English literature of the 20th century, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica English literature of the 20th century e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! THE 20TH CENTURY Prose: from Experimentation to the Transition period The 20th century was an age of experimentation, characterized by the search for new forms of expression. It was fiction which first showed the signs of reaction to the novels of the previous century. The prose writers had constructed long and complex plots and were meant to be a mirror of the society of their times. This interest began to shift from society to the inner self of man. The causes of this change were many: the two World Wars, the economic crisis, the sense of anxiety, the loss of faith in traditional principles, the expansion of education, Freud’s studies, the influence of Russian and French writers (Tolstoj, Chekhov, Zola, Proust). The novelist in the Edwardian period follow the old literary principles, though foreseeing the changes of the 20th century: they were called Edwardians (John Galsworthy, Arnold Bennet, Herbert George Wells). The refusal of traditional values led to the loss of the old accepted principle of a fixed relation between man and the world; a unique vision of the world and of human actions becomes impossible: each of us gives a personal interpretation of events (subjective truth). • Henry James: felt the necessity of an acute psychological inquiry, followed the chronological sequence of external events, but focused his attention on 
 the personal reactions and thoughts that an external event may produce. • Joseph Conrad: tried to explore man’s inner world. • Edward Morgan Forster: studied people of different cultures and traditions, which give origin to complex and deep differences of behavior. • David Herbert Lawrence: studied the hidden activity of the unconscious, particularly on the theme of sex, which he considered a vital force, a kind of revealed religion. HENRY JAMES Henry James led to the foundation of the modern psychological novel. PRINCIPAL FEATURES AND THEMES: - The study of Americans in Europe (international theme); - The conflict of the artist with society; - The passion for knowledge and experience and the desire for self-fulfillment; - The study of the inner development of a character: all actions proceed from the psychology of an individual, so the study of human mind is more important than action; - The importance of the point of view: the narrator’s point of view isn’t omniscient and the story is presented from several perspectives; - The author is to stand apart, he must not express his personal opinion, so that the reader is involved in the story; - The use of dramatic method (dialogue). JOSEPH CONRAD Conrad’s production is divided into three periods: 1.1894-1897: apprenticeship (Almayer’s Folly); 2.1897-1910: great achievements (Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, The Nigger of the Narcissus); 3.1910 forward: decline, with the exception of The Shadow Line. LANGUAGE: rhetorical style, fondness for high-flown words and images, long sentences and obscurity. 
 PRINCIPAL FEATURES: • The study of the moral nature of man, who can change under extreme circumstances (testing time) revealing his real inner self and often falling into moral degradation; • Love for the sea and exoticism: isolating man from society. In exotic places the ordinary rules that work on the mainland are replaced by loyalty, duty hierarchy; • Symbolism: all natural elements are real in themselves but also symbols of the thoughts and emotions of man; • Oblique narration: the author wants to disappear, he’s no longer the single omniscient narrator but the story is presented from different points of view; • Time shifts: the traditional time-sequence is often manipulated; • Presence of a double (a character that is the alterego of the protagonist and represents his hidden sides). HEART OF DARKNESS (1902) The novel is set on the Congo river and is inspired by the historical events of Belgian Congo (colonialism). It represents the reality of European colonialism: its aim was to civilize the natives, abolish the slavery and give them liberty of religion and trade, but it actually deprived the locals of their riches. The names of places aren’t mentioned in the novel because Conrad wants to condemn all form of colonialism. - Theme of the double: Marlow and Kurtz. Marlow feels sympathy for Kurtz, instead he doesn’t the pilgrims, as they are hypocritical and conventional (hollow men); - Research of the reality of human nature (testing time: Kurtz reveals himself as a man who only wants to get ivory, not to help the natives); - The ship is interpreted as a microcosm; - Oblique narration: a third person narrator sets the scene and then Marlow starts to speak about an experience of his past; - Time shifts: European colonialism is compared to Roman colonialism; - Realism and symbolism (ivory is the symbol of moral degradation and of European greed). “Mr Kurtz - he dead” Kurtz’s last words are “The horror, the horror!”: he realizes his bad behavior. When he dies, the natives feel a sense of relief and freedom: attitude of fear and not admiration towards Kurtz. The pilgrims are interested in getting the ivory collected by Kurtz. Prose: Modernism The 1910s seem to mark a dividing line in the history of the novel: these years were characterized by an actual revolution in English literature, called Modernism (applied to all artistic movements). “Modernism” usually refers to those novelist who actually experimented with new forms and who tried to explore the mental process of the human mind through the “stream of consciousness” technique. This technique applied to literature William James and Henri Bergson’s philosophical theories: • HENRI BERGSON introduced what he called “durée” (duration) and proposed a distinction between clock time and psychological time. Internal time can’t be divided into a sequence of separate points but it’s an unbroken continuum. • WILLIAM JAMES stated that consciousness flows like a stream (stream of consciousness). There are two levels of consciousness (ICEBERG: only the top is visible, the greatest part is underwater): 1.Speech level: can be communicated orally or in writing; 2.Pre-speech level: can’t be communicated, it isn’t rationally controlled. The Stream of consciousness fiction is concerned with that area which is beyond communication, while the previous works dealt with the “rational communicable area”. The novelist must explore what constitutes the mental process and analyze how this process works. The most prominent method is the use of interior monologue: the “stream of consciousness” refers to the mental activity itself, while the interior monologue is the instrument used to translate this phenomenon into words. The interior monologue often disregards logical transitions, formal syntax and even conventional punctuation, so as to reflect the apparently disconnected and chaotic sequence of thoughts. - INDIRECT INTERIOR MONOLOGUE (Virginia Woolf): introduced by such clauses as “he thought”, it provides more rational links for the association of ideas. - DIRECT INTERIOR MONOLOGUE (James Joyce): shifts abruptly from thought to thought, without any apparent connection of verbs, subject or even 
 punctuation. 
 resemblance and difference the actions and people of a Dublin day to give them another dimension. Joyce brought together realism and symbolism and was able to create a new form of realism (modern epic in prose). SETTING This novel sums up the themes and techniques Joyce had developed in his previous works. It’s a detailed account of ordinary life on an ordinary Dublin day, June 16th 1904. Dublin becomes itself a character in this novel. STRUCTURE The structure reflects a new vision of time: a single day is representative of someone’s past and future. RELATION TO THE ODYSSEY Like the Odyssey, Ulysses is the story of a journey. The novel is divided into three parts: 1.The first part is dominated by Stephen Dedalus (TELEMACHUS): the Joycean alter-ego. His Christian name, Stephen, is that of the first Christian martyr; his surname, Dedalus, is that of the legendary Greek artificer: Stephen desires to convert the Irish to the cult of beauty inherited from the Greeks (but his efforts are not reciprocated). 2.The second part is dominated by Leopold Bloom (ULYSSES): a middle-aged man who wanders around Dublin aS Ulysses wandered around the Mediterranean, encountering adventures which parallel those of the Homeric hero. 3.The third part is dominated Molly Bloom (PENELOPE): Leopold’s wife. The book is divided in 18 sections, each one corresponding to one of the episodes in the Odyssey. REPRESENTATION OF HUMAN NATURE The characters are more than individuals: represent two aspects of human nature. Stephen is pure intellect and embodies every young man seeking maturity; Mrs Bloom stands for flesh, since she identifies herself totally with her sensual nature and fecundity; Mr Bloom, uniting the extremes, is everybody, the whole of mankind. The theme of the novel is moral: human life means suffering, failing but also struggling to rise and seek goodness. NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE The narrative technique implies the direct interior monologue, the cinematic technique, question and answer, dramatic dialogue, juxtaposition of events (“collage technique”). LANGUAGE The language rich in images, contrasts, paradoxes, juxtapositions, interruptions and symbols. Expressions taken from advertising are present and used to voice the unspoken activity of the mind. Episode 8: Bloom’s train of thought Joyce uses different devices to express sequence of thought: - To describe Bloom’s actions he uses the pronoun “he” and the past tense; - To report Bloom’s thought he uses the pronoun “I” (or no pronoun at all) and the present or future tense; - Ellipsis of verbs; - Ellipsis of the subject; - Inversion of word order, repetition of words; - Grammatical mistakes. Joyce dig up subconscious hidden thoughts and long-forgotten memories; often readers find it difficult to follow his flow. FINNEGANS WAKE (1939) The novel tells the story of a Dublin night: it begins in the evening and ends at dawn. It contains the whole human history in the guise of comic events happening to a family consisting of mother, father and three children. At dusk the three children play outside the pub with the little girls of the neighbourhood. During their games became rivals for the favour of the girls and are scolded by their father. In the meantime Earwicker goes to bed after drinking too much and he is tormented by hundreds of dreams throughout night. Finnegans Wake is without beginning and end: it has a circular structure which the writer openly demonstrates by starting his narration with the last part of the sentence that he left unfinished on last page. TITLE The title comes from an old Irish ballad., Finnegan’s Wake, about a legendary bricklayer who fell off a scaffold having drunk too much; he was taken for dead, but came back to life when the word “whiskey” was mentioned. The title anticipates the content of the novel: it can be broken down into “fin” (French) and “again”, meaning end and beginning. If the apostrofe is restored in the title, it comes to mean either “the wake of Finnegan” or “Finnegan is awake again”. STRUCTURE Joyce used called upon the theory of history of Giambattista Vico: man’s history proceeded cyclically through three phases (theocratic, aristocratic and democratic). After a ricorso, or period of reflux, the cycles begin again. The viconian scheme provides Joyce with a sequence composed of three substantial stages (three main books) followed by a dissolution (a final book in which the characters collapse). The sense of life embodied in this work is of a process in which neither progress nor regress is possible. Life has got a circular pattern in which the same characters and the same episodes come round again and again. CHARACTERS Characters are defined by their function (family relationships). The whole of human history, myth and ritual is presented in terms of this constant framework. LANGUAGE The language is characterized by the continuous word-play, the verbal extravagance, the use of distortions, multilingual puns and examples from different languages. His aim was “to express how things are at night, in the conscious, then semi-conscious, then unconscious” level of a character. Joyce uses the extreme interior monologue (the novel was conceived according to the logic of a dream). Riverrun The three opening paragraphs of the novel are centered on the man’s falling asleep; at first the semiconscious level can be detected, then the uncoscious level overwhelms it (pre-speech level). The Inter-war years novelists: utopian and dystopian writers There were many novelists active in the inter-war years and in the post-war period: Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. The term “utopia” derives from Thomas More’s work (Utopia) and can mean either a Nowhere Land or a better place than the present one. More’s Utopia paved the way for a series of novels which were called “utopian” (Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels). Utopia was seen as a place of brotherhood and peace in contrast to the corruption and tyranny of the time in which the books were written. The 20th-century utopia actually turned into a dystopia, in which the optimism of previous fables was replaced by a gloomy vision of the future and a warning for the present: Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), and Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1948). GEORGE ORWELL Orwell wanted to turn political writing into an art, fusing political and artistic purposes into one whole. He was a writer of realistic novels on social and political themes (the condition of the working class, the danger of totalitarism, the exploitation of the masses, the failure of revolutionary ideas). His language was to be simple, clear and direct, so as to become an instrument of information and communication, but never of propaganda. He provides examples of form and style: he was not merely an author of political treatises or political allegories, but also political essays (The language of politics). He is against any form of exploitation of the common people, who are generally manipulated, and their revolutions are doomed to failure by lack of unifying values and of class consciousness. Orwell’s standpoint was that of the committed left-wing democrat with leftist sympathies. Gradually he decided not to adhere to any definite political party, as he had realized that there was always a great deal of rivalry between the different factions of each political movement. He is against the omnipresent control in the totalitarism countries on every citizen in order to eliminate original ideas and individual emotions. 
 ANIMAL FARM (1944) 
 it’s a political fable in the form of an allegory, describing the revolt of the animals on a farm, who expel their cruel human master and resolve to run it themselves on Socialist principles. The egalitarian rules on which the farm is initially run are eventually reduced to a single commandment: “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others”. The story is told from the animals’ point of view. The final party The historical events alluded to in his novels are those of the Russian Revolution, from its utopian principles to its development in the world of “Realpolitik”. - Old major = Karl Marx: proposed a new society, a system under which property would be held in common and everybody would live as equal. - Mr Jones = Tsar Nicholas II: was forced to abdicate and murdered along with all his family. - The farmhouse = the Kremlin. - Napoleon = Stalin: banished Trotsky. - Snowball = Trotsky: idealistic proponent of international Communism. - Squealer = the voice of the leader (government newspapers, official propaganda, source of media information, link between the leader and the common people). NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949) The novel describes a future England as an outpost of Oceania, a vast totalitarian system. The novel is traditional and chronological in structure; it is divided intro three parts: 1. Part one introduces the protagonist, Winston Smith, in the context or an oppressive world; 2.Part two describes Winston’s love for Julia; 3.Part three deals with Winston’s imprisonment and torture by the Thought Police, and the final loss of his intellectual integrity. A NOVEL ABOUT THE FUTURE Orwell defined the novel as “a novel about the future, in a sense a fantasy, but in the form of a naturalistic novel”. The title itself, which reverses the last two numbers of its year of composition, suggests that he author’s target was to attack present society as much as to warn about the future. A NIGHTMARISH WORLD The novel is set in London and creates a nightmarish world in which the party has absolute control of the press, communication and propaganda. Language, history and thought are controlled in the interests of the state. The individual has no place, every aspect of society is subordinated to the state. Newspeak, the official language, have a lexis so limited that people find it impossible to express their own ideas. WINSTON SMITH Winston Smith is the last man to believe in human values in a totalitarian age: beauty, truth and all the finer emotions and values belong to the past. “Smith”, the commonest English surname, suggests his symbolic value; “Winston” evokes Churchill’s patriotic appeal to “blood, sweat and tears” during the Second World War. Winston Smith is a middle-aged and physically weak, he experiences alienation from society and feels a desire for spiritual and moral integrity. In private he keeps a diary in order to maintain sanity in a disorienting world. In the first two parts of the novel Winston and the narrator are one: he expresses Orwell’s view. STYLE Orwell drew on the satiric tradition of English utopian fiction, on H.G. Wells’s scientific realism, on Huxley’s Brave New World. He combined various genres and styles in an original way, blending documentary realism with parody and satire. The novel is characterized by the journalistic style, the attention to precise detail and the use of satire. The tone becomes increasingly pessimistic in the last part. The novel does not offer consolation but reveals the author’s acute sense of history and his sympathy for the millions of people persecuted and murdered in the name of the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century. REPUTATION The novel has aroused great interest: it has been filmed and translated into many languages. It has given the word “Orwellian” to the English language, denoting oppression and thought control. The term “Big Brother” has come to stand for total control and deliberate invasion of privacy. Only through rain, love and faith will our waste land be saved and restored to fertility. 
 STRUCTURE It has neither a plot nor hero. The poem is only a sequence of images, apparently unconnected and open to various interpretations, but linked to each other by the technique of the association of ideas. It is divided into five sections: 1.The Burial of the Dead: coming of spring in a sterile land; 2.A Game of Chess: juxtaposition of present squalor to pass splendor; 3.The Fire Sermon: introduction of Tiresias; 4.Death by Water: focus on Phlebas and the idea of purification; 5.What the Thunder Said: disintegration of Western civilization and the suggest of its possible salvation. The poem isn’t easy to read because of the lack of links between the episodes described, the language made up of verse that often reads like prose, the sentences and quotations from foreign languages, the frequent allusions to far off people, traditions or events, the use of stream of consciousness technique, which turns the five sections into interior monologues, the peculiar temporal structure which mingles past, present and future, the specific references to places and times being transformed into universal symbols. 
 Unreal city The situation is set in the present but is given a universal value by the presence of Tiresias (blind Greek seer): past, present and future coexist in him (he lived in the past, he has fore suffered what is now seeing in the present and can also foretell the future). Tiresias represents all women and all men (hermaphrodite). What Tiresias sees is a love scene where love is totally absent: it represents the human alienation of modern life. The characters are commonplace people and the setting is the woman’s untidy flat. The spiritual blindness and sterility of the scene is emphasized by the last actions of two people, which underlines the mechanization of life. The squalor of the scene is increased by her automatic gestures, which suggest lack of love and communication, thus confirming the initial definition of the City as “unreal”: the people in it seem to be automatons and are spiritually dead. The passage is written in lines that sound like prose, the style is immediate and colloquial. Eliot uses the technique of juxtaposition: London (which stands for all cities) and Smyrna, Tiresias and the typist’s lover (the former is physically blind but can actually see what happens because he’s a seer, the latter is spiritually blind). THE HOLLOW MEN (1925) The poem mirrors Eliot’s pessimistic view of life and represents the condition of man in the modern society (alienation). The expression “the hollow men” is taken from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (Marlow describes the pilgrims as hollow men: they are conventional and hypocritical). There are many references to European literary tradition: Shakespeare (Macbeth), Milton (“broken jaw”: Samson Agonistes) and Dante (ignavi: souls of people who didn’t dare act). FOUR QUARTETS (1943) It’s made up of four poems, published separately, but they constitute a whole work unified by structure and themes. The names of each poem derive from a place which was particularly important for Eliot: 1.Burnt Norton comes from a country house which Eliot visited in 1934; 2.East Cocker is the village in Somerset from which the Eliots originally came; 3.The Dry Salvages refers to a group of rocks in the sea off Cape Ann, Massachusetts, connected with Eliot’s childhood; 4.Little Gidding is a village in Huntingdonshire, where a small Anglican community was established in 1625 and which Eliot visited in 1936. The structure is essentially the same as The Waste Land. Each quartet is structured “musically”, depending above all on its metrical and verse forms, as well as on such stylistic devices as alliteration, rhythm, assonance, repetition and internal rhyme. Each Quartet is divided into five parts, alternating lyricism and conversational style; the central point is the third part, which sums up the previous two and introduces the next two. Each Quartet also corresponds to one of the four seasons and to one of the four elements of the universe (air, earth, water and fire) and can be read at various levels. 
 The poem focuses on the single main theme of time and eternity, conveying a mystical view of life. Man must learn to disregard the temporal and look beyond this life to eternity, which he can contemplate only by “dispossessing” himself of all earthly attributes. 
 O dark, dark, dark The passage echoes Milton’s Samson Agonistes. The image conveyed is one of death: our civilization is going to die, and the long list of people all ending in a “silent funeral” sounds like an ironic comment on the emptiness of our society, where the funeral is indeed “nobody’s”, since there is no real man to bury. The only way out of darkness is for the soul to be still and humbly submit to it, since it is darkness that will lead to light. the darkness of God is exemplified through the use of a three-fold simile: 1.The theatre when “the lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed”; 2.The train in the rube, when it “stops too long between stations”; 3.The mind “under ether”. Man is aware that something is being taken away. The soul must again be still and wait, even without hope and love. Faith is all in the waiting, we must learn to “wait without thought”. If we accept it with humility, “the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing”. This new condition is suggested by images (“whispers of running streams”, “wild plants unseen”, “a garden”) which appear like flashes, sudden illuminations that “echo” moments of “ecstasy”, which are not “lost” but real, provided we remember that they cannot be parted from the agony of birth that will follow death. The last part of section three sums up the doctrine of the Negative Way of St. John of the Cross: what we know and own is something earthly, material and impermanent, which stands between our temporal limited world and the timeless life of the spirit. If we want to possess the only thing that really matters, we must choose the negative way and give up all that prevents eternal transcendence since, if we want our spirit to live, we must die to the world. British Drama Reaction from Realism After the great success of the late 1890s, the British theatre faced a period of crisis and stagnation. Dissatisfaction with excessive realism was spreading, not only in literature but in all fields of art. This leads some writers to turn to escapist plays such as Peter Pan (1904) by Sir James Barrie. The Celtic Revival Others tried a drama of fantasy and symbolism: a group of Irish playwrights (W.B. Yeats, J.M. Synge, Augusta Gregory, Padraic Colum and Sean O’ Casey) found the Irish Dramatic Movement, whose aim was to stage Irish plays on Irish subjects and performed by Irish actors, thus reviving people’s interest in the Irish theatre. In 1904 they settled in the most famous of Dublin playhouses, later called the Abbey Theatre. Poetic Drama A new sort of drama developed in the Thirties with T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and Christopher Fry. It was called a poetic revival, since it revived the use of verse in drama, as in the Elizabethan Age. T.S. Eliot wrote Murder in the Cathedral (1935), in which he was able to combine poetry and common speech, thus making his verse dialogue believable as well as poetic. Drama: British theatre from the 1950s to the Present THE ANGRY YOUNG MEN In 1956 Look Back in Anger (John Osborne) was performed, setting off a revival of British drama. It marked a turning point in the history of British drama because of its characters and the language, shocking in its realism and violence. It was easier to understand than Poetic drama (intellectual language), so it got great success and was more appealing to the masses. Jimmy Porter, the protagonist, became the spokesman of a whole generation and the play started a new vogue: The Angry Young Men. (John Arden, Arnold Wesker: kitchen-sink plays, his works are often set in a kitchen, which becomes a microcosm of the world). The group also included novelists and poets. THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD Before the new drama began in Britain, a new play arrived in London in 1955: Waiting for Godot (Samuel Beckett), written in French. The play spread Beckett’s reputation throughout the world and made him the best representative of the Theatre of the Absurd. The term, coined by Martin Esslin, refers to a group of dramatists in the 1950s who didn’t regard themselves as a coherent group or as a school, but who seemed to share certain attitudes towards the predicament of man in the universe. These attitudes had already been summed up by Albert Camus in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus: man feels a stranger in a universe deprived of illusions and light, he’s an exile. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, costumes the feeling of Absurdity (out of harmony). The dramatists of the Absurd include Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and many others, each one independent from one another. All of these share Camus’s sense of metaphysical anguish at the irrationality of the human condition. The Absurdists thought that, since life is absurd, it cannot be represented by harmonious or logical speeches but only by a sort of language which also has to absurd. In this way they achieved the unity between subject-matter and form. JOHN OSBORNE Osborne’s plays revitalized the post war English theatre (which had become a form of middle-class entertainment) by bringing a new kind of realism through the use of a new language and a criticism of the Establishment. Dissatisfied with his own society and the dullness of everyday life, he created characters who shared his own rebelliousness and his wish to change a world that was getting more and more stifling. Osborne restored a feeling of commitment, political and personal, to the theatre. He innovated it with his first play, Look Back in Anger, thanks to its voicing the dissatisfaction of the younger generation (everybody under thirty) and to its realistic and violent language (slang and colloquialism), different from the upper-class diction of most plays at the time. Osborne made the protagonist voice of his own doubts and selfish impulsiveness. LOOK BACK IN ANGER (1956) The action of the play is a closed circle: - Act 1: Jimmy (who comes from a working-class family) lives with Alison (his wife, who comes from an upper-middle-class family; she is pregnant but hasn’t told Jimmy) and Cliff (a friend of his) in an attic flat in a Midland town. - Act 2: Alison, influenced by her friend Helena (an actress) leaves Jimmy, while he cohabits with Helena. - Act 3: Alison (who has lost her child) and Jimmy are together again. The scheme of the play seems conventional (eternal triangle theme), but it marked a turning point in the British theatre: • STRUCTURE: Osborne rejected traditional canons. He applied a closed-circle technique to his play (to represent the dullness and repetitivity of everyday life) by presenting identical settings in the first and last acts, with the two female characters performing exactly the same actions. • SETTING: the play is set no longer in London, but in a Midland town. • CHARACTERS: there are only five characters. They stand not only for social class differences (upper middle class: Alison and her father; middle class: Helena; working class: Jimmy and Cliff), but also for the so-called generation gap. Both Jimmy and Alison’s father are frustrated by the state of British life: the latter laments that everything has changed, the former claims that everything is still the same as it was, meaning that power still lies in the same hands, among the members of the Establishment. • LANGUAGE: the language is immediate, genuine and understandable by everybody, no longer meant for a restricted elite, thus involving his audience. Have you ever watched somebody die? The passage can be divided into a dialogue and a monologue. In the dialogue, Jimmy’s language is provocative and aggressive (he’s trying to fight Helena back as she wis determined to protect Alison from him). Then he asks Helena a question that sounds in contrast with