Modernist Literature: Breaking Tradition with Stream of Consciousness & Subjective Time, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Modernist Literature: Breaking Tradition with Stream of Consciousness & Subjective Time e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! Inglese THE MODERN NOVEL The beginning of the 20th century saw the birth of the modern novel for the influence of some new views of man. The enormity of the War had undermined humankind’s faith in the foundations of Western society and culture and Post-War Modernist literature reflected a sense of disillusionment and fragmentation. Modernists felt a growing alienation incompatible with Victorian morality in an era characterized by industrialization, rapid social change, and advances in science. Modernism was a radical break with the past and the concurrent search for new forms of expression. Writers were influenced by some theories: Sigmund Freud's theory of the unconscious had the most impact on modernist literature. Freud held the belief that the human mind had an enormous unconscious as compared to conscious. This unconscious mind was responsible for many human behaviors and it rules over people's mental lives without them even knowing it. The unconscious was a vast realm of irrational mental activities. The bled into modernist literature as new writing techniques, such as stream of consciousness, dissociation of time, and patchwork non-sensical narratives. Albert Einstein conceived space and time as subjective dimensions. His Theory of Relativity proposes that the measured speed of light is constant even if the observer of the light is moving. This questioned the reality of nature. Since restrictions which had been in place around human activity were falling, then art, too, would have to radically change. A series of writers, thinkers, and artists made the break with traditional means of organizing literature, painting, and music. The French philosopher Henri Bergson, whose work had a profound influence on the ways in which modernist literature represented time and consciousness. He believed that our notion of time was false; we can only measure immobile, complete lines, while time is mobile and incomplete. Time is really duration, it’s a “flow” – and no two moments are the same because memory impacts each experience (consciousness). He made a distinction between external time, which is linear and chronological, and internal time, which is subjective because in our mind time is a continuous “flow” William James first used the expression of “Stream of Consciousness” which described the continuous flow of thoughts and sensations in our mind and the term became a narrative mode, a technique of writing. In Modernist literature, the writers were more interested in inner workings of individual’s mind unlike traditional writers whose aim was to explore society and to provide characters as being used as mere tools. Specifically, Modernist writers were fascinated with how the individual adapted to the changing world. Many Modernist writers used the Stream of Consciousness technique in their works. The use of comparison, symbolism, discontinuous narrative, and Psychoanalysis was also pre- dominant. Often the works had multiple narratives. Thematically, works in this style often depicted a breakdown of societal norms, depressive behaviour in the face of uncertain future, loneliness, alienation from known things, and so on. There was an attempt to break away from traditions, not only political, religious, and social but also literary views that were established, and cornerstones of society. The other characteristic features of Modernism were, Impressionism, nonlinear plotting and, above all, the Interior Monologue. The interior monologue has some features: It is the verbal expression of a psychic phenomenon ( the stream of consciousness) The omniscient narrator disappears, because the viewpoint is the character’s mind and not the external world We also have the lack of the chronological order because time is subjiective We can find the absence of the rules of punctuation (Joyce’s “Ulysses”). Introduction to Modernism and the 20th Century The Modernist Period in English Literature occupied the years from the beginning of the twentieth century through roughly 1965. In broad terms, the period was marked by unexpected breaks with traditional ways of viewing and interacting with the world. Experimentation and individualism became virtues, where in the past they were often heartily discouraged. Modernism was set in motion, in one sense, through a series of cultural shocks. The first of these great shocks was the Great War, which ravaged Europe from 1914 through 1918, known now as World War One. At the time, this “War to End All Wars” was looked upon with such ghastly horror that many people simply could not imagine what the world seemed to be plunging towards. In contrast to the Romantic world view, the Modernist cares rather little for Nature, Being, or the overarching structures of history. Instead of progress and growth, the Modernists see decay and a growing alienation of the individual. The machinery of modern society is perceived sexual crisis following his father's death and the end of his relationship with his girlfriend. To recover from this nervous breakdown, he embarked on long worldwide travels which led him first to Germany, then to the USA, Canada and the Pacific. Confused and hesitant about his future prospects when the First World War broke out, he was personally encouraged to join the Royal Navy by Winston Churchill. Sent on a mission to help the Belgians in October 1914, Brooke witnessed the siege of Antwerp and composed his famous set of five war sonnets, 1914 (published in January 1915), when he was home on Christmas leave. At the end of February 1915 the poet sailed with his naval division for the Gallipoli expedition against the Turks but one month later he contracted sepsis and died of acute blood poisoning on 23rd April, on a ship in Skyros. Themes and style Rupert Brooke started writing during his Cambridge years and produced a number of popular poems that perfectly captured the mood and character of England before the outbreak of the first world conflict. Like that of the other poets of his generation, Brooke's early verse was mainly focused on the themes of love and nature and projected an idealised, pseudo-pastoral view of the placid landscape of rural England. The poems he wrote during his later wanderings in the South Seas also revolved around the same themes, mixing idealistic descriptions of the exotic scenery of faraway lands with his fond appreciation of the tranquil sensuality of the Pacific islands. Only his war poetry, however, achieved immediate and undisputed acclaim and secured Brooke an eternal place in English literary and cultural history. Written between December 1914 and January 1915, his set of sonnets effectively expressed the hopefulness and enthusiasm of the early months of the conflict. In a perfect fusion of style and content, the traditional structure, smooth imagery and gentle rhythms of the five poems included in 1914 combined the sentimental attitudes of the home front with the patriotic mood of the troops, and were therefore actively exploited by official propaganda to spread the idea of virtuous self-sacrifice among civilians. > Peace and Safety revolve around the themes of war as a joyful opportunity for a young generation whose existence has so far been useless, and of death as a safe shelter from the pains of the body. > Similarly, The Rich Dead, the third and fourth sonnets of the set, celebrate the noble reward of dying for one's own country as well as the frosty peace that is secured by that kind of death. > The Soldier, Brooke's best-known and best-loved poem, aptly concludes the sequence with its appealing combination of high-sounding patriotism and rapturous identification with the native homeland. The poet's death only three weeks after TheSoldier was read in St Paul's Cathedral on Easter Sunday 1915 rapidly turned him into a hero. Winston Churchill himself wrote a touching obituary for Brooke in The Times and official postcards reproducing the poet's handsome looks were soon printed and circulated, boosting his long-lasting reputation as an inspiring symbol of youthful courage and fearless sacrifice. The Soldier Themes and style The Soldier is the concluding sonnet of Rupert Brooke's 1914 collection. Composed while the poet was at home on Christmas leave, the poem expresses the patriotic enthusiasm of the early months of the conflict and offers an idealised view of war as a noble adventure and honourable enterprise, as well as a means of achieving glory and immortality on the soldiers' part. In its smooth images and melodious iambic pentameters, the sonnet revolves around England's personification as a generous mother requiring her sons' sacrifice. In the first stanza, the poet exorcises the horrors of death by depicting the soldier's decaying corpse as a physical extension of his homeland enriching the foreign field. In the second stanza, the sonnet celebrates the blissful state of those who die in battle, whose souls will now become part of a greater, immortal being. WILFRED OWEN Biography Wilfred Owen was born in Shropshire, in 1893. Owen was always a devout Christian and for a time considered taking Holy Orders; in 1911 he started to work as a lay assistant to the vicar of Dunsden, Oxfordshire, coming into contact with sickness and poverty and developing those feelings of compassion and pity which were to characterise his later verse. In spite of financial problems, he managed to attend classes at Reading University College and immersed himself in Romantic poetry. To get away from the cold English climate and improve his bad health, he spent two years in France between 1913 and 1915. After visiting a French war hospital, Owen decided to go back to England and enlist in the British Army. He sailed to France and fought in the famous Battle of the Somme in 1916. Although full of high spirits at first, the horrors of trench warfare soon traumatised him. Shell-shocked, he was sent home on sick leave the following year. He was treated at the Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, where he made friends with important war writers such as Robert Graves, Robert Nichols and Siegfried Sassoon. The latter's pacifism, in particular, would influence Owen's writing a lot and encourage him to develop his own voice as a poet. He was posted back to France in the late summer of 1918, and was awarded the Military Cross shortly afterwards for his courage and determination in seizing a German machine-gun and using it against the enemies. He died in action on 4th November 1918, exactly one week before the signing of the armistice. Owen's collected poems, which he was preparing for publication at the time of his death, were published posthumously in 1920, edited by his friend and mentor Siegfried Sassoon. Themes and style Wilfred Owen's poems written before the summer of 1917 were modeled on the Romantic poets. Accordingly, his early themes were typically those of loneliness and isolation, beauty, disillusionment and unrequited love; most of them were conventional love lyrics, which followed the established tradition as far as form, imagery and diction are concerned. World War I had an enormous impact on Owen's mature verse. It was only after he had personally experienced what trench warfare was really like that his writing style finally moved away from his previous derivative models. The first-hand experience of conflict provided his poems with a sense of realism, and encouraged him to develop a distinctively personal voice in terms of theme and style. As he himself explained in the Preface for his collected poems, the subject-matter of his later verse was not the glory of dying for one's own country nor the celebration of fearless sacrifice, but the actual reality of the conflict - the brutality of front-line fighting, the atrocities of trench life, the meaningless waste of human lives, the horrors of death, permanent injuries and their psychological aftermaths. In poems like Dulce et Decorum Est, The Sentry, Strange Meeting and Futility, he recreated snapshots of the Western front in vivid detail, sparing the readers none of the cruellest aspects of everyday combat and death so as to warn against future futile conflicts. Owen's attitude was always one of compassion and pity, but occasionally slipped into anger at the wilful blindness of the British public. Encouraged by Sassoon to abandon the conventions and express himself in atmosphere particularly appealed to the writer. Here he began his novelistic tour- de-force Ulysses. At the invitation of the expatriate American poet and critic Ezra Pound, Joyce settled in Paris in 1920 where he devoted himself to full-time writing, composing the long and experimental novel Finnegans Wake (1939). After the German occupation of France during the second world war, Joyce was forced to resettle in Switzerland. He died in Zurich in 1941. Themes and style THE ROLE OF ART James Joyce's self-imposed exile in a series of notably polyglot and cosmopolitan European cities (Trieste, Paris, Zurich) after 1904 was perfectly consistent with his view of art and artists. Rejecting the aesthetes' belief in 'art for art's sake', he thought that art had the important social function of increasing people's awareness of their own condition. In order to do so, literary writing had to provide readers with an objective image of life by representing the whole range of human experiences without any form of constraints, be they religious, political or social. For an Irishman like Joyce, that meant first of all the artist's total independence from the patriotic ressures which were at work at that time. He considered the nationalist movements that had developed after Parnell's death as backward-looking and the excessive power of the Catholic Church of Ireland as paralyzing people's pursuit of happiness and personal freedom. Similarly, he disliked the rediscovery of the Celtic identity promoted by literary figures such as W.B. Yeats within the resurgence of interest in Irish history and folklore known as 'Gaelic Revival', because it kept Ireland trapped in its past roots and prevented the development of a modern and independent spirit. THEMES Recurrent themes in Joyce's works are those of paralysis and search for freedom, exile and self-fulfilment, as well as the universality of the human condition. In particular, in order to express the thoughts and feelings of other men as objectively as possible, Joyce advocated that artists be completely invisibile in their works. In other words, a work of art had to be a totally impersonal and autonomous creation, where no judgement was offered. This cool detachment on the artist's part allowed for a greater interest in the characters' subjectivities, as recently promoted by Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theories. Joyce's predominant focus on the inner world of his protagonists led him to explore thorny issues too, such as sexual repression, taboos and guilt, and to adopt a variety of narrative voices, viewpoints and styles so as to give an authentic and life-like portrayal of their states of mind. STYLE At a time when the controversy over the two most influential literary currents reached its peak, Joyce refused to be considered a follower of either realism or symbolism since he combined both in his works. Broadly speaking, his writing style evolved from the linear plot and logical syntax of the stories collected in Dubliners to the extreme experimentation of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake; yet, the extravagant and multi-layered prose of his longer novels is simply the result of his attempt to stretch realism to its very limits, so as to reproduce the fluid consciousness of his characters as faithfully as possible. Symbols and allegories, moreover, abound in all his works. The city of Dublin, for example, is the constant setting of his fictional accounts as the centre of the modern universe and symbol of the paralysis of man. Similarly, Joyce often used classical myths (Dedalus and Icarus's flight for freedom in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; the Homeric hero's wanderings around the Mediterranean in Ulysses) as a way of controlling and giving shape and significance to the fragmentary quality of contemporary life. Dubliners Finally published in 1914, Dubliners is a collection of short stories written between 1904 and 1907. Structure In Joyce's words, the collection was intended to offer the Irish "one good look at themselves" and was to be read as "a chapter on the moral history of [his] country"; accordingly, he provided readers with brief windows into the lives of a wide variety of subjects representing the different stages of human life. The 15 stories can be arranged thematically: > the first three of them are stories of childhood: The Sisters, An Encounter, Araby; > four deal with adolescence: After the Race, The Boarding House, Eveline, Two Gallants; > four with mature life: A Little Cloud, Clay, Counterparts, A Painful Case; > three with public life: Ivy Day in the Committee Room, A Mother, Grace; > with the last story acting as a sort of epilogue to the whole collection: The Dead. Themes Although set in different parts of Dublin and focused on people of all ages, backgrounds and professions, Joyce's stories reveal a series of recurring preoccupations: > the experience of death, love, disappointment and betrayal; >exhaustion, weariness and alcohol abuse; > the encounter between generations and the difficult relationship between men and women. The unifying leitmotiv of the whole collection, however, is the theme of paralysis, which Joyce perceived as a distinctive mark of the Irish capital at the turn of the 20th century. He saw his fellow Dubliners either as hopelessly trapped by apathy and torpor, or as longing to get rid of moral and physical constraints but ultimately unable to achieve freedom and independence. All escapes in Dubliners, in short, are doomed to failure. Style Joyce's stories distinguish themselves for their descriptive precision and psychological penetration. The writer's prose is clear, concise and detached: he scrupulously recreated actual churches and pubs of early twentieth-century Dublin, but managed to evoke whole settings and create a sense of place with great economy of detail and without any form of authorial comment. The events are always told from a character's perspective and include interior monologues and free indirect speech in order to provide each of his Dubliners with a distinctive voice. He moved from first-person to third-person narrative, adapting the language to the characters' social backgrounds and showing a remarkable understanding of human nature in key moments of painful self-realisation. Borrowing from Christian terminology, he called these sudden awakenings "epiphanies" and described them as being triggered by trivial and apparently insignificant experiences (e.g., words, gestures, objects, etc.). Combining Joyce's masterful realism with symbolism, such moments of intense insight into their own lives on the characters' part give Dubliners a unique style, and make it one of the best collections of short stories ever published in the contemporary age. Virginia Wolf Biography Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882. She was the daughter of Victorian author and critic Leslie Stephen and Julia Jackson, a model and philanthropist. She was raised in an upper-class, culturally vibrant household, and displayed great brilliance and curiosity from a very young age. Thanks to her family, Woolf came into close contact with the many distinguished artists and intellectuals - from Henry James to James Russell Lowell - who were regular visitors at the Stephens' home,