Età Vittoriana, Lungo 18esimo secolo e autori correlati, Schemi e mappe concettuali di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica Età Vittoriana, Lungo 18esimo secolo e autori correlati e più Schemi e mappe concettuali in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! 04/10/2021 Victorian age The Victorian era, in British history, is the period between approximately 1820 and 1914, corresponding roughly but not exactly to the period of Queen Victoria's reign (1837-1901) and characterized by a class-based society, a growing number of people able to vote, a growing state and economy, and Britain's status as the most powerful empire in the world. During the Victorian period, Britain was a powerful nation with a rich culture. It had a stable government, a growing state and an expanding franchise. It also controlled a large empire, and it was wealthy, in part because of its degree of industrialization and its imperial holdings and in spite of the fact that three- fourths or more of its population was working-class. Late in the period, Britain began its decline as a global political and economic power relative to other major powers, particularly the US, but this decline was not actively noticeable until after WWII. Key words: imperialism and colonialism. 07/10/2021 Long 18th century It was a century in which the novel (narration that has nothing in common with chivalric romance) made an appearance. Victorian novel comes from the long 18th century's novel. 1) long 18th century deals with the actions of the protagonist 2) Jane Austen → novel interested in speech itself. George Steiner talks about Jane Austen and, according to him, her novels need to be considered especially for her language, we have to pay attention to the formal aspects. Jane Austen's protagonists are not the protagonists of the novels of the 18th century. 3) Victorian novel → attention to the characters' opinions and thoughts The novel becomes autoreferential, it begins to analyze the means of expression. The reality now is really complex → Darwin and G. H. Lewes (who was in a relationship with G. Eliot). The second one combines the 2 cultural orientations of the time: science/rationalism (utilitarian approach) and Hegel's idealistic point of view. Therefore, the Victorian age is realted to rationalism and realism (in literature). Reform Bill 1832: George Eliot wrote the Felix Holt, the Radical, the setting is the period of the rights of working men. Growing number of people able to vote. Quando la Reform Bill fu approvata, i maggiorenni acquisiscono il potere di votare ma non per le donne. Robinson Crusoe is about colonial enterprises. England became poorer after some natural phenomenons (for example flood, fire, tempest). The middle class (e.g. Robinson Crusoe) became source of richness, but the aristocracy survived. – 18th century → colonialism – 19th century – Victorian age → imperialism With the Victorian novel, it is clear that Sigmund Freud is about to arrive. Queen Victoria's rule: she was queen of England and emperor of a huge empire (India, Nigeria, Rodhesia, while North America was not a colony because of the independence of the 1776, but it was under England's influence). In generalm terms, the relationship between England and its empires was manageable especially from the economic point of view (South America was divided and were colonies of other European states). There was the Civil War between North America (against slavery because it was a way from the Europeans to have political power on these colonies) and South America (for slavery for the economy based on plantations. The victorian stereotype and double standard Today “Victorian” connotes a prudish refusal to admit the existence of sex, hypocritically combined with constant discussions of sex, thinly veiled as a series of warnings. There is some truth to both sides of this stereotype: some Victorians did write a lot about sex, most others never talked about it. Double standard also refers to a double ethic. Victorians lived with a sexual double standard. According to it, men wanted and needed sex, and women were free of sexual desire and submitted to sex only to please their husbands. But there were a lot of contradictions, like prostitution, veneral disease and women with sexual desires. There were 2 types of women: 1) angels 2) fallen women, which were no longer angels. They were fallen in a hellish dimension Thanks to Virginia Woolf, today we (women) are free from these stereotypes. The Victorian age was also perceived as a cage by women. Gender and class in Victorian society Victorian society was organized hierarchically. While race, religion, region and occupation were all meaningful aspects of identity and status, the main organizing principles of Victorian society were gender and class. As is suggested by the sexual double standard, gender was considered to be biologically based and to be determinative of almost every aspect of an individual's potential and character. Victorian gender ideology was premised on the “doctrine of separate spheres”. This stated that men and women were different. Men were strong, while women were weak. For men sex was central, and for women reproduction was central (the soldiers had to cope with deseas, therefore reproduction = soldiers. In the colonies, because of leprosy - = il sacerdote lebbroso in The Mark of the Beast - in India and Pakistan they died). Men were independent, while women dependent. Men belonged in the public sphere, while women belonged in the private one. Women were also thought to be more religious and morally finer than men. While most working-class families could not live out the doctrine of separate spheres, because they could not survive on a single male wage, the ideology was influential across all classes. Jane Eyre/Victorian woman vs. Betha Mason/Carribean woman = her approach is more natural, she is imprisoned in an attic because of her exuberance, that could not be accepted in England. She is expelled from life. Natural women were women that contemplated their experience as mothers. Therefore, Victorian age = 1) sex 2) man and animal 3) empire → women as mothers 4) class 14/10/2021 The upper class had titles, wealth, land, or all three; owned most of the land in Britain; and controlled local, national, and imperial politics. Aristocracy still has power but we have also the emergence of the burgeois and we can see how far we are from the previous century. What went wrong? Why the aristocracy still manage the country? Because England was based on social differences, it was a class-based society. Process which was shaped in order that aristocracy would have the benefits. Before the Victoria n age, the society was well planned: tutto era stato già progettato così che nella società vittoriana il potere era ancora nelle mani something that is not in the text but it is transcendent because it cannot be perceived with 5 senses - trans-frastic level → words reveal something Eliot recalls Boccaccio to explain the temperament of Rosamund Vincy in Middlemarch but also Guendaline Harlet of Daniel Deronda, which is a woman that is not an angel. Thus, Eliot creates a metaphor. Between Alfred and Bertha, the 1st one is more feminine than the 2nd one. In matter sexuality, George Eliot (named the Victorian Sage) doesn’t accept the vision of women of Victorian society and for this reason in the work the characters are mixed. She describes women also as plants. 21/10/2021 Even in the previous century (mid of 18th century) we’ve seen the arise of the Gothic novel, it reappears in a scientific century, in a scientific frame of mind. Middlemarch is deeply impressed on science: world that is always in flux. Simplicity and rapidity are blended with impulses (Freud). During the Victorian Age, a rational establishment gave thus birth to the bizarre, incomprehensible and therefore repressed side of a primitive psyche. The Lifted Veil represents a defence of imagination and a critique of the power of science. The Lifted (sollevato, dissolto) Veil (behind the veil of religious doctrin we see the real nature of man). The Lifted Veil An implicit message is expressed in the title. The epigraph is an invocation to Heaven. Light, energy → recall the scientific research of the world. The Lifted Veil is a cautionary tale about the scientific persuasion of the era. This epigraph is Eliot’s manifesto about the need of a communion between men, sympathetic relationship between them. The epigraph and the title simply re-asserts the value of science in our life → she says that it isn’t a novella which wants to take distance from science but she wants also to please the audience. Non si può tornare indietro, dato che il velo è stato già svelato. Epigraph → she knows that the title and the epigraph are a moment when the author declares something and transpasses the boundaries. Epigraphs has to be read as proverbs, which are a concatenation of words that the reader receives in their real meaning. Proverbs = social regularity, they are direct and are commonly shared. In fact, they are cultural clichès and cannot be interpreted → man is a social animal. Human fellowship = sympathetic relationship. He asks for no light (but such as turns to energy of human fellowship), no powers (beyond the growing heritage that makes completer manhood → this heritage grows like a tree, whose branches represent new ideas, conclusions). Quindi il peritesto, tutto ciò che non è il testo, è importante tanto quanto quest’ultimo. Behind this epigraph we can see the sonet 15th of Shakespeare; Coleridge, who talked about the relation between man and nature in Biographia Literaria; but also Dante, the metaphor of book as a tree and the plant as a book, the tree reminds of the past and connects different ages. Chi viene dopo può trarre beneficio dall’eredità che lo ha preceduto. Poetry, love, tender affections are not based on our heart, which is a pump and even love is an istinctive fact → tutto è stato messo a nudo. Angina pectoris, pysician, physical constitution → scientific terms, medical research. 25/10/2021 R. L. Stevenson He was interested in human psychology. His most famous work is The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde. He lived in the transition phase between the late Victorian period and the modern age. Psychology: no separation between human and body. Pinel, Cabanis (what we call soul is our sensitivity) / Decartes or Cartesio (res cogitans = the part of our body which is able to think and res extensa = that is something which occupies a space, the body). The philosophers tried to find out the connection between mind and body in this period but in a way Freud’s considerations were not different from Decartes’ conclusions → although linked, psyche/soul and body are 2 different realities and they are independent realities, which are inter-dependent. Therefore, the effort to find a connection between kind and body was unsuccessful because Freud recalls Decartes’ dualistic theory → holistic vision of human being but mind and body are separated. According to the holistic vision of human being, these 2 parts are not separated because you can’t separate man from his environment. We have a wild man within our person. Stevenson meets a means to represent our deprived part in a Victorian context, which is a sort of drug → interesse per quegli stati delle coscienza sotto gli effetti della droga o quando si è mesmerizzati o ipnotizzati. He was an explorer of exotic worlds (Treasure Island, that recalls fable) and keen investigator of human psychology. His literary success must be ascribed also to the careful search for a harmonious style able to give pleasure to the reader. Not surprisingly, in a letter he exalts the beneficial effect of the stories compared to the poiates administred by the writer, defined “doctor of the mind”, in order to soothe the sufferings of the reader. What emerges is the escapist function of the works by Charles Reade, Dumas, The Thousand and One Nights and Walter Scott, which allow the reader to escape from everyday reality and enter parallel worlds steeped in exoticism and romanticism. In Stevenson’s words it is possible to trace Roland Bathes’s theory of pleasure in the text, according to which reading a text steeped in culture is a comfortable practice that satisfies and gives euphoria. Stevenson pleasure texts produce both physical pleasure for their weaving of adventurous plots and for the calibrated use of language, creating an almost fetishistic relationship with stories and words. This aesthetic formula is used in Treasure Island (1883) becomes a text par excellence as it is outside any conceivable logic attesting the novum, the new absolute that strikes the conscience. To escape the alienation of Victorian society, he understands that only the new can bring enjoyment by staging the opposition between the rule and the exception, good and evil, pleasure and generated enjoyment, from the exploration of the modern self. In the Mr. Hyde, Dr. Jeckyll’s malefic double, incarnation of the Freudian repressed emerged through a mysterious potion, lies the reader’s jouissance/bliss. Sublime mode is important according to Stevenson → not the realistic novel. You’re able to thrill your reader or through fable narratives or by means of a sublime narrative, which represents the contradictory natures of men and is stronger. 28/10/2021 Escapist function of the world. Vertigine del soprannaturale. Joseph = “Green tea” → power that drugs. Baudelaire → “I fiori del male” → nella droga trovi i mondi paralleli. Morbid state of mind translated into literature. Potion frees the wild beast which is inside. Common people are looking for a drug. • Walter Scott (inizio ‘800) combines romance and novel → Dumas (padre), Charles Reade • Robinson Crusoe is a bourgeois modern novel → protorealism as realism is of Victorian novel • literature is a mirror of society: mirroring • romance produced during the Middle Age: invoca il soprannaturale Everyday life is intermingled with visions that don’t mirror reality. Deus ex machina. Ci sono modelli esterni. Scott ha ricevuto la legacy del Gothic novel (metà ‘700): 1768 “Castle of Otranto” (Walpole), si è attratti da eredità del Medioevo e si scrivono storie di personaggi sovrannaturali. Heroine in distress, Gothic villain, knight, monster → personaggi del romanzo gotico. • romance ricco di terror, imaginery, devil Literature instructed the bourgeois, che aveva il compito di fondare le colonie nel Nuovo Mondo dopo il Medioevo (‘700) = si deve acquisire wisdom, si deve essere protorealisti = realism mirrors our life. Metà ‘700 nostalgia del passato, cioè del terrore e del mistero. Quindi il Medioevo vive nel Gothic novel. Scott combina i protorealisti e la fantasia. Treasure Island = proiezione del tesoro nascosto. Treasure, pirats create metonimic pleasure which derives from the revelation of mysteries etc. Atavistic regression. The mental deseases come out from what is already inside us. Suggerimenti sulla professione dello scrittore (“The art of writing”) • writing is a game of prestige, presi dalla righe del poema satirico di Hudibras (1660-1680) → lo scrittore deve comportarsi come prestigiatore, creando un’illusione non subito riconoscibile dallo scrittore. Lo scrittore deve essere un giocoliere la cui terza caratteristica è l’elemento tecnico che deve aggiungersi. The juggler has to strive 3 elements in order to maintain in balance the whole: 1) conta il livello simbolico della struttura 2) subject matter = l’argomento che sceglie di trattare 3) technical element Le parole devono essere selezionate con cura nella letteratura. Mondo testuale = evento linguistico che crea struttura e tesse nodo capace di legare se stesso alla prossima frase. Stile, eleganza, variety, syntax combinati tra loro. I giocolieri del verso: supremo potere dell’arte → Shakespeare (Enrico IV usa la metrica, dramma storico monumentale di ricchezza virtuosistica di linguaggio), Victor Hugo, Milton. Il primo è capace di comicità, ripetizione, allusione, antitesi che rappresentano l’intelligentia inexhaustile. Si creano versi di sofisticazione burlesca. Jeux de melancolie (Eliot), jeux de prestige (Stevenson) → correlazione. 04/11/2021 The Art of Writing: some technical elements of style in literature (1885) and to which the writer must pay attention. According to Stevenson is a game of prestige. “Some technical elements of style in literature” is the 1st essay in the ART OF WRITING. Stevenson makes some very intelligent examples like Shakespeare. The 2nd essay: “The morality of the profession of letters” (1881). Here Stevenson talks about the pedagogical function of the writer, about the didactic function of writing, an art useful to the community of readers. The profession of literature is an ethical – intellectual service offered to the public. The writer has the intellectual duty to guide and give voice to all human experiences, but he takes on the moral responsibility of making the reader better by increasing his knowledge. The writer projects his experiences and his personal ways of thinking into the works. For Stevenson, the greatest representatives of this profession (which combine pleasure and profit) are Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson. 3rd essay: “The book that influenced me” (1887):this reveals a really interesting aspect of the writer, he confesses his innermost truths through the books he loved to read. He says aspect = nobody of us possesses something but we are possessed, we are objects, things. We are seen as consumers nowadays, we are no longer thinking humans. In the Victorian Age the working class was defined hands while today we are defined followers of the influencers. What’s really counts is money = the oligarchy is only interested in the profit so the only reality which counts is the profit. Nell’età vittoriana è importante la dimensione psicologica, mentre nel romanzo contemporaneo (Doris Lessing) si parla di malattie mentali. Victorian novels are connected to psychological insides, while contemporary novels stress the psychological aneasiness or deseases of the characters (subentra la psichiatria, psychiatry is a science = this is the age of complex personality → inside you, you can find more than 2 persons, for example Rochester in Jane Eyre of Charlotte Bronte). A quei tempi il più importante ospedale psichiatrico era il Bethlem Royal Hospital e dare del bedlamita a qualcuno significava designarlo come pazzo. 11/11/2021 The Lifted Veil It can be interpreted as an existentialist work of art. Existentialism is something that belongs to the 2oth century, what is not visible doesn’t exist. In this century “God is dead”. George Eliot is writing “The lifted veil” while Kierkegaard was developing his philosophy. The story is that of a man with a particular power, he can forecast future events, his visions are about what is about to happen, but he cannot forecast the death of his brother. We don’t know if this power is good or not, if it is from God or from someone else. Latiner is not happy, he is always miserable, he knows that he is a miserable man. One of his first vision is the one where his wife calls him a mad man and urges him to kill himself (in this vision he is looking many years into the future). He is given this power, but he cannot do anything to change the future. He describes himself through his wife’s eyes. Latiner is focused in what he cannot see, his life is all darkness, his mind is full of darkness when he doesn’t have visions. POSITIVISM Eliot’s fictions are beyond that. She shows particular modern features (simplicity, grotesque, Victorian features combined with bizarre impulses that Freud describes in terms of irrationality). There is something hidden in the novella, it is a critique in the power of science, it is against the positivistic science and about the imaginary power. Siamo consegnati ad un inferno di certezze hellish vision of life. The lifted veil shows the emptiness of science, in which God doesn’t exist. But in saying that God doesn’t exist, we admit that he does exist (Bertolucci: assenza, più acuta presenza). The lifted veil is a warning, that prevents us from going to a waste land. Scientific discoveries + melancholic desire of regression. The novella can be considered part of the Victorian Gothic fiction with Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll, Dracula. The gothic novel supernatural= kind of horror that mortals can’t reproduce. Key word= uncanny, it preannounces Freud’s conclusions: our sensibility is populated by ghosts. SYMBOLS: darkness connected to the quote almost at the beginning. Repetition of the word “darkness” a reality in which nothing happens. Nothing is important in King Lear (Cordelia’s “nothing nothing”). Latiner anticipates that his last moments alive will be knarred by darkness. His last moments= analogous to the closing moments of an ending day, with darkness, he will not perceive the happenings in his life. CURTAIN: it is allegorical of the unknown details regarding Latiner’s future. Latiner would precisely forecast how his adulthood would be due to the uncertainty which is attributed to the curtain. The lifted veil is a “jeaux de la melancholie”, Eliot needs to write it, it’s a kind of medicine for her depression. CURTAIN= synonym of veil. The veil shows the distinction between what is real and what is not. Ability to know= unhappiness Latiner . E’ desiderabile avere questo velo davanti agli occhi la conoscenza porta all’infelicità. THEMES: the burden of knowledge: Latiner cannot take advantage of his gift. His knowledge is a burden for him, he cannot enjoy the present. Knowledge is a gift which one must learn how to use. Knowledge becomes a burden only when it goes unused. Eliot: dobbiamo essere come dei girini, ancora non consapevoli della loro rana figura. “We must learn to think of ourselves as tadpoles unprescient of the future frog”. The veil should not be lifted, it creates unhappiness. Eliot shows us what happens when you lift the veil. TREADING INTO GOD’S DOMAIN: Latiner was not born with his ability, it is mysteriably acquired. At some point, there is an experiment about corpse reanimation, but the doctor is not punished, the man whose God-like powers come not from science, but nature. EVERYONE LOVES A MYSTERY: Latiner is the ultimate realization of the human craving (desiderio animalesco) for mystery. He wants to marry Bertha because she stays out of his visions and thus she is a mystery (she sees only the vision in which she says that he is mad and should kill himself). But she is not a mystery. Latiner wants one so he creates a veil and a mystery behind it. But when we lift the veil there is an actual mystery. “The easiest way to decline a poet is to tell him the truth”. Bertha is a bad woman, she is interested in improving her condition she is a social climber. 15/11/2021 Doris Lessing raised up in Rodhesia (colonizer Cecil Rhodes) or Zimbabwe. She embodies someone who came into contact with the territories under the control of the British Empire. Robinson Crusoe tells us the secrets of the methods of the colonization → his relationship with Friday. Crusoe teaches his language to Friday (1 – Friday is thought and Robinson is his master); he persuade Friday to convert to his religions, the Protestant one with a clear calvinist matrix (2 – conversion of Friday, which had an animistic vision of life: nature was his god) → ambiguity: the care of the natural environment, everyone of us has received a gift from God. The Catholics don’t take care of things. (3) Friday is thought how to rule his society respecting the laws of that same society. S0cial contract → 1600, prima di esso gli uomini si sbranavano tra di loro. These are the 3 rules in order to achieve the personal success, according to the Spanish writer Salvador de Madariaga. London still represents the irradiation of the world political economy. Con Giorgio III le colonie americane acquisirono l’indipendenza. The identity of Northern American people is very similar to the English ones → tracce della mentalità calvinista. The Grass is Singing – List of characters • Mary Turner → poor not from the economic point of view, she only raised in poverty with a drunkard father who would spend any savings on alcohol, Mary manages to make a life for herself based on her intelligence and diligence; she lives in a boardinghouse for girls and works ably as a secretary in town. The only moments of happiness are those when Mary has grown up (a lei piacerebbe vivere così fino alla fine dei suoi giorni una volta cresciuta: dividersi tra il suo lavoro da segretaria, lo sport…). In the book there is the representation of a technological world → she lives in a town which is not so dissimilar from an English town. She falls in love with Dick Turner (she will fall from the condition of an happy girl and an happy housewife) and leaves with him to his farm. On the far, she is oppressed both by the isolation and by her husband’s lack of success. This frustration channels into her latent feelings of racism, which leads to a strange inverted attraction when the African man she beat begins to take care of her. She eventually loses her mind and is murdered by him. While she having her shower (after a tennis match), it happens that she’s able to eavesdrop a dialogue between 2 friends of her and her 2 friends describe her in a way that it sounds not so proper. They discribe her as a childish woman unable to get a proper marriage, to get a family on her own and to have children. In Doris Lessing’s time a woman whose wishes has nothing to do with the maternal desire is highly criticized → this is the reason why Mary Turner is described as weird woman. Something must be wrong with her, she’s not a normal person according her friends. Then she decides that she has to get married, she meets Dick at the cinema, she’s watching an Hollywood movie (while she’s watching the kiss scene between the 2 characters, she turns her body in order to see whether she can catch a glimpse of those present in the cinema and she meets Dick). They choose each other just because Mary has been criticized, she wants to demonstrate that she is a normal woman and Dick on the contrary needs a sort of companion, a servant. She has a sort of relationship with Moses but she is also a racist • Dick Turner → brought up in an impoverished family in a suburb of Johannesburg in South Africa, Dick Turner worked several jobs before giving up plans to study to become a veterinarian and traveling to Southern Rhodesia to live independently on a farm of his own. He incurs debts that he never manages to pay off while managing to stave off bankruptcy. He feels intensely lonely and takes Mary as a wife to assuage these feelings. After Mary gets into an illicit relationship with Moses and Charlie Slatter pratically forces Dick to leave his farm. Dick goes insane at the prospect of being anywhere else. At the same time he is a victim but also a villain → he doesn’t take care of his wife, who would need some sort of special care not to get insane Title taken from a verse of T. S. Eliot → title which has to do with the Waste Land and a way to reconnect a previous author, George Eliot (Middlemarch). Date of publication of The Grass is Singing: 1950. Incipit: newspaper article → a corpse (Mary Turner) has just been found out in the veranda so the novel opens from the end → one of the peculiar characteristics of Modern fiction → the treatment of time follows a circular movement. This is a sort of cyclic time, there is no linear time in Africa in particular. The places described at the beginning of the novel might be European ones but one indication telling us that is not an European story is revealed by such a particular beginning → the novel begins with the end. 2 categories → temporal and spacial are fundamental in literature. Here the treatment of time is particular, it starts with its end. Prolessi = anticipazione; analessi = il procedere a ritroso. Non lo possiamo definire romanzo postmoderno ma nemmeno The Golden Notebook (1962) possiamo definirlo tale → because Postmodernism as a term was coined later. 18/11/2021 Pag. 241 in The Grass Is Singing → ci sono una serie di frasi utili, da tenere in the way home he commits an inflaction = he extinguishes his cigarette butt on the effigy of Hanuman, the monkey god. Excipit The Silver Man (as white as snow) is a priest of Hanuman’s temple → Christian iconografy do describe something that is in a context whose religion is Induism, a religion whorshipping animal gods = it sounds as a sort of blasphemy. Kipling does it to melt different and rival cultures, identities. He can’t renounce his Indian identity but also his English identity. Alla fine Kipling dice che per due motivi non pubblica la storia perché nessuno gli crederebbe e perché ogni persona assennata penserebbe agli idoli indiani solo in termini di statuette in pietra e ottone e qualsiasi tentativo di trattare la materia degli idola sarebbe condannato giustamente (right-minded = rationality, Positivistic science). Qui vediamo un Kipling rinsavito, un Kipling che torna ad essere un right-minded man e se la raccontano per quella che è stata la storia, sono sinceri, lo fanno in maniera spassionata. Kipling non vuole essere criticato dal punto di vista positivista inglese ma allo stesso tempo la storia la scrive e l’abbiamo anche letta. Diciamo che ci sta prendendo in giro. E’ lui il narratore in realtà e non Strickland → comportamento ambivalente ma anche ambiguo. This is a way that Kipling uses in order to intermingle between 2 cultures. 25/11/2021 The Summer Before the Dark – Doris Lessing It is a narration dealing with nostalgia → Empiricism and its methods in a way influenced society at a deeper level (in the middle of 18th century → nostalgia for Medioeval period emerged). One example of that we can find in the Gothic novel but also in the writer Kazuo Ishiguro → nostalgia for treatments: on the one hand you have a main protagonist who remembers a past and the memory of such a past is shared with contemporaries, on the other hand such a remembrance allows him to recreate that same past. Such feeling of nostalgia is felt by a battler who should be glad that world is about to become different, to establish a sort of democratization and this is striking. Instead of being happy of embrace a new age, he feels nostalgic of past ages (perché gli uomini si abituano un po' a tutto). However, the gothic revival is characterized by the fact that people feel nostalgia for past ages (per il ‘700 il Medioevo, per il ‘900 invece il periodo che precede il primo conflitto bellico). Kazuo Ishiguro si somiglia molto alla Lessing, mentre nell’opera del primo c’è un maggiordomo che dovrebbe essere felice ma è nostalgico del passato, di un’epoca in cui a lui non era consentito progredire seriamente; in The Grass Is Singing (as well as in The Golden Notebook) we have a representative of the white settler, in fact in Lessing’s novels you can find a representative of the white settlers who is willing that a transformation of the social apparatus in the African context will soon change. She displays a real nostalgia for that African context in which she was born, she spent her childhood and adolescence and nostalgia for a mythic past made up of time that has a particular characteristic (it is not linear). Passing of time in Africa is represented by the flux of seasons’ changing. The nostalgia is a moment where the singol one shares with other people. We can define Doris Lessing cosmopolitan writer → kind of international writers in the Postmodern age (our age). Period of mass-migration of writers → nel XX secolo si moltiplica il numero di scrittori con doppia personalità, ovvero doppia nazionalità (mentre nell’800 abbiamo Kipling che era anglo-indiano o L. Byron che era un great traveller). She in Africa had already experienced the distruction of nature due to the white settlers. 29/11/2021 Doris Lessing’s works → we have to put them in the Modernist wave because the word Post-Modernist has not appeared yet and she is both things. Victorian Age → G. Eliot, Stevenson, Kipling (in order). In Kipling native means Indian. Imperial Gothic The revival of the Gothic→ in 1764 The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole was published and it is considered the 1st Gothic novel and it contradicts the state of mind of the natural philosophers of the time. In Kipling’s case we are in the 1890s, so a century has passed but his stories can be considered as Imperial Gothic stories → all the Gothic devices are revived in his short stories but what is new is the setting, not France, Spain or Mediterranean area because it was Catholic in general but India or Pakistan for example, therefore it is an Oriental setting. Migration of such a form, the Gothic novel. We should highlight the fact that the enlightenment age is not so different from the Victorian age → both are Materialistic ages, they are similar. The long 18th century was an age of rationalism, Empiricism, Materialism and so on and in 1768 The Castle of Otranto appeared; then we have the Victorian age and the Edwardian age (Kipling), which is an age made up of Positivism. Il gotico (XII secolo) nasce come attrazione di tipo architettonico, successivamente (a metà del ‘700 → nostalgia per il gotico della Middle Age, nostalgia per il sistema feudale, le cattedrali… English people miss the Middle Age) si trasforma anche in un’attrazione di tipo letterario → New Gothic o Gothic Revival o Gothic of the origins → Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, C. Reeve, The Old English Baron, M, Lewis, The Monk, W. Beckford, Vathek. Nell’Ottocento il New Gothic si ripropone → Romantic sublime, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Nell’età vittoriana possiamo nominare Dorian Gray di Oscar Wilde, Dracula di Bram Stoker... Con Kipling il gotico delle origini assume la connotazione dell’Imperial Gothic. Sublime E. Burke’s (philosophical) Inquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful → the date of publication is 1756 = from the philosophical point of view something was changing considering the aesthetic. Sublime and beautiful are opposite terms. Beautiful = classical beauty, lightness so symmetry, perfection. Sublime = it is a theory developed by E. Burke in the mid 18th century where he defined sublime art as art that refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation. A machine’s movement is respectful of roles (repetition of a scheme) = perfection while man = imperfection. The advent of machines have altered life of mankind = positive factor but also a replacement. In this sense the machine makes men alienated. This is the reason why 18th century intellectuals are afraid of the machine, because of Industrialization. 02/12/2021 Doris Lessing Il Postmodernismo è la nostra epoca, quella che è cominciata nel ‘900. Doris Lessing distinguishes between primary sources and secondary sources → classical models = primary sources (everything has been told by philosophers, which have founded the cultural dimension), while the secondary sources can reformulate the primary ones. Therefore, she has an eclectic vision and she is a cosmopolitan woman. In fact, she is the translator of Idries Shah, a charismatic leader who has somehow founded the religion known as Dervisci rotanti → loro con un movimento rotante appunto attraverso la ripetitività (la ruota in questo caso) si arriva ad uno stato di trans. She had an African experience, where she comes into contact with the tribal life. Doris Lessing is conscious of other ways through which acquire contact with what is not visible. She is not a religious author but she is a some sort of mystic writer. Religion comes from relegare → man with God. She attempts at a reconciliation between man and God through her works. Key words for Doris Lessing: myth, mysticism, nostalgia, psychoanalysis → mixture of different suggestions that are reformulated in very different contexts. According to her, literature can only derives its forms from itself and nowadays we can only reformulate those messages wich have been told in the past. Doris Lessing represents the frame of mind of the period between the 60s and the 70s. In her final phase she returns to the science fiction. 06/12/2021 The Golden Notebook (written by Doris Lessing, who won thanks to this work the Nobel Prize in 2007) depicts the sense of fragmentation after the 2 world wars. In fact, it stands for the possibility of re-unification. There are in the work 4 books, at the end our expectations to get the golden notebook (which is mentioned in the title) are betrayed. The reader has a specific function here, he has to fill the golden notebook with his previous readings. The Summer Before the Dark (1973) Strange title: the protagonist is a middle-age woman who has been very engaged in raising up her children, she is alone and she can’t bear with this sense of isolation (the ideal family is an illusion) → il senso è che i figli, una volta cresciuti, pensano a se stessi e seguono la propria strada. Il titolo, comunque, ci farebbe pensare alla vita prima della morte (life before death). In the book we have a quotation, in fact the title has to do with Plato’s Dialogues and we know that Doris Lessing recalls all the global literary production. Fedo (1st dialogue of Plato): here Plato adopts the usal method used by classical authors, that of questions and answers. He imagines to talk with Socrates (the master of Plato), which is here a sort of ghost and Fedo is a pupil. Plato reflects on a humanity that has lost its deep identity, losing memory of its origin, of the enigma of its being there. Menon – he’s the pupil (2nd dialogue of Plato): here we have Socrates that has a task, that of bringing back to the mind of the ancient knowledge lost in the hard impact with the earthly substance (il mito dell’auriga → black horse = Dioniso, down / white horse = Apollo, up e l’auriga deve mediare tra i 2). Once precipitated, man loses the memory of his former condition but philosophers such as Socrates are able to remember and the task of the last one is that of helping Menon to remember. He tries to recall in Menon that ancient knowledge. Therefore, the original sharpness and brightness of the Edenic landscape are to be rediscovered and they are opposed to the darkness of the postmodern era, the Age of Darkness. Summer = Paradise / Dark = Earth. The trans-personal plot of thought is something that is related to humanity in general. Indeed, it moves social groupings and constitutes the civilization. Comte defines the Great Being made up of all past, present and future beings and according to him there is a tendency in man to consider all living beings as living a life similar to his own and to assimilate all phenomena to acts produced by human will. Filosofia giusnaturalista → you must already know. Reproduction permits natural awareness, which is a shared awareness. Capitalism (can be described as a great father) → is the opposite of socialism, prevalence of paternal, patriarchal influence, which is built on power, possession, the application of the law and which only gives importance to rational factors. Socialism (can be described as a great mother) → it establishes