PROGRAMMA INGLESE V ANNO LINGUISTICO (maturità), Appunti di Inglese

Scarica PROGRAMMA INGLESE V ANNO LINGUISTICO (maturità) e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! THE VICTORIAN AGE The Victorian age was named after Queen Victoria, who was born in 1837 and came to the throne at the age of 18 to rule for 64 years. This was a very optimistic age of economic and scientific progress and social reforms in which England became the “English Empire”, extended overseas and owner of many colonies, such ad Canada, Asia and South Africa. In 1840, Queen Victoria married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg- Gotha, a german prince who, during WW2, had to change his surname to “Windsor” because of suspicion of some connection with the nazis. They had 9 children and their family life provided a model of respectability, which was the key word of Victorian Age. In fact, this period represented a sort of return to Puritan age : the family had to be patriarchal and society had to keep appearances and was divided into three classes :  UPPER CLASS (in which women could teach or do voluntary work)  MIDDLE CLASS (in which women had to take care of the house and children)  LOWER CLASS (in which women had to work); Women who had children out of marriage were called “fallen women”, and their children were often abandoned in the “workhouses” which were institutions where the poor received board and lodging in return for work. Life in the workhouses, which were mainly run by the church, was appalling on account of their system of regimentation, hard work and monotonous diet in which the poor had to wear uniforms. This apparent hard line was due in part to a faith in progress and Puritan visues of hard work, frugality and duty. The 1830s had seen the beginning of what was to be called an “age of reform” acted by Queen Victoria. Firstly, the Great Reform Act had transferred voting privileges from the small boroughs controlled by the nobility and the gentry, to the large industrial towns. The Factory Act had prevented children aged 9 to 13 from being employed more than forty-eight hours a week, and no person between 13 and 18 could work more than seventy-two hours a week. Lastly, the Poor Law Amendment Act had reformed the old Poor Laws with the creation of the workhouses. In 1845, the destruction of potato crops in Ireland occurred because of an unknown plant disease. Since this country’s agriculture was based on potatoes, they experienced a terrible famine because of which many people died or emigrated to find a better life. Moreover, the prime minister was forced to abolish the Corn laws, which imposed tariffs on imported corn. The Victorian Age was also a very rich period which, in the mid-years of the 19 th century, saw a second wave of industrialization which brought economic, cultural and architectural change, avoiding the revolutionary wave which had invested the rest of Europe. In 1851, a Great Exhibition organized by Prince Albert showed the world Britain’s industrial and economic power and attracting millions of visitors. People became fond of exhibitions, so money was invested in setting up several museums. THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE The Victorian Age was marked by complexity : it was a time of unprecedented change but also of great contradictions in which progress, reforms and stability coexisted with poverty and injustice. Religion had an important role in people’s lives and evangelicalism, in particular, led to philanthropy : they encouraged public and political actions and created a lot of charities which were mainly led by middle class women. The Victorians believed in God, but also in progress and science. Increasing emphasis was placed on education and hygiene was encouraged to improve health care. There was also general agreement on the virtues of asserting a social status, keeping up the appearances and looking after a family, which were all considered respectable things. However, the concept of respectability was a mixture of morality and hypocrisy. It was just a veil underneath unpleasant aspects of society (dissolution, poverty, social unrest). There was also a growing emphasis on the duty of men to respect and protect women, seen at the same time as physically weaker and morally superior, who controlled the family business and brought up the children. Moralising ‘prudery’ in its most extreme manifestations gradually led to the denunciation of nudity in art, the veiling of sculptured genitals and the rejection of any attitude or reference to sex, including words with a sexual connotation. THE VICTORIAN NOVEL A great deal of Victoria literature was first published in a serial form, appearing in instalments in the pages of periodicals. This allowed the writer to feel he was in constant contact with his public, being obliged to maintain the interest of his story gripping because one boring instalment would cause the public not to buy that periodical any longer. There was a further advantage because an author could change the story according to its success or failure. There were different types of Victorian novel :  The novel of manners, which dealt with economic and social problems and described a particular class or situation  The humanitarian novel, of realistic, fantastic or moral nature according to the predominant tone and the issue dealt with  Novel of formation, dealt with one character’s development from early youth to some sort of maturity  Literary nosense, describing a nonsensical universe in which social rules and conventions are disintegrated. The bulk of Humanitarian novel can be identified in Charles Dickens’ novels, which were admired for their tone, combining humor with a sentimental request for reform for the less fortunate. CHARLES DICKENS Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth in 1812 and had a very unhappy childhood. In fact, his father was sent to prison for debt and at the age of 12 he was put to work in a factory. When the family finances improved and his father was released, he was sent to a school in London and at 15 found employment as an office boy at a lawyer’s and studied shorthand at night. By 1832 he had become a very successful shorthand reporter of parliamentary debates and began to work as a reporter for a newspaper. In fact, he dedicated his life to writing, starting from journalistic and editorial activities. After the success of his first publications, he started a full-time career as a novelist. In 1843, he published “A Christmas Carol” , the first of his successful Christmas books who started the Christmas tradition in England. He wrote many other novels in which he denounced the evils of Victorian Society and the conditions of the poor and the working class. Among his works, there are Hard Times, in which he criticized the Victorian school system, and Oliver Twist, an autobiographical novel in which he portrayed his difficult childhood an the evils of the workhouses. A CHRISTMAS CAROL OLIVER TWIST Oliver Twist first appeared in instalments in 1837 and was later published as a book. The novel fictionalizes the economic insecurities and humiliation Dickens experienced as a child. The name Twist, though it is In fact, his friend has created a potion able to release his evil side, Mr. Hyde. These two beings are in perpetual struggle; once Hyde is released from hiding, he achieves domination over the Jekyll aspect, so that the individual has only two choices : -on the one hand, the man might choose a life of crime and depravity -on the other hand, Jekyll must eliminate Hyde in the only way left, by killing him. In fact, suicide is Jekyll’s final choice. THE DOUBLE SIDE OF THE PLOT The story takes place in London in the 1870s. At that time, London had a double nature and reflected the hypocrisy of Victorian Society. In fact, there was a contrast between the “respectable West end” and the poverty of the “East End slums”. This ambivalence is reinforced by the symbolism of Jekyll’s house, whose two facades represent the faces of two opposed sides of the same man : the front of this house, used by Dr. Jekyll, is fair and handsome, while the rear side, used by Mr. Hyde, is part of a sinister block of buildings. Most scenes of the novel take place at night, without no natural daylight. In fact, the most important events are wrapped up in darkness and fog; for example, when Hyde tramples over the child and it is 3 in the morning, as well as Jekyll’s suicide, that also takes place at night. STYLE Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has a multi-narrative structure, in which a complex series of points of view is presented -Utterson has a role of detective since he follows clues and drawes hyphoteses. He has a strange relationship with Enfield, the walks of these two very different men may be a metaphor for the double nature of every human being, which must be accepted by men to live. -Enfield, his distant relative -Dr. Lanyon, a friend and a collegue of Dr. Jekyll’s as well as a great advocate, is the first person to see Jekyll’s transformation. Since he witnesses a physical impossible phenomenon, he prefers to die. -Dr Jekyll himself, who is the last narrator and speaks in first person in the last chapter, in which his narrative and final confession take up. THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is the portrayal of good and evil, and its characters are the stereotypes of people who are “good” and “evil”. As Jekyll has lived a virtuous life, he has an handsome face, well-shaped hands and a large and more proportioned body. Meanwhile, since Hyde is evil, he is pale and dwarfish, giving an impression of deformity, and the good Mr. Utterson reads “Satan’s signature” under his traits. On several occasions, Hyde appears dressing with Jekyll’s fine clothes, which are too large for him. This points out how much smaller and uglier Mr. Hyde is than his alter ego. However, despite being less developed, Hyde begins to grow in stature, threatening the original balance of good and evil in Jekyll’s nature. SOURCES This novel originally came from a dream that Stevenson had when he was afflicted with tuberculosis. He had dreamed of a man in a laboratory who had swallowed a drug and turned into a different being. The gothic side of this story excited him, and made him write a first draft. In the 19th century, several literary works depicted the double nature of Victorian society, and Stevenson himself had been concerned since his youth with the duality of man’s nature. Moreover, the Calvinism of his family gave him a sense of man’s divided self and its pessimism moved him to rebel against religion. INFLUENCES AND INTERPRETATIONS Stevenson drew inspiration for the description of Hyde from Darwin’s studies about man’s kinship to the animal world. Hyde’s small stature indicates that his body is not exercised. In fact, he is deformed and even Lanyon calls him “abnormal”, but what this deformity consists of, nobody is able to say. Hyde may be both primitive and the symbol of repressed psychological drives. In fact, Jekyll has projected his hidden pleasures onto Hyde, which became part of its own being. This novel may also be considered a reflection of art itself, as a kind of psychological search and Jekyll’s discovery may symbolize the artist’s journey into the unexplored regions of human psyche. THE BRONTE SISTERS Charlotte, Emily and Anne are three sisters who spent most of their lives in isolation, living in a remote part of Workshire. Like many others female writers of the period, they decided to use pseudonyms. It was under these pen names that each one of them published their novels which were, for example, Jane Eyre for Charlotte, Wuthering Heights for Emily and Agnes Grey for Anne. WUTHERING HEIGHTS PLOT The novel revolves around two houses, “WUTHERING HEIGHTS” and “Thrushcross Grange”. At the beginning of the story, Mr. Lockwood visits his landlord Mr. Heathcliff at Wuthering Heights. Forced to stay the night because of a snowstorm, Mr. Lockwood has a strange dream about a girl, Catherine, who is tapping on the window, asking to be let in. The next day, Mr. Lockwood returns to Thrushcross grange and the housekeeper, Nelly Dean, tells him the whole story of the family from the heights. Mr. Earnshaw, the father of Hindley and Catherine, one day came back from Liverpool with a foundling that he called Heathcliff. Hindley hated Heathcliff, whereas Catherine got on very well with him. One day, Catherine was bitten by a dog and for that she was forced to spend five weeks at thrushcross grange, which gave her the opportunity to know Edgar and Isabella, as well as their way of life. So, when a few years later Edgar proposed to her, she accepted. Meanwhile, she told Nally Dean she would not marry Heathcliff because he was socially inferior. Then, Heathcliff overheard part of the conversation and disappeared to return three years later, rich and determined to take revenge. In fact, he won the possession of Wuthering Heights by gambling (=gioco d’azzardo) with Hindley. Then, he eloped with Edgar’s sister, Isabella, married her and treated her like a servant. Catherine fell ill and died giving birth to her daughter, Cathy. Years later, Heathcliff kidnapped Cathy and obliged her to marry his weak and spoilt son, Linton. His revenge was complete since he became the owner of Thrushcross Grange too. Nelly’s narrative ends here. Then, Mr. Lockwood leaves Yorkshire and comes back after a year to find out that both Linton and Heathcliff are dead and Cathy and Haretons (Hindley’s son) are going to get married and to live in peace and happiness. SETTING This novel is built around the contrast between the two houses on the Yorkshire moors, Wuthering heights and Thrushcross Grange. Wuthering Heights is a severe environment, firmly rooted in local traditions and customs, while Thrushcross Grange is based on stability, kindness and respectability. So, the two houses stand for two opposing forces : -the principle of the storm and energy -the principle of calm However, with the marriage between Hareton and Cathy, there will finally be an harmony. To sum up, the novel is based on the contrasts between : -the two houses -love and hate -death and life -caos and order -the outside (mr. lockwood) and inside (Nelly Dean) narrators. CHARACTERS The hero, Heathcliff, is moved by irresistible passion and also appears as a gothic villain. Catherine is driven partly by her social ambitions, but she is also prompted to violate her social conditions. So, she embodies a wild and romantic nature. In fact, the spirit of romanticism is still present. However, there are also some gothic themes like the sinister atmosphere of Wuthering Heights or Catherine’s ghost. THE STRUCTURE AND STYLE The narrative mode is a “concentric” system of narratives. There are two major narrators : Mr. Lockwood, the “outsider” who simply narrates what he sees in the form of a journal, and Nelly Dean, the insider, closely involved in the story and entirely reliable. Her narrative does not proceed according to chronological time : it starts almost at the end of the story and develops a narrative within the narrative, including the use of flashbacks. This complex structure creates a sense of verisimilitude and suspense which represents an unique achievement in Victorian Literature. Often compared to a Shakesperean tragedy for its rendering of turbulent passions, the novel marked a departure from the observation of society towards the description of the individual personality, anticipating the early 20th century novelists in narrative technique. OSCAR WILDE Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. Later, he moved to London where he soon became a celebrity for his extraordinary wit and his characteristic style of dress as a “dandy”. In a speaking tour after the A comic situation is created when Algernon and Jack face each other. Then Gwendolen is announced: jealousy and curiosity have brought her down to the country to find out more about Jack, whom she knows only as Ernest. The two young women find that they both seem to be engaged to an Ernest Worthing. In the third act Lady Bracknell arrives and she refuses to allow a marriage with Algernon until she knows Cecily is the heiress of an immense fortune. Lady Bracknell recognises Miss Prism, who confesses that she put the manuscript of a novel she was working on into the perambulator and the baby in her care into a handbag which she then deposited in the cloak-room of Victoria Station. Lady Bracknell is thus able to solve the riddle about Jack’s birth: he is the eldest son of her poor sister, Mrs Moncrieff, and therefore Algernon's brother. In the end both men succeed in marrying the women they want. CHARACTERS Wilde's contribution to theatre was a new sort of the Restoration comedy of manners, in which the problems of his age were reflected through his witty remarks. His social drama was a mirror in which fashionable audiences could see reflected the images of their own fashionable world, in which everyone knew very well that the life they led was not as stable, as exclusive or as moral as it pretended to be. The Importance of Being Earnest presents an aristocratic society whose members are typical Victorian snobs: the are often arrogant, formal and concerned with money. Lady Bracknell, in particular, embodies the stereotype of the Victorian English aristocrat. THEMES The main concern of all the characters in the play is marriage. Wilde deliberately adds a Victorian-era interpretation to the old English formula of the marriage plot. The works of Jane Austen provide multiple examples of this genre. Wilde makes fun of marriage, which he saw as a practice surrounded by hypocrisy and absurdity. Although the play ends happily, it leaves the audience under the impression that marriage and social values are often tied together in destructive ways. In fact, Victorian aristocracy does not see marriage as the result of love, but rather as a tool for achieving social status. IRONY AND APPEARANCE The whole play is built on dialogues, puns, misunderstandings and paradoxes to deal with the complexity of social and personal identification. The title is a pun in itself: the name 'Earnest (a misspelling for Ernest) evokes the adjective earnest, that is, serious or sincere, while none of the characters is truthful. The characters, used by the playwright to criticise the Victorian society, exist only because they take part in conversation. What is important to them is not what they say, but how they say it; thus Wilde's social satire comes from the ironic use of solemn language in frivolous situations. Appearance is also quite important in the play, since in this world the laws of reality can be suspended and the characters may change their identities as they wish. THE WAR POETS When the First World War broke out, thousands of young men volunteered for military service, and most of them regarded the conflict as ah adventure, undertaken for noble ends. It was when the slaughter of thousands of soldiers occourred in 1916, that this sense of pride was replaced by doubt and dissillusionment. For soldiers, life in the trenches was comparable to hell. In fact, almost from the beginning, the common soldiers improvised verses which being rough, genuine, obscene songs of the trenches, did not reach the ears of the literate people. However, there was also a group of poets who volunteered to fight in the Great War and managed to represent modern warfare in a realistic and unconventional way, awakening the conscience of the readers to the horrors of the war. These poets became known as the “war poets”, whose poetry was modern because of its subject-matter, which forced them to find new modes of expression. Ù RUPERT BROOKE Rupert Brooke was born in 1887, and joined up at the beginning of the conflict, but saw a little combat because of an illness which brought him to death. His reputation as a War Poet is linked to the five sonnets of 1914, in which he advanced the idea that war is clean and cleansing. He expressed an idealism about the conflict, in which the only thing that can suffer is the body, and even death is seen as a reward. His poems were traditional in form, but also showed a sentimental attitude, which was completely lost in the works of other War Poets, who witnessed the horrors of trench warfare. The publication of Brooke’s sonnets coincided with his death in 1915, and made him extremely popular, turning him into a symbol of the ‘young romantic hero’ who inspired patriotism in the early months of the Great War, when England needed a focal point for its sacrifice, ideals and aspirations. ‘THE SOLDIER’ In this poem Brooke idealizes War, giving a patriotic view of it and seeing death as a way to honor England, which is personified and seen as a mother who gave him life and raised him. Moreover, he deals with the idea of immortality, nobility and the lyricism, which was one of the things that made Brooke a favorite poet among the young people of his generation. WILFRED OWEN After visiting a hospital for the wounded, Owen returned to England and decided to enlist. He is noteworthy for his poems, which are painful in their accurate account of ‘gas casualties’ and the technical innovation of ‘pararhymes’ (half-rhymes where the consonants in two different words are the same but the vowels vary), as well as his extensive use of assonance and alliteration. These devices made the poems suitable for any situation in which people must suffer and die. ‘DULCE ET DECORUM EST’ This poem is based on the poet's experience of the horrors of war in the trenches and it is an attempt to communicate the 'pity of War' to future generations. The Latin title means it is sweet and honorable; it is a quotation from the Latin poet Horace. It is set in the trenches and describes terrified soldiers escaping from a gas attack, some of which lost their boots because of the gas shell. The soldiers are panicking and are trying to put their masks on but one of them dies, as the poet tells us when he says ‘I saw him drowning’. The sight of this man dying, which he describes as horrible, also returns in his dreams. Finally, we can see how the author tries to communicate that dying for the country is sweet and honorable is a lie. SIEGFRIED SASSOON In 1915 he joined the army and was sent to France. His reactions to the realities of the War were bitter and violent, and he expressed them through irony in his poems, in which he denounced the political errors and insincerities for which the soldiers were being sacrificed in various ways: in a documentary way, by which he recreated the physical horror of the war, through anger and satire and through sardonic distancing. What Sassoon achieved was not compassion, but the bitter spontaneity of shocking and realistic detail. ‘GLORY OF WOMEN’ (poem) This is a “Petrarchan sonnet”, since it is structured in 14 lines. The protagonists are women waiting for their men, who idealized war and thought it was something glorious. In fact, the poem is mainly about what women were told about war, since they imagine men as heroes. They cannot believe to the terrible reality, in which the battlefield is compared to hell in which people trample on corpses. The poem tells about both German and English women because even if their nations were in conflict, they felt the same sorrow. Additionally, waiting for their loved ones, they used to work in factories or spend time knitting, preparing shells and knit socks because they did not know there was a chance they would not come back. WYSTAN AUDEN He was the leader of the so-called 'Oxford poets', a group of young intellectuals who expressed a left-wing viewpoint. As a young man, he was deeply committed to social and political issues. First, he worked for the strikers; then he witnessed the rise of Nazism. During the Spanish Civil War he served as an ambulance driver and he 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 with a British passport so she could escape from Nazi Germany. Auden worried increasingly about the fact that he was homosexual. Homosexuality was condemned by the standards of his religious upbringing and was regarded as a criminal offence in England. In 1939 he moved to New York in 1940 he published what is probably his best volume of the decade, Another Time. Auden's political period was over; from then on his social poetry was to be anti-ideological, anti-political. It was at about this same time that he returned to the religion of his youth, Anglicanism. INFLUENCES At the beginning of his career - the English period -, Auden was deeply influenced by Freud and psychoanalysis but thought about psychological models in relation to the customs and rituals of an entire society. He believed that the role of poetry was to tell 'stories of particular people and experiences, from which each, according to his immediate and peculiar needs, may draw his own conclusions. Another important influence in this period was that of Karl Marx AUDEN IN AMERICA A second phase in Auden's poetry started with his move to America in 1939 and his withdrawal from political commitment. 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. THEMES Auden's themes are various. He deals with Tre tying to achieve a definition of what true love is, praising the sweetness of everyday affection. However, he often implies that love cannot be achieved without sorrow. Modern suffering, including unfaithfulness, sickness, the passing of time, greed and religious doubt, is another theme which Auden highlighted in some of his poems. The theme of death can be found in Funeral Blues (- Text Bank 85), which describes mourning and grief experienced by the bereaved. Politics, social concerns and citizenship are other central issues, with which he deals also in Refugee Blues. The theme of the quest recurs in both the earlier and later periods, but the message differs. In the English period the quest is for a new society and a new self. Later on it becomes a quest for a new life. REFUGEE BLUES The blues reflects the sadness and the tribulations of the Afro-Americans on a secular level, as opposed to The Gospel songs; it is the expression of the individual contemplating his situation in relation to the Dubliners consists of 15 short stories which disclose human situations and moments of intensity, and lead to a moral, social or spiritual revelation. The opening stories deal with childhood and youth in Dublin; the others, advancing in time and expanding in scope, concern the middle years of characters and their social, political or religious affairs. Joyce, being a Modernist novelist, was hostile to city life, finding that it degraded its citizens. In fact, his Dublin is a place where true feeling and is the compassion for others do not exist. The stories are arranged into four groups, in which Joyce presented Dublin under four of its aspects : childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The last story, The Dead, was a late addition and can be considered Joyce's first masterpiece. It summarises themes and motifs of the other 14 stories of the collection, but it functions more as an epilogue. The description in each story is realistic and extremely concise, with an abundance of external details, even the most unpleasant and depressing ones. The use of realism is mixed with symbolism, since external details generally have a deeper meaning. THE USE OF EPIPHANY In “Dubliners”, Joyce experiments for the first time the “Epiphany” technique, that is, the sudden spiritual manifestation' caused by a trivial gesture, an external object or a banal situation, which reveals the character's inner truths. STYLE His style in Dubliners is characterised by two distinct elements: the interior monologue and patterned repetition of images, that is, chiasmus. In the first three short stories, which make up the childhood section, Joyce employs a first-person narrator, who remains nameless and not identified. For the other 12 stories a third-person narrator is employed: he often shares a particular character's perspective and tends to reflect the language and the sensitivity of the person who is being described. PARALYSIS Paralysis (of which Dublin is the centre) is a pervasive theme in Dubliners; it is present from beginning to end and becomes gradually more powerful and universal. The paralysis which Joyce wanted to portray is both physical - resulting from external forces - and moral - linked to religion, politics and culture. Joyces Dubliners accept their condition either because they are not aware of it or because they lack the courage to break the chains that bind them. However, the moral centre of Dubliners is not paralysis alone but its revelation to its victims. In fact, the main theme is the failure to find a way out of'paralysis. The opposite of paralysis is "escape and its consequent failure. It originates from an impulse caused by a sense of enclosure that many characters experience, but none of them succeeds in freeing themselves. EVELINE (pg. 251) This short story describes the life of a 19-year-old girl who has the opportunity to change her routine life but is unable to leave her familiar community in Dublin. In fact, she lives a very sad life : her mother is dead and she is forced to take her place, her father is violent and she does a job she does not like at all. Her only escape is Frank, her fiancèe, who proposed to her to run away together. However, she thinks her fate is to stay in Ireland and she can’t find the courage to escape. This story is written in a traditional way, through the use of epiphany and a specific choice of the terms. For example, the 'street organ’, which is also called harmonium" in Eveline, in contrast to the everyday words for the rest of the furniture in the sitting room, takes on a symbolic meaning. Most of the story takes place in Eveline's mind; however, her thoughts are not arranged in chronological order and they wander from past to present and future. A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN This is a semi-autobiographical novel which involves a young man, Stephen Dedalus, a young Irish writer, in search of experience and success. It proceeds chronologically and follows Stephen's life from childhood through adolescence until the age of 20, age of Stephen's greatest transformation from fanatical religiousness to a new devotion to art and beauty. ULYSSES The novel is constructed as a modern parallel to Homer’s Odyssey. This novel, stylistically dense and exhilarating, is generally regarded as a masterpiece and it has been defined by Elliot as “the most important expression that the modern age has found”. All the action of Ulysses takes place in and immediately around Dublin on a single day (June 16, 1904). The central character in the first part is Stephen Dedalus, the Joycean alter ego, a self-assertive young man whose name is that of the first Christian martyr, while his surname, Dedalus, is of course that of the legendary Greek artificer. The second part of Ulysses is dominated by the figure of Leopold Bloom,the Ulysses of the title: a middle- aged married man, who wanders around Dublin as Ulysses wandered around the Mediterranean, encountering adventures which roughly parallel those of the Homeric hero. The third part is dominated by his wife, Molly Bloom, who corresponds to Ulysses's wife Penelope, just as Stephen Dedalus represents Ulysses' son Telemachus. PARALLELS WITH THE ODYSSEY The parallel with the Homeric poem is developed in more detail in each of the sections or chapters into which the book is divided. There are eighteen in all, each one corresponding to one of the episodes in the Odyssey, although not in the same order: the way in which these parallels function can be illustrated by reference to certain episodes. For example, the first episode is called "Telemachus", and it echoes the theme of the first book of the Odyssey, who describes the son of Ulysses, forced to share his home with his mother's suitors. PENELOPE (molly’s monologue, last chapter) The last chapter is called “Penelope”, representing the goal of the wanderings of Bloom and Stephen. Safe at home again, Bloom is in bed asleep beside his wife, who lies awake reflecting on her past and present. Although her thoughts seem totally random and formless, they do have a form: they begin with the word "Yes" and they end with the same word, so that her thoughts flow in a circle. The monologue is divided into eight long sentences, for a total of about 30,000 words through which Joyce represents her thoughts adopting a technique which is the most complete experiment in Ulysses of the stream-of-consciousness method, which attempts to represent the natural, disordered sequence of thoughts and feelings as they come up in the individual mind, uncensored or incompletely censored by rational control. GEORGE ORWELL Orwell was a prolific book-reviewer, critic and political journalist. Indebted to Charles Dickens in his choice of social themes and the use of realistic and factual language, he conveyed a vision of human fraternity and of the misery caused by poverty and deprivation. He insisted on tolerance, justice and decency in human relationships. He also strongly criticised totalitarianism, warning against the violation of liberty and the increasing artificiality of urban civilisation. 1984 PLOT The novel describes a future world divided into three blocks: Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. The regimented, oppressive world of Oceania is ruled by the Party, which is led by a figure called 'Big Brother, and is continuously at war with the other two States. Free thought, sex and any expression 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. Then, he knows two other people who have a rebellious attitude towards "the party" and together they form a mysterious group that tries to overthrow it. However, he later discovers that one of them is a spy who tortures him for months, until he completely gives up his identity and learns to love Big Brother. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND The novel is set in a state of perpetual war reminiscent of World War Il and the society, although fictional, reflects the political atmosphere of the tyrannies in Spain, Germany and the Soviet Union. In fact , the ‘character' of Big Brother is both Stalin and Hitler, both real and terrifying leaders, though on opposite sides. So Orwell made clear that he was against any form of totalitarianism, either from the left or the right. THEMES Nineteen Eighty-Four is a satire on hierarchical societies which destroy fraternity. The dictator is called 'Big Brother' but he actually does not watch over his people as a brother should do; so watching here does not mean 'taking care of' but 'controlling. Memory and mutual trust become positive themes in the struggle put up by Winston to maintain his individuality. Decency is mutual trust, tolerance, behaving responsibly towards other people, acting with empathy, which is extremely important for political action and civic culture. A DYSTOPIAN NOVEL Set in a grotesque, squalid and menacing London, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a dystopian novel. A ‘dystopia’ shows a possible future society that is anything but ideal and that satirises existing conditions of society. Orwell establishes a model of what the world should not become by presenting a frightening picture of the future as being under the constant control of Big Brother. In this novel, he does not offer consolation but reveals his sense of history and his sympathy with the millions of people persecuted and murdered in the name of totalitarian ideologies. ANIMAL FARM In the late 1930s news reached the West of Stalin’s purge trials, which led to the death of three million people and sent many others to forced labor camps. In 1939 Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler,