Conrad, Joyce, Virginia Woolf, War Poets, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Conrad, Joyce, Virginia Woolf, War Poets e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! THE WAR POETS 1) RUPERT BROOKE LIFE ● he belong to a rich family and traveled a lot; ● He was very educated and graduated at Cambridge and is one of the war poets that express patriotic feelings. ● He was young and took part in the war as a volunteer as a member of a royal navy but he didn’t have a long experience of the war since he contracted blood poisoning and didn’t fight. WORKS ● he represented an idyllic and nostalgic view of the english countryside; ● He made an idealistic and enthusiastic praise for war because he was animated by patriotic feelings and became very popular. ● he considered war as a purifying experience for people and nation, a sacrification for the nation and a triumph of patriotism and heroism (no bloody imagines); ● He was too sentimental and superficial but his works represent the exalted mood of Britain during the outbreak of the war. THE SOLDIER ● It’s a sonnet; ● contains the reflection of a young soldier at war. ● PARAFRASI: He says that if he dies this is his last memory. In that field (dove muore) there is his dust, the rest of his body, that Britain generated. Britain gave his flowers to love, breathing air, sun, and clean rivers. Once I die and I become a pulse of the universe I can give back the memory of myself and everything that regards me given by England (family, scenery, values). Since Britain gave me all these beautiful things, he praises England and hopes for peace under an “English heaven”. ● Britain is represented as an ideal and beautiful place and it equals ideally is mother, thus loves her children and should do everything for them. 2) SIEGFRIED SASSOON LIFE ● he studied in Cambridge university; ● He wrote his poems after the first world war: he fought in France; he had to leave the trenches twice because of a disease. ● He then converted to catholicism. ● he lived the war and became increasingly disillusioned. WORK ● he used explicit and simple language; ● he provoked strong reaction in Britain because of the shocking violence of his poems that captured the true feelings of the soldier with a lack of patriotism; ● He was disillusioned and used poetry to denounce the truth about the war against the pro-war propaganda considering that “no truth unfitting”. SUICIDE IN THE TRENCHES ● it contained the shocking story of a young soldier who decides to commit suicide because he cannot stand the horrors of the war. ● PARAFRASI: he knew a soldier boy fairly happy, in trenches he suicided and no one spoke of him again. To the patriotic crowd supporting the soldiers he says to pray not to know where youth and laugh go. JOSEPH CONRAD LIFE ● He was born in Poland (today the city where he is born is in Ukraine) but his family was forced to leave the mother country because his father was chased by Russians for his political ideas and thus became a refugee and partisan. ● He worked as a seaman for the British marin service: his nomadic life on the sea was his main source of inspiration for his books: ○ In particular to Congo, that was a Belgian colony ruled in a very brutal way by king Leopold II for economic and political exploitation of ivory and gums and bringing civilization to the “savage” (today is important for petrol and minerals). He spent in here 4 months; ○ He thus lived in a microcosm (strict group of people), he lived in a boredom monotony thus he meditated about everything. ○ He had serious consequences on his health (fevers for all his life) and his psychology (he became pessimistic and disillusioned, nihilistic sense of life = vedi sotto). ● he wrote novels with an elegant mesmerizing prose, such as: ○ Heart of Darkness; ○ The Nigger of the Narcissus; ○ Lord Jim; ○ Nostromo. WORKS ● VISION OF THE WORLD: ○ After this travel in congo, he became pessimistic and disillusioned: in his novels man is impotent against evil, colonialism or dictatorship, the man has no weapons to survive. ■ Thus he describes the monstrosity and cruelty of the colonizers, not emotionally or empathically but using a dehumanizing attitude towards colonized people, no suffering, it’s better not to be involved. ■ Conrad represents European colonization as innerly corrupted: the “light” of European civilisation hides the “darkness” of corruption and the death of any moral value = colonialism also shows that the white man has degenerated values. ■ He is opposed to Kipling who considers that colonialism is positive because it brings civilization, culture and christianity. ■ He was criticized because of: ● his dehumanizing attitude toward the colonialist people; ● for reflecting the dominant image of Africa in the western imagination because as a consequence of his pessimism doesn’t totally condemn colonialism explicitly, it seems that colonialism is brutal but necessary. For example he says that the colonized are cannibals. ○ dismissive and disqualifying attitude towards women: women have no important role in the story (it reminds to Victorian women: she needs to be the perfect mother and wife and to be protected from colonialism). novella’s message about colonialism or its use of Africa and its people as an indistinct backdrop against which to explore the complexities of the white psyche. ● That changed in the 1970s when Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian author of Things Fall Apart, leveled an excoriating critique against Heart of Darkness for the way it dehumanized African people. Achebe’s critique opened the doors for further postcolonial analyses of the work. ANALYSIS Heart of Darkness straddles the boundary between a waning Victorian sensibility and a waxing Modernist one. Modern elements: ● Conrad’s use of multiple narrators; ● his couching of one narrative within another; ● the story’s achronological unfolding; ● his almost post-structuralist distrust in the stability of language; ● early post-structuralist treatment of language: his insistence on the inherent inability of words to express the real, in all of its horrific truth. Marlow’s journey is full of encounters with things that are “unspeakable” but, since the violence of colonialism is plain, Conrad's attitude veils it. JAMES JOYCE LIFE ● he was one of the greatest representatives of Modernism; ● celtic revival: cultural movement that was born at Trinity university whose leader was the poet W.B. Yeats. According to Yeats, Ireland had to go back to its celtic origins to find/strengthen its cultural identity. Joyce joined this movement but he did not share completely its ideas: intellectuals should look at Europe, not to the past. ● his family belonged to the catholic middle class and he graduated in foreign languages; ● He met Nora Barnacle on 16 June 1904, who later became his wife. ● From Dublin he went to Paris, and then to Trieste (he met Italo Svevo, who influenced his style and themes). During the first world war he was obliged to go to Switzerland, which was a neutral country, and he was able to go on with his life thanks to the money given by other authors. ● His main work were: ○ Dubliners; ○ A portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a sort of semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman; ○ Ulysses, where he used the stream of consciousness. DUBLINERS ● The Dubliners is a collection of short stories that revolve around the lives of 15 inhabitants of the city and tackle the time of childhood, adulthood characterized by the impossibility to escape from suffering, and their relationships in a condition of extreme mediocrity because of the city, excessively attached to the past (thus Joyce went to paris). ● These characters are united by the common nature of failure they experience because of the roman church that is a universal condition of paralysis, that means spiritual and physical death. One potential way to escape from universal paralysis is epiphany, the sudden revelation of paralysis that unfortunately doesn’t change their lives. ● He uses the internal perspective (there are no introductory verbs = it seems like the narrator is a character), which means that each of the stories contained is narrated from the point of view of the author. And he uses the direct interior monologue using flashbacks and anticipations. ● TEXT: Eveline ○ dysfunctional (the father doesn’t estimate her) and toxic family: ■ she is now an orphan of the mother and the father is not a nice man. ■ Family is a shelter but not a place of love. ■ abusiveness of her father: physically mainly against her brothers, while psychologically against her; ■ the father kept all the money from their wages but he didn’t give them money to live, thus they don’t have enough money to go on, because he wants to spend the money on Saturday night at the pub. ■ she became the mother of the family as the element that keeps it united in particular for the little sibling so, since she is leaving, she feels remorse. ■ epiphany (revelation) = present banal thing that recalls the past and should change the present but in this case this doesn’t change anything: she hears a street organ and remembers the promise she did to her family to keep the family united, before becoming mad. ■ for what Joyce says this is the typical irish family. ○ work: ■ the place of work is not a nice one and there aren't nice people, especially her boss, everybody seems against her and we don’t know the reason: ● she doesn’t have a very high education and she is a shop assistant in a department store. ● Her colleagues don’t have a good opinion of her, and her boss would be happy that she is leaving the village (when there were customers, she also tried to put her in an uncomfortable situation). ○ love: ■ she is going to leave her home to another home that is going to be certainly nice and people would treat her with respect (Joyce considered ireland not a good place to live in, because there is poverty). ■ she is underestimated at work and at home so her fiancè, Frank, who was kind and open-hearted and a sailor, was the first person that made her feel as a person and he talks about his travels having a fascinating power on her. ■ she leaves with frank without having communicating her decision; ■ Frank is a way to begin a new life (more than a lover) but the moment she should come away with him she feels a feeling of drowning and paralysis and finally the gate closes and her eyes give him no sing of recognition or love. ○ church: ■ the family is Catholic and in the house there are two symbols of their faith belonging to the past, the image of a priest and a photograph of Blessed Margaret Mary. The father dismisses the image of his priest friend who decided to emigrate to Australia: this is an image to prove that the church is a decaying institution without solid bases (he says just that “He is in Melbourne”). ULYSSES ● STYLE: ○ direct interior monologue = free flowing stream of consciousness, free working of the mind = no syntax or punctuation respect but mental association, impression and memories without any logical or rational association; ○ he invented words; ○ encyclopedic work very meticulously built < talks about everything and everyone (= history, medicine, religion, philosophy, economy, school…) to whom it is associated a color, an organ, a symbol and a narrative technique. ○ he uses different writing techniques and structures = because he wanted to made a linguistic and syntactic revolution; ○ narrative tecniche similar a Svevo’s. ○ The literary frame is from the Odyssey but the episodes are very different. ● PLOT: there is no plot = the novel is set in Dublin on one morning, 16 June 1904 (the day when he met his future wife) and revolves around the actions of three characters: Stephen Dedalus is a young man, Leopold Bloom and the unfaithful wife Molly: ○ the first part of the work is called “The Telemachiad”: Stephen Dedalus is a teacher and an unsuccessful writer because he didn’t find any publisher during his life, an autobiographical character (James Joyce when he was young); ○ the second part is called “The Odyssey” - urban wonderings of Leopold Bloom: when the protagonist (= leopold) leaves the house, he leaves the door open > he has an unfaithful wife (= molly) and knows that her lover is coming > she waits for her husband like penelope, but she doesn't wait faithfully, she waits for him while she is cheating on him > however, the protagonist has accepted this situation. Leopold is a judge advertising agent (collegamento con gli ebrei che non hanno uno stato); The protagonist goes on a journey and walks through Dublin. He stops in the church (was under attack because of the organization of orphanage and because was concerned about maintaining the past, rather than favor the evolution of the society, corrupted and currumping), station, hospital, museum, library (culture), pubs (amusement < in eveline is just for men), church (christianity); There is another character, who almost represents a son < perhaps an unsatisfied desire to have a child < he is an aspiring painter; ○ the third part is called “Nostos” - Leopold comes back to his wife: the end of the story is the beginning of the new relationship between leopold and molly < positive ending because molly thinks back to her life and her betrayals; ● female character represent seduction;