Eliot, Joyce e Woolf, Schemi e mappe concettuali di Inglese

Scarica Eliot, Joyce e Woolf e più Schemi e mappe concettuali in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT (1888-1965) LIFE • poet = is a playwright and critic • Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on 26 September 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri • he studied at Harvard University • in 1910 he moved to Paris, where he studied at the Sorbonne • he return to Harvard where he achieved a doctorate. • he moved to England in 1914 (married) • began to work first as a teacher and then at Lloyd’s Bank • he met the famous American poet and critic Ezra Pound (1885-1972) in London and with his help began to publish his work • in 1925 he left his job at the bank for a position with Faber and Faber, a respected London publishing house which he later directed • in 1927 Eliot became an Anglican and a British citizen • Eliot wrote a series of important poetical works (including The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915), the collection Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) and his great poetic masterpiece, The Waste Land (1922), which established his reputation as a leading avant-garde poet. Other important works followed: The Hollow Men (1925); Ash Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1943). Eliot also wrote seven plays, best known among which is Murder in the Cathedral (1935).) • While still at college Eliot was impressed by the French Symbolists from whom he took the ability to combine intellectualism and sensuous language but his style was far more original and innovative. • His works presented a wide range of cultural references and he used a variety of techniques like pastiche and juxtaposition. His early work created images of disillusioned modern man and his psychological fragility in the years after the First World War: a lonely, intellectual figure who was incapable of expressing himself in the ruins of modern culture. • His later poems became less pessimistic as Eliot explored art and spirituality with a use of language that exploited the sounds and musicality of words. • Throughout his production Eliot succeeded in combining intellectual, aesthetic and emotional elements. • He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. • Eliot died in London on 4 January 1965. THE WASTE LAND (1922) THE STRUCTURE OF THE POEM The Waste Land is composed of five parts, each with a different title and theme. • In Part 1, entitled The Burial of the Dead, the author presents a series of juxtapositions, such as the ones between life and death, fertility and sterility, hope and despair. • Part 2, named A Game of Chess, introduces the theme of the sterility of modern life in contrast with the splendour of the past. • Part 3, called The Fire Sermon, deals with the theme of love, which is presented as mere, fruitless sexual desire. • In Part 4, entitled Death by Water, Eliot describes the decomposition of a drowned sailor in the sea and further develops the theme of modern sterility. • Part 5 is entitled What the Thunder Said and presents the theme of the spiritual journey of humanity through the desert of modernity. The title suggests the idea of a possible revelation, which never comes. The poem is written in free verse and is characterized by a high level of experimentation in the choice of the verse form, in the length of lines and in the use of punctuation. The language, too, is particularly varied and contains a number of different tones, from the solemn to the colloquial. A MODERNIST POEM - Modernism = experimentation -> rejection of traditional forms _ The burial of the death = funeral _ line 1 -> the poet try to explain why winter is better then spring _ lines 1-7 -> the tone in elevated _ lines 1-7 -> oxymoron -> we usually associate winter as cold _ lines 1-8 -> image of waste land were life is impossible _ “April is the cruelest month” -> strong affirmation: we usually associate this month to spring (new born) like Geoffrey Chaucer (-> April = water, rebirth of nature) CRUELLEST (superlative form) = opposite to sweet -> the coming to spring is cruel because there are no life ready to born in the land after war (it is a devastated land) -> resuscitation only for memories, no possibility to rebirth _ winter = better than April -> snow is forgetful -> land prepare under the snow -> protect the memories that cannot spring in the waste land _ line 8-17 -> tone = different: prosaic -> description of everyday life -> episode that no have apparently connection with lines 1-7 _ line 18 -> use of irony _ God is talking to Ezekiel -> reference to the holy scripts -> condition of humans in a terrible situation _ line 20 -> stony rubbish -> material destruction of a waste land -> there are only ruins _ line 22 -> broken images -> metaphor: material and spiritual destruction -> everyone lives alone -> Europe = devastated by the war _ line 23 -> dry stone -> no water = no life = sterile land -> death, desolation _ line 24 -> red rock = alliteration (red because of the sun) _ line 31 -> change -> studio of Madame Sosostris _ line 32 -> search the truth, but there isn’t truth _ line 43 -> “Fear death by water” use of imperative form -> fear of drowning = water = symbol of death _ the cause is the collapse of the values of Victorian’s age -> world that fast change -> there isn’t only one vision of the world (es: image of the iceberg: we only see the top of an iceberg, the part that we can’t see is the irrational part _ Mrs Equitone -> we don’t know who she is but there is a reference to everyday life _ lines 51-52 -> 4th capture of inferno of Dante -> Madame Sosostris = symbol of ignavi of Dante _ line 53 -> the poet is describing a modern man in a modern town (London) -> people are like machines, alienation, he describe a people who don’t live in London but go there everyday -> there is time only for work -> this man is a hollow man -> he only work -> THE TOWN IS SPIRITUALLY DEATH _ line 57 -> “I” the speaking voice is of one of the hollow man, of one of the workers _ lines 59-61 -> hope for new life, but there isn’t new life because frost kills everything -> sterile land, life is still impossible (waste land is described by images and feelings mood trough the images) _ last line -> Boudlaire, Le Fleurs du mal -> France language -> the poet is talking to then readers asking them to look inside their self (you) _ use of a device -> juxtaposition = contrast -> futility of the present is in contrast with the plunder of the past -> past is the opposite of a sterile land _ Elliot want to highlight the lack of values of the modern world -> only the poets (like Dante or Shakespeare) and the culture of the past can rebuilt the present THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS The first half of the 20th century was one of the most revolutionary ages in the history of world literature: in this period authors experimented with styles, techniques and words to express not only their reaction against 19th-century tradition, but also their desire to give voice to a new concept of human consciousness and of human life. The technical device that allowed authors to start this revolution was a new, apparently shocking technique: the so- called ‘stream of consciousness’ technique. THOUGHTS FLOWING INTO WORDS The phrase ‘stream of consciousness’ refers to a highly varied narrative technique used by early-20th-century authors to write their books. Its main 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 such as the fragmentation of the character’s perspective, the breaking of syntactic and grammar rules, and the overlapping of past and present events. The idea of the ‘stream of consciousness’ in literature was the result of the interactions of a series of important factors, such as: 1) the influence of the theories of Sigmund Freud and the revaluation of the role of the unconscious; 2) the theorization of the difference between objective (or chronological) and subjective (or inner) time made by the French philosopher Henri Bergson; DIRECT INTERIOR MONOLOGUE James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I we ara red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. INDIRECT INTERIOR MONOLOGUE Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) Direct interior monologue presents the thoughts of a character in a direct, uncontrolled and non-filtered way. Thoughts are expressed using the 1st-person point of view and punctuation is abolished because it represents a way to control and organise the characters’ thoughts. The result is a rather shocking and apparently unorthodox way of representing the workings of the mind of a character. Indirect interior monologue, on the contrary, shows the workings of the mind of a character using a 3rd-person omniscient narrator, who controls the character’s flux of thoughts and uses grammar rules and punctuation to organise them in a logical way. The narrator uses verbs like ‘he/she thought’ to introduce the characters’ thoughts. James Joyce (1882-1941) James Joyce is one of the most important novelists of all time and one of the greatest innovators of 20th-century prose writing. He was born in Dublin in 1882 to John Stanislaus Joyce and Mary Jane Murray, who belonged to the Catholic middle class. When Joycewas a child, his parents lost their wealth and his father lost his job as a tax collector. In 1898 Joyce started studying Italian, French and English at University College, Dublin, where he also started writing literary reviews and articles. In 1904 he met Nora Barnacle, who later became his wife. When the director of the Berlitz Institute of Trieste offered him a teaching position, Joyce moved to the Adriatic seaport city, then still belonging to the Austria-Hungary, where he worked on two of his best-known literary works: Dubliners  (1914), a collection of short stories  written using a naturalistic style, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), a sort of a semi-autobiographical  Bildunsgroman. The protagonist of the book is Stephen Dedalus, a young artist who rebels against his country, his family and religion and leaves Ireland in a sort of self-imposed exile to find freedom. In Trieste Joyce became friends with the Italian writer Italo Svevo, who greatly influenced Joyce’s style and themes. In 1914, when the First World War broke out, Joyce moved to Zurich, where he started working on what would become his masterpiece, Ulysses (1922). In Zurich he also made the acquaintance of the poet, Ezra Pound. Ulysses reproduces the structure of Homer’s Odyssey: the 18 chapters of the book draw inspiration from similar episodes contained in the Greek epic poem, thus giving the idea of a contemporary epic narration. The narration follows the actions of one single character, Leopold Bloom (the modern Ulysses), who wanders through the city of Dublin in one single day (16 June 1904). Through the use of the stream of  consciousness technique Joyce enters Bloom’s mind and allows the reader to follow his fragmented thoughts, sensations and perceptions. Despite its intrinsic difficulty, heightened by the obsessive use of the stream of consciousness, the rudeness of its language and the frankness of some of its themes, Ulysses remains an unrivalled milestone not only in the development of Modernist writing, but also in the realm of 20th-century literature. In 1920 Joyce moved to Paris, where he started working on his last novel, Finnegans Wake (1939). After the Germans occupied France in 1940, Joyce and his family went back to Zurich, where he died in 1941. Joyce is to be considered one of the greatest representatives of Modernism. JOYCE AND IRELAND: A COMPLEX RELATIONSHIP Joyce’s literary works reveal his complex relationship with Ireland, his mother country: even though he left Dublin in 1904, Joyce’s works are all obsessively set in Ireland, which he both loved and hated. Joyce’s self-imposed exile gave him the chance to represent Ireland and its capital with a certain objective distance.For Joyce Ireland was a country dominated by stagnation and stasis, but was also his main source of inspiration: in all of his works Joyce drew inspiration from Irish people and places, which he portrayed with vivid realism and attention. DUBLINERS THE STRUCTURE OF THE COLLECTION Dubliners is a collection of 15 short stories written in 1900 and published in 1914. As the title suggests, the stories revolve around the lives of 15 typical inhabitants of the city of Dublin and represent an ideal portrait of the Irish capital at the beginning of the 20th century. The stories can be divided into three main groups, each dealing with a particular theme. The first three stories tackle the theme of childhood and are suffused with a strong sense of disillusionment and failure. These are followed by another group dealing with adulthood: Eveline belongs to this sub-section, which tackles issues such as man’s impossibility to escape from suffering, the passivity of Irish people and the paralysis of their will. The last group of stories portrays the sterile relationship between Irish individuals and collective institutions, such as politics, the musical world and the Church. These stories, too, develop the concept of paralysis and its ramifications in private and public life. The last story of the collection is meaningfully entitled The Dead. It is an implacable portrait of the Irish middle class, stuck in a condition of irresolvable mediocrity and stubbornness. The protagonist of the story, Gabriel Conroy, is the prototype of the mediocre Irish middle-class man, an individual who lives his life like a dead person. THE CITY OF DUBLIN Not surprisingly, one of the major themes of the short stories contained in Dubliners is the city of Dublin. The Dublin that Joyce portrays is a rather static and provincial  town, a place which does not have the cosmopolitan atmosphere of many other indicating for each episode: a title referring to a character or incident from Homer’s The Odyssey, a time and place, a part of the body (heart, liver, stomach...), an art (music, painting...), a colour, a symbol and a narrative technique. Joyce’s constant references to Homer’s The Odyssey and to the world of ancient mythology adds a layer of universality to the events narrated in the novel and at the same time ironically underlines the squalid reality of modernity, which lacks the heroism of the ancient world. In this sense the ‘mythical method’ adopted by Joyce in Ulysses is very similar to the one used by T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land: both writers use ancient myths to represent the modern world as a place where heroism has disappeared and sterility dominates. JOYCE’S STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS One of the most remarkable features of Joyce’s Ulysses is its narrative style, which represents the triumph of one of the most interesting techniques of Modernist writing: the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique. By relying on the massive use of this narrative technique, Joyce’s novel tries to reflect the workings of the mind of its protagonist, Leopold Bloom, whose incoherent flux of ideas, thoughts, mental associations, impressions and memories is rendered on the page without any logical or rational organisation. Fiction Unlike Woolf’s style, which is characterised by the poetical attempt to express the characters’ free thoughts in a syntactically- controlled way, Joyce’s style is an attempt to get rid of any kind of control over the character’s thoughts, which flow on the page freely and incoherently as they do in Bloom’s mind. The result is a kaleidoscopic, estranging, disturbing and shocking novel, which represents one of the best examples of Modernist experimentation in prose writing. Joyce’s Ulysses focuses on the actions of one character on one single day. Like Ulysses, another Modernist novel, Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), exploited the same literary topos. Joyce and Woolf used this narrative device as an act of rebellion against Victorian prose writing, which was based on the variety of characters and events, and also as a way of showing the importance of subjective time against objective chronological time. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882. She was the daughter of a very important Victorian man of letters, Sir Leslie Stephen, the founder of the Dictionary of National Biography, and of Julia Prinsep Stephen, a woman who had travelled extensively in her life and had worked as a model for Pre-Raphaelite painters. Being a woman, Virginia did not have the chance to go to university; however, she received a very fine home education, was surrounded by artists and writers and became an intellectual and a prolific writer herself. In her lifetime, she published many books, essays, articles and novels. Among her novels, the most remarkable are Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), two works which show the influence that the theories of Marcel Proust, Sigmund Freud and Henri Bergson had on Woolf’s imagination. Like Joyce, Woolf used the stream of consciousness technique in her novels. However, unlike Joyce, she pushed it in different directions: Woolf’s novels are like mental voyages which centre around the contrast between inner life and external reality. When her mother died at the age of 49, Woolf had a serious nervous breakdown: this is considered to be the beginning of the psychological instability that would affect her entire life. In 1904, after her father’s death, Woolf moved to Bloomsbury, where she founded the Bloomsbury Group, a group of intellectuals and artists which included E.M. Forster and Roger Fry. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, with whom she founded the Hogarth Press, a publishing company whose aim was to publish the works of experimental writers. In 1941 she committed suicide, drowning herself in a river. Mrs Dalloway (1925) PLOT The story of Mrs Dalloway takes place on one single day in one single place – the city of London. A middle-aged woman, Clarissa Dalloway, is busy buying flowers and objects for the party she has organised for the evening. The narration follows her, her thoughts and her actions and tries to capture the myriad incoherent impressions that the modern city of London produces in and on her. In the novel, Clarissa’s counterpart is represented by a man, Septimus Smith, a shell-shocked veteran of the war. Septimus, too, wanders through London, but his is a voyage towards self-destruction: the novel ends with Septimus’ suicide. The news of his death reaches Clarissa while she is at her party. She is deeply shocked and realises that Septimus’ death was essential for her to stay alive. The novel ends with Clarissa’s realising that ‘she felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away while they went on living.’ SEPTIMUS AND CLARISSA The novel is named after its female protagonist, Clarissa  Dalloway, a middle-aged woman who has rather conservative political views and is not particularly open-minded. As a woman, she is clearly defined by her marital status, as suggested by the title ‘Mrs’ which accompanies her name, and by her condition of mother. She is a complex and frustrated woman: she lives her being a ‘wife’ and a ‘mother’ as a limitation to her freedom, but she is not able to express her feelings spontaneously and self-imposes strong restrictions on her liberty just because she feels weak and imperfect. Clarissa’s mind is constantly pervaded by her past  memories, which the reader can follow thanks to the stream  of  consciousness technique used by Woolf. By entering Clarissa’s mind the reader can understand her inner thoughts and realise that Clarissa’s self is split between the desire to celebrate life (which is shown by her love for parties and social life) and a morbid attraction  towards death (which characterizes her as an ageing woman). Clarissa’s male  counterpart is Septimus  Warren  Smith, a veteran from the war who was shell-shocked to be cured for his panic attacks and terrible visions. Septimus is a man whose sensitiveness has been ruined by the experience of war. Septimus, too, is characterized by Clarissa’s morbid attraction towards death and considers suicide as a form of liberation from the weight of life. Woolf follows Clarissa and Septimus while they wander through