modernism and victorian age (Eliot, Joyce and Woolf), Sintesi del corso di Inglese

Scarica modernism and victorian age (Eliot, Joyce and Woolf) e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! Differences between the traditional and the modern novel with examples from the Victorian and the Modernist novels you know. The shift from the Victorian to the Modern novel was caused by the trasformation of British society in the 20th century. Deep social and intellectual changes caused the break with traditional values and novelist had to mediate between values and assumption from the past and the new ones. The focus shifted form the external world to the inner world, from the society to man, from the action to thought. Virginia wolf for exemple was particularry interest in giving voice to the inner word and the complexity in it. The importance of the events in the story shft to the emotion that those events produced in the character. That's why in her novels, like in James Joyce's ones, they do not use omniscient narrator but the third person with character's point of view. Flashbacks, momentary impressions and the associations of ideas are used as a tool to put the reader inside the character's minds. On the other hand, in the Victorian novel the narrator was omniscient and he used to make digressions, comments and he decided what was wrong and right. The focus was on the plot, ofter long and complicated. For exemple in the novel Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte wrote about the journey of the main charachter from her childhood through adulthood. In the modern society novelists used new narrative tequiques. Ihe novel Dubliners, for exemple, written in 1914 by James Joyce, it's about fifteen short story, and each one of them has different points of view and narrative tequiques appropiate to the characters portrayed in that story. He use epiphany, a technique where the main charater, because of a a trivial gesture, an external object or a banal situation, realize something that he or she didn't know before. And this this self realisation is what lead the story, not the event itself. An important technique used by Virgina Woolf and James Joyce is the “stream of consciousness” . In Joyce's novels the thoughts flow without control and a grammatical orgoganisation (and that's called interior monologue) meanwhile In Woolf's novel the thoughts are well organized and clear (and thats called indirect interior monologue or free indirect style). Another innovation is related to the main theme and the setting of the story. In the traditional novel the favourite theme was the gain or the loss of social status. Like in Oliver Twist novel, written by Charles Dickens in 1837 the main character comes form a extremely poor and abusing enviirement. At the however, he is adopted by mr.brownlow and star his bourgeois life. The theme is often more pessimistic because it tends to a realistic portrayals of the currption of society. that's why happy ending is not typical. - The modern novel has a new setting, witch is the cityscape, which represents social contrasts. The isolation and the alienation of modern man became the main themes of literature and poetry. Poets like Ezra Pound and Thomas Elliot were the greatest exponent of the movement. In the dramatic monologue “love song of alfred profrock” the main character is the rappresentation of the modern man and the modern poet, and the deep senss of inadequancy that he feels in the traditional society, where is forced to stay. He also use a lot of reference to the remoter periods. He starts the poem with a reference to Dante Aligheri. He also nominates Homer and the bible. Indeed Eliot belived in the importance of tradition and cultural heritage Another tecnique that Eliot used in poetry for the first time is the objective correlatives, where the poet this way the writer doesn't pour out his feelings, but he lets the reader the freedom to do so. To summary, the 20th century and the modernist movement brought a lot of changes to the tequiques and the themes of the novels and the poems written in this period. The complexity of the inner world became the centre of litterature and we can still see the resul on the contemporanety. ELIOT Eliot was probably the most influential 20th-century poet and the best representative of Modernism. His most used tecnique is the objective correlatives where he use an object or an image to provoke an emotion and he doesn't describe the emotion itself., instead of describing the emotion, or pouring out his/her feelings, He also give importance to the tradition and cultural heritage, reflected in numerous allusions and references from other literatures He leave the possibility for the reader to bring meaning to the poem THE WASTE LAND a 434 lines poem divided into 5 section. In this poems he uses different tecniques and themes like: • the fragmentation and reassembly of historical narratives to create something new out of something old • The alienation of the modern man • he saw tradition and history as the repetation of the same events, of classicism as the ability to see the past as a concrete premise for the present • free association of ideas and thoughts, because present and past lives simultaneously • use of legends and myths • free verse (chaos of modern civilisation) • metaphors and symbols • juxtaposition: squalid elements with poetic ones THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD: opening of the poem and it introduces its most important images and the dominant theme He says that April is the cruellest month, even tho is often the rapresentation of life, because every birth remind him of death. Winter however, “kept us warm”, so it turns out to be positive because allows men to live at peace and to forget THE FIRE SERMON: The main theme is the mechaniscism and the alienation of the modern men. In this case Eliot entroduces the figure of Tiresias, the narrator of the plot, a prophet who was punished with blindness bc he had seen Athena, the goddess of knowledge, bathing naked. He was trasformed into a woman by a spell. The poem talks about this woman that comes home from work “at the violet hour” and wait her lover; they make love, even tho the woman doesn't really want to and behave passive, like a human engine. LOVE STORY BY ALFRED PRUFROCK: