Letteratura inglese 2 professore Lucking Unisalento, Sintesi del corso di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica Letteratura inglese 2 professore Lucking Unisalento e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! 1 | P a g e L L C C L L S S - E n g l I s h L I t e r a t u r e I I , P r o f e s s o r D a v I d I a n C l I v e L u c k I n g 2 0 1 8 RUPERT BROOKE…….................................................................................................... Pro War Involved in the Bloomsbury Group (always on the fringe but not part of it). He believed that society in his time was sick and apathetic and for this reason war was going to regenerate society, particularly the young generation. Although he was very enthusiastic about war he never actually experienced it (He never went to war and died of pneumonia.) He was very popular for his academic success and is seen as a leading light of his generation: Because he wrote patriotic poems, he is turned into an iconic figure of WWI in England (by the English establishment) and thus his work was used for propaganda. Peace • This poem debates his romanticized view of war, which is a joy for the young and fit for fighting. War exercises a positive effect on them, because it helps to a true awakening and internal renewal to soldiers, because it arouses the senses (hands more sure, eyes more open), and also gives the senses of redemption and regeneration. Those who do not fight are not considered real men. • The title “Peace” is a paradox because it is a poem about war. Death itself is going to be peace, where they die, and they are buried, they are at peace. • According to Brooke, soldiers find peace only fighting because they stop thinking about women1, romantic things which only cause agony and pain. • Brooke thanks God for war because it stimulates people and gives a solution to ordinary life (Romantic concept of War). 1sex and women are seen as dangerous because they threaten the priorities of men. In the last verses of the first strophe he is expressing his own romantic disappointment and also for this reason he wants to find release in war. The Soldier • Also used for propaganda, it is a famous poem that represents the patriotic ideals that characterized pre-war England. It portrays death as a noble end and England as the noblest country fir which to die. This is obvious in the words that Brooke repeats in which he (literally) repeats the same concept: English and England. • And then again there is an idealized point of view: He is romantic and passionate but naïve. • If he is to die, the land where his body2 will lie will be a better soil than any other soil, and that place will be a part of England richer than any other place on Earth. • He also expresses in the first stanza that his grave will become England itself. In the second stanza instead, he says that he will become “a pulse in the eternal mind” (but it would be an English heart.) Death is redemption in the name of the country. 2We are talking about the body of a soldier, of someone that gave his life for his country. JOHN MC’CRAE………………………………………………………..……………….. Ambiguous view War is bad but necessary McCrae was a Canadian poet, military doctor and soldier. He went to war and cured every man that needed his help, despite their nationality, so he was impartial. Besides his military service and being a doctor, he also lectured at the University of Toronto. He moved very quickly, and he was in fact placed at the head of the medical division, but he died a couple days before; however, he died because of pneumonia and meningitis and not because of war consequences. November 11th is called Memorial Day or Remembrance Day because that’s the day in which WWI ended. The symbol of this day is the “Poppy flower”, and the custom of wearing the poppy flower on this day comes from a poem written by McCrae: In Flanders field. In Flanders field Flanders: Belgian area where most of the battles were fought at the beginning of war. • It is a poem dedicated to those who died at war, that asks to the living people why the fallen died, so that they did not die in vain. The main message is to have courage to carry on and pass the torch (which symbolizes DUTY) to those who are still alive. 2 | P a g e L L C C L L S S - E n g l I s h L I t e r a t u r e I I , P r o f e s s o r D a v I d I a n C l I v e L u c k I n g 2 0 1 8 • He wrote this poem after a friend of his died at battle, and he gave the funeral service for him. Afterwards he stars writing a poem, but unsatisfied (last strophe) he threw it away. A soldier picked it up and sent it to a magazine in England, which immediately published it as a propaganda poem. • We can appreciate contrast in this poem between life and death. In the sky the birds fly and sing whilst in the battle field men fight and die. Also, in the first stanza we have the poppy, which is a symbol of sleep (because Opium comes from poppy seeds) • In the 2nd stanza there is a comparison between how the soldiers were alive and loved, while now they are dead. Besides, there is no distinction between soldiers: They are exactly the same young men who have been sent to wat by governments and died. (Probably this statement is declaring such thing because the author was a doctor.) • The 3rd stanza is what made this poem so popular, but at the same time is the reason why he (John McCrae) ditched it away. Here he expresses the conventional idea of the enemy; the perspective is our side, the good and virtuous side (the English one), while the others are the enemies (the foe.) • There is a transition from the anonymity (and impartiality) from the first strophe to the distinction of people because of their nationality and their side in the conflict. WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS………………………………….. (PRONOUNCED "YAYTS", NOT "YEETS") Ambiguous view War is bad but necessary William Butler Yeats was one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, "for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation". Today, he is remembered as Ireland's "national poet" (though he did not write in the national tongue), and regarded as one of the foremost figures of English language literature in the early 20th century. He was very involved in the Irish Renaissance or Celtic Renaissance; he himself became an Irish Republican senator. Despite being a Dubliner and living abroad for long stretches, he is forever connected with Sligo, the area which inspired much of his writing. His work evolved during his life, so there is not just one kind of poetry (they present different styles among themselves). An Irish man foresees his death • This poem is a soliloquy given by an Irish aviator in WWI, who describes the circumstances surrounding his imminent death (he is shot by an Italian3 pilot). The aviator knows he is going to die among the clouds. • He does not hate those fights nor love his countrymen, he is not driven by ideals of duty nor he is obeying the law. His position is clearly neutral because he is Irish, and his loyalty goes only to Kiltartan4 people. • This poem reveals Yeats’ political consciousness and his propensity for a kind of symmetrical nature that lures the airman to the clouds. Whatever happens in this war will not improve or worsen the previous conditions. 3Italy, in the First World War, was on the same side of England, so in this poem it is shown a certain conflict between the Irish and the English, and so this poem reflects the Irish position during war. (The relationship between Ireland and England was sometimes fraternal whereas sometimes they were enemies) 4Kiltartan is a barony and civil parish in County Galway, Ireland. Off topic: When you are old • This poem can be considered as a parody in which the poet is trying to seduce a woman trough poetry, and in which he says that she will regret in a future not have being in love with him. Critics believe that this woman was Maud Gonne, who was married with someone else and involved in the revolutionary cause that led to his husband to being executed by the English. • Here, the poet imagines himself and the woman he loves in the future, a common future, and he immortalizes himself through the narrative voice, talking to her in an eternal present when he refers to “this book”, which was the poem itself. Off topic: Sailing to Byzantium • This is a poem of contrasts and it also present a paradox. Yeats, just like Shakespeare with the golden statue of Romeo and Juliet or Keats with Ode to a Grecian urn, wants to express the idea of immortality that is inherently linked to the act of becoming an artifice. He refers more than once to birds and music, but these elements mutate in order to transcend. (The bird of the 1st stanza at the end is transformed into an artificial bird, a golden bough) 5 | P a g e L L C C L L S S - E n g l I s h L I t e r a t u r e I I , P r o f e s s o r D a v I d I a n C l I v e L u c k I n g 2 0 1 8 • This poem deals with two lovers parting. The speaker plays a dual role, in the 1st stanza he describes his beloved woman and directs her movements like a painter to a model. • In the second stanza, the speaker divides himself in "I" who narrates the farewell scene and "Him", who participates to the painting. In the 3rd stanza, the author describes how much he is obsessed by the woman and he feels guilty for using her beauty to turn her into a static but aesthetic figure. • The poetical voice feels a certain compassion and wonders what would have been of them together, but he thanks their goodbye and her suffering because art depends on the frustrations of life. He is disturbed by his own decisions, because in one hand he decided to sacrifice the girl for his art, but on the other hand he is also aware that he has done something terrible: In a moral sense he has killed the woman. In this form the author feels a deep sense of regret for breaking this woman's heart and wants to regain control. For this reason, he turns her and the memory of her into an aesthetic subject. The flowers are a symbol of rebirth in contrast with the fact that their love has gone, and they evoke the famous painting of "Ophelia". What the poet does is coping with the pain by modifying his memory in an artistic image. The love song of j. Alfred Prufrock • The main character of this poem can be described as the prototypical modern man, overeducated and incapable of action in front of the events of life. The title is ironic, this poem isn't about love but about a journey into a modern hell (that’s why it starts quoting Dante). Prufrock is a peculiar character: He is observant, but he is an inept, he has no moral courage, not even to live; he is obsessed with self-consciousness and does not have a strong sense of his own personality so his particularly aware of the way people see and judge him. • Like Dante and Virgil, Prufrock and the reader arrive in a horrible place. It's a squalled part of the city with cheap hotels and prostitutes walking in the streets. Here Prufrock is having an existential moment but he is not able of formulating the "overwhelming question" that haunts him. • Prufrock is attracted to women, but he can't do anything about it because he knows he is becoming old (he is becoming bald). The main theme of the poem is paralysis, the incapacity to act. Shakespeare's Hamlet is a character defined by paralysis, unable to sort through his anxious mind, and Eliot parodically updates Hamlet's paralysis to the modern world. There is an intertextual reference and interaction between Prufrock and Hamlet. • Another characteristic of this poem is that Eliot is strongly influenced by French symbolists (Mallarmé Rimbaud and Baudelaire) so he takes their sensuous language and eye for anti-aesthetic details like "the yellow smoke" and "the hour- covered arms of the women". He was strongly criticized and called antipoetic because he wanted to express the reality as it was. 6 | P a g e L L C C L L S S - E n g l I s h L I t e r a t u r e I I , P r o f e s s o r D a v I d I a n C l I v e L u c k I n g 2 0 1 8 P O E M S – T A L E S – N O V E L S DOVER BEACH MATHEW ARNOLD DOVER IS A TOWN IN ENGLAND, WHOSE CLIFFS ARE VERY FAMOUS (“THE WHITE CLIFFS OF DOVER”); DOVER IS A PLACE IN WHICH FRANCE CAN BE SEEN. PROBABLY THE POEM IS ADDRESSED TO THE WRITER’S WIFE EVEN IF SHE IS NOT EXPLICITLY MENTIONED, AND WE ARE SURE THAT IS HER BECAUSE THE POEM WAS WRITTEN IN THEIR HONEYMOON AT DOVER BEACH. • This poem opens with an image of a quiet nocturnal sea scape • 1st Stanza: 2 people in a room, one is looking outside the window, and invites the other to join the view, which is calm. There is a nocturne background and the sea is shown as something visible to the reader, but it will change its nature and meaning through the course of the poem. • 2nd Stanza: He (the poet) breaks the quiet atmosphere with the word "only" and then he focuses on the sounds which are described as unpleasant. Looking at the sea is calming for the poet, but the sound and atmosphere bring him sadness. • ("GRATING ROAR": The 2nd stanza ends with the phrase "Bring the eternal note of sadness in" which represents the consequence of the sad sound of the waves.) • 3rd Stanza: Arnold talks about Sophocles and this tells us what his ideals of life and human misery are: Sophocles wrote Antigone, a classic in which the sea becomes a metaphor for the misery of human life (Sophocles believes that man's destiny is to suffer). So here, in Dover Beach, the sea is a symbol for the ebb and flow of human emotions and feelings because human misery is eternal and universal. • 4th Stanza: "Sea of Faith" is a reference to religion. Religion has always been something that makes people feel protected and that gives life a meaning. Now however faith is disappearing5, and the world is in danger. In the end all that remains is a beach made of stone (Naked shingles of the world) which can be translated to the humanity being naked, unprotected, helpless. 5: We must consider the context in which Matthew Arnold wrote this poem: He belonged to the Victorian Age, and so, the scientific advances and awakening of society thanks to it meant a loss of faith in the population. • 5th Stanza: Arnold gives us a solution that is not religion but our moral values, however there is a dichotomy: Since traditional values are dead, the only solution is to be true to one another. (This is a principle shared by the members of the Bloomsbury Group) • At the end of the poem, Arnold focuses on the concept of the Night. The poem started with the night, so we move from one night to the other. Night is also Spiritual, so that means that the starting calm night is just an illusion. • Dover Beach is a melancholic poem that deals with the lack of faith and attitude typical of the Victorian Age. Arnold uses the expression "pathetic fallacy" when he attributes human feelings to an unanimated object (the sea). He creates pathos because the reader feels sympathy for the suffering lyrical self. THE DEAD JAMES JOYCE • PLOT: The Dead is the last tale of "Dubliners". A professor named Gabriel Convoy attends a Christmas Party thrown by his aunts (Julia and Kate) with his wife Gretta. At the end of the party, Gretta is listening attentively to a song. The intensity of her focus on the song makes Gabriel feel lustful. But when they go back to their hotel room, Gabriel realizes that he has misunderstood Gretta; in fact, was feeling that type of passion because of a memory of a man (Michael Furey) who was deeply in love with her and who died for her. Gabriel realizes that his marriage with Gretta has never felt this passionate. He feels alone and emotionally dead. • Explanation of the title Here the roles of the dead and the living are inverted: Gabriel, who is alive cannot give the same passion that a dead beloved man has given in his life. Gabriel is technically alive but then he realizes he is not truly alive (epiphany) as Michael still is being dead, and this is because Gabriel does not have enough courage to live. Gabriel has the possibility of escaping (symbolized by the open window) and it coincides with a possibility if a spiritual transformation (paradox of what life and death are). • THE SNOW: We don’t know precisely the meaning of snow itself, but we can clearly understand for what it is used for. Gabriel, since his first appearance protects himself from the snow, from the problems that surround him, the problems of Ireland and himself not entering in other people’s mind; Michael on the other hand had died because of exposition, of courage, he died as a consequence of getting wet under the rain when he wanted to talk with Gretta. Water is a source of life, it may cause death, but death is fundamental for life, so life and death are connected with one another, therefore snow creates a connection between the dead and the living. 7 | P a g e L L C C L L S S - E n g l I s h L I t e r a t u r e I I , P r o f e s s o r D a v I d I a n C l I v e L u c k I n g 2 0 1 8 THE TURN OF THE SCREW HENRY JAMES PLOT AND ANALYSIS This story shares its convoluted narratological structure with Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, written some years later. The story doesn’t begin with a young man (James does not tell the name of this young girl), very sensitive and shy who gets a work, but there is another narrator to the story. We must distinguish between the story and the way the story is told: we are in a country house in England around Christmas festivity and a group of people is narrating ghost-stories to one another, so the context in which the story happens is the context in which is recounted. Hence, we have two narrative levels: The author’s and another narrator within the story which name is Douglas, the one who actually tells the story of the young woman that years ago had decided to work as a governess. Like in Heart of Darkness, Henry James is the first narrator as author, but then Douglas is the narrator of what the governess has written down. The governess narrates that she heard about this job in a place called Bly, where there is handsome young man, uncle of two children, Flora and Miles, but he does not want to deal with them, so he needs to someone who can look after them. Then we discover that the governess has fallen in love with this man and she wants to impress him. She arrives to Bly and meets Flora, a very beautiful child, and the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose, and afterwards Miles arrives. The girl becomes more and more excited about her job and for what happens at Bly in general; she learns that before herself there was another governess, Miss Jessel, who had a relationship with a man called Quint and, even if not directly, we understand that she got pregnant and died, whereas Quint got drunk and fell and died too. She becomes convinced that the ghost of Miss Jessel and Quint are continuing to be around the children in order to seduce and corrupt them and bring them where they live. At a certain point, she sees a ghost of Quint outside, in front of the window, and then she goes there to control what he is doing (she has not realized yet that he is a ghost): This means that Quint is an aspect of herself. She tries to prove that they are in danger and also that they can see two ghosts, so she starts protecting them (the children) until at a certain point she confronts Flora, who has a breakdown and is taken away; so, she has the final confrontation with Miles. She wants him to pronounce Quint’s (she is certain that she is right, and she thinks that in this way he will be saved), but Quint appears at the window looking him from outside, and the boy finally pronounces his name. The governess, in relief, hugs this boy so hard that a moment later he is dead. INTERPRETATIONS 1) What happens is real, the two hosts really exist, and the governess can see them (so it’s interpreted as a ghost-story) 2) It is a story told by a psychotic woman, considered for this reason an unreliable narrator. The story creates this doubt and we can not know the truth. The signs of the governess’ madness are: • She is sexually repressed • She is in love with the uncle of the two children So, she projects her own repression onto the figures of Quint and Miss Jessel, who seem to have had this passionate love affair in the past with the strong suspicion that she got pregnant and then died of pregnancy. THE TITLE What happens is a turn of the screw. There is this reference in the story to something which makes pressure, the idea of something which becomes tighter and tighter. HEART OF DARKNESS JOSEPH CONRAD DETAILS: • Marlow narrates this story to other sailors • In Africa, the Company is inefficient and disorganized • The Natives are brutally mistreated • Contrast between the Natives who look like they belong to the magnetic nature of Africa and the imperialist white man who do not belong to the scenery • Marlow takes the ship to find Kurtz with the manager, some agents and a crew of cannibals (who like they are very unforgettable) • They arrive and find chaos, severed heads adorning the fence posts • Kurtz has gone mad THEMES: • Good v/s Evil: Marlow wants to be a good man, but as soon as he arrives in Black Africa he can't escape the nightmare of the situation. Impossibility of distinguishing between good and evil. • Nature and Man: Nature is described as a dark and frightening place. The natural world is as scary as the civilized world. • Civilization: Conrad sees Civilization as an excuse to conquer other territories and make more money.