Letteratura inglese, riassunti per la letteratura inglese, indirizzata soprattutto alla classe del 5° anno delle superiori, Sintesi del corso di Inglese

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THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT AND THE ALIENATION OF MODERN MAN - Thomas sterns Eliot was born in St. Louis in 1888 - He studied at Harvard, sorbonne (paris) and Oxford - When 1ww broke out he settled in London where he started to work first as a Clerk and then as a director for the publishers faber & faber. - His first important work was the collection of poems was PRUFROCK - He suffered from a nervous breakdown after the war and he wrote most of his masterpiece while recovering. - Poetry was his only refuge. - WASTE LAND was published in 1922 - In 1925 he published ‘the hallow man’, a sequel to the waste land - In 1927 he became an English citizen and joined the church of England where he finally found the answers to his uncertainties. - Eliot was also an influential literary critic, his critical essays on authors are of primary importance and most of them are collected in ‘the sacred woods’ and ‘selected essays’ - In these essays he concentrated on specific problems of style and technique and shared with James Joyce the view about the importance for the artist to be impersonal. - In one of his essays he says in fact that the poet has no personality to express and that the emotion of art is impersonal. - In 1948 he won the nobel prize for literature - He died in London in 1965. THE WASTE LAND The waste land ( desolate, sterile, destroyed ) consist of 434 lines divided into 5 sections: - the burial of the dead (where the main theme is the opposition between fertility and sterility, life and death ) - A game of chess (which collocates the present squalor to a past ambiguous splendor) - The fire sermon ( where the theme of the alienation is explained through the description of a loveless ,mechanical and sexual encounter ) - Death by water ( which reinforces the idea of spiritual shipwreck) - And what the thunder said (which evokes religions from both east and west. A possible solution could be the sympathy with other human beings) The poet uses fragmented images of historical narratives to mirror his society’s reliance on old traditions and costumes when creating the new Europe. All the fragmentary parts are connected by the main theme, which is the contrast between the fertility of the past and the sterility of the present. By doing this he wants to show the consequences of the war. The mythical past appears through quotations from various literary works of different traditions and cultures like the Bible and the Hindu sacred texts. Elliot saw history as a repetition of events of classicism, which he saw as the ability to see the past as a premise for the present. Elliot regarded legends and myths as extremely important. In modern society myths are present but they have lost their deep meaning, and it is especially through the mythical allusion that the contrast between past and present appears. In the essay “Ulysses, order and myth” he explains the mythical method by saying “it is simply a way of controlling, giving shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history “. The style of “waste land “ is fragmentary because there is a mixture of different poetic styles ( such as: blank verse, the ode, quatrains and free verse ) in order to reproduce the chaos of modern civilization. The meaning is not found in the single fragment, but in the whole. The reader experiences the same world as that of the poet. Elliot adopts the technique of “the objective correlative” as an attempt to communicate philosophical reflections and feelings. A device used by Elliot is the repetition of words, images and phrases to give the impression of the increasing musicality of the poem. BURIAL OF THE DEAD 1: - The burial of the dead is a metaphor for the condition of contemporary man, whose life is meaningless, empty and quite similar to death. - Lines 1-4: an unknown speaker claims that April is the cruelest month, because flowers and plants, instead of growing from fertile land, they grow out of dead land. - Lines 4-7 he surprises the reader by telling that it was the winter that kept the speaker warm, because it covered up the dead land in snow, which made him forget that the land was dead, (a waste land) - In this poem we can find a sense of fear and uncertainty regarding the future, because the author doesn’t know, what is going to grow after the devastation of the war BURIAL OF THE DEAD 2 : - The burial of the dead is a metaphor for the condition of contemporary man, whose life is meaningless, empty and quite similar to death. - There is the use of traditional myths and symbols. - The lines don't have a regular scheme and the meter is not traditional - There are some alliterations that give the poem musicality, and repetition of sounds are used to to emphasize particular a situation (f.ex so many..so many referred to the crowd) - He uses different references and quotations from different traditional literary works. (like Dante, Baudelaire etc.) - There are a lot of quotations from Dante, because he tries to make the city look like dante’s inferno. ( for example: sighs, short and infrequent were exhaled) or (there I saw one I knew, ..la vidi uno che conoscevo.. ) - Last line : quotation from Baudelaire.
 THE ROSE BUSH: - the text takes place in the wood, the two lovers Paul and Miriam, are wandering in the woods looking for a rose bush. - Paul is hesitant to follow Miriam in the woods. He didn’t want to step away too much from home, because his mother would worry about him - Miriam wants to show him a rose-bush. She feels that if he doesn't see the rose bush, she would not feel complete in her soul. - The roses are pure white and gleaming - At the end of their excursion, Paul starts running because he is late. - When he arrives home, he finds his mother sitting and thinking about his relationship with Miriam. She thinks that Miriam is taking Paul away from her and she resents her. - She tells him that his behavior is unacceptable and and that he shouldn’t go too far away from home at that time of the night THE MODERNIST SPIRIT - the first decades of the 20th century were a period of extraordinary originality and vitality in the history of art - The artistic activity was mainly centered in Paris, but it also spread in Europe and America. - The term MODERNISM is used to refer to this powerful international movement. - Modernism expressed the desire to break from established forms and subjects. - The novel started exploring the character’s psyche through the stream of consciousness technique and the interior monologue. - Poetry, mixed slang with elevated language and started experimenting with free verse , and often used obscure symbols and fragmented images. - In painting, the main theme was the primitive and the magical - simultaneously, CUBISM began to develop. - Painters painted by separating objects and figures into geometrical shapes such as cubes, spheres, cylinders and cones. - In England, Wyndham founded VORTICISM that tried to incorporate the ideas of violent motion with natural vortices, tornadoes and whirlpools. - Italian futurism, let by Marinetti celebrated the power symbolized by the new technology and urban setting. - In music there was an experimentation with dissonance and distorted musical effects, and a rejection of the traditional rules of harmony and composition. - all artistic forms of modernism share common features : * The intentional distortion of shapes * The rejection of linear flow of narrative and conventional verse * The awareness that our perception of reality is uncertain, there is an emphasis on subjectivity rather than on what is perceived. In literature this was provided by a third-person narrator * The use of allusive language * The intensity of the isolated moments * The importance of conscious and unconscious life * The rejection of elaborated formal aesthetics THE MODERN NOVEL - the shift away from the victorian novel was caused by a transformation of the brutish society marked with the inter-war years and by unrest and ferment. - The new role of novelists consisted in mediating between the values of the past and the confused present - In his ‘’principles of psychology’’ James stated that our minds record every single experience, however it was Bergson who made a distinction between historical and psychological time. - Historical time Is external and linear - while psychological time is internal and subjective - The modern novelists rejected the omniscient narrator and experimented with new methods to portray individual’s consciousness. The analyses of a character’s consciousness was influenced by freud’s theories. - TIME: time was subjective and internal, there was no interest in building a well-structured plot with a chronological sequence of events - The stream of consciousness technique was introduced to reproduce the flow of thoughts similar to the mind’s activity. - The psychological novelists concentrated on the development of the character’s mind and on human relationships. - James Joyce and virginia Woolf experimented with narrative techniques and explored the mind of characters. - JAMES JOYCE - A MODERNIST WRITER : - James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882 and was educated at jesuit schools - He studied French, Italian and German languages and literature and graduated in modern languages in 1902 - He was interested in broader European culture and he thought of himself as a European rather than an irishman. - Joyce believed that the only way to to increase Ireland’s awareness was by offering a realistic portrait of its life from a European point of view. - In June 1904 he fell in love with Nora barnacle, in October they moved to Italy and, in Trieste where he became friends with Italo Svevo. - The years in Trieste were difficult and filled with financial problems. - Dubliners, is a collection of short stories about Dublin and Dublin life published during the 1ww - In 1922 he published ulysses - In 1939 he was forced to move to Switzerland due to hitler’s advanced in Europe. - his effort was to give a realistic portrait of the life of ordinary people doing ordinary things and living ordinary lives. - His goal was to render life objectively and to give the readers a true image of it. - He uses different points of view and his style developed and he went from using free direct speech to the interior monologue. - The language broke down into words without punctuation and grammatical connections - And reality became the place of psychological projections. GABRIEL’S EPIPHANY => manifestation of god / in literature: when a character understand the real meaning of life. - From ‘’the dead’' - the protagonists of the story are Gabriel Conroy and Gretta, has wife. - the story opens up with the two, going to a Christmas party given by Gabriel’s aunt - The evening is a disaster for him - Towards the end of the evening he notices that gretta is absorbed into a song called "The lass of Aughrim”. - After the party they go back to their room in a hotel, and gretta explains to him the meaning of that song and that it reminded her of Michael Furey, a young man that died for her love. - As gretta is thinking of that song and that young man, she falls asleep. - He watches her sleeping with pity and wonders how beautiful she must’ve been in the past, for Michael Furey to die for her love. Context: she’s sleeping and he is watching her. Setting: at first they are at a Christmas party, and than in a hotel room Main characters: Gabriel,Gretta Main theme of the passage: the boarder between the living and the dead - isolation - mortality Narrative technique used: third person narrator (expresses what Gabriel is thinking) Predominant lexical field: most of the lexicon refers to the crucifixion ( spears = lance, crosses, thorns, swooned=svenuto, etc..) Tone: sad and controversial Rhythm: slow, long sentences. Figures of speech: ‘’ the snow falling upon all the living and the dead’’ => metaphor for isolation. - the window => represents the boarder between the living and the dead