Literary Analysis: Lives & Works of Orwell, Gordimer, and Eliot, Schemi e mappe concettuali di Inglese

Scarica Literary Analysis: Lives & Works of Orwell, Gordimer, and Eliot e più Schemi e mappe concettuali in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! INGLESE ULTIMA INTERROGAZIONE MATURITÀ 2023: ARGOMENTI 📌Orwell 📌Kazuo Ishiguro 📌Auden 📌Beckett 📌Gordimer 📌Elliot GEORGE ORWELL: George Orwell was born in India in 1903, and he was the son of a minor colonial official. He was educated at a Preparatory school in Eastbourne then at Eton. There, he began to develop an independent personality and he started to declare that he was socialist and atheist. After finishing school, he tried to enter the Indian police, opting to serve in Burma where he remained from 1922 to 1927 , then he came back to London. He directly experienced poverty and learned abou institutions for the poor, such as hostels, prisons and lodging houses and hospitals. He moved to Paris,where he worked as a dishwasher in a hotel, where decided to begin publishing his works under the pseudonym of George Orwell. In 1936 got married and in the same year was commissioned by a left wing publisher to investigate conditions among the miners, factory workers and unemployed in the industrial North, where he stayed for two months. His report was published in 1937, with the title “The road to Wigan Pier”. He has been a reporter of the Civil war in Spain. Back in England, the couple adopted an infant child, Richard. George suffered from Bronchitis and pneumonia, so he died in 1950. During the Second World war years, Orwell moved to London and in 1941 he joined the BBC, broadcasting cultural and political programmes to India. He became the literary editor of the Tribune , socialist weekly. He also began writing Animal Farm which was published in 1945 and made Orwell internationally famous. Orwell's last book was published in 1949 and soon became a bestseller. The artist’s development: He had a deep understanding of the English character. His various experiences abroad contribute to his unusual ability to see his country from the outside. He chose to reject his background and to establish a separate identity of his own. He was receptive to new ideas and impressions. He believed that the writer should be independent and no good writing could come from following a party line. Nineteen eighty four Plot The novel describes a future world divided into 3 blocks: Oceania, Eurasia and East Asia. It’s an oppressive regiment and it’s ruled by the party which is led by a figure called the Big brother and is continuously at war with Eurasia and East Asia. The only thing that Big Brother wants is to control people’s lives. Free thought, sex or any expressions of individuality are forbidden, but the protagonist, Winston Smith, illegally buys a diary in which he begins to write his thoughts and memories addressing them to the future generations. At a certain point in the story Winston, at the Ministry of Truth where he rewrites historical records to suit the needs of the Party, notices an attractive dark haired girl staring at him:she is Julia, a rebel girl. They began a secret affair. One day O'Brien, a member of the powerful inner party, summons them to his luxury flat and tells them that he too hates the Party and works against it as a member of the Brotherhood led by Emmanuel Goldstein. O'Brien gives Winston a copy of Goldstein’s book, the manifesto of the Brotherhood. Winston is reading it to Julia in their room when some soldiers suddenly break in and arrest them. Winston is taken to the Ministry of Love where he finds out that O’Brian is a party spy. O’Brian tortures Winston for months but he struggles to resist. Winston was forced to confront his worst fear: rats on his head, ready to eat his face. Winston's will is broken and he is released to the outside world. He no longer loves Julia and has given up his identity and has learned to love Big Brother. Historical Background: The society, although fictional, reflects the political atmosphere of the tyrannies in Spain, Germany and the Soviet Union. Orwell expressed that he was against every kind of totalitarian government. Settings: The setting of the novel is Oceania, a large country that includes America, Atlantic Islands, Australia and the Southern Portion of Africa as well as Airstrip One, previously England. The story takes place in a terrifying London in 1984. Orwell’s aim was to work on a memory that every reader was likely to have. The political structure is divided into three segments: The inner party, the ruling class, the outer party and the proles, so it’s the working class. For a socialist such as Orwell class distinctions meant the existence of conflict and class struggle. Characters: Winston Smith>the last man to believe in humane values in a totalitarian society. He is 39 and physically weak; he experiences alienation from society and feels a desire for spiritual and moral integrity. Julia>is more naive and pessimistic about the party, since she believes that it will never be overthrown . O’Brien> a member of the Inner Party who tricks Winston and Julia into believing that he belongs to the secret Brotherhood, but he is the main agent of Winston torture. Themes: Is a satire on hierarchical societies which destroy fraternity. Memory and mutual trust that become positive themes in the struggle put up by Winston to maintain his individuality. Decency is another theme and it is trust, tolerance, behaving responsibly towards other people acting with empathy. Leggere fotocopia Animal farm e approfondire themes di 1984. 4) DEATH BY WATER: which focused on a drowned Phoenician sailor Phlebas. The idea of a spiritual shipwreck is reinforced. 5) WHAT THE THUNDER SAID: which evoques religions from East and West. A possible solution is found in a sort of sympathy with other human beings; However, such a solution does not modify the general atmosphere of utter complete desolation. Themes: All the fragmentary parts of the poem are connected by one main theme: the contrast between the fertility of a mythical past and the spiritual sterility, chaos and devastation of the present world. The fragmentation of this poem reflects the breakdown of a historical, social and cultural order, destroyed by war and modernity. New concept of History: The mythical past appears in the allusions to and quotations from many literary works belonging to different traditions and cultures, as well as religious works, like the Bible and Hindu sacred texts. This use of quotations reflects the concept of tradition and history; he saw classicism as the ability to see the past as a concrete premise for the present and the poetic culture as a living unity of all poems written in a different period. Present and past exist simultaneously in the waste land. The style The style of the Waste Land is fragmentary because of the mixture of different poetic styles, such as blank verse, the ode, the quatrain and free verse, thus reproducing the chaos of modern civilisation. Eliot requires the active participation of the reader/public, who experiences the same world as that of the speaker/ poet, by employing the technique of implication. Eliot adopted the technique of objective correlatives: “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of arte is by finding an objective correlative in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion.” So writers must find a combination of images, objects or descriptions evoking that appropriate emotion. The emotion originates in the combination of these phenomena when they appear together. Wystan Auden: Auden was born in York in 1907 in a middle Anglican class family. He loves to read: his early readings consisted of fairy tales, myths and legends, but also he was really interested in psychology and technical works on mining engineering. He studied at Oxford and during this time he became familiar with Modernist Poetry and he was the leader of the so-called Oxford poets. As a young man he was deeply interested in social and political issues. During the Spanish Civil war he served as an ambulance driver and he also expressed solidarity with the Jews persecuted by Hitler after 1933: in 1935 he married the German writer Thomas Mann’s daughter, Erika, only to provide her a British passport, so she could escape from Nazi Germany. Despite that, he was homosexual and during this period being homosexual was considered a criminal offense in England. In 1939 he moved to New York and settled in Brooklyn. In 1940 he began teaching and published “Another time”. Here, his political period was over. His poetry became anti ideological and anti political, he also returned to the religion of his youth: Anglicanism. In 1946 he became a citizen of the USA, and in 1956 he became a Professor of Poetry at Oxford. He died of a heart attack in Vienna in 1973. Influences: During his life he was influenced by two big characters: Freud and Marx. From Freud he was interested in his studies of psychoanalysis but he thought about psychological models in relation to the customs and rituals of the entire society. Influenced more by Marx philosopher than social reformers or political analyst, Auden did not embrace Marxism in its rigid form but adopted it as a means to find a workable theory of human nature and a reliable basis for understanding an individual’s actions in society. The 30ies: He defines Thirties as a dishonest decade and reveals his disillusionment with political events. The move to America freed him from the burden of social responsibility, of being the leader of the intellectual left rather than simply a verbal artist. He developed a style that refused identification with a single poetic culture or nation. He came to believe that improvement must begin within the self and not within the society. Themes: Love Modern suffering Death Politics and social concerns The theme of the quest Hope for the future. Style Auden’s use of language made him an experimenter all his life, but he also loved tradition. He emphasized the popularizing function of poetry. He used free verse, meter, rhyme and many forms, including sonnets but also simple popular forms such as ballads and songs. His lyrics often starts in medias res. Another time: This work contains some of Auden’s most famous poems. His composition covered the eve and the beginning of the Second World War, and also the moment when the writer moved to the USA. The title is symbolic: the poet entered the work through the exile which he shared with many other refugees and that would eventually lead to his becoming an American citizen. Structure and themes: 1) people and places man and nature 2) Lighter poems 3) Occasional poems death of great figures like Freud or Yeats.