LETTERATURA INGLESE - PROGRAMMA QUINTO ANNO DI LICEO (SINTESI AUTORI), Schemi e mappe concettuali di Inglese

Scarica LETTERATURA INGLESE - PROGRAMMA QUINTO ANNO DI LICEO (SINTESI AUTORI) e più Schemi e mappe concettuali in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! Victorian Age 1837 – 1901: Queen Victoria’s reign, which lasted 63 years (one of the longest reigns in the history of the British monarchy). →Liberal Party (Gladstone) and Conservative Party (Disraeli). COLONIAL EMPIRE = the Victorians believed it was their duty to export their language and cultural supremacy. Social reforms (Britain became the workshop of the world).  Reform Bill (1832): the property owner class is now forced to share power with the male middle class.  Reform Bill (1867): suffrage is now extended to workers in towns (it was followed by the 1884 Reform Bill, which extended the right to vote to workers in mines and agricultural workers).  Education Act (1870): elementary education becomes compulsory.  Trade Union Act (1875): trade unions are given full legality. PROBLEMS: great urban poverty (agricultural depression), social injustice, urban problems, contrast between the wealthy and the poor, inequality between men and women. NOTE: time of industrial prosperity whose culmination was the Great Exhibition of 1851. → Contrast between religious faith and the triumph of science (Darwin’s The Origin of Species, 1859). ≠ Triumph of fiction: the novel became the leading genre of the age. EARLY VICTORIAN AGE Optimism and faith in progress. →Birth of Evangelicalism and Utilitarism → Victorian compromise, or the coexistence of dark sides and optimistic faith in progress. Literary production: identification between writers and the society the represent (it reflects the ambiguity of the age). LATE VICTORIAN AGE Growing depression and lack of optimism (which lead to an anti-Victorian reaction). Literary production: criticism towards the Victorian compromise. EVANGELICALISM = religious movement, which was committed to social reform and human welfare, deeply moralistic and puritanical, and embodied the moral code of the middle class. It derived from Methodism; a religious movement founded by John Weasley, and was brought to its highest point by William Wilberforce, who achieved in 1807 the Slave Trade Act. UTILITARIANISM = ideology of the middle class which stated that only what is useful is good, it was inspired by the desire to secure the maximum happiness to the greatest possible number, founded by Jeremy Bentham, which was highly criticized by Dickens. Criticized for neglecting emotions, feelings, and spiritual fulfilment, and promoting a world of arid, useful facts. SOCIAL DARWINISM = theory which affirmed that the life of humans and society was a struggle for existence ruled by survival of the fittest, proposed by the philosopher and scientist Herbert Spencer. Poverty and inequality were natural. • Women still didn’t have the right to vote (the Suffragette movement), birth of the first feminist movements. IMPERIALISTIC WARS [THE CRIMEAN WAR (1854 – 1856)] Britain and France allied with the Turks to halt Russian advance towards Constantinople, with the fear that Russia might control the Dardanelles. [THE INDIAN MUTINY (1857)] A rebellion in which the native soldiers of the East India Company rebelled against the British commanders. [THE OPIUM WARS (1840)] China’s attempt to suppress the Opium trade to India. China had to cede Hong Kong and Shanghai. [THE BOER WAR (1899 – 1902)] War with the South African provinces of Orange and the Transvaal, which had been colonized in the 17th century but the Dutch Boers. THE VICTORIAN NOVEL  Increase in the number of people who were able to read;  Increase in the number of people who could afford books;  People could borrow books from circulating libraries;  Readers searched for entertaining and realistic plots;  Novels were portable and could be read anywhere;  Novels were published as instalments in newspapers. R.L. Stevenson [THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1886)] The protagonist is a man with two identities: Dr. Jekyll, a doctor and the rational and moral character, and Mr. Hyde, dominated by instincts and sensuality, a depraved, irrational, evil character which commits ferocious crimes. The story ends with Hyde’s suicide.  The story is told from multiple perspectives, which has the effect of misleading the reader who is lost in horror, and many of the elements of the story belong to the genre of detective fiction, unsolved crimes, scattered clues, mystery, and suspense. THEMES: it is a novel about the dangers of scientific and technological progress, the divided self (Dr. Jekyll is a respectable man, Mr. Hyde is Jekyll’s other self), pessimism and anxiety vs progress and civilization. NOTE: the novel is set in London, which contributes to add horror thanks to fog, dark corners, and grimy alleys. OTHER WORK TREASURE ISLAND (1883): is considered a “boy’s novel”, a tale of historical adventure. Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh on 13 November 1850, and had poor health as a child. In 1867 he started to study at Edinburgh University and took a degree in law. He travelled across Europe for four years and met Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne, and they got married in 1880. They returned to Britain in 1881. After his father’s death in 1887, he went to the States, and travelled to the Hawaiian and Samoan islands, where he adopted the name Tusitala (storyteller in the Samoan language). Troubled by his poor health and depression, he died on 3 December 1894. 1850 - 1894 Thomas Hardy [TESS OF THE D’UBERVILLES (1891)] the story recounts the tragic life of young Tess, who becomes the victim of the men she meets. Pessimistic view of life, partly derived from Determinism → destiny is controlled by a blind, indifferent, and inexplicable force, the Fate of Circumstances. → adverse events that have nothing to do with her: Victorian class division and a series of tragic coincidences. • STYLE: realist writing in the style of the traditional 19th century novel, 3rd person omniscient narrator, in the dialogues the register corresponds to a precise reproduction of the Dorset dialect. Use of symbolism: Tess’ letter slipped under the carpet is the symbol of how chance contributes to tragedy, and Stonehenge alludes to her role as the innocent sacrificial victim to the Gods. Naturalism: it derived from the idea that the world could be understood in scientific terms, without referring to religion, influenced by Darwin and Determinism, human beings are controlled by two forces beyond their control: biology and environment. Thomas Hardy was born in Dorset, on 2nd June 1840, in a little village near Dorchester, the first of the four children of Thomas Hardy senior, a builder and stonemason. He spent his childhood exploring the countryside and developed knowledge of its flora and fauna. He moved to London to collaborate with an architect, studied art, frequented the theatre, and began to write prose and poetry. His first novel appeared in 1871 and became a full-time writer in 1878, building his new home in Dorchester in 1885. He was appointed President of the Society of Authors in 1909, was granted the Order of Merit by King George V in 1910 and received an honorary degree and fellowship from Cambridge University. He died on 11 January 1928. 1840 - 1928 Oscar Wilde [THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (1890)] Dorian Gray is a rich, beautiful young man who has his portrait painted by Basil Hallward. He decides to sacrifice his soul if he can maintain his youth and beauty, while the portrait itself will bear all the signs of time. • It overtly proclaimed beauty as the unique purpose of art and life, and discarded bourgeois morality with contempt. Dorian’s double life is only a sign of his hypocrisy, he uses his innocent appearance to be accepted in society and to fulfil his basest desires without paying the consequences. STYLE: it combines the supernatural elements of the Gothic novel (Dorian’s mysterious portrait) with French decadent fiction, obtrusive 3rd person narrator, dialogue to reveal his charaters’ personalities. [THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ERNEST (1895)] Jack Worthing is a wealthy and idle young man who leads a double life. He lives in the Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was born on 16 October 1854 in Dublin, Ireland, the son of a wealthy famous doctor, Sir William Wilde. He was immediately recognized as a brilliant student and after his school years in Enniskillen he went on to study at Trinity College, Dublin. In 1874 he won a scholarship to continue his studies at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he graduated. He published his first collection in 1881 and he created himself a name as a leading figure in the aesthetic movement. At his greatest success and popularity in London, he became involved in a legal case that would lead to his ruin, since he had an affair with the young Lord Alfred Douglas, whose father Lord Queensberry accused him of homosexuality. The libel case against Queensberry was rejected, but Wilde was put on trial for gross indecency and sentenced to two-year imprisonment and hard labour in Reading Gaol. He came out of prison in 1896 and died on 30 November 1900. 1854 - 1900 H. Melville [MOBY DICK (1851)] The young Ishmael, a sailor, testifies the fall and death of Captain Ahab and his ship, the Pequod, after seeing him be so obsessed with killing the legendary great white whale, Moby Dick, despite the mad prophet Gabriel’s warning. Ishmael is rescued by another ship, the Rachel, after everyone is killed.  Sources and influences from wide reading: Shakespeare (Amlet, King Lear, Machbeth), John Milton (Paradise Lost), 19th century whaling narrative (“Natural history of the Sperm Whale” by Thomas Beale and “Etching of a Whaling Cruise” by Ross Browne). Variety of styles: language of sailors, biblical prophecy, soliloquies, various tales, and a dissertation on whales. Philosophical allegory of life and death, discussion of fate, economic expansion, moral values, recognizable political figures of the day. NOTE: the novel is realistic and symbolic at the same time. -The novel opens with Ishmael as 1st person narrator, but there are chapters where the narrative shifts to 3rd person, or dialogue. Ahab’s quest = the symbol of the epic conflict between man and the inscrutable forces of the universe. THE BIBLE as source of references and the theme of man’s defiance, especially the BOOK OF JONAH. The whale as a symbol of nature → Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  Critics also compared Ahab’s quest to Ulysses and Homer. Herman Melville was born in New York on 1 August 1819. His father died in 1832 after his business collapsed. He sailed on a ship to Liverpool as a dockland in 1839 and went to work on a whaler. He then joined the US Navy and authored books based on his experience. In 1851 he wrote his masterpiece, Moby Dick, and died on 28 September 1891. 1819 - 1891 Walt Whitman He was one of the first poets to provide America with a voice.  The scope of his work was immense as he dealt with the self, the concept of individuality, with society, democracy and his boundless admiration for his own land, the United States of America. • Everyday life is fit subject for poetry: that’s why he turned his back on the traditional poetic forms in favor of the free verse and made free use of slang to create something new. Walter Whitman was born in West Hills, New York, on 31 May 1819. He became a journalist but was a man of strong opinions and held radical positions on different subjects. In 1848 he worked as an editor in New Orleans. In 1855 he published his first anthology, Leaves of Grass. With the start of the Civil War, he found himself in financial difficulties. He died on 26 March 1892. . 1819 - 1892 W. Churchill [THE SPEECH TO THE HOUSE OF COMMONS (13 MAY 1940)] His first speech as Prime Minister is commonly known as Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat, announcing formation of new administration. He warned Parliament and nation of the terrible sacrifices to be faced. It is one of the masterpieces of 20th century political rhetoric, with clear, direct, and highly effective words. • The title is not entirely original, but he borrowed it from the Italian 19th century revolutionary, Giuseppe Garibaldi, who once offered his troops nothing but “hunger, forced marches, battle and death.”  His genius lays in his ability to update a formula that had already been used in the past and to apply it to keep the motivation of the British people high in one of the most difficult periods in history. Winston Churchill was probably the most influential British politician of the 20th century. Born into an aristocratic family, he joined the British Army and had a distinguished military career in India, South Africa and in the First World War. He is best remembered for his role as British Prime Minister during the Second World War. His wartime speeches, which he delivered with consummate rhetorical skill, are a masterpiece of political inspiration and determination. He was a man of talents: thanks to his literary works was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953. He lost the elections after the war in 1945 but returned to power briefly in 1951. He died in 1965 and was granted a state funeral by Queen Elizabeth II. . 1819 - 1892 T. S. Eliot NOTE: after his conversion the main theme of his poetry became religion → faith to escape from nihilism. • Use of the stream of consciousness technique in poetry (no traditional structure of logic coherence, use of free verse, quotation, and complex language). [THE WASTE LAND (1922)] 20th century Europe is a dead land; modern life is meaningless (desperate search for truth and meaning). The quest (Holy Grail) and its myth (universal quest for salvation).  THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD: based on the juxtaposition between life and death, fertility, and sterility.  A GAME OF CHESS: focuses on sterility of modern life.  THE FIRE SERMON: centered on the theme of love.  DEATH BY WATER: explore further the theme of sterility.  WHAT THE THUNDER SAID: spiritual journey of humanity. • It is considered the masterpiece of Modernist poetry. Characterized by high experimentation in the length of lines and use of punctuation and fragmentation. OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE = a set of objects, images or events that represents the “formula” to produce an emotion. →Meanings are never clear, and boundaries are blurred, quotes from ancients’ classical works juxtaposed them to modernity. Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in Missouri in 1888 and studied at Harvard University. He moved to Paris in 1910, where he studied at the Sorbonne. He married in 1914 and started working at Lloyd’s Bank. He met Ezra Pound in London and became Anglican and a British citizen in 1927. In 1948 he received the Nobel Prize for literature. He died in 1965. 1888 - 1965 J. Conrad [HEART OF DARKNESS (1902)] Marlow, a sailor, tells the story of his journey to the Belgian Congo in search for Kurtz, who ran the Belgian company in the jungle. When Marlow reaches Kurtz, he realizes he is worshipped by the natives and has become a cannibal. Kurtz is too ill to return to Europe and dies. NOTE: fictional sailor and narrator, Marlow, as a framing device. His stories of maritime, colonialist adventure present philosophical depth in their reflections on truth and falsehood, and often represent a single human being confronted with the need to make important decisions after traditional values have collapsed. • Using multiple narrators and points of view reflected complexity of human experience and difficulty of judging men’s actions. The novel depicts the monstrosity and cruelty of the colonizers, but colonization has a double effect: it affects both the natives, who are enslaved and dehumanized by the colonizers, and the colonizers, whose souls are corrupted by vice and desire to subjugate others. EUROPEAN CIVILISATION: corrupted and hopelessly damned. EUROPEAN CITIES: sepulchral cities full of hollow men. Joseph Conrad was born in 1857, but his family was forced to leave the homeland because of his father’s political ideas. In 1874 he went to Marseille and entered the marine service. In 1878 he went to England, where worked as a sailor on British ships. In 1880 he became an officer of the British merchant navy. In 1890 he travelled to Africa and visited Congo. His nomadic life on the sea was his main source of inspiration for his books. After retiring from the navy in 1893, he became a full-time writer. As the quality of his work declined Conrad began to enjoy a life of comfort and companionship in a circle of friends including Henry James, H.G. Wells, Ford Madox and Bertrand Russell. He died in 1924. 1857 - 1924 The duality of the novel: DARKNESS (Africa and its unexplored regions, blackness of its inhabitants, obscurity of the heart of Western colonizers, mystery of the human soul) and WHITENESS (Europe and its apparent civility, the color of ivory). • A moral story, an anticolonial novel, an allegory of colonization and a parable of the Western history of dominion. STYLE: significant difference between the Truth and the reader, giving the idea that the Truth underpinning the whole story is itself surrounded with darkness and ambivalence (use of time shifts and breaks of the chronological order of narration). Virginia Woolf Her novels are like mental voyages focusing on the contrast between internal and external reality → no traditional plot or style. Poetic and lyrical style with frequent use of symbols: use of interior monologue to render the working of the minds of the characters, and the stream of consciousness technique. Frequent themes: “Moments of being” (the moment in which a certain spiritual truth is revealed), the passing of time (difference between subjective time, the one of the minds which goes backwards and forwards in time in one second, and objective time, the actual duration of chronological time), womanhood. NOTE: Time is symbolized by the Big Ben, whose constant chiming is heard by all the characters, as a unifying element among them. [MRS DALLOWAY (1925)] The story takes place on one day in one single place, London. Mrs. Dalloway is a middle-aged woman who is organizing a dinner party. The narration follows her as she wanders through London. Her male counterpart, the war veteran Mr. Septimus Smith, wanders through London as well, but the novel ends with his Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882, as the daughter of Leslie Stephen, a Victorian intellectual founder of the Dictionary of National Biography, and Julia Prinsep Stephen, a traveler and model for Pre-Raphaelite painters. She did not go to university but was surrounded by intellectuals and artists. When her mother died at the age of 49, she had a mental breakdown. In 1904, after her father’s death, she moved to Bloomsbury where she founded the “Bloomsbury Group”, a group of artists which included E.M. Forster and Roger Fry. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf and founded the Hogarth Press, a publishing company which published the works of experimental writers. She committed suicide in 1941. 1882 - 1941 suicide. The news of the death reaches her at the party and makes her realize that his death was essential for her to stay alive.  CLARISSA: a complex and frustrated woman, being a wife and a mother is a limitation to her freedom, but can’t properly express it, as weak and imperfect. Her mind is constantly pervaded by memories, split between the desire to celebrate life, and a morbid attraction towards death.  SEPTIMUS: a man whose sensitiveness has been ruined by the experience of war, characterized by a morbid attraction towards death, sees suicide as a form of liberation from the weight of life. ONE SINGLE CHARACTER (Mrs. Dalloway) → ONE SINGLE DAY (a Wednesday of June) → ONE SINGLE PLACE (London) • Even the most ordinary character on the most ordinary day can be the object of a writer’s scrutiny. Experimental approach to writing: actions are fragmented and disconnected, unity is given by the coherence of the mind, which receives a huge quantity of impressions, inputs, and stimuli at once. Third-person omniscient narrator → showing thoughts in a controlled and organised way, never abandons the stability of syntax and grammar and her prose is elegant and logically structured. George Orwell One of the strongest anti-totalitarian voices in literature. His works express a clear warning against the mystification of power and the dangers of totalitarianism in society. A polemicist, independent thinker fascinated by the power that censorship and language have in politics and writing. • Powerful sense of moral awareness and aimed to transform political writing into art. [NINTEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949)] Winston Smith is a journalist whose job is to rewrite history. He rebels against the oppression of the regime and writes a diary where he affirms his belief in the existence of objective truth. He falls in love with Julia, but their affair is discovered by the Thought Police. They are arrested. At the end they betray each other and reject their ideals. • A dystopian novel with plain language and plain prose style. THEMES: anti-totalitarianism, consequences of an oppressive government on people, power, and domination, future of a world in George Orwell, penname for Eric Arthur Blair, was born in 1903 in India, as his father worked in the administration of the British Empire. He spent his childhood in England and went to the prestigious boarding school Eton College. In 1922 he joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, gaining first-hand experience of the poor and of the oppressive role of the Imperial administration. Five years later he returned to England and lived among the poor people in London before Paris. He published his first book in 1933, and fought in the Spanish Civil War, before having to return to England, where he worked briefly for the BBC and became a literary editor for The Tribune. He moved to Jura, a Scottish island and died on 21 January 1950 of tuberculosis, in a London hospital. 1903 - 1950 E. Hemingway [A FAREWELL TO ARMS (1929)] Frederic Henry is an American ambulance driver serving as a volunteer with the Italian army during the First World War. He meets an English nurse, Catherine Barkley and falls in love with her. She gets pregnant and Henry returns to the front, where he is taken, but then escapes and joins Catherine escaping to Switzerland and try to forget the war, even if Henry is tormented by guilt. Catherine dies after giving birth to a dead baby. STYLE: lean, hard, athletic narrative prose, based on simplicity and essentiality, punctuation is kept to a minimum.  ICEBERG TECHNIQUE: using every explicit, visible element to support an unseen structure and symbolism. Dialogues where there is no intervention from the author. THEMES: man’s code of behavior and its efficacy in certain situations, man’s loneliness and disillusionment, conditions of life of expatriates, relationship between men and women. NOTE: the title has a double meaning (inability to say goodbye). Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in 1899 in Illinois. At the age of 17 he became a reporter for the Kansas City Star. He left the paper in 1918 and took part in the First World War as a volunteer ambulance driver in the Italian army. He became a member of a group of artists and intellectuals which included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Pablo Picasso, and James Joyce. In 1941, when America joined the Second World War, he again worked as a war correspondent. In 1953 he won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, followed in 1954 by the Noble Prize in Literature. In July 1961 he shot himself at home in Ketchum, Idaho. 1899 - 1961 J.D. Salinger [THE CATCHER IN THE RYE (1951)] 17-year-old Holden Caulfield tell us about a flashback with him in a mental hospital in California, what happened over a two-day period the previous December. • A CATCHER IN THE RYE is a defender of the innocence of the young, he struggles against growing up because of fear of death. Sexuality disturbs him although he is drawn to sex and is obsessed with his idea of the falsity of so many people he meets. STYLE: colloquial, slang and ungrammatical expressions of language of a high-school adolescent of the Fifties. American tradition of the protagonist as a rebel trying to escape, literally or metaphorically, from a society he despises. Jerome David Salinger was born on 1 January 1919 in New York. After attempts to study at university he attended an evening school in New York, where he met Professor Whit Burnett, who was also the editor of a magazine called Story and encouraged him to write. He served in the Second World War from 1942 to 1944 and took part in the D-Day landings in Normandy. In 1946 he began drafting stories for the famous New Yorker magazine. He left New Your City and moved to a secluded country house in New Hampshire, where he remained a recluse and tried to avoid contact with others. He died on 27 January 2010. 1919 - 2010 Samuel Beckett [WAITING FOR GODOT (1952)] There is no real plot: two men, Vladimir, and Estragon, are waiting for a man called Godot. Two men, Pozzo and Lucky, enter and interact with Vladimir and Estragon, then they go. The first act ends with a boy saying that Godot will not come tonight but will surely come tomorrow. Act two is very similar. • One of he most shocking and revolutionary works of theatre. THEMES: life as an endless wait, repetitiveness of actions, time, and its passing (people seem to have no past and no future, the present is endless), the absurdity of life and the indifference of universe. STYLE: it was defined by the author as a tragicomedy in two acts, language is essential and fragmentary, use of silence and mime, actions are repeated and are often meaningless. Samuel Beckett was born on 13 April 1906 in Dublin. He studied French, Italian and English at Trinity College, graduating in 1927. In 1928 he went to Paris to work as an English teacher, met and became friend and assistant to James Joyce. He then travelled and returned to Paris in 1937 and met Suzanne Dechevaux- Dumesnil who became his wife. He fought with the French Resistance until 1942 and was awarded the Croix de Guerre, and in 1969 the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in December 1989. 1906 - 1989