Modernism in Literature: Eliot and Joyce's Exploration of Time, Space, and the Human Mind, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Modernism in Literature: Eliot and Joyce's Exploration of Time, Space, and the Human Mind e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! domenica 8 maggio 2022 Modernism: Modernism is a period that went from 1901 to 1945. This term belongs especially to the British tradition, but some of the aspects of this period are common in many different country in Europe with different names. The modernists expressed the desire to break with the past and find new fields of investigation. Modernism also contributed to express the nature of moderne experience through creative forms of experimentation. All artistic forms of Modernism share several common features: -the distortion of shapes; -the breaking down of limitations in space and time; -the emphasis on subjectivity, on how perception takes place rather than on what is perceived; -the use of allusive language and the development of the multiple association of words; -the importance of unconscious and conscious life; -the need to reflect the complexity of modern urban life in artistic form. Beliefs in general were questioned and most of traditional values or religious beliefs were now put into question and shattered or eliminated. For example we can considers the German philosopher Nietzsche. One of his most important statement was that God was dead, it means that man is now living in a mechanism where there is no finale aim. In this period Sigmund Freud started studying the individual, psychology, he started talking about psychoanalysis. He discovered that man's action could be motivated by irrational forces. He also provided a new method of investigation of the human mind through the analysis of dreams and the concept of 'free association' (his patients were invited to speak about whatever entered their mind at the moment). He believed that our personality develops through interaction between the three main parts of the human mind: the id, ego and superego. The id is the most primitive. It does not change with time or experience, since it is not related to the external world. The ego is the rational, pragmatic part of our personality. The superego is concerned with social rules and morals. It develops around the age of 3-5. According to Freud, the id, ego and superego are in constant conflict. In this period he elaborated one of his most important theories: the Oedipus complex. According to Freud, all small boys choose their mother as their primary object of desire. They subconsciously wish to usurp their father and become their mother's lover. These desires appear between the ages of 3 and 5. This stage represents an important point in the formation of sexual identity. The analogous experience for girls is known as the Electra complex, in which girls feel desire for their father and jealousy of their mother. Another important aspect of this period was relativity. Einstein, Picasso and Stravinsky believed that there wasn’t only one prospective, but different truths, and all of this truths are equally right. Especially Einstein, with his theory about relativity, he told us that science, which is pure objectivity, can have some relativity inside. 1 domenica 8 maggio 2022 There isn’t only one truth, but there are many truths. So talking about the concept of time and space we can say that we all have a different perception of time. The idea of time was also questioned by the American philosopher William James and the French philosopher Henri Bergson. James said that our mind records every single experience as a continuous flow. Bergson, instead, made a distinction between historical time and psychological time. Historical time is external, linear, psychological time is internal, subjective and measured by the emotional intensity of a moment. Bergson also suggested that a thought or feeling could be measured in terms of the number of perceptions, memories and associations attached to it. This period is characterised by unrest and ferment, social changes, a need for different form of expression. The novelist had a new role, which consisting in mediating between the solid and unquestioned values of the past and the confused present. Two factors contributed to this changes: the new concept of time and the theory of the unconscious. The modern novelist rejected omniscient narration because it didn’t represent the new reality of the world. The viewpoint shifted from the external world, to the internal world of the character’s mind. The narrative technique used by the modern novelist was the stream of consciousness: is a narrative technique through which the writer tries to reproduce the unconscious workings of the mind before a logical speech is formed. It consists in a flux of thoughts and sensations that flow without apparent logic inside the mind of the characters and are reported faithfully on the page; as a consequence the syntax is broken and traditional punctuation non existent. The flux is triggered by an external perception (a sight, smell, sound, taste...) and the only linking principle is the association of ideas. Symbolism influenced this new poetry. This style was marked by: -the use of the objective correlative; -the importance given to the sound of words; -the use of quotations; -the use of free verse; -the possibility for the readers to attribute their own meaning to the poem. T.S. Eliot: Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in 1888 in Missouri and has studied at Harvard. He studied a lot of poets such as Dante at whom he also dedicated an essay where he defined Dante as the poet who best expressed a universal situation. For Eliot from Dante can more be learned how to write poetry than from any English poet. In 1910 Eliot moved to Europe to study at the Sorbonne and where he attended Henri’s Bergson’s lectures, an important philosopher. Here Eliot started also reading the works of the French Symbolists. During the First World War he stayed in London where he published essays on philosophy and started working as a clerk. He married a ballet dancer, Vivienne Haigh-Wood despite her mental instability. Eliot’s first important work was the collection of poems Prufrock and Other Observations. In this period he became the 2 domenica 8 maggio 2022 The speaker remembers watching a crowd flowing over London Bridge like zombies. Here, Eliot is talking about the circles of hell in Dante's Inferno (he's quoting the poem), and is comparing modern life to living in hell, where all the dead people are. He is taking all these pieces of Western culture because he wants to represent the collapsing of modernity and progress. The people in this scene are sighing and staring only at the ground in front of their feet. They seem pretty unsatisfied with their undead lives. They don’t communicate. The speaker mentions a landmark street in London. The crowd is going to work, but the people are alienated, they don't decide anything. It's just a mass of people unhappy and dead inside. Describing this there is a sense of irony in Eliot, we are just a mass of people doing, feeling nothing. He confronts a figure with whom he once fought in a battle that seems to conflate the clashes of World War I with the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage (both futile and excessively destructive wars). The speaker asks the ghostly figure, Stetson, about the fate of a corpse planted in his garden. There is also a recall to an Egyptian myth, the god Osiridis, planted and refleashing. There is an opposition to elevated and low terms. The episode concludes with a famous line from the preface to Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal. The speaker admits that he's no better by calling the reader "mon frère”. He is judging the reader, he is shaming him but in reality he is like him. Eliot is also a victim of this world sterility. The speaker of the poem blames us, himself, and everybody for what's happened, accusing the reader of sharing in the poet’s sins. James Joyce: James Joyce was a novelist and poet, considered one of the most influential writers in early 20th century. He was born in Dublin in 1882. He attended the University in Dublin, where he graduated in 1902. On June 1904 he met and fell in love with Nora Barnacle, who will become his wife. In the same year James and Nora left Dublin and they settled in Trieste, where Joyce started to teach English. There he met Italo Svevo. In this period he wrote a lot of works, such as Chamber of music, Dubliners, a collection of short stories, and a Portrait of the Artist as Young Man. Then he moved to Zurigo, where he started working on his masterpiece, Ulysses. In 1920 he moved to Paris and started to write his last novel, Finnegans Wake. On World war II’s eve, he moved to Zurigo with his family, where he died in 1941. He set all of his work in Ireland, mostly in the city of Dublin. He wanted to give a realistic portrait of the life of ordinary people doing ordinary things and living ordinary lives. In his works he used different narrative technique: free indirect speech (the transposition in the third person narration of the character's thoughts, which is a sort of inner dialogue, using the words, syntax and linguistic register of the same character. The language used reflects the level of education of the characters), the interior monologue and the extreme interior monologue. Dubliners: Joyce’s first great portrait of Dublin life came with Dubliners, a collection of 15 short stories. It is a depiction of the paralysis of the Irish middle class life presented in four stages: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. Characters accept 5 domenica 8 maggio 2022 their condition because they are not aware of it. All Dubliners are spiritually weak people, they are slaves of their familiar, moral, cultural, religious and political life. The hearth of the whole collection is the revelation of the paralysis to its victims, and the failure to find a way out of it. The technique used is the epiphany, coined by Joyce: it is a sudden revelation of a strong reality caused by a trivial gesture, an external object or a banal situation. According to his task to reproduce the deep and hidden meaning of the life, the epiphany represents the key of the story. Each story is told from the prospective of a character and so the interior monologue is widely used: it is the presentation of protagonist’s thoughts. Thanks to it, readers acquire direct knowledge of who was speaking. Linguistic register is varied: it suits the age, the social class and the role of the characters. The description of the story is realistic. The use of realism is mixed with symbolism. Religious symbolism can also be found. Even the colour symbolism is widely employed. Eveline: The protagonist of this short story is Eveline, a nineteen-year-old girl, who works as a shop-assistant, she has to look after her brothers, but she wants to be respected. At the beginning of the story, she looks out of the window. Her father changed after her mother's death: he started to drink and became selfish and violent. She met a man, called Frank, who fell in love with her and proposed her to leave Dublin, but she's not really into him, she looks at him like the only chance to escape. While she is looking outside the window, she listens to street organ playing, which recalls to her mind a song she heard before her mother’s death. She remembers her childhood. Before leaving, she holds two letters: one is for Harry, her brother, and the other is for her father. She is in doubt: is it better to stay or to leave her family for the unknown? The memory of her mother’s and the sad life pushes her to leave, because she knows that if she remains in Dublin, she will end up like her mother. When they arrived at the port, a “bell clanged upon her heart”, Eveline thinks again about her past, especially for the promise she made to her mother: to keep the family together. So she doesn’t follow her boyfriend. Frank, who has already embarked on the ship, inviting her to join with him. At the end of the story he is forced to leave without her. Eveline has the chance to escape, but she feels paralyzed, a typical condition of Dubliners. Gabriel’s epiphany: Gabriel is the main character together with his wife Gretta. They decided to go back to Dublin to spend Christmas evening with the original Irish family. On this occasion all the family and friends meet at the aunt's house, and it is common that Gabriel delivered his annual speech at the dinner. Gabriel is considered as the intellectual man. He was very busy and concentrated on what to say in this speech, he was also considering if it was the case to mention some important poets and philosophers. So he delivered his speech, he was very proud of himself. After the dinner the family listened to some music. During one of this music his wife Nora was totally astonished, totally involved. Gabriel was surprised watching his wife listening to that song with so much interest. At this point the evening finished, and on the way back to the hotel, Gabriel, who was really in love with his wife, was wondering of spending a passionate love night with her. But it happens that he saw his wife a little bit distant, she was not so involved. When they arrived at the hotel they started 6 domenica 8 maggio 2022 to undress and Gabriel asked his wife the reason why she was so distant, so she revealed something terrible for Gabriel. She revealed that the song she was listening to the dinner party, reminded her of a boy whose name was Michael Furey, who was playing that song under her window in the snow, and after playing that song in the snow, he died. So this means that this boy died for her. After revealing this terrible truth, something changed in Gabriel. (The two names are symbolic: Gabriel is the name of the archangel Gabriel and Michael is the name of the archangel Michael. So there is a religious reference.) After revealing this, she was fast asleep but for Gabriel begins a terrible moment: Gabriel's mind is totally overwhelmed by all kinds of thoughts. In this moment begins his epiphany: he feels useless, he thinks he had a minor role in his wife's life, since Gretta had had a great love that even died for her. He started watching her as he and she had ever lived together as man and wife. He sees her as a different person. He started to imagine her when she was young. The confusion of the clothes on the floor and on the chair, represent the same exact kind of confusion that Gabriel has in his mind. At this point generous tears started to fill Gabriel's eyes because he had never felt something like that towards a woman in his life. He heard a noise at the window, it was snowing. The snowflakes are silver and dark, not white (epiphany) (it’s a symbolic colour, it means distance, no communication, isolation). The snow was falling everywhere and also above the cemetery where Michael Furey was resting. The snow was covering all the living and all the dead. Michael Furey, who is dead, is alive in Gretta's heart and differently Gabriel, who is alive, he seems to be dead in Gretta's heart. At this very moment Gabriel understands that he is still in love with her. Why is the snow considered as an optimistic symbol? Because it is a symbol of purity, rebirth. From the snow we have the water, and the water is for Joyce positive because it refers to life and rebirth. And also because below the snow there is still life that goes on anyway. There is a kind of similarity between the living and the dead, but a paradox as well. A paradox because it seems that Michael Fury, who is physically dead, is still alive in Gretta's heart and seems more alive than Gabriel. The dead people are alive, until they are in someone's heart. Another theme is the theme of the lust because on the way to the hotel, Gabriel wonders about having a beautiful night with his wife. But then, after the revelation, he discovered that he simply loved his wife. Another contrast is that Gabriel is very proud of himself, he considered himself superior to others. But after this revelation he understood that he knew nothing about his wife, even if they had spent a lot of years together. Ulysses: Joyce’s masterpiece, written in 7 years, is one of the most extraordinary literary works of the 20th century. It tell the story of a typical day of a common man, Leopold Bloom, who gets up, walks around Dublin, and meets some people such as Stephen Dedalus and finally he goes home to his wife Molly. But things are not so simple, because he wants to reproduce through a common man the life of humanity. Bloom's wonderings are similar to the travel of Ulysses in Homer’s Odyssey. (The Odyssey) Ulysses is the Greek hero whose ship is blown off course. He is involved in dangerous events, but he survive and he can return to his home, Ithaca. 7