MODERNISM, JAMES JOYCE, VIRGINIA WOOLF, ELIOT, Schemi e mappe concettuali di Inglese

Scarica MODERNISM, JAMES JOYCE, VIRGINIA WOOLF, ELIOT e più Schemi e mappe concettuali in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! MODERNISM Modernism was a complex movement that began after 1910 and flourished in the 1920s and 1930s, involving all forms of art, from literature and music to visual arts and cinema. Modernist literature includes modern novelists like Joyce, Woolf and modern poets like Eliot. The term MODERNISM includes a wide variety of approaches and attitudes to representing the modern world and humanity's place in it. What unites the different expressions of Modernism is the desire to break with tradition through the experimentation of forms and style. Modernist work is typically fragmented and relative, favoring subjective perceptions of reality. The city of Paris became the center where most of the avant-garde movements began. VISUAL ARTS: the most outstanding artists who contributed to the development of such avant-garde movements were Picasso, Braque (Cubism); Balla, Boccioni (Futurism); Duchamp, Kandinsky (Conceptual Art); Magritte, Ernst, Dali (Surrealism). MUSIC: Stravinsky, Schoenberg (that introduced the dodecaphonic system). CINEMA: it developed in line with the visual arts. In France it was influenced by Surrealism; in Germany by Expressionism. MODERN NOVEL: the WWI marked a radical break with the Victorian Novel. Modernists were aware of the dehumanising effects of industrial and mechanized society. Therefore, moral ambiguity, sense of emptiness, absence of values were the main themes of modernist novels. The omniscient narrator disappeared; the characters' thoughts, feelings and memories were presented directly or indirectly; no linear plots; there is no chronological series of events, since time is perceived as duration. The Modernists rejected the idea of the novel as a mirror of society and the sense of social responsibility felt by the Victorian novelists. They produced difficult avant-garde novels designed for a small elite of highly educated readers in contrast with popular literature and mass culture. On the other hand, Modernists were deeply influenced by the revolutionary scientific and philosophical theories which widespread in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century. SIGMUND FREUD: proposed a theory of human consciousness, which involved different levels of experience and memory. The deepest level was the unconscious, which could only be accessed through dreams. Much of man's conscious behaviour was governed by irrational unconscious drives, which were established in man's childhood. Such ideas determined the development of the Modern Novel (Joyce, Woolf). HENRI BERGSON: in contrast to the scientific Materialism and Positivism of the Victorian Age he argued that we don't perceive time as linear; we experience a mixture of past, present and future in the same moment. WILLIAM JAMES: American psychologist. His idea of stream of consciousness influenced the narrative techniques used by Modernists like Woolf and Joyce. Consequently, the theories of Freud, Bergson and James (together with Albert Einstein's theory of relativity) led to the development of new techniques of writing. J. Joyce and V. Woolf were the two greatest writers who applied the idea of the stream of consciousness to their works. The two main narrative techniques which derived from that revolutionary concept are: Direct interior monologue: it refers to the direct presentation of a character's stream of consciousness without the presence of a narrator. The most famous example is Molly's monologue in "Ulysses" by Joyce. Indirect interior monologue: it refers to the indirect presentation of a character's thoughts filtered through the voice of a third-person narrator. Woolf preferred this type of monologue, which can be found in her most famous novels "Mrs Dalloway and" To the Lighthouse ". Joyce used the indirect interior monologue in" Dubliners "and in" Ulysses ", where it is employed in combination with the direct interior monologue. JAMES JOYCE 1882-1941 James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882 from a Catholic middle-class family. He went to a Catholic college led by the Jesuit order. However, because of his mother’s death, he began to drink and live-in poor conditions. He fell in love with Nora Bernache and they settled in Austria and then in Trieste. Meanwhile he worked as an English teacher and he met Italo Svevo. With the outlook of the 1stWorld War, he moved to Zurich, a neutral city where he began to work on ‘Ulysses’. Then, he went to Paris, where he met Picasso and visited the USA. But, with the outlook of the 2ndWorld War, he went to Zurich again where he died in 1941. His maim works are → Dubliners (1914), A portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) Ulysses (1922) Finnegan’s Wake (1939) THE MYTH AND THE ANTI-HERO Joyce revives traditional myths to universalize personal experience and, on the contrary, to emphasize the less heroic and undignified life of modern humanity, thus creating irony. Joyce's main characters are similar to Svevo's inept protagonists in Zeno's Conscience, as they are individuals without qualities, unable to make sense of the world around them. They experience only temporary flashes of wisdom (epiphanies) that do not fully respond to their thirst for deeper meaning. CHANGE POINT OF VIEW The narrator can be within the story as a character or outside of it, providing a different perspective in space and time. Its purpose is to offer different visions of its characters and the reality they perceive REALISM+ SIMBOLISM = MODERNISM Realism aims at objectivity, symbolism instead is based on the use of symbols to convey individual emotions. Both represent the first steps of Joyce's literary inspiration and are cleverly combined in the Dubliners, for example. OBJECTIVITY Artists must be outside of society and must not express their opinions or emotions. The narrator withdraws from his works and lets the characters speak for themselves. This provides the reader with a plurality of interpretations STREAM OF CONCIUSNESS In the 20th century, the Stream of consciousness technique allowed authors to give voice to a new concept of human consciousness and human life. Its main aim was to render the free flux of thoughts of the characters, without any intervention of the author. It was achieved through the fragmentation of the perspective, the breaking of grammar rules and the overlapping of past and present events. Many authors focused on this new technique. In fact, the idea of the instability of the self, had been introduced for the 1st time by Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, which formalized the concept that consciousness is multi-layered and that reality exists only as it is perceived by the self. Term also used by William James in Principles of Psychology (1890). It is a psychological process that is adopted by modernist writers like Joyce when they want to portray the way the human mind works and shapes our personality. INTERIOR MONOLOGUE This is an experimental narrative technique in Joyce's works to realistically show the stream of consciousness of his characters: it is the fictitious adaptation of the characters' thoughts as if they were delivered in a monologue. VIRGINIA WOOLF 1882-1941 Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882 but being a woman, she didn’t have the opportunity to go to university, so she received a home education and she became an intellectual writer. When her mother died she had a serious mental breakdown and this is the beginning of her psychological instability. After her father’s death in 1904, she moved to Bloomsbury, where she founded a group of intellectuals called Bloomsbury group. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf and they founded the Hogarth Press, a publishing company whose aim was to publish the works of experimental writers. She died in 1941 as a suicide woman. STYLES she’s one of the greatest literary innovators of the 20s since she rejected the conventions of realistic fiction preferring new techniques to describe the interiority of the characters, the impact of exterior event on their consciousness and their “moments of being”, rare moments of insight during the characters' daily life when they finally manage to see reality behind appearances. In her vision, facts were less important than the impact they had on the characters and the subjectivity of experiences was more important than the objectivity of the events. Virginia Woolf used the interior monologue in order to reveal characters directly through their own thoughts. Her prose was full of subordinate sentences, following the logical development of sentences in the human mind. The androgynous = a man-womanly character that combines a masculine and feminine vision of reality = a symbol of perfection MAIN WORKS • Jacob’s room (1922) • Mrs Dalloway (1925) • To the Lighthouse (1927) • Orlando (1928) • A Room of One’s Own (1929) = an essay! • A great number of reviews and critical essays - collected in The Common Reader (1925) and The Second Common Reader (1932) MAIN THEMES • problems of PERSONAL IDENTITY and personal relationships → Freud’s psychoanalysis: he studies the unconscious through the interpretation of symbols and dreams As all modernist writers, SHE FOCUSES ON THE SINGLE INDIVIDUAL, she rebels against the materialism of her time and she rejects both Victorian conventions and aesthetic theories • the significance OF TIME, CHANGE AND MEMORY for human personality → As Bergson stated, TIME is a personal perception, so it is a flexible dimension. • the position of WOMEN in society → Woolf supported the claims for women’s rights and underlines the inequalities and the injustices women have to suffer under MRS DALLOWAY 1925 The story of Mrs Dalloway takes place in one single day (Wednesday) and in one single city (London). The narration follows Clarissa’s thoughts while buying flowers and objects for the party she has organized, and tries to capture the impressions that the city of London evokes in her mind. Clarissa’s counterpart is Septimus Smith, a veteran of the war, who wanders through London as a way to reach distraction from reality, but at the end he kills himself. Clarissa’s counterpart is Septimus Smith, a man who experienced the war and has therefore problems related to anxiety and terrible war visions. Just like Clarissa, he feels a strong attraction towords death and consider the suicide as a form of liberation. They both wander through London on the same day and they share the same feelings, but at the end of the day only Clarissa is able to survive and, understanding that death is part of life, she decides to live on. Clarissa is a woman with conservative political views and is not particularly open-minded. She is defined by her status (as suggested by the title Mrs) and by her condition of mother. She lives her being a wife and a mother as a limitation to her freedom but she doesn't express these feelings because she feels weak. Her mind is also pervaded by her past memories, expressed through the Stream of Consciousness technique, so we can understand her inner thoughts and realize her desire to celebrate life (since she loves parties and social life) and her sort of attraction towards death. Mrs. Dalloway - Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself → is the incipit of Woolf's novel “Mrs Dalloway”. Mrs. Dalloway is about to go out and buy some flowers. The first line underlines Woolf's point of view on female emancipation: Mrs. Dalloway is an independent woman. TIME IN THE NOVEL Time is unconventional, subjective: Woolf stresses the Importance of the time of the mind, which goes backwards and forwards in one second. The obsession with time is an important feature of Mrs Dalloway, which is pervaded by numerous references to the chiming of clocks and the passing of time. Time is symbolically represented by the Big Ben, whose constant chiming is heard by all the characters and represents a unifying element among them. WAR IN THE NOVEL This is particularly evident in the case of Septimus Smith. Through him Woolf can deliver a strong message of social criticism against English society, which sent its youth to experience the horror of death and ultimately abandoned them. WAR IN THE NOVEL – FOCUS ON SEPTIMUS As an idealistic young man, Septimus Smith surely embraced war with the enthousiasm that characterised many young people of his generations (see Brooke), but his enthousiasm and his ideals crashed under the blows inflicted inflicted on him and on his comrades comrades by the war. the war. He experienced the loss of a friend, massive death, despair, moral aberration and loneliness. When he returns home, he is a broken man, he no longer feels part of the world, he feels lost (shell-shock). His final act of suicide frees him from what he considers the burden of an absurd life. AN EXPERIMENTAL NOVEL She abandons the traditionally-structured Victorian novels in favour of a more experimental approach to writing: actions are fragmented and disconnected. Like Joyce, Woolf Joyce, Woolf is more interested interested in the working working of the mind, the impressions the world arouses in it and the ways in which it is affected by external reality. That’s why she uses the stream of consciousness technique, but in a very unusual and poetic way unlike Joyce, she shows her characters’ thoughts in a more controlled and organised way. ORLANDO (1928) PLOT “Orlando” is the fictional biography of a young boy travelling in time and space, but also in gender, since he turns into a woman over the course of the story. The story begins in the Elizabethan period and Orlando is a 16-year-old boy. He is a favourite of Queen Elizabeth. During the Stuarts, he makes career and he becomes becomes an ambassador ambassador in Turkey. The exotic setting provides providesthe appropriate the appropriate background for the turning point of the novel: Lord Orlando undergoes a mysterious metamorphosis and becomes a woman. She comes back to England and her life develops in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. She finally completes the poem she has been writing for centuries and she is awarded a literary prize. THEMES • GENDER DIFFERENCES AND IDENTITY Orlando's sex change is a very important scene. What Woolf is suggesting here is that gender roles are not biological, but societal. Gender is a concept imposed on people who live in society. The point is that when society allows the freedom of gender neutrality, people will be more free as individuals to act according to their nature and personality. • CONFORMING TO SOCIETY This theme of 'conforming to society' plays an important role in the novel. Orlando is introduced to each new age and each new situation, he changes him/herself to fit the rules, but eventually she grows to be an independent mind and she rejects the idea of conformity, choosing to remain however she chooses to be.