail. The life expectancy of the poor inhabitants of industrial cities was well below twenty years, due to incessant toil, disease and heavy drinking (especially gin, was very cheap) to beat the fatigue and alienation. William Blake His experiences as a craftsman, visionary and radical contributed to the development of his poetry, which is regarded as early Romantic because he rejected the neoclassical literary style and themes. He stressed the importance of imagination over reason and believed that ideal forms should be created from inner visions. The collections of short lyrical verses Songs of Innocences (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) are the most accessible of Blake's works. The first is in pastoral mode; the narrator is a Shepherd who receives inspiration from a child. The imagery of the poems is full of lambs, flowers and children playing on the village green; it deals with childhood, lamb as the symbol of innocence. The language is simple and musical. While Songs of Innocence was produced before the outbreak of the French Revolution when Blake was enthusiastic for liberal ideas, Songs of Experience was written when the period of the Terror was at its height in France (disappointed about french revolution). Amore pessimistic view of life emerges in these 'Songs', which are intended to be read together with Songs of Innocence, so that the paired poems comment on each other, 'Experience', identified with adulthood, coexists with and completes Innocence, thus providing another point of view on reality. Blake considered imagination as the means through which man could know the world, meaning 'to see more, beyond material reality, into the life of things'. The poet therefore becomes a sort of prophet who can see more deeply into reality and who also tries to warm man of the evils of society. Blake was very much concerned with the political and social problems of his time: he supported the abolition of slavery and shared enthusiasm for the egalitarian principles which came to the fore during the French Revolution. He believed in revolution as purifying violence, necessary for the redemption of man. Later, disillusioned, he focused his attention on the evil consequences of the Industrial Revolution. In his poems he sympathised with the victims of industrial society, such as children and prostitutes, as well as with the victims of oppression by institutions, such as orphans and soldiers. Style Blake's poems present a very simple structure and a highly individual use of symbols: these are the child, the father and Christ, representing the states of innocence, experience and a higher innocence. His verse is linear and rhythmical; and is characterised by the frequent use of repetition. LONDON: Songs of Experience. One of his greatest, this poem conveys Blake's view of the city - of the disease and suffering brought about by industrialisation. In this poem the only interest of man is gain, also cheating the others. This negative aspect is common for everyone and brings no happiness, only sufferance. This situation has to do with exploitation, lack of freedom, but it's something we created by yourself, it's not external. The progress sold imagination from our minds. the symbol of child labour exploitation, The church is corrupt is the responsible of these exploitation, they didn't do anything to stop it. Many women in the city had to find a way to gain money and then started selling the body and became prostitutes. for this reason curses the society that doing this makes other victims: the children that were bom from thiswoman were sentenced to death for disease. Arranged marriage is the death of love, And this ruined by the plagues of disease. Sublime identified the sublime with the beautiful and found its origin not in the perfection of the style but in the passion of inspiration in the soul. The sublime should be discussed in terms of its effects upon the perceiver. For the first time the person who enjoys sublimity became more important than the qualities of the pleasing object. Burke generates a conception of the sublime in connection with our encounter with nature as well as art. The sublime now becomes what causes astonishment, that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. the sublime produces admiration, reverence and respect, that which produces terror, it is the fear of pain, we are terrified by the vastness of the ocean; by obscurity, which hides the full extent of a danger from us; by what is powerful, and by what is infinite. the sublime excludes white, green, yellow, blue, pale red, violet and requires 'sad and fuscous colours like black, or brown, or deep purple'. The sublime has its roots in the feelings of fear and horror created by what is infinite and terrible. For example, void, obscurity, loneliness and silence are sublime, the night is sublime, whereas the day is beautiful. This horrible beauty, affected the literature of the end of the 18th century. The taste for obscurity, terror and introspection became the distinguishing feature of the Gothic novel. Burke's theory was further developed by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. the mixture of horror and pleasure created either by what is great and immeasurable in time and space, or by those natural sceneries and phenomena which underline the frailty of man. ROMANTICISM The word 'Romantic' was adopted in the last decades of the 18th century and few would have agreed on a general meaning a 'Romantic age', we identify a period in which certain ideas and attitudes arose in reaction to the 18th-century Enlightenment and became dominant in most intellectual areas. Expression was perhaps everything to the Romantics. In most cases, these ideas were created by a sense of dissatisfaction with the dominant ideas of the Enlightenment and the society that had produced them. Romanticism valued the subjective and irrational parts of human nature: emotion, imagination, introspection and a relationship with nature.William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, These writers shared a feeling that they were giving voice to a period of political, social and intellectual change.In the last thirty years of the 18th century a new sensibility became dominant which came to be known in literature as Romanticism', claiming the supremacy of feelings and emotions It included elements of introspection nostalgia, emotion and individualism, and itled to a new way of considering the role of man in the universe. There was a growing interest in humble and everyday life, and great attention was paid to the countryside as a place where there could still be a relationship with nature, as opposed to the industrial town. A new taste for the desolate was part of a revival of a past perceived as contrasting with present reality, a revolution in the concept of nature. began to be perceived as a manifestation of a divine power on earth. Imagination assumed a key role as a means of giving expression to emotional experience not strictly accountable to reason. To a Romantic, a child was purer than an adult because he was unspoilt by civilisation. His uncorrupted sensitivity meant he was even closer to God and the sources of creation, therefore childhood was a state to be admired and cultivated. The Romantics admired the power of living nature and looked especially for its moral and emotional relationship to mankind. The warmth of the heart was found and encouraged by communion with nature. Men could learn more through intuition and feelings, by learning to trust their instincts. Romantics reinterpreted the irrational aspect of reality - the imagination. The Romantics considered nature as * opposed to institutionalised practices of thought; * a substitute for traditional religion; * a vehicle for self consciousness: nature allows people to discover what they truly are; * a source of sensations; * a provocation to a state of imagination and vision; * an expressive language: natural images provide the poet with a way of thinking about human feelings and the self. William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was born in the English Lake District. He was educated at St John's College, Cambridge, and he went on a walking tour of France and the Alps, filled him with enthusiasm for democratic ideals which he hoped could lead to a new and just social order. He returned to France and fell in love with Annette Vallon, who bore him a daughter. The despair and disillusionment of The brutal developments of the Revolution and the war between England and France, were healed by contact with nature, which he rediscovered in Dorset, where he went to live with his sister Dorothy. In the same year he moved to Somerset to be near Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Their friendship proved crucial to the development of English Romantic poetry: they produced a collection of poems called Lyrical Ballads, which appeared anonymously. The second edition contained Wordsworth's famous 'Preface', which was to become the Manifesto of English Romanticism. William married a childhood friend, Mary Hutchinson, who WORLD WAR I (1914-1918) After Queen Victoria's death in 1901, her son Edward VII reigned until 1910. The Edwardian period was a time of industrial unrest, strikes and violence. The strikes, meant to be weapons against the govemment, were called because of high prices and low wages. The suffragettes were educated ladies who, together w2a very small number of male sympathisers, had been arguing in favour of voting rights for women. Edward VII died in 1910 and was succeeded by his son George V. In 1914 the first world War broke out, when the Austrian Archduke was assassinated in Sarajevo, Germany marched through Belgium in order to attack France. The king pressed for proper treatment of German prisoners of War and he also pressed for more humane treatment of conscientious objectors. He change the family name to Windsor. The war involved the central European powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary) on one side and the allies (British empire, France, Russia, Italy and United States) on the other. Britain declared war on Germany in August 1914 because Britain signed an agreement to respect Belgium's neutrality, and that it would defend the weak, fighting for democracy and freedom. Germany nearly defeated the allies in the first few weeks of war since it had better equipment, better-trained soldiers and a clear plan of attack. Shell shock was the term used by doctors to allude to the psychological effects of shell explosion, blamed for the frequent cases of psychological disorders among soldiers. The United States joined the war on 2hd April 1917, considering it a safe for democracy", a ‘war to end all the wars'. American participation accelerated the German defeat: on 11th November 1918, Allied and German leaders signed an armistice. The peace treaty was signed at Versailles in 1919 by British Prime Minister Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau of France, American President Woodrow Wilson and Vittorio emanuele Orlando of Italy. President Wilson proposed 'Fourteen Points' to work out the peace treaty and prevent future occasions of war. He devised a plan to set up the League of Nations', an organisation in which the representatives of the world's nations would try to discuss and settle their differences instead of resorting to war. However the United States never joined the league of nations. The war claimed the lives of about nine million men. It caused the ruin of four great empires, made possible a Communist revolution in Russia, and paved the way for the rise of dictators like Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. THE WAR POETS When the First World WAR broke out, young men volunteered for military service; most of them regarded the conflict as an adventure undertaken for noble ends. The loss of human lives on the so-called 'Western Front, the line of trenches running from northwestern France to Switzerland, was terrible. For the soldiers, life in the trenches was hell because of the rain and mud, the decaying bodies that rats fed on, the repeated bombings and the use of poison gas in warfare. Almost from the beginning, the common soldiers improvised verses which, precisely because they were the rough, genuine, obscene songs of the trenches. There was a group of poets who actually experienced the fighting, and in most cases lost their lives in the conflict, that managed to represent modern warfare in a realistic and unconventional way, and to avwaken the conscience of the readers to the horrors of the war. These poets are known as the War Poets. Theirs can be considered a definite move away from the 19th century poetic conventions. Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) Actually saw little combat during the war. He advanced the idea that war is clean and cleansing. He tried to testify to the safeness of war, in which the only thing that can suffer is the body, and even death is seen as a reward. His poems show a sentimental attitude which was completely lost in the brutal turn that war poetry took in the works of the other War Poets. The publication of Brooke's war sonnets coincided with his death and made him immensely popular, turning him into a new symbol of the ‘young romantic hero' who inspired patriotism in the early months of the Great War, when England needed a focal point for its sacrifice, ideals and aspirations. "The soldiers" It is a deeply patriotic and idealistic poem that expresses a soldier's love for his homeland. The soldier's bond with England is that he feels his country to be both the origin of his existence and the place to which his consciousness will return when he dies. The poem was a hit with the public at the time, capturing the early enthusiasm for the war.The poem implies that people's country is something worth defending with their life. the soldier willing to sacrifice his life for the greater good of his nation. This is a deeply patriotic poem. The speaker thus doesn't want people to grieve his death. Nationhood is portrayed as something that is inseparable from a person's identity—even when they die. The speaker feels he owes his identity itself primarily to his country. England is already a kind of heaven, everything about England is supposedly pure and nourishing. There is nothing in the poem, then, of the horrors of war. Indeed, there is very little of the realities of war at all. Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) His poems are painful in their accurate accounts of gas casualties, men who have gone mad and men who are clinically alive although their bodies have been destroyed. He used assonance and alliteration extensively. In June 1918, Owen was preparing Disabled and Other Poems for publication. At that time, he was writing the preface to the book, words which have now become essential in discussing his work and much of the poetry about World War |: "This book is not about heroes. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. AII a poet can do today is wam. That is why the true Poets must be truthful." "Dulce et decorum est" illustrates the brutal everyday struggle of a company of soldiers, focuses on the story of one soldier's agonizing death, and discusses the trauma that this event left behind. Wilfred Owen wrote this while he was fighting as a soldier during World War |. The way Owen uses language to put readers inside the experiences of a soldier helps them begin to understand the horrific experience of all of these awful aspects of war. Even surviving war offers ceaseless future torment. It reveals all aspects of war-living through it, dying in it, and surviving it—as being brutal, agonizing, and without meaning. It's not “dulce et decorum” die for their homeland. MODERNIST WRITERS The structure of the English novel remained unaltered till the second decade of the 20th century. It was firmly anchored in a social world with the gain or loss of social status as its favorite theme. The novelist was expected to mediate between his characters and the reader, relating in a more or less objective way, significant events and incidents in chronological order. inter-war years marked by unrest and ferment. The urgency for social change and, from a literary point of view, the pressing need for different forms of expression forced novelists into a position of moral and psychological uncertainty. The novelists had a new role, mediating between the solid and unquestioned values of the past and the confused present. The modern novelist rejected omniscient narration and experimented with new methods to portray the individual Consciousness; the viewpoint of the character's mind. The analysis of a character's consciousness was influenced by the theories of freud. Time was subjective and inner, don't need specific plot the passing of time that revealed the truth about characters. The story might unfold in the course of a single day, as in James Joyce's Ulysses and in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, by observing the character performing a common action, or by what Joyce called epiphany: moments of revelation when you realize something important in your life. The narrative technique was the stream-of-consciousness or the interior monologue. William James coined the phrase 'stream of consciousness' to define the continuous flow of thoughts and sensations that characterise the human mind. Interior monologue is the verbal expression of this psychic phenomenon. The main features of the interior monologue are: the stream of consciousness; frequent lack of chronological order; the narrator may be present; formal logical order may be lost or lacking; the action takes place within the character's mind; speech may be immediate, without introductory expressions. JAMES JOYCE (1882-1941) Was born in Dublin, was educated at Jesuit schools, here he studied the french, italian and german languages and literatures and english literature. His interest was for a broader European culture, and this led him to begin to think of himself as a European rather than an Irishman. His attitude contrasted greatly with that of his literary contemporaries, Joyce believed that the only way to increase Ireland's awareness was by offering a realistic portrait of its life from a European, cosmopolitan viewpoint. Fell in love with Nora Barnacle, they moved to Italy, settling in Trieste where Joyce began teaching English and became friends with Italo Svevo. Joyce and Nora had two children and eventually married in 1931. The years in Trieste were difficult, filled with disappointment and financial problems; in fact, Joyce was in trouble with publishers and printers from early on due to supposedly obscene elements in his prose, and as a consequence of this the first of his works to appear in book form was thirty-six short poems. Dubliners (1914), a collection of short stories all about Dublin and Dublin life published on the eve of the First World War. In 1916 Joyce published A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, his semi-autobiographical novel. Hitler's advances in Europe forced the Joyces to flee to neutral Switzerland, where he died in 1941. He set all his works in Ireland and mostly in the city of Dublin. His effort was to give a realistic portrait of the life of ordinary people doing ordinary things and living ordinary lives. He rebelled against the Catholic Church. All the facts in his narratives explored from different points of view simultaneously. His style, technique and language developed from realism, through the use of free direct speech and the epiphany, to the interior monologue with two levels of narration up to the extreme interior monologue. So language broke down into a succession of words without punctuation or grammatical connections, into infinite puns, and reality became the place of psychological projections, of symbolic archetypes and cultural knowledge. Dubliners (1914) Dubliners consists of fifteen short stories; they all lack obvious action, but they disclose human situations and moments of intensity and lead to a moral, social or spiritual revelation. The opening stories deal with childhood and youth in Dublin; the others, advancing in time and expanding in scope, concern the middle years of characters and their social, political or religious affairs. He chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis. He tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood (the sisters), adolescence (Eveline), maturity (A little cloud) and public life (The dead). The stories are arranged in this order. The last story, 'The Dead', can be considered Joyce's first masterpiece. It is denser, more elaborate and more remarkable. VMat holds all these stories together is a particular structure and the presence of the same themes, symbols and narrative techniques. The description in each story is realistic and extremely concise, with an abundance of external details. The use of realism is mixed with symbolism, since extemal details generally have a deeper meaning. Joyce thought his function was to take the reader beyond the usual aspects of life and he employed a peculiar technique to reach his purpose, the 'epiphany' caused by a trivial gesture, an external object or a banal situation, which is used to lead the character to a sudden self-realisation about himselferself or about the reality surrounding him/her. is revelation that drives the stories. These epiphanic moments are unveiled by both the character who experiences them and by the reader who perceives them; the whole process, in turn, becomes an epiphany for him. Dubliners a sequence of multiple epiphanies that offer a revelation of the city in its intellectual, moral and spiritual paralysis. The paralysis of Dublin which Joyce wanted to portray is both physical, resulting from external forces, and moral, linked to religion, politics and culture. Joyce's Dubliners either accept their condition because they are not aware of it or because they lack the courage to break the chains that bind them. AIl the Dubliners are spiritually weak and scared people, they are to some extent slaves of their familiar, moral, cultural, religious and political lives. Coming to awareness or self realisation marks the climax of these stories, since knowing oneself is a basis of morality if not morality itself. The main theme is the failure to find a way out of paralysis, escape and its consequent failure. They live as exiles at home, unable to cut the bonds that tie them to their own world. (paralysis: they can't decide, live their life, love. AII the characters are paralysed). Each story is told from the perspective of a character. Narrated monologue in the form of free direct speech, and often of free direct thought, is widely used; direct presentation of the protagonist's thoughts, the language used in all the stories suits the age, the social class and the role of the characters. Eveline This short story describes the life of a nineteen-year-old girl who has the opportunity to change her routine life but she is unable to leave her familiar community in Dublin. Characters: Eveline,passive, influenced by her family's mentality; Her father, a violent and strict man, her fear; Her mother, conservative, her duty; Frank, Eveline's fiancé, a very kind, open-hearted and brave boy, her unknown future. Antithesis between Eveline's house and her new one in Buenos Aires Paralysis / Escape. The story opens in medias res ( starts in the middle of things), Third-person narrator but Eveline's point of view. Subjective perception of time. Epiphany a street organ which reminds Eveline of the promise she made to her dying mother. Symbolic word: dust = decay, paralysis; sea = action, escape Themes: struggle between one's happiness and one's responsibility; dream vs reality; action and inactivity; paralysis and the failure to find a way out ofit. In many ways, Eveline typifies the difficulties faced by many Dubliners at the time. Joyce depicts her current existence as dull, uninspiring, even oppressive, with her abusive father highlighting the idea that the older generation needs to be cast off if young Ireland is to forge itself into a new nation. Even the good aspects of old Ireland, such as Eveline's mother and her older brother Ernest, are dead and gone. The promise of a new start in a new country seems like the best way to shake off the musty old air of Ireland. And yet when it comes to crunch time, to the moment when she must board the boat, Eveline is unable to do so, and instead clings to the barrier as though literally clinging to old Ireland and the past which is dead and gone but which she cannot leave behind. VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882-1941) Her father, Leslie Stephen, was an eminent Victorian man of letters. Thus, she grew up in a literary and intellectual atmosphere, and her education consisted of private Greek lessons and, above all, access to her father's library, where she read whatever she liked. For Virginia, water represented two things: on the one hand, it represented what is harmonious and feminine; on the other hand, it stood for the possibility of the resolution of intolerable conflicts in death. The death of her mother affected her deeply and brought about her first nervous breakdown. She began to revolt against her father's tyrannical character and his idealisation of the domesticated woman. It was only with her father's death that Virginia began her own literary life and career. She decided to move to Bloomsbury and she became a member of the Bloomsbury Group. In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, and in 1915 she published