Scarica LA CRISI DELLE CERTEZZE e più Tesine di Maturità in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! CRISI DELLE CERTEZZE - ING With the term “crisis of certainties” we identify all the periods in which thoughts, theories and values, now consolidated in a society, are questioned. In particular, the period that best embodies the collapse of all certainties is the 20th century. World War One brought the so-called soldier’s post-war syndrome: many soldiers developed traumatic stress disorder, that the psychologists identified as shell shock. From this trauma will arise the War Poets, who are veterans that tells, through their poems, the horrors lived in the trenches and the deceptions of propaganda. At the beginning of the 20th century there is a gradual collapse of Positivism, an optimistic ideal about the possibilities of knowledge. This cultural movement is inspired by the Enlightenment, of which it shares trust in science and technological progress. People started doubting the function of science and its impossibility to solve human life problems, even though because the technological revolution had modified life and thought conditions. Scientists in particular questioned the objective knowledge of reality, but the theories that they developed, which were not absolute ideas, turned out to be in contrast with each other. On a cultural level three important personalities are recognized as the main influencers of 20th century thought: Sigmund Freud, a doctor who devoted himself to the study of mental illnesses, he developed a theory on psychoanalysis, exposed in his essay The Interpretation of Dreams, which consists in a method of investigation of the human mind through the analysis of dreams and the concept of “free association of thoughts”; Henri Bergson, a French philosopher known for his arguments that processes of immediate experience and intuition are more significant than abstract rationalism and science for understanding reality. He attempted to redefine the modern conceptions of time, space, and causality in his concept of Duration, making a distinction between historical and psychological time: while the historical time is linear and measured in terms of spatial distance, the psychological time is internal, subjective and measured by emotions; Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher author of nihilism, who criticizes Christianity because it wants man to live in a condition of mediocrity and deceive him. Hence the statement “God is dead”, God is an illusion of man that can be accepted only by becoming Ubermensch. On the literary side we speak of Decadentism. The term was born in France and it has a derogatory sense towards the cursed poets, but in Italy it was used with a negative meaning in reference to modern poetry, which was characterized by the theme of crisis, introspection, disease and death. The general characteristics of Decadentism are distrust of reason, art for art’s sake and life imitating art (typical of the Aesthetic Movement), visionary poet and use of metaphors, analogies and synesthesia (typical of Symbolism). In particular the exponents of this literary movement were Giovanni Pascoli, Gabriele D’Annunzio, characterized by an exasperated individualism with the Superhuman myth inspired by Nietzsche’s theories; but also, Luigi Pirandello and Italo Svevo, deeply influenced by Freud’s psychoanalytic studies. The undisputed model of the new way of making poetry is the French symbolist Charles Baudelaire: he led a wild life to denounce the figure of the marginalized poet and the decadence of poetry, which fails to find a place in the new society. His masterpiece Les fleurs du mal created a sensation for the oxymoron that associated the delicacy of poetry to the evil that dominates the world. Often Decadentism is also associated with Naturalism, whose greatest exponent is Emile Zola. His works show a tendency to build complex symbology and the fascination for the sick and perverse atmospheres.
