L’età di crisi dopo l’età vittoriana, Dispense di Inglese

Scarica L’età di crisi dopo l’età vittoriana e più Dispense in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! MODERNIST REVOLUTION A deep cultural crisis had been growing over the last two decades of the 19th century and this led to the end of both Victorian morality, which had been strict and taboo-ridden, and Victorian values. Faith in progress and science was swept away by the First World War (9.4), which left the country in a disillusioned and cynical mood. Some soldiers celebrated their return home with a frantic search for pleasure; others were haunted by a sense of guilt for the horrors of trench warfare, or missed the sense of purpose the war years had given them. There was an ever-widening generation gap between the young and older people who were considered responsible for the tragic waste of lives during the war. The 1920s proved comfortable only for the privileged classes. Nothing seemed to be right or certain; even science and religion no longer offered comfort or security. New views of man and the universe emerged. Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis (9.10) recognised the importance of the unconscious in affecting human behaviour, and Albert Einstein's theory of relativity (9.11) radically changed the concept of time and space. This was the background of Modernism, an international cultural movement which affected literature and the arts in the first decades of the 20th century. The Modernists' rejection of the traditional structure and organisation of a work of art evoked the crisis of Western values and the alienation, fragmentation and disintegration of old values that were emerging as the main features of the Modern Age. It implied a break with traditional values and a rejection of Naturalism and Aestheticism (8.13), in favour of introspection and technical skill. Modernist artists and writers intentionally distorted shapes and broke down the limitations of space and time. They were aware that any interpretation of reality was possible since the perception of reality was uncertain, temporary and subject to change. They also felt the need to reflect modern urban life in artistic forms to highlight the complexity of human existence. They favoured short, meaningful images which were able to provide a true insight into the nature of things. Moreover, the past was seen as something which could be remoulded in a personal, original way. They also recognised the importance of both conscious and unconscious life. FREUD’S INFLUENCE Freud's psychoanalytic theories about the power of the unconscious and his discovery that man's actions could be determined by irrational forces, which he might know nothing about, had a profound influence on modern literature. Freud's theory also maintained that the superego, that is to say, the constraints imposed on the individual by society, education and moral laws, can profoundly affect man's behaviour. Modern writers rejected the Victorian tendency to define characters by means of historical and social context. They focused on the inner lives of individuals while trying to reconcile their subconscious and conscious lives, as shown in works like Heart of Darkness (9.18) by Joseph Conrad. Freud also placed enormous importance on the demands of 'libido', and his theory of the Oedipus complex influenced the English novelist Irbelt D.H. Lawrence ( 9.20), who dealt with the obsessive relationship between mother and son in the novel Sons and Lovers. Freud also provided a new method of investigation of the human mind through the analysis of dreams and the concept of 'free association', which inspired T.S.Eliot (9.15), James Joyce (9.22) and Virginia Woolf (9.24) to look for new techniques to capture the irrational, unpredictable side of human nature. A NEW CONCEPT OF SPACE AND TIME Special and general relativity The ideas of the German physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955) influenced modern culture from painting to poetry. In June 1905 Einstein elaborated the theory of special relativity, which changed our perception of both space and time forever. He pointed out that the motion of one object was always relative to the motion of everything else. The measurement of motion depended on the relative speed and position of the observer. This implied that there was not a universal time that all clocks measure, but that everyone had his own personal time. Einstein gave this example to explain his theory: 'Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity.' A consequence of relativity is the relation between mass and energy. Einstein's postulate that the speed of light should appear the same to everyone implied that nothing could be moving faster than light. As energy is used to accelerate a particle, the object's mass increases. The equivalence of mass and energy is summed up in Einstein's famous equation E = mc². In this formula, E is the energy, m is mass and c is the constant speed of light. The equation message is that energy and mass are related. No equation has ever been more famous. Later, Einstein realised that there was a close relationship between acceleration and a gravitational field. Someone in a closed box cannot tell whether he is sitting at rest in the Earth's gravitational field or being accelerated by a rocket in free space. This equivalence between acceleration and gravity did not seem to work for a round Earth, however; people on the other side of the world would have to be accelerating in the opposite direction but staying at a constant distance from us. Einstein realised that the equivalence of gravity and acceleration could work if there were some give-and-take in the geometry of reality. His idea was that mass and energy would cause a distortion in space-time. Objects like apples or planets would try to move in straight lines through space-time, but their paths would appear to be bent by a gravitational field because space-time is curved. This new theory, which was elaborated by Einstein in 1916, was called general relativity MODERN POETRY The poetry of the years preceding World War I was characterised by a sharp distinction between the avant-garde groups and those poets who were still influenced by the Victorian romantic tradition. The latter are usually described as the Georgian poets; their name derived from the title of an anthology, Georgian Poetry, published during the reign of George V (9.1). These poets used traditional poetic forms to write about nature and country life. Among them were Rupert Brooke (9.13), Walter de la Mare (1873-1956) and Edward Thomas (1878-1917). World War I inspired a whole generation of promising young poets, the so-called War Poets (9.13), like Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) and Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918). They became a collective voice dealing not only with the horrors of modern warfare, but also with the hopes and disappointments of an entire generation. The value of their poems lies in the choice of violent, everyday language and in their unconventional style. Modern poetry officially began with Imagism, a movement which flourished between 1912 and 1917. The name 'Imagiste' was invented by the American poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972). Imagists used hard, clear and precise images, and a rhythm which was freed from metrical regularity. They felt free to choose any subject matter and their poems were usually short and without any moral comment. The aim of poetry, for them, should be precision and concreteness. Modern poets drew inspiration from Symbolism, a movement which had started in France with Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal (1857). Symbolist poets gave importance to dreams and visions, and the associative powers of imagination. They used language and images to evoke rather than to state, and they employed free verse to exploit the sound and musicality of words. Imagism and symbolism influenced modern poetry, whose main representatives were W.B. Yeats (9.14) and T.S. Eliot (9.15). Yeats carefully wove symbols into the pattern of They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.’ HIS STYLE Owen's poems are shocking, accurate descriptions of gas casualties, soldiers who lost their minds and men whose bodies have been torn apart. He used the traditional poetic devices of assonance and alliteration. These devices give his lines a haunting quality and moral force. He also introduced 'pararhymes' -eyes/bless, moan/mourn -, a technique which contributed to the effect of discordance and disharmony. - DULCE ET DECORUM EST Dulce Et Decorum Est" is an anti-war poem by Wilfred Owen, a soldier in the British Army during World War I. The title of the poem is derived from a quote by latin poet Horace, who claimed that it was "sweet and fitting (dulce et decorum)" to die for one's country. This statement was being echoed by many British politicians in Owen's day, and it is his intent with this poem to prove that it was, as he flatly says, a "lie." He describes the drudgery and misery of war, opening the poem by describing soldiers slogging through mud "knock-kneed, like old beggars under sacks," coughing "like hags." As they are slowly marching along, a gas shell explodes nearby, and as the men fumble to put on their gas masks, they are horrified to realize that one of their number has failed to get his mask on. Owen then describes, in equally vivid language, the horrors of the man's death struggle as he thrashes about "like a man in fire or lime" and drowns as his lungs fill with fluid. The scene is terrifying, and Owen tells the reader that if they had witnessed such carnage, they would not tell the "old lie" that it was sweet and fitting to die for one's country. With these lines, he sends a powerful antiwar message through the eyes of one who has witnessed the worst of war. ALL ABOUT THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT AND THE WASTE LAND HIS LIFE Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1888 into a family of (1) english discot? He had a cosmopolitan education studying at Harvard, the Sorbonne in Paris, and Oxford. When World War I broke out, he decided to settle in London, where he started to work as a (2) clark in Lloyds Bank. His collection of poems Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) gained him recognition as an important avant-garde poet. He founded and edited The Criterion (1922), an (3) influential/intelletgazine of European literature, and in 1925 he became a director for the publishers Faber & Faber. Unhappily married to a British ballet dancer since 1915, he suffered from a (4) nervous break down soon after the war. Most of his masterpiece, The Waste Land (1922), was written while he was recovering in a Swiss sanatorium in Lausanne. Poetry was, in fact, his only refuge, where he could overcome his personal situation in order to represent the (5) General crisis of Western culture. In 1925 he published The Hollow Men, a poem read as a sequel to The Waste Land's (6) Phylosopical desere. In 1927 he became a British citizen and in the same year he joined the Church of England, finding the answer to his own uncertainties and to the despair of the modern world's (7) lack of faidh and religion. His religious poetry blossomed in Ash Wednesday (1930), a purgatorial poem, in Four Quartets (1943) and two important plays written in verse, Murder in the Cathedral (1935), on the assassination of Thomas Becket, and The Family Reunion (1939), on the guilt and expiation of a man haunted by the Furies. Eliot was also an influential (8) Litical critic: most of his critical essays on authors, both ancient and modern, as well as on the theory of poetry and on the (9) foundatio of literary criticism are collected in The Sacred Wood (1920) and Selected Essays (1932). In these works, he underlined the importance for the artist to be (10) impersoned and to separate 'the man who suffers' from 'the mind which creates'. In 1948 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in London in 1965. SECTIONS The Waste Land is divided into five sections. 1. 'The Burial of the Dead', which focuses on the opposition between sterility and fertility, life and death. 2. 'A Game of Chess', which juxtaposes the present squalor to an ambiguous buddismo past splendour. 3. The Fire Sermon', where the sermone fuoco theme of present alienation is rendered through the description of a loveless, mechanical, squalid sexual encounter. 4. 'Death by Water', which focuses on Phlebas, the Phoenician sailor who died by drowning. The idea of a spiritual shipwreck is reinforced. 5. 'What the Thunder Said', which evokes Eastern and Western religions. A possible solution is found in a sort of sympathy with other human beings; however, such a solution does not modify the general atmosphere of utter desolation. STRUCTURE AND THEMES The Waste Land is one of the best examples of Modernist poetry. In fact, it breaks away from any order or unity. The poet uses fragmented images of historical narratives which are connected by these main themes: the contrast between the fertility of a mythical past and the spiritual sterility of the present world, peopled by alienated characters; the collapse of civilisation through the ages; and the despair of living in a modern alienated world. The poem is dramatic because we, as readers, are continually made to listen. The speaking voice seems to be related to a multiple personality beyond the limits of space and time. THE MYTHICAL METHOD The mythical past appears in the allusions to and quotations from many literary works belonging to different traditions and cultures as well as religious works, like the Bible and Hindu sacred texts, to represent the contrast between present and past. This use of quotations reflects the concept Eliot had of history, which he considered the repetition of the same events, and his view of 'classicism', which he saw as the ability to see the past as a concrete premise for the present. For him, 'the poetic culture' was a 'living unity' of all the poems written in different periods. Thus present and past exist simultaneously in The Waste Land, and the continuous shifts in time and space are created by the free associations of ideas and thoughts. Eliot called these 'unattended moments. They were similar to James Joyce's epiphanies (9.23) and Virginia Woolf's moments of being (G☞ 9.25). INNOVATIVE STYLE The style of The Waste Land is as fragmented as modern civilisation: it is a mixture of different poetic styles, such as blank verse, the quatrain and free verse. Eliot requires the active participation of the reader/public, who experiences the same world as that of the speaker/ poet, by employing the technique of implication. He also uses the technique of the objective correlative and that of juxtaposition: squalid elements are paired immaging poetiche with poetic ones, trivial elements with sublime ones. Another device widely used is the repetition of words and images, which increases the musicality of the poem. The objective correlative in Montale Metaphors and symbols replace direct statements in Eliot, who adopted the technique of the objective correlative, that is, the use of a sequence of events, a cluster of images or a setting, in order to express a certain emotion and evoke it in the reader. For example, in the text The Fire Sermon the objective correlative of the squalid, passionless present age is the banal and loveless scene where a typist is seduced by her lover. - THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD The burial of the dead is a metaphor for the condition of contemporary man, whose life is meaningless, empty, alienating, and as a result quite similar to death. Traditional myths and symbols are used in an original way and acquire different and sometimes difficult connotations. The lines don't actually have a regular scheme, and the metre isn't traditional. Furthermore there aren't even classical divisions in stanzas, and the lines can be either be composed by two words or normal and short-length sentences which makes them free lines. Even if the poem lacks traditional features, it contains some alliterations here and there, which give it a kind of musicality. Moreover, repetitions of sounds and words are used in order to emphasize a particular aspect of the situation E.G. "so many...so many" referred to the crowd. Since Eliot is quoting Dante's lines, he's trying to make the city (which is caught during its rush hour) look like Dante's Inferno. In this passage spring is regarded as a cruel season, since it breaks the illusion of safety and protection created by winter. This unique view of the coldest season of the year is definitely odd, as it breaks with the traditional stereotype of a hostile and glacial period. In this poem winter acquires a positive connotation. People who are part of the crowd in the City often sigh and continuously fix their eyes before their feet, so it is possible to understand how frustrated they feel. Stretson is one of the people Eliot meets in the crowd, and he's likely to be identified with Ezra Pound (who used to wear the Stretson hat). The reference to the First Punic War metaphorically stands for the universal issue due to the dismay of contemporary society (which came from the first World War). Similarly the corpse is a metaphor for the contemporary man, who feels useless, empty and overwhelmed by and alienating reality, which can be compared to death. The sprout probably means a new beginning, like a rebirth, so it represents the victory of life over death. The Dog the author mentions is probably three-headed Cerbero, which guards the entrance of Hades, the ancient greek god of underworld. Eliot calls the reader "mon semblable,-mon frère!" (quoting Baudelaire) as they both share the same situation. - THE FIRE SERMON The title of this, the longest section of The Waste Land, is taken from a sermon given by Buddha in which he encourages his followers to give up earthly passion (symbolised by fire) and seek freedom from earthly things. A turn away from the earthly does indeed take place in this section, as a series of increasingly debased sexual encounters concludes with a river-song and a religious incantation. The speaker proclaims himself to be Tiresias, a figure from classical mythology who has both male and female features and is blind but can "see" into the future. Tiresias observes a young typist, at home for tea, who awaits her lover, a dull and slightly arrogant clerk. The woman allows the clerk to have his way with her, and he leaves victorious. Tiresias, who has "fore-suffered all," watches the whole thing. After her lover's departure, the typist thinks only that she's glad the encounter is done and over. This section of The Waste Land is notable for its inclusion of popular poetic forms, particularly musical ones. The more plot- driven sections are in Eliot's usual assortment of various line lengths, rhymed at random. "The Fire Sermon," however, also includes bits of many musical pieces. The use of such "low" forms cuts both ways here: In one sense, it provides a critical commentary on the episodes described, the cheap sexual encounters shaped by popular culture. But Eliot also uses these bits and pieces to create high art, and some of the fragments he uses are themselves taken from more