La Seconda Guerra Mondiale e il contesto storico, Sintesi del corso di Inglese

Scarica La Seconda Guerra Mondiale e il contesto storico e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! SECOND WORLD WAR DIFFICULT 30s (P.167) Because the British prime minister had to face two urgent problems, one was connected with the succession of the king and the other one was connected with rearmament: 1. When George the 5th died his son Edward the 8th became the new king. But Edward fell in love with an American divorced woman and the king wasn’t allowed to marry a divorced woman at that time and Edward didn’t want to give up on her (non voleva rinunciare a lei). So he was forced to abdicate in favour of his brother prince Albert; but prince Albert didn’t want to become king because he has a problem: he had a stammer, he couldn’t speak fluently. But he was forced to become the new king and then he was help by an Australian speech therapist who also help him when the king had to address the nation to tell them that Britain had to join the second world war, in 1939, after Poland was invaded by Hitler. He became king as George the 6th. 2. The other problem that the British prime minister in the 30s had to face was rearmament. The government invested a lot of money on the air force→ the Royal Air Force (RAF). TOWARDS WORLD WAR II (P.167) What was happening in the rest of Europe? In 1935 the Italian dictator Mussolini attacked the African monarchy of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia); and he moved closer with an alliance with Hitler and Germany. Because in 1933 Hitler became the dictator of Germany he seized power (ha preso il potere), taking advantage of a poor country, an economic crises that Germany was going through (che stava attraversando). The first thing that Hitler did is to build up an army and he started his expansionist policy/plan, and in 1938 he invaded first Austria then part of Czechoslovakia (Cecoslovacchia). Then he met with Chamberlain, the British prime minister, and he promised him that he would stop; but he didn’t keep his promise (he wasn’t one you could trust), he invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia and he didn’t stop because after that he invaded Poland in 1939. So at that point Great Britain entered the war/declared war on Germany. Chamberlain made a huge mistake, because he trusted Hitler. In 1938 there was one of the saddest episode in our history, which is the Kristallnacht (crystal night). It was the night where paramilitary forces broke the windows of shops, building, synagogue which belongs to Jews and German polities didn’t do anything. Hitler signed a deal with Stalin according to which he wouldn’t invade the Soviet Union. But he didn’t respect that deal and it’s one of the biggest mistake that Hitler could do; because it was also there that he lost the war. The German army was crushed. THE BEGINNING OF THE WAR (P.168) The second world war was fought mainly in the air. There were a lot of air raids (when soldiers bomb civilian targets from the air). In Britain evacuation schemes/plans were organized to move people, especially children, from towns to the countries (capagna). And adults took shelter (rifugio) in the underground, in the tube station (stazione della metro). In 1940 Hitler invaded Norway and Denmark because there he could fine the iron (ferro) he needed. Then Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium and he was heading (diretto) for France, for Paris. In 1940 Chamberlain was replaced by Churchill, because Chamberlain was considered too weak and he didn’t take the right decision because he trusted Hitler and the nation needed a much stronger man. At the beginning of the war Britain had sent troops to France but when the prime minister Churchill saw that Hitler was heading for Paris he orders the British troops to gather Dunkirk, because he wanted to bring them back. PAINTING P.168→ Tube Shelter Prospective We can see a long tunnel of the underground where people took shelter inside the underground station because they were dug underground so they could be safe and escape bombing. OPERATION SEA LION (P.168) It was the Battle of Britain which saved Britain from German invasion, it was 1940. Hitler had planned to invade Britain from the sea, and so they had to divert British attention from the sea, but the plan wasn’t successful. There was a battle in the air between the RAF and the Luftwaffe (which was the German air force). Britain won the battle and so Hitler had to change his plan and he started bombing civilian targets because he wanted to weaken the nation, but he didn’t succeed. Because the king George the 6th and his wife Elisabeth didn’t surrender, didn’t leave London, so they became the symbol of resistance. Churchill was offered a deal from Hitler, but he was supported by the people and he didn’t accept that deal (because Hitler wasn’t one you could trust). AMERICA JOINED THE WAR (P.168) In 1941 Japan attacked the American naval base of Pearl Harbor, so the American president Roosevelt declared war on Japan and Germany declared war on America. In 1943 the Allies landed in Sicily started fighting in Italy to free our nation. The German army was stopped and crushed in the battle of Stalingrad. (The allies continued to score victories against the Germans, also helped by the science of sonar, radar and the Enigma code-breaking computer). In 1944 there is the D-day: Normandy landings. The Germans at that point retreated across France. 4) Nowadays refugees are immigrants. So those people who are forced to leave their country and their home for different reasons (for example war or religion). The statement of line 17 is still used nowadays by people who are against the reception of immigrants. I think the opposite of this sentence, because, in my opinion, immigrants shouldn’t be "left out" but should be "let in" to allow everyone to have a home. Moreover, they "do not steal our daily bread" or our work but they are a help for our country. DESCRIPTION OF THE PAINTING AT PAGE 211: A man is sitting bent over (piegato) a chair, with his head in his hands. Near him there is a walking stick and a pile of things. In the foreground there is a long table with only a globe on it which may remind his country but also the fact that he can’t go back to his country in that globe there is a world which rejected him; and the room looks like a prison cell. In the background there are bare trees and some (a flock of) birds. It a desolate place. Even birds are free but he isn’t. FUNERAL BLUES Is a sad song/poem about the death of a person, someone loved by the speakers. The speaker is suffering and asks for silence: he orders all the clocks, telephones, barking dogs and pianos to be quiet. He also wants everybody and everything to take part in the morning: the airplanes in the sky, the doves, even the policemen in the street, because the person who has just died was everything to him… his compass, his working week ad his Sunday rest….his time. The death of this person (a friend, a wife, a husband, a son, a daughter, a mother or a father) is also the death of the idea that love can’t last forever; with love gone nothing in the world seems to matter anymore: not the stars, the moon or the sun, not the woods or oceans. MODERNIST WRITERS Conrad is considered a bridge between traditional and modernist writers; and he paved the way to Virginia Woolf and Joyce. Characteristics: 1. Also modernist writers want to be rid of (essere liberi)/rejected the omniscient narrator. 2. The narration moved forward and backward: past, present and future are mixed. 3. Modernist writers shift their attention from action to the unconscious and led the reader enters in the character’s mind. In that way the reader can understand all the character’s innermost thoughts and feelings. THE END OF THE 19TH CENTURY This new philosophical, psychological current which lead to a sense of disillusionment and pessimism; because man understand that there are things which don’t depend on his will but those things are the result of something which goes beyond his will. So men can’t control everything. So, by the end of the century there was a reaction against the Victorians’ traditional ideals, against their superficial optimism and against their hypocritical concept/idea of respectability. New trends began to appear and they eventually led to a deeply pessimistic view of life. FICTION IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE 20TH CENTURY (1901-1945) Consciousness= your mind and your thoughts Victorian readers wanted to read something about their world, their life and about the people they knew; so about reality, they wanted realistic fiction. So a fiction which could portrait reality had to have a plausible, interesting story and lifelike characters. In the first years of the 20th century there was a reaction against the realistic traditional Victorian novel, a reaction caused by the new psychological and philosophical theories and writers shifted their interest from action to the mind of the character, to the subconscious. Among the psychological theories the once of Sigmund Freud an Austrian psychologist who opened the way to the exploration of the subconscious. He described consciousness as a multi-layered phenomenon in which past coexist with the present. Each individual responded to reality according to his/her own personal experience, so reality is no longer objective. Reality is subjective because everyone sees things from their point of view according to their experience, their personal history. And then there are some thigs which are part of reality which are objective. At this point modernist writers had a problem, the problem was how they could portrait human consciousness in writing. Human consciousness which was seen as a flux of thoughts in which past, present and future coexisted. In Victorian’s fiction this problem had been avoided by the use of the omniscient narrator (because the omniscient narrator knew everything about you). But modern writers wanted to get rid of/rejected the omniscient narrator. So they had to find new narrative techniques to solve the problem and the most important technical innovation was the shifting of the point of view from the external narrator to the minds of the character. They led the reader enters in the character’s mind. In that way the reader can understand all the character’s innermost thoughts and feelings. Reality was described throw the Stream of consciousness= It’s a movement, a flux of thoughts inside human mind. It’s when an idea recalls an other one which recalls another; one after the other in an association of ideas. Some writers (Joyce, Woolf) follow the Bergson’s idea of time. He said that there is a time inside individual consciousness so time is subjective. (Because an hour of English for you is too short, instead an hour of English for me never ends. So different perception of time.) So they distorted the chronological order of events expanding or shrinking (ristringere) time. For example Joyce’s Ulysses takes place in one day and it is almost 600 pages long. Also in Virginia Woolf’s novel “to the lighthouse” the 1st chapter take place in one day and covers more than a half of the novel, instead the second chapter take place in 10 years and covers on tenth of the novel. Modernist writers eliminate action almost completely. REALISTIC FICTION Anyway realistic fiction survived and developed during the 20th century but changes a little bit; because the interest of the writer shift from events to the human soul. So the focus of the narration shift from the event of the story to the psychology of the character. In realistic fiction we find a mixture of events and psychology.