Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, Orwell, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, Orwell e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! T.S. ELIOT (1888-1965) T. S. Eliot was born in Missouri in 1888 and was educated at Harvard; even if he was born in America, his cultural background was first of all English and then european. He studied John Donne and he also learned Italian by studying Dante, devoting to him an essay in 1929. In 1910 he went to Europe and studied in Paris at the Sorbonne, where he attended Bergosn’s lectures and started to read the works of the French Symbolists. In 1915 he married the british ballet dancer Vivienne Haigh-Wood, despite her parents worries about her mental instability. In 1922 he founded The Criterion, an influential international literary magazine, and three years later he became director for the publishers Faber and Faber. While also Vivienne was in poor mental health, he spent some time in a Swiss sanatorium for a psychological treatment, and poetry became his refuge, representing the general crisis of Western culture. There he finished his masterpiece, The Waste Land, a long poem which was published in 1922 after Ezra Pound had contributed to reduce it to its final form: that’s why Eliot will later refer to him as “il miglior fabbro”, a quotation from Dante’s Purgatorio. In 1925 he published The Hollow Men, a sequel to The Waste Land but with first evidence of his future Christian faith. In 1927 Eliot became a british citizen and in the same year he joined the church of England; he finally decided to separate from his wife, who was committed to a mental asylum, where she died in 1947: her death created in Eliot a sense of guilt and unhappiness that is expressed in a letter where he said “I have always known hell - it is in my bones”. In the 30s and 40s Eliot’s writing became more concerned with the ethical and philosophical problems of modern society; he also became an important exponent of poetic drama. In 1948 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Eliot works can be divided in two groups: before and after conversion to Anglicanism. ● The works of the first period are all characterized by a pessimistic vision of the world, without any hope, faith or values. ● The works of the second period are characterized by purification, hope and joy (Four Quartets) The impersonality of the artist: Eliot was a literary critic, he wrote essays on style and technique saying that the artist should be impersonal with a separation between the man who suffers and the mind which creates. That’s why the characters of his first works turn their own subjective experience into a universal one that everyone identifies with. The Waste Land-1922 The poem consists of five sections: ● the burial of the dead: it deals with the coming of spring in a sterile land; it centers on the opposition between life and death, sterility and fertility; ● a game of chess: in this part the author creates a juxtaposition between present squalor and an ambiguous past splendor; ● the fire sermon: Tiresias is introduced. The theme of present alienation is presented through the description of loveless sexual encounter; ● death by water: focuses on the drowned Phoenician sailor Phlebas; the idea of a spiritual shipwreck is reinforced; ● what the thunder said: it evokes religions from east and west. Possible solution with sympathy with other human beings, even if the desolation remains. This poem is considered a central work in Modernism: it rejects any order or unity, it’s a collection of indeterminate states of the mind, impressions, situations and personality with a cinematic technique where emotions are conveyed by images (objective correlative, Montale). All the fragmentary passages seem to belong to one voice relating to a multiple personality beyond the limits of space and time: he is Tiresias, the prophet who experienced blindness and the life of both sexes. All the parts are connected by one main theme: the contrast between the fertility of a mythical past and the spiritual sterility of the present world. The fragmentation of this poem reflects the breakdown of a historical, social and cultural order, destroyed by the war. The mythical past appears in the allusions to and quotations from literary works of different traditions and cultures. This use of quotations reflects the concept Eliot had of tradition and history: he saw them as the repetition of the same events, and he saw classicism as the ability to see the past as a concrete premise for the present, while the “poetic culture” is considered as a “living unity” of all the poems written in a different periods. In The Waste Land, past and present exist simultaneously and the continuous shifts in time and space are caused by the free associations of ideas and thoughts (as in Ulysses by J. Joyce, it’s the same concept but in poetry). The style of The Waste Land is fragmentary because of the mixture of different poetic styles (blank verse, the ode, free verse), thus reproducing the chaos of modern civilization. His works require the active participation of the reader with implications, metaphors and symbols that replace direct statements (Baudelaire). Eliot adopted the technique of the objective correlative, which he explained in one of his essays like “the only way of expressing emotions in the form of art is by finding an objective correlative”: objects or situations express a particular emotion, external facts evoke immediately that emotion with a sensory experience. Therefore, writers must use a combination of images, objects or descriptions to recall an emotion. In The Fire Sermon, the objective correlative of the squalid and passionless present age is the loveless scene of seduction of a typist and her lover. He also juxtaposes squalid elements with poetic ones, and another device is the repetition of words, images and phrases from page to page. The mythical method: in modern society myths have lost their deep meaning, so they are used by Eliot to oppose present and past. In one of his essays he says that the mythical method is a way of ordering and giving shape to the futility and anarchy of contemporary history (Joyce). ● The Burial of the Dead: The title of the first part of the poem refers to a funeral service in the anglican rite: it’s a metaphor for the condition of modern man, whose life is meaningless, empty, alienating and quite similar to death. Here, the images make us feel the squalor of the contemporary world. The poem opens with the declaration that April is the cruellest month, since flowers grow but from a dead land, so spring it’s a symbol of rebirth and life but in an unusual sense, because life is painful. This opening reminds the first line of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales but with an opposite view that is distant from the abundance of fertility of which Chaucer spoke about. Here, the author seems to prefer winter rather than spring, because it protected and kept the inhabitants of the waste land warm, covering up the dead land in snow, with a non-life that reminds of the concept of Coleridge’s death in life. The city is described as unreal with a quotation from Baudelaire but in the opposite sense, since Baudelaire talked about a city full of dreams. Over the London Bridge, the speaker sees a crowd of people that are living corpses, unable to communicate and already dead inside. Quoting Dante, he says that he didn’t think death had undone so many. Then he encounters a man he knows and stops him, claiming that they both fought during the battle of Mylae in the first Punic War (=present World War I) and asking him if the corpse he planted in his garden of the dead will bloom this year. The last line is taken from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, accusing the reader of being hypocrite but also his brother, since they share the same reality (collegamento Penombra, E.Praga) ● The Fire Sermon: this passage introduces a key figure: Tiresias, the theban prophet who was punished with blindness because he had seen Athena bathing naked.He also has two sexes and foresuffers everything. In Sophocles’s tragedy he predicts to Oedipus that Thebe will be destroyed. It’s a description of modern-day decadence, where sex is only seen as lust and a loveless experience. It recalls a poem by Edmund Spenser, Prothalamion (1596) that was written to celebrate a holy marriage, contrary to the union depicted here. It opens with the setting of a mercantile society dominated by money, where past and present coexist as we understand for the ancient city of Smyrna where the merchant Mr Eugenides comes from. With a Dante’s quotations from Purgatorio VIII he describes the violet hour when office work finishes and the human engine waits sitting up from the desk, then the narrator presents himself as Tiresias and describes a typist who lives alone and a young man with lots of pimples who have a sexual encounter, even if she is bored and tired. At the end she’s glad it’s over, she smoothes her hair with an automatic hand and puts a record on the gramophone→ compared to machines. kills himself. Every character seen on this day is present at Clarissa’s party, and she feels a strong connection with Septimus, so she starts thinking about killing herself but then returns to the party, which is the symbol of life. The party is the climax of the novel, where all the people Clarissa thinks about during the day are united. Like Joyce’s Ulysses, Mrs Dalloway takes place on a single ordinary day in June 1923; the novel is set in a very small area of London. Woolf does not elevate her characters to the level of myth, but shows their deep humanity behind their social mask. Using “tunneling technique”, Virginia allows the reader to experience the characters’ recollection of their past. The range of characters is small: they belong to the upper-middle class. Clarissa is a London society lady of 51, the wife of a conservative member of the parliament, Richard Dalloway, who is her safety. She is characterized by opposing feelings: her need for freedom and independence and her class consciousness. Her life appears to be an effort towards order and peace, an attempt to overcome her weakness and sense of failure; she makes her home perfect to become an ideal human being but she doesn’t express her spontaneous feelings Septimus Warren Smith is a young poet and an extremely sensitive man because of his friend’s death during the war. So he is a character specifically connected with the war, he is a shell-shock case, he suffers from headaches and insomnia. There’s a theory that Septimus is Clarissa’s double. The novel deals with the way people react to new situations and provides an insight into the most significant changes in the social life of the time. Woolf makes use of some cinematic devices, such as flashbacks and tracking shots. She also adopts the clock motifs which acts as a structural connection and as a symbol of the awareness of death. The insistent chiming of clocks reminds the reader of the temporal grid which organizes the narrative, of the passing time in life and the awareness of death. Life expresses itself in moments of vision which are at the same time objective and yet subjectively creative, these are the moments of being where the character sees reality beyond appearances. Like Joyce, she uses the stream of consciousness technique but she never lets the thoughts flow freely without control, maintaining instead a logical and grammatical organization with a third-person narrator. ● Clarissa and Septimus: Clarissa is walking in Bond Street to the flower shop while she thinks about the relationship between her daughter and her teacher who is seen as an enemy. This leads to a feeling of hatred that she calls the brutal monster. The author explores the inner world of the protagonist who enjoys the perfumes and colors of the flowers, but suddenly the main event is interrupted by a shot in the street and she turns to observe the mysterious person passing in a luxury car, wondering about who it is. Septimus Warren Smith also hears the explosion, he is a veteran of World War I who suffers from shell shock because of the horrors seen during the war, and he’s now thinking that the traffic congestion is his fault. That’s why his wife Lucrezia is embarrassed, but also worried because his husband has recently threatened to kill himself. ● Clarissa’s party: subjective reality with Clarissa’s point of view. The doctor Sir William Bradshaw explains that he’s late because a young man killed himself. When Clarissa hears that he threw himself from a window, at first she has a physical response and feels her body burnt. She is angry at the doctor for bringing death at the party, but everyone went on living and people kept coming, while she thinks about death as an attempt to communicate in life’s loneliness, so it is not so negative since there’s an embrace in death. She sees death as a preservation of something that she has obscured in her own life with chatter and frivolity, while Septimus preserved his purity through his suicide, and was controlled by Sir William (she doesn’t trust this new science). Clarissa feels that Septimus’s death is her “disgrace” because she lacked his bravery, instead settling for a life of upper-class comfort and conformity with Richard, her certainty. She keeps thinking about the uselessness of being at the party that still goes on, as it is the symbol of life. She then sees the old woman behind the windows and mirrors herself in her, then with Shakespeare's quotation "Fear no more the heat of the sun” she suddenly has a moment of being, realizing that social life is superficial but she must assemble to go on living, Septimus was more courageous but his death makes here appreciate more the beauty and joy of life. So she goes back to the party, to life, while the clock remembers the passing of time towards death. George Orwell (1903-1950) George Orwell was born as Eric Blair in India in 1903 (he was the son of a minor colonial official). As a child he was taken to England and was educated at Eton, but he couldn’t stand the pressure to conform to school values because of his independent-minded personality, indifference to accepted values and his ideas of atheism and socialism. From 1922 to 1927 he went in India for the Indian Imperial Police, but he decided to leave since he wanted to escape from every form of man’s dominion over man, such as the British imperialism over India, as he said in The road to Wigan Pier (1937). In London he started a social experiment: he lived as a poor man to directly experience poverty and learn how institutions for the poor worked. He also worked as a dishwasher in a hotel in Paris, then he began publishing his works with the pseudonym of George Orwell, because George is a very ordinary English name that suggests common sense, and Orwell was the name of a river in a place he loved. In Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) he described his experiences among the poor, while in Burmese Days (1934) he recalls his colonial service. In 1936 he stayed for two months in the industrial North to investigate the conditions among the miners and factory workers, writing a report published in 1937 as The road to Wigan Pier. In the same year he went to Catalonia to report on the Spanish Civil War, he joined the POUM (Workers’ party of marxist unification) and fought in the trenches, of which he speaks in Homage to Catalonia (1938), saying that this experience represented his true conversion to socialism and the ideals of brotherhood and equality. During the Second World War he moved back to London and joined the BBC to broadcast programmes to India. In these years he started writing Animal Farm, published in 1945, that would make him internationally known. His last and most original novel is Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949, the year before his death. Orwell understood completely the English character with its common sense and his various experiences made him able to see his country from the outside (as for Joyce) so that he could judge its strengths and weaknesses. Because of this, he chose to reject his background and open himself to new ideas, but he felt the unresolved conflict between his middle-class background and his emotional identification with the working class. In the essay Inside The Whale (1940) he claimed that the literature of the 1930s had left-wing sympathies and valued social commitment, so that writing had a useful social function, but at the same time the writer should be independent from particular party lines. He’s close to Dickens for the social themes discussed with a realistic language, he insisted on human fraternity, tolerance, justice and the risks of urban civilisation. Most of all, he criticized totalitarianism (both Hitler and Stalin) that led to the violation of liberty, trying to make his readers recognize tyranny in all its forms. Nineteen Eighty Four -1949 It describes a future world divided into the tre blocks of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. Oceania is ruled by the Party of the Big Brother and is always at war with the other two States. The party controls every aspect of people’s lives, even with a new language (Newspeak) that has a limited number of words, and the threat of the Thought Police: free thought, sex and any expression of individuality are forbidden. The main character is Winston Smith, who illegally writes his thoughts in a diary for future generations. He works at the Ministry of Truth where he rewrites history so that it aligns with the party. Here he sees an attractive woman staring at him and he is afraid she might be an informant who will accuse him of thoughtcrime. Her name is Julia and they begin a secret relationship, until O’Brien, a member of the Inner Party, pretends to also be a rebel who’s trying to overthrow the party, but in reality he’s a spy and he has them arrested. O’Brien tortures Winston for months and at last sends him to Room 101, the final destination for the oppositors where they have to face their biggest fear. For Winston, rats are put on his head and, when they are ready to eat his face, his will is broken and so he is released. He then meets Julia, but at the end he’s given up and learns to love Big Brother. The state of continuous war reminds of World War II and the idea of the three countries probably comes from the Tehran Conference (1943) where Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin organized their military strategy and the set-up of the post war period. The society reflects the political situations of the tyrannies in Spain, Germany and the Soviet Union, with the descriptions of hunger, forced labour, mass torture and authorithy’s control. So, the Big Brother represents Stalin and Hitler and the novel is against any form of totalitarianism. The setting is London in the year 1984 with a war atmosphere, and the political structure is divided into: 1. Inner Party, the ruling class with less than 2% of the population. 2. Outer Party, educated workers, 18% of the population. 3. the Proles, the working class. The main character, Winston Smith, is the last man who believes in humane values that seem to be lost because of totalitarianism. His name is an extremely common one since it has a symbolic value, and “Winston” also refers to Winston Churchill, the leader of England during the war. Winston is 39, alienated from society, physically weak and feels the desire for spiritual and moral integrity. Julia is more ingenuous and pessimistic about the party, convinced that it will never be overthrown, she’s not concerned with historical truth unlike Winston who’s afraid that in the future no one will have memories of actual history. The novel is a satire of hierarchical societies that destroy fraternity and control people’s lives, it’s a dystopian novel that shows a possible future society where everything is the contrary of what we hope the world would become. The main instruments that Winston has to maintain his individuality are memory and mutual trust, that’s why he tries to write a diary to defend private memory against the attempts to rewrite history. ● Big Brother is watching you: third person omniscient narrator, it’s the beginning of the novel with a description of the totalitarian state of Oceania, whose capital is a post-war London, where men have lost their individuality and only Winston Smith tries to resist. It opens on a bright cold day in April, when Winston Smith returns to his home. He is a thin and frail thirty-nine year old. The elevator is always out of service, so he does not try to use it. As he climbs the staircase, everywhere there are posters depicting an enormous face with the words “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.” Winston is an insignificant official in the Party, his life is under the Party’s oppressive political control and in his apartment there’s a telescreen which is always on, it can’t be turned off, and through it the Thought Police monitor the actions of citizens. Winston keeps his back to the screen and from his window he sees the Ministry of Truth, where he works as a propaganda officer altering historical records to match the Party’s official version of past events. He reads the slogan “war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength”, full of paradoxes. He tries to remember a time when London was not filled with decayed old buildings. ● Newspeak: it is a language created to control thoughts and action, since the corruption of language has political consequences and can be a weapon. In the canteen at lunch, Winston talks with Syme, a linguist who is working on the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak dictionary. Winston suspects that Syme, despite his political orthodoxy, will one day be arrested by the Thought Police because he's simply too intelligent. The Eleventh Edition will be definitive and much shorter than previous dictionaries. Syme believes the "destruction of words" is a beautiful thing, saying enthusiastically that thoughtcrime will eventually be impossible because there will be no words with which to express disloyal thoughts. The Revolution, he says, will then be complete. Orwell viewed the impoverishment of vocabulary as a primary tool of totalitarian regimes.