Letteratura Inglese III. The 20th Century in Britain: War Poets, Space and Poetry., Sbobinature di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica Letteratura Inglese III. The 20th Century in Britain: War Poets, Space and Poetry. e più Sbobinature in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! LETTERATURA INGLESE III A.A. 2022/2023 Prof.ssa Carla Tempestoso Lezione 1, 12.10.2022 WORKSHOP/ Parte laboratoriale. Progetti di PPT in cui gli studenti, organizzati in gruppi, analizzeranno e presenteranno una poesia. PPT 4 parts  1st student: Social-historical context  2nd student: Poet/Poetess’ life and works  3rd student: Analysis of the poem  4th student: Analysis of the poem Each group will have 30 minutes to talk about the project (7.5 minutes per person). Documento indicatore per il discorso: quattro pagine e mezzo di Word – interlinea singola – Times New Roman, 12. Lezione 2, 13.10.2022 The 20th Century in Britain The British Empire came into existence in the 16th century when Britain started to compete with other European countries for control of the seas and of the riches of the new unexplored continents. During the 18th century, Britain colonised large parts of North America, Africa, Asia and Oceania, and colonial expansion continued steadily through the 19th century. By the 19th century, Britain owned maybe ¼ of the world, and all of these lands were part of the Commonwealth, both from a political and an economical point of view. At the beginning of the 20th century, the British Empire was the biggest empire in world’s history, so that one could say that ‘the sun never set on it’. By 1937, the British controlled all the trades in its colonies. They used to import slaves as well as raw materials; the latter were used to manufacture goods to sell. Locals of the colonies had to work long hours, they did not earn money and they rarely participated in the political life of their country; thus, rebellions started to spread among the countries of the Empire. The first colony to obtain independence was India, in 1947. Gandhi, India’s leader, caught the world’s attention with his speeches and his ideals against injustices. The colonial occupation was never peaceful: the British also changed the name of some countries, thus ‘stealing’ the identity of these people. The latter was a very common practice, and it still is today for some minorities. The place of India in the British Empire was so important that it was called ‘the jewel in the crown’. Parts of it had been governed by the East India Company since the 17th century. In 1858, it passed under the direct control of the British Government which appointed a viceroy to govern the country. Many British civil servants, engineers, administrators, and businessmen went to live in India with their families. In 1877, Queen Victoria became Empress of India. The empire was a source of pride and wealth for Britain. Colonies provided cheap raw agricultural materials for its manufacturing industries and were a huge market for its manufactured goods. For better or worse British rule and emigration have left their mark on the independent nations that arose from the British Empire. The English language became a major language worldwide. Most countries of the former empire have now a system of government, civil service, army, and legal system organized along similar lines to those in Britain, while British colonial architecture, such as in churches, railway stations and government buildings, continue to stand in many cities. British colonialism brought civilization to underdeveloped regions. The colonists built hospitals, prisons, police stations and schools. They also constructed roads and fought against diseases and superstition. Most British people thought that it was their duty to spread their culture and civilization around the world. The other side of the coin is, however, that the British Empire was built upon unacceptable ruthlessness. The British only followed their own interests, exploiting natives with cheap labour and slavery and stealing their resources. Native people everywhere were considered inferior and had few rights. The British kept them under control teaching them to obey and destroyed native cultures forcing the English lifestyle upon them. In his novel Burmese Days, George Orwell wrote: ‘They build a prison and call it progress’. Queen Elizabeth II 1952-2022  Queen Elizabeth has been not just a queen, but an icon for the whole world as well.  She was both a conservative queen and a very modern ruler, an open-minded monarch.  She also was the first British monarch to choose to keep her real name after becoming queen.  All royal marriages need the approval of the reigning monarch. Lezione 4, 18.10.2022 – Theme: War poets. ‘War poets’ are known as such because they fought in World War I and wrote both during the war and/or about the war. WWI hit Germany and Europe like a calamity, and WWII was even a worse source of destruction for the entire world. WWI destroyed empires, created new nation states, and – as we talked about the independence of some British colonies – it also encouraged rebellions for independence in other colonies. After the wars, the balance of power was not focused anymore on the European system. But, despite the horror that the World Wars brought, thanks to them, the EU was born: without them, there would be no European Union (EU) today. World War I With WWI came the destruction of whole empires, the creation of many new nation-states; the war also encouraged independence movements in Europe’s colonies, forced the United States to become a world power and brought to life the ideals of the Soviet Communism and the rise of Hitler. The diplomatic alliances and the promises made during the First World War, especially in the Middle East, would still haunt Europeans a century later. The ‘balance of power’ approach to international relations was broken, but not shattered. It took the Second World War to bring about sufficient political forces to embark on a revolutionary new approach to inter-state relations. Who Caused the War?‣ Part of the debate in today’s Europe about Germany goes back to the origins of both world wars. Many believe that because of Germany’s role in both World Wars it cannot act as an independent nation state and has to be embedded in structures such as the EU and NATO for its own good. Thousands of books have been written about the 1914-18 conflict with many seeking to apportion responsibility for the outbreak of war. Why?‣ Long-term reasons: 1. Militarism: Militarism can best be understood as the build-up or expansion of the ability of a country’s military to wage war. In the decades before World War I, many European countries began to practice militarism and worked to expand and strengthen their military forces. For example, there was an intense arms race and naval race between several European nations in the build-up to World War I. Specifically, France and Germany were heavily involved in an arms race in which each country doubled their armies between 1870 and 1914. Both nations had a history of war against each other, and their rivalry caused them to expand their military forces. At the outbreak of fighting in 1914, France had approximately 4 million soldiers while Germany had over 4.5 million. This arms race showed the distrust between the nations of Europe and when war did break out in 1914 it allowed the countries to go to war more easily. 2. Alliance system: this system existed even before the 1914. When World War I began Europe divided between two separate alliance systems. Britain, France, and Russia made up the Triple Entente while Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy made up the Triple Alliance. Both sets of alliances were created in the years and decades before World War I between the partnering countries. The assassination of Austro-Hungarian archduke Franz Ferdinand and the resulting crisis between Serbia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire caused each system of alliances to enact and World War I began. To understand how the system of alliances led to the start of World War I, we first need to understand the series of events that unfolded after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in June of 1914. Immediately after the assassination, which was carried out by a Serbian nationalist organization called the Black Hand, Austria-Hungary blamed Serbia and began to threaten Serbia. In response, Russia came to the defence of Serbia. Russia did this as part of its larger movement for Pan-Slavism. Pan-Slavism was the theory that supported the promotion of all Slavic people of which Russians and Serbians were both. As such, Russia wanted to support the Serbians against Austro- Hungarian aggression because Russia viewed Serbians as sharing a similar ethnic heritage. After Russia came to the defence of Serbia, Germany pledged its support to Austria-Hungary in the form of a 'blank check', meaning Germany was offering Austria-Hungary its unlimited support. This act by Germany caused an alliance between Russia and France to take effect and both France and Britain were pulled into the conflict in support of Russia. Italy was then also pulled into the conflict but on the side of the Triple Entente and fought extensively against the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the Alp Mountains. Italy didn't enter the fighting until a year after World War I began, but ultimately entered on the side of the Triple Entente after a period of secret negotiations. What had begun as a conflict between Austria-Hungary and Serbia had expanded to include all of the major powers in Europe. Ultimately, the alliance systems that existed before the start of World War I obligated countries to go to war in defence of their allies. This obligation is how countries such as Britain, France, Germany, and Italy were pulled into the conflict. 3. Imperialism: it occurred in the 1800’s and early 1900’s before World War I erupted in 1914. Imperialism is understood as a process in which a country overtakes another country or region’s political, economic, or social life. Imperialism was carried out by the powerful European nations against the rest of world in the decades before World War I began. Even Italy had its colonies, but Italians don't like to talk about it. For instance, Britain and France were the two Europeans nations that had control over the largest regions of Africa and Germany was angry that it lacked the colonies in Africa that both Britain and France had and resented their general role in Africa. 4. Nationalism: Nationalism is best defined as a group of people which identify with each other and display a strong sense of loyalty towards their nation or country. Nationalism spreads when people share similar beliefs, values, ethnic heritage, relationship to land, language, culture, and customs. For example, both Germany and Italy unified from many separated kingdom states into unified nation-states in the late 1800s. These separate kingdoms unified as the people in those regions began to identify with each other and as nationalism swept across the people of Europe. Short-term reasons: assassination of Franz Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The controversy about the First World War was at the centre of the discussion of some scholars even today. The Human Cost in WWI‣ The human cost in World War I was enormous. More than 9 million soldiers and an estimated 12 million civilians died in the four-year-long conflict, which also left 21 million military men wounded. Convincing People of the Necessity of a War‣ The government used to convince people to support the cause of the war and to fight in it with posters and pictures. Posters were everywhere, and whoever did not decide to join war was considered a coward. Today, our world is constructed around propaganda, which is made with ads, social medias, and similar tools. Why was propaganda so important during WWI? What the public thought about the war really mattered. The government needed to recruit lots of soldiers and wanted people to support them. Posters were printed that made the army look exciting. Other posters told men it was their duty to join, that they would feel proud if they did and guilty or embarrassed if they didn't join. Posters brought people with different jobs and backgrounds together. As well as soldiers, the posters show blacksmiths, munitions workers, gentlemen, and nurses. Dramatic depictions of events were used to motivate people to join the army. Posters tried to persuade men to join friends and family who had already volunteered by making them feel like they were missing out. Left: famous poster on which was used the face of Lord Kitchener to persuade men to join the army. Kitchener died when his ship hit a German mine. Right: Germany is depicted as a ‘mad brute’ which is taking away the USA’s freedom. The Russian government also wanted to recruit women. ‣ Recruitment and Conscription The government saw no alternative but to increase numbers by conscription – compulsory active service. The Parliament was deeply fractured on this matter, but it recognized that because of the imminent collapse of the morale of the French army, immediate action was essential. Thus, in January 1916 the Military Service Act was passed. This imposed conscription on all single men aged between 18 and 41, but exempted  Social changes: women were required to take on many of the traditional male roles. This was a key fact about women’s independence and their position in society. They passed from the Angel in the House in the Victorian Age to Productive Women. An Introduction to Poetry In a poem the words should be as pleasing to the ear as the meaning is to the mind – Marianne Moore. ‣ What is a Poem?  Webster says a poem is a metrical composition; a composition in verse written in certain measures, whether in blank verse or in rhyme, and characterized by imagination and poetic diction  Some poems are very formal, and others are more playful. Some are published in beautiful books, and others are written on sidewalks.  The thing that makes all poems alike is that each expresses the writer’s imagination and feelings in a creative way. The Human Brain‣  Divided in 2 parts  Each half has its own function — Left brain: logic reality — Right brain: creativity emotions But, when we study poetry, we need both sides. For the left brain: recognizing certain devices used within a poem will give the left brain something to concentrate on. ‣ The Rhyme The repetition of sounds at the ends of words (e.g.: hat, cat, brat, fat, mat, sat). A rhyme consists in the repetition of syllables, typically at the end of a verse line. Rhymed words conventionally share all sounds following the word's last stressed syllable. The rhyme is one of the first poetic devices that we become familiar with, but it can be a tricky poetic device to work with. Matching content to a rhyming pattern takes a lot of skill. The‣ Rhythm (Beat) When reading a poem out loud, you may notice a sort of sing-song quality to it, just like in nursery rhymes. This is accomplished by the use of rhythm. Rhythm can be described as the beat and pace of a poem. The rhythmic beat is created by the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line or verse. In modern poetry, line breaks, repetition and even spaces for silence can help to create rhythm. One of the most frequently used patterns of metre is iambic pentameter and it is very common in William Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets. An iamb is a metrical foot that is made up of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one: da-DUM. Different rhythmic patterns are created by choosing where the emphasis (stress) falls in the line. These patterns all have names:   An iamb: unstressed / stressed – da-DUM   A trochee: stressed / unstressed – DUM-da   A spondee: stressed / stressed – DUM-DUM   An anapaest: unstressed / unstressed / stressed – da-da-DUM   A dactyl: stressed / unstressed / unstressed – DUM-da-da  Poets arrange their words in such a way that they create those rhythmical patterns. The Meter‣ In poetry, this pattern of the stressed and unstressed parts of words is called the metre, which is the number and type of rhythmic beats in a line of poetry. The metre in a line of poetry is identified through the stressed and unstressed pattern of words. Poetic rhythms are measured in metrical feet.  A metrical foot usually has one stressed syllable and one or two unstressed syllables. Different poets use the pattern of the metre to create different effects.  The type of meter is determined by the number of feet in a line:  Dimeter: contains two metrical feet   Trimeter: contains three metrical feet   Tetrameter: contains four metrical feet   Pentameter: contains five metrical feet   Hexameter: contains six metrical feet Alliteration‣ The repetition of the initial letter or sound in two or more words in a line. It is something created on purpose. To the lay person, these are called tongue twisters. Onomatopoeia‣ Words that spell out sounds; words that sound like what they mean: growl, hiss, pop, boom, crack, ptthhhbbb. Repetition‣ Using the same key word or phrase throughout a poem. Refrain‣ The repetition of one or more phrases or lines at the end of a stanza. Lezione 6, 21.10.2022 Visione del film 1917. Lezione 7, 03.11.2022 As swimmers into cleanness leaping ‘Peace’, in The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke. The Golden Summer 1914 The Strange Death of Liberal England by George Dangerfield. ‘The war, far from shaking the foundations of English society, actually helped to preserve the status quo by diverting the energies of a social revolution being threatened by the workers’ and women’s movements, not to speak of the steadily escalating menace in Ireland.’ Georgian Liberalism A frame of reference for what was a tissue and at stake in August 1914, and an account of the fate its representative poetry met in the trenches may begin to focus the difference the war made in relevant aspects of English national life. The Georgian movement was a poetic movement during which many anthologies where published, but it was as well a frame of reference, even though it has been forgotten and obscured because of the diffusion of the Modernist movement. The Soldier By Rupert Brooke If I should die, think only this of me:       That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be       In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,       Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam; A body of England’s, breathing English air,       Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. And think, this heart, all evil shed away,       A pulse in the eternal mind, no less             Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;       And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,             In hearts at peace, under an English heaven. (1914) In this sonnet, the words ‘England’, ‘English’ etc. are quite frequent (they recur six times) because this is a patriotic poem. This is an example of an exasperation of Georgian’s nationalism. The concept of war is here idealised. A Private By Edward Thomas This ploughman dead in battle slept out of doors Many a frosty night, and merrily Answered staid drinkers, good bedmen, and all bores: 'At Mrs Greenland's Hawthorn Bush,' said he, 'I slept.' None knew which bush. Above the town, Beyond 'The Drover', a hundred spot the down In Wiltshire. And where now at last he sleeps More sound in France—that, too, he secret keeps. Attempt to establish a continuity between his character’s English background and his distant death. Thomas’ poems differ from Brooke’s because of their landscape: in fact, each of his poems is a literary landscape. Englishness: the quality of being English or having characteristics regarded as typically English. (OED) The concept of Englishness has become of relevance for scholars in the last 25 years, because it concerns the UK’s integrity. It is now a term which is again brought up in the context of Brexit. Englishness is also about race and skin colour, about the English language and the bourgeois’ values. The idea that Englishness is a construct is also supported by Silvia Mergenthal, who explains that it does not reflect a pre-established […] SLIDES Wilfred Owen’s poems are characterised by such a realism that resembles a report: in fact, Owen was a reporter. This poem is a testimony of Owen’s own war experience. He refers directly to the readers: ‘my friend’. - The Government controlled the war language in literature, but not for the entire duration of the war (language cannot be easily controlled or modified) - The language was modulated to be addressed to the audience under those circumstances. Truth untold: una perifrasi per dire ‘bugia’. The Poetry of Isaac Rosenberg ‘On Receiving News of the War’ Snow is a strange white word. No ice or frost Has asked of bud or bird For Winter’s cost. Yet ice and frost and snow From earth to sky This Summer land doth know. No man knows why. In all men’s hearts it is. Some spirit old Hath turned with malign kiss Our lives to mould. Red fangs have torn His face. God’s blood is shed. He mourns from His lone place His children dead. O! ancient crimson curse! Corrode, consume. Give back this universe Its pristine bloom. ‘August 1914’ […] Iron are our lives Molten right through our youth. A burnt space through ripe fields, A fair mouth's broken tooth. Isaac Rosenberg was a Jew painter who looked at war through a frame of reference that appeared to be completely indifferent to nationalist discourses. As a Jew, he understood that his experience should have been in historical and prophetic books. As a painter, he uses in his poetry ‘verbal colours’. Even later, his language is characterised by a rationalistic use of grammar. Passage from the Victorian Era to the next. The moral code for the military action has been broken. Lezione 8, 04.11.2022 Space and Poetry L’époque actuelle serait peut-être l’époque de l’espace. – Foucault From a physical point of view, space and place are considered to be the same thing: space is linked to something uncertain, because it indicates something without delimited boundaries; on the contrary, place is delimited and influenced by our experience. What has space to do with poetry? For instance, the sheet on which a poem is written is a place in which the words are distributed in a certain way. Today we are going to understand the poems’ space and the poems as a space. Seamus Heaney is an Irish poet who is very place-bound, that is, linked to a place. To Heaney, a place is not a distraction: it’s pure concentration, a focus. And he quite considers poetry as a space itself. Also, he believes that the conscious and the unconscious coexist in literary representations, in poetry and literature (Karla non condivide sull’inconscio). Ekphrasis: The word comes from the Greek ἐκ ek and φράσις phrásis, 'out' and 'speak' respectively, and the verb ἐκφράζειν ekphrázein, 'to proclaim or call an inanimate object by name'. → intersemiotic translation, that is, the voicing of the poem. Mapping Space Poem as:  Visual space  Speaking voice  Relationship between the reader/performer/viewer and the poet According to Sass, by reading a poem and thus voicing it, we enter in its ‘space-of-action’. However, how do we link this spatial and effective idea of lyric space and experience to affective mapping as a viable methodology for poetics?  From space to psychoanalysis.  The process of trauma and recovery through the writing experience finds a parallel in the ‘talking cure’ (largely employed to cure women’s hysteria) of psychoanalysis.  Julia Kristeva’s La Révolution du Langage Poétique.  Peter Sacks.  Johan Ramazani. But what has this psychoanalytically indebted approach to literature to do with ideas of space in poetry?  Readings as the artistic expression of a particularly traumatic period in the writer’s life.  Voices of the poem as strange places.  Helen Vendler writes, ‘the voices in lyric are represented not by characters, as in a novel or drama, but by changing registers of diction, contrastive rhythms, and varieties of tone [...]. The ‘plot’ of a lyric represents that of a sonata’. What Vendler is saying is that the specific way we voice the poem (which is influenced by our diction, the rhythm we follow) is our aesthetic signature and it creates the ‘plot’ of the poem. Key themes: Psychoanalysis. Voicing a trauma (e.g., war poets). Lyric Voice  Lyric voice becomes something which is at once embodied and disembodied, and which is, in both cases, inherently spatial.  The 'I' (vocal utterance) and 'eye' (vocalic landscape) of enunciation are, in the lyric poem, inextricably linked, and, in voicing the lyric poem it is with this enunciating I/eye that we identify.  Voice as the point at which critics of the lyric poem both converge and diverge in their ideas about the form.  Voice as the vehicle by which we identify with and differentiate between lyrics, and by which the 'apparently phenomenal world' of the lyric poem is produced. Culler, ‘Changes in the Study of Lyric’, Lyric Poetry, 50. The I/eye is both ours and not ours: every single one of us can read a poem and give their own interpretation. Thus, voicing is not an act of appropriation, but a process of primary identification: the way I read a poem is a manifestation of how I identify in relation to it. It’s the affective experience of poetic voicing that gives meaning to it. Voicing the Poem  Voicing the poem establishes, at the initial stage of the reading process, the inherently spatial nature of the lyric poem.  Steve Connor: ‘The voice is not merely orientated in space; it provides the dynamic grammar of orientation [...]. When I speak, my voice shows me up as a being with a perspective, for whom orientation has significance [...]. A voice also establishes me as an inside capable of recognising and being recognised by an outside. My voice comes from the inside of a body and radiates through a space which is exterior to and extends beyond that body. In moving from an interior to an exterior, and therefore marking out the relations of interior and exterior, a voice also announces and verifies the cooperation of bodies and the environments in which they have their being. The voice goes out into space, but also always, in its calling for a hearing, or the necessity of being heard, opens a space for itself /to go out into, resound in, and return from. Even the unspoken voice clears an internal space equivalent to the actual differentiation of positions in space necessary to the speaker or hearer.’ The internal voice when we read a poem too conveys a meaning, even if it’s, by definition, unexpressed. Lezione 9, 08.11.2022 World War I Poetry ‘At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them.’ (Binyon 15-16) Popularity  Jon McCrae’s poem In Flanders Fields became the inspiration for the British Legion’s annual poppy campaign (the Royals wear a poppy pin)  Rupert Brooke’s The Soldier, one of the best-known poems in English – choice of the Prime Minister Tony Blair for inclusion in The Big Book of Little Poems  Came at a great time of great social, political, and cultural changes  Birth of movements in the arts (Modernism)  ??? SLIDES World War I was the catalyst for more major military technological innovations than any other war in history.  Aircrafts and air warfare  Submarines  Tanks  Poison gas  Machine gun  Artillery and high explosives  Electronic communications (field telephones) During the war, the term ‘soldier-poet’ was ‘almost as familiar as a ration card’ (Edmund Blunden). Many soldiers tried to express their feelings and hardship through poetry. Also, in the television series Blackadder Goes Forth (1989), Lord Flasheart complains: ‘I’m sick of this damn war – the blood, the noise, the endless poetry.’ Popularity of Poetry Then  Popular in ways it’s hard to appreciate today, published even in newspapers  Newspapers regularly printed new poems and volumes of verses also did well  In 1914 a Georgian Poetry anthology Trench Warfare  The middle part of the war, 1916 and 1917, was dominated by continued trench warfare in both the earth and sea.  Soldiers fought from dug-in positions, striking at each other with machine guns, heavy artillery, and chemical weapons. Though soldiers died by the millions in brutal conditions, neither side had any substantive success or gained any advantage.  Threat of illness from decomposing bodies and diseases bred in mud Moreover, the War was dehumanizing. It brought home how quickly and easily mankind could be reduced to a state lower than animals. Pat Barker, in her novel Regeneration (1992), reflects on the War's terrible reversal of expectations: ‘The Great Adventure. They'd been mobilized into holes in the ground so constricted they could hardly move. And the Great Adventure (the real life equivalent of all the adventure stories they'd devoured as boys) consisted of crouching in a dugout, waiting to be killed. The war that had promised so much in the way of 'manly' activity had actually delivered 'feminine' passivity, and on a scale that their mothers and sisters had scarcely known.’ Themes of WW1 Poetry  Patriotism  Heroism  War and Nature  Visions and Dreams Rupert Brooke • Brooke's entire reputation as a war poet rests on only 5 ‘war sonnets.’ seven days before the armistice. Shell Shock (or PTSD) – The Symptoms • Hysteria and anxiety • Paralysis • Limping and muscle contractions • Blindness and deafness • Nightmares and insomnia • Heart palpitations • Depression • Dizziness and disorientation • Loss of appetite The Road to Recovery • Shell shock victims found themselves at the mercy of the armed forces' medical officers. • Treatment was often harsh and included: - solitary confinement - disciplinary treatment - electric shock treatment - shaming and physical re-education - emotional deprivation Analysis ‣ Title: ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ was a motto used for propagandistic aims at the very beginning of WWI. In this case, Owen uses this motto ironically. The title is ironic: it is intended to mean the opposite of the literal. The aim is to shock the audience. The use of Latin reflects the classical education of the wealthier classes at the time and indicates that the audience Owen is writing for are well-educated Brits who support the war in Europe. Lezione 10, 10.11.2022 • Stanza 3 The poet is having flashbacks of his past experiences. These two lines recall the experience of the gas attack, the images of which live rent- free in his mind. • Stanza 4, lines 1-4 Here, Owen is revisiting the thoughts he expressed throughout the poem. The tone is ironic: he is directly addressing the reader, aware that he or she is not going to fully understand the horror of the war he’s witnessed. The ‘white eyes’ are the unnatural eyes of the devastated soldiers. • Stanza 4, lines 5-12 ‘Dulce et decorum est // Pro patria mori’ is a Horace’s quote (Horace, Odes 3.2) Charlotte Mew London, 15th November 1869 Charlotte Mary Mew was born in a family of seven children. However, when she was still a child, three of her siblings died and one of her brothers and a sister were hospitalised for dementia praecox (schizophrenia). She was left with her sister Anne and they both decided to not have any children because of their tragic family story, but, because of this, they were later considered mentally ill. She published her very first work when she was in her mid-twenties. Although today she is best remembered for her poetry, she also wrote a number of short stories, including this first published work titled Passed, which appeared in the new journal Yellow Book, in 1894. Inspired by Mew's volunteer social work, the story is narrated by a woman who, while visiting a church, happens upon an unsightly scene. A desperate sex worker leads her into a room where another woman, the sex worker’s sister, lies dead. The narrator tries to comfort the grieving woman for a while until fear causes her to flee back to the security of her own home. Trying hard to forget the awful experience, the narrator is unexpectedly confronted by it again when she sees the same woman on the street wearing a red dress and accompanied by a man. The moment causes the narrator to break down because she can no longer turn a blind eye to the social ills all around her. [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/charlotte-mew] Charlotte Mew was a closeted homosexual, and her repressed sexuality brought her to alienation. Thus, she was labelled as a New Woman because of her quirks. Some of them were:  Smoking  Frequent swearing  Mannish dresses Historical context: 1533, Buggery Act. 1967, Sexual Offences Act. Mew never explicitly talked about her sexuality in her works, but many recurrent themes (such as love and isolation) show the pain she felt by hiding her sexual identity. Being a lesbian during the Victorian Era, Charlotte Mew stood out very much like a sore thumb: in that period, the woman had to be like an angel in the house, but she was neither married nor interested in men. 1898: Frederick Mew, Charlotte’s father, dies. Charlotte, her sister Anne and their mother fall in a financial strait. Thus, the family had to move in a rented home, and they sublet a part of it in order to make ends meet. 1923: Anna Kendall Mew dies. wild sweet blood refers to a part of a whole (synecdoche) - Hyperbole, Oxymoron, Synecdoche, Metonymy ‣ Structure and Figures of Speech (ll. 6-10) ‘We shall build the Cenotaph: Victory, winged, with Peace, winged too, at the column's head. And over the stairway, at the foot—oh! here, leave desolate, passionate hands to spread Violets, roses, and laurel with the small sweet twinkling country things Speaking so wistfully of other Springs From the little gardens of little places where son or sweetheart was born and bred’ Metaphor in absentia: Springs → happiness which won’t come back because of the war. - Allegory, Personification, Synecdoche, Enumeration of Symbols, Synaesthesia, Repetition, Metaphor in absentia. « L’installation de la subjectivité dans le langage crée, dans le langage et […] hors du langage aussi bien, la catégorie de la personne. » (E. Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale) ‣ Structure and Figures of Speech (ll. 11-16) In splendid sleep, with a thousand brothers          To lovers—to mothers          Here, too, lies he*: Under the purple, the green, the red, It is all young life: it must break some women's hearts to see Such a brave, gay coverlet to such a bed! It is all young life (Paradox). The young lives are now dead: reference to the eternal youth of the souls of the soldiers who died. *He is surely the Unknown Soldier; after WWI, some empty tombs were built, as the Cenotaph itself, in order to memorialise dead soldiers, whose identities were not known. - Metaphor in absentia - Metonymical Enumeration - Paradox Multi-syllabic scheme: from 4 to 23 syllables. Artistic language → licenza poetica Second part of the poem: ll. 19-25 → The Alien Word, Lotman ‣ Structure and Figures of Speech (ll. 17-25) Only, when all is done and said, God is not mocked and neither are the dead. For this will stand in our Market-place—          Who'll sell, who'll buy           (Will you or I Lie each to each with the better grace)? While looking into every busy whore's and huckster's face As they drive their bargains, is the Face Of God: and some young, piteous, murdered face. - Alliteration - Repetition - Climax - Epiphora “The act of voicing the lyric poem involves a suspension of self on the part of the reader and a subsequent identification with and ventriloquism of the lyric voice” H.H. Yeung, Affective Mapping in Lyric Poetry Lezione 11, 11.11.2022 Websites – Digital Humanities • www.archive.org • www.eighteenthcenturypoetry.org • www.shelleygodwinarchive.org • www.gutenberg.org • www.firstfolio.bodleian.ox.ac.uk Lezione 12, 15.11.2022 New word: Eterotopia Transgression, Taboo, Spatiality and Experience Both temporarily and geographically the phenomena of taboo and transgressions, can be considered always present. If the ubiquity of taboos and their influence on social structure is generally accepted when talking about the past. Reference to the recent debates on political correctness and censorship  Terrorist attacks of 9/11  The Holocaust  Sex  Menstrual Flux  Victorian to Modernism – Feminist poetry  Modernism – War Poetry  Post-Modernism – Queer Poetry TABOO OED Quick reference: • A social or religious custom prohibiting or restricting a particular practice or forbidding association with a particular person, place or thing. Other scholars talked about taboos: • The oldest unwritten code of humanity • The impression given by most anthropologists is that the incest taboo is an even more important sign of our humanity than the development of language, the use of tools, or the obligation we feel to care for the old and the infirm. • Space studies • Queer studies • Feminist studies Limits and borders exist in all shapes of our lives. From a literary point of view, there is the important fact that the readers of border texts, by switching from one referential code to another, are both ‘self’ and ‘other’. The First Decades of the 20th Century In the first years of the 20th century, there is a way of crossing new borders from a poetic point of view, poets were seen as transgressors. • A period of extraordinary originality and vitality in poetry • A variety of trends and currents expressed the nature of modern experience • The Georgian poets • The war poets • Imagist poets • Symbolist poets. Copiare foto slide per ogni categoria The idea of transgression should be employed to spatial relation. We communicate by crossing barriers: leaving our space or making another’s space our own. Transmission of information is therefore always simultaneously and appropriation (or assimilation) of it. But there is always a gap between our own intentions and the words which are someone else’s words – we speak to articulate them. The gap may be greater or smaller, however, depending on the ‘fit’ between what we believe and what we are saying. SPACE: Occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities. (Certeau 1984) BEFORE CERTEAU > FOUCAULT • Foucault’s geography ’as a “truly” postmodern human geography’ taking seriously of space, place and geography as sources of fragmentation. Foucault’s work stressed the attention on some space geography from a literary point of view and today we think about space according to him. • Lee on the blurring of boundaries between war and domesticity • Bailey and Shabazz’s themed issue on ‘Gender and sexual geographies of blackness’ • Actual resistance is not inevitable and might be relatively scarce • Alternatives in the nexus of power relations and ‘power-geometries’ Eterotopia. M. Field, Long Ago: Preface When, more than a year ago, I wrote to a literary friend of my attempt to express in English verse the passionate pleasure Dr Wharton's book had brought to me, he replied: ‘That is a delightfully audacious thought-the extension of Sappho's fragments into lyrics. I can scarcely conceive anything more audacious.’ In simple truth all worship that is not idolatry must be audacious; for it involves the blissful apprehension of an ideal; it means the very phrase of Sappho-Devoutly as the fiery-bosomed Greek turned in her anguish to Aphrodite, praying her to accomplish her heart's desire, I have turned to the one woman who has dared to speak unfalteringly of the fearful mastery of love, and again and again the dumb prayer has risen from my heart– (Preface) Sappho serves as a dominant model of Greek poetry, but it’s also important from the ‘cultural authority’ point of view: by following her poetry, her style and her philosophy, they somehow gained some cultural authority which Sappho had at the time and which they couldn’t have themselves as lesbians and women poets. The inspiration for this work comes from the Greek world. https://michaelfield.dickinson.edu/longago [Digital version] This collection was considered to be Sapphic lyrics. Micheal Field also intended to embody an aesthetic ideal. [Walter Peter]. This Fieldan project is fully engraved in paratextual features. Left: Long Ago’s cover. Right: Long Ago’s frontispiece, depicting a Greek woman. The title echoes a fragment that appears in its original form in the interstice between the cover and the preface. [vedere slides] Each Fieldan poem grows out of Sappho’s fragment and responds to them in a well-embedded dialogue. Sappho's Greek appears to constitute an ambiguous form of immanent otherness: it inheres deep-rooted in the textual self of Long Ago, and yet transcends it as a fugitive other that cannot be reduced to a determinate facticity. Moreover, the lyrics are written to look as if it was Sappho herself to write them: thus, the Greek culture completely permeates this Fieldan work. Dialogic Identity and the Liberated Space  A long conversation that merges their ‘voices and consciousnesses’ and creates ‘a genuine polyphony’ (Bakhtin 1984: 6) → in modern terms, we could say it’s about coming out.  The dialogism of Long Ago does not involve the plurality of more voices: Sappho and Michael Field are not strictly independent of one another, thus  Dialecting between co-dependence and autonomy ‘Sappho speaks anew and renews her expression in the Fieldan poems, which are in turn founded upon the Sapphic word’. A scholar named Reynolds stated: In choosing Sappho, the Fields opt for a particular model of authority: they form a bond of filiation with the most ancient poetess, authorise themselves by directly citing her originals, and engage with her special lyrical corpus, which is not a primal locus of finished words hard to emulate, but a liberated and liberating “space for filling in the gaps, joining up the dots, making something out of nothing” (Reynolds 2001: 2). Metaxological Aesthetic: ‘Neither Imitation nor Self-Creation’ The Metaxological: From Greek ‘metaxu’, meaning ‘between’: Metaxu is the Greek word for ‘between’, whereas logos can mean ‘an accounting’, or ‘reasoning’, or ‘wording’. A metaxological philosophy is concerned with a logos of the metaxu, or a ‘wording of the between’. Such a philosophy is concerned with life itself as a between-space, a metaxu, and with the fact that this between is an articulated middle or intermedium. (Desmond 2018, 120) To round off: I am talking about a space opening up in which a diversity of articulations becomes possible. These articulations can put different stresses on what is showing itself in the between. There might be a stress on sacred significance with religion, an artistic stress in a more aesthetic orientation, or a stress on precisions of thought in a philosophical consideration. But, without the opening of this space there is no wording of significance between humans and each other, and indeed between humans and the ethos of ‘being wherein we wake up to ourselves and the world other to us. This opening is an ultimate between space. To consider drama as metaxological is not to conflate it with philosophy. Rather it offers a powerful expression of human being as metaxological, and in an aesthetic form that itself is a metaxological, and thus as open to what is other to itself. W. Desmond, The Gift of Beauty and the Passion of Being (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018) William Desmond: metaxological aesthetic. ↓ Dualism between imitation and creation, ‘two fundamental ideas in the tradition of reflection on art’ (Desmond 2012: 152) As a type of imitation: Its textual complexity rejects any presumption against imitation as a debased form, a second-rate artefact, and a mere parasitic duplication of ‘an original already complete in itself’ (152). The Fields become Sappho, but they remained themselves: thus, their identity is double (a creative double). ‘Capacity to be other to itself’.