Programma Intero Inglese 5° Anno Liceo Linguistico, Sintesi del corso di Inglese

Scarica Programma Intero Inglese 5° Anno Liceo Linguistico e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! The American Revolution When George III came to the throne, Great Britain was in peace. The American colonies were rich and well populated, but relationship with the British government changed when the king decided to tax the colonies, that however stated that if they had no representatives in the Parliament, they couldn’t be taxed: their slogan was «No taxation without representation». At the beginning of the war, the thirteen American colonies met in Philadelphia and gave George Washington the military command. On the 4th of July 1776, the Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson, was approved: it stated that all the men were born equal and with the same rights. The American colonies were supported by a lot of intellectuals, for example Benjamin Franklin, that went to Paris to convince the French government to send an army to help the colonies. With the Treaty of Versailles, Great Britain accepted the American independence. The French Revolution When the French Revolution broke out, Britain condemned it for its violence and became the leader of the six European coalitions formed against France. Britain kept resisting thanks to Horatio Nelson, who defeated the French army in Trafalgar in 1805. Napoleon was defeated in the Battle of Waterloo by the troops of the Duke of Wellington. In November a treaty that restated the return of monarchies was signed. Britain made meetings of workers illegal to prevent public disorder, but this didn’t stop them: the Luddite Riots broke out when workers attacked factories. The army repressed them, killing eleven people and injuring a few hundred. This episode is known as the Peterloo Massacre: because of this, in 1829 Sir Robert Peel founded the Civilian Metropolitan Police. The Industrial Revolution The Industrial Revolution that took place from 1760 to 1840 transformed Britain from an agricultural to an industrial country. In these period some technical innovations developped, such as new materials (iron and steel), new energy sources (coal, petroleum, electricity), new machines (steam engine), new means of transport and communication, a new organization of work (factory system). Because of this revolution there was a lot of unemployment, so many people starved. The ones who worked were badly-payed, badly-fed and badly-clothed, and worked for 16 hours. Women and children were payed less than men. People lived in overpopulated slums, called mushroom towns, where people often died because of the lack of hygiene. For this reason, in 1824 the first Trade Unions were founded. When William IV came to the throne, he enacted a Reform Bill that extended the right to vote to most of the male middle class. Other important reforms were the Factory Acts (children under nine couldn’t work), the abolition of slavery and a new system of national education. Pre-Romanticism The Age of Reason slowly turned in the Age of Sensibility, characterised by a subjective poetry. Nature, folklore and mystery are the main features of the Gothic movement and the Graveyard School. Gothic novels aimed to thrill the reader and were set in remote places, such as castles or churches; Horace Walpole inaugurated the Gothic movement with the novel The Castle of Otranto. Graveyard School’s poems were usually melancholy and set in graveyards; some authors of the Augustan Age belonged to this movement, but wrote in a new meditative and melancholy style (Edward Young, Thomas Gray, Robert Burns). Romanticism The word romantic first appeared in the 17th century in the sense of «extravagant» or «unreal», but by the end of 1700 it assumed a meaning connected with feelings and imagination. In France, the Romanticism had a revolutionary attitude with authors like Voltaire and Rousseau. In Germany, the literary movement called Sturm und Drang was strongly philosophical and emphasized the return to nature, including authors like Goethe and Schiller. In Italy it had patriotic characteristics, while in England it developped in literature. The language was simple and democratic, so that everyone could understand it: in fact, the artificial poetic diction was replaced by a language really spoken by men. The poet was seen as a divine prophet, in the sense that he was free to feelings», which comes from «emotion recollected in tranquillity». Tranquillity gradually disappears as emotions are produced: imagination stems from it, thanks to which the poet is able to write his work. The poetic process is described in I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, also called Daffodils. Nature is seen as a source of inspiration and great pleasure, but also as a life force. The natural world, to which men belong, seems to have life of its own: men communicate with it almost like with a God, so in this sense this vision of things is called pantheistic. Samuel Coleridge Unlike Wordsworth, Coleridge is more interested in the sublime: his style rich of archaisms is noticeable in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which is part of the Lyrical Ballads. In his years of greater frustration he began to take opium and gradually became addicted to it: this is why his poems seem to come from a dream world and share the presence of supernatural. Coleridge is the perfect example of Romantic personality, which is someone who never fully realized his potential. Biographia Literaria is his major critical work: it is a sort of spiritual autobiography in which he explains what he means by nature, imagination, poetic task («to procure a willing suspension of disbelief») and so on. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner This is the opening poem of the Lyrical Ballads: it is in ballad form and has a moral teaching, which is not to go against nature. There are two recurring elements, which are crime and supernatural: for this reason it can be defined as a mixture of Gothic romance and traditional ballad, but also travel literature. It is divided in seven parts, but there is not a real ending because the author does not give an explanation of supernatural events, which are made credible gradually leading the reader to them. An old sailor meets three guests going to a wedding and stops one to tell him a story: he can do nothing but listening. The sailor tells about how his ship reached the South Pole because of storms: an albatross shows up and the crew welcome him as an omen of good luck. After a while, the sailor kills the bird without a reason. A curse is spelled on the ship, which suddenly stops. All the sailors die, leaving the «murderer» alone and haunted by their eyes. He -gradually begins to feel compassion and the curse begins to break. The focal point is the murder of the albatross, which was suggested by Wordsworth (Coleridge wanted to kill a man instead, but it would have been too cruel and shocking): it is a crime against nature and God, and only after he repented he could reach salvation, represented by the return to his country. The visual description are linked to the sailor’s state of mind: they are in fact a metaphor for it. John Keats Keats was labelled «cockney poet» because he came from a poor family and did not attend University: cockney was a rhyming slang invented by East-End criminals, but later it became the name of the working class in London. His father died when he was eight, and his mother when he was fourteen. He spent some years in Italy to recover his health, but he died. He is part of the second generation of Romantic poets, which is more interested in the relationship between life and art. Beauty is the central theme of his poems because it was the only consolation he found in his troubled life. He took inspiration from nature, the Middle Ages and the ancient Greece: he often went to the British Museum to study vases and urns, one of which is described in Ode on a Grecian Urn. Ode on a Grecian Urn In this urn he finds the answer to man’s wish for permanence because art is able to freeze actions and emotions, presenting an ideal world: he thinks in fact that art is the only solution to death («an artist can die but the beauty he has created lives on»). The pictures are cold because they are static, but imagination brings life to them: anyway, what is carved on the urn is frozen, so the lover will never actually reach the girl, trees will never lose their leaves, the pipers will never end their song and so on. Keats defines his ability to convert suffering in art as negative capability: he loses his identity and describes the objects without moral judgements. An Age of Industry and Reforms Queen Victoria came to the throne during a difficult period. The middle class had been partly satisfied by the Reform Bill of 1832, but the working class still lived and worked in very poor conditions: children were amassed in workhouses resembling jails, while workers lived in filthy urban slums. The largest workers’ movement was the one of the Chartists, who wrote a People’s Charter to ask for the right to vote, which was gave to them by other Reform Bills. On the contrary, the rich could benefit from the new inventions, such as the steam engine, electricity and the telegraph. Several reforms were enacted: the Mines Act (forbidding the employment of women and children in mines), the Emancipation of religious sects (which allowed Catholics to hold government jobs) and the Trade Union Act (which legalized the activities of the unions of workers). During Victoria’s reign, modern parties were born: the Conservatives came from the Tories, the Liberals came from the Whigs. The working class founded his own party, called Labour Party. The British Empire The relationship with Ireland had always been difficult, but it worsened during Victoria’s reign. A movement for Irish independence began, known as Irish question: irish people asked for self-government, but it was twice rejected. In this period, the British Empire expanded because of two reasons: to consolidate overseas markets and to remedy the overpopulation at home. The main colonies were Australia, New Zealand and Canada, but also India and some territories of Africa became part of the British Empire. The Victorian compromise The Victorian Age is also known as «the age of the two nations» because there was a huge gap between the rich and the poor. The Victorian compromise was the situation which saw wealth and progress on the one hand, and poverty and backwardness on the other. In fact, town workers kept living in poor conditions while being exploited by their rich employers. According to the mentality of the time, the poors were not victims of circumstances, but a dirty and dangerous species. possibilities of life; - The spiritualization of the senses: there is no difference between good and evil, they can coexist in human soul; - Life as a work of art: Wilde reverses the role of life and art, which means that life takes inspiration from art and not the opposite. This novel a sort of big metaphor of the difficult task to choose between good and evil. The true purpose of Dorian’s life is the pursuit of pleasure and beauty: the same philosophy is stated in the preface of the novel, which contains some of Wilde’s aphorisms (for example «All art is quite useless» in the sense that art has no purpose, which is incoherent because this novel has a moral: there is a price to pay for a life only meant to pleasures and vices). The element of mystery is visible through the story: for example, the fact that all Dorian’s corruptions are seen in his picture, which corresponds to his conscience. The portrait stands therefore for the hidden side of human nature. The conclusion shows Wilde’s theory of art: art is superior to life because it is eternal. The Importance of Being Earnest This is the best known of Wilde’s comedies, which are comedies of manners because they satirize a particular social class or society in general. The title contains a pun: the word «earnest» means honest, but the character who has this name is quite the opposite. The play is based on a succession of equivocations, mistaken identities and revelations, given through witty dialogues. The humour derives from Wilde’s technique of contraries (the actors should appear absolutely imperturbable) and can be divided in: - Verbal humour (which derives from what the characters say); - Situational humour (which derives from very humorous situations); - Behavioural humour (which derives from the funny behaviour of the characters). The play transforms life’s unpleasant situations in enjoyable witticism. It has not a real plot, because the only purpose is to amuse and entertain the audience. The Turn of the Century After Queen Victoria’s death, her son Edward VII came to the throne. During his kingdom a series of processes started, characterizing British social life for the past two centuries: industrialization, the growth of urban areas because of the increase of population, and the extension of the transport network. After his death, his son George V came to the throne. Life during his kingdom was the British counterpart of the Belle Époque, however the upper class still thought of itself as the centre of the civilized world: this conception ended when World War I started. The First World War Austria and Gemany declared war on Serbia: this started a chain of events that brought France, Russia and Britain to side with Serbia against Austria and Germany. Because of this reason, king George V changed his German name of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to an English Windsor. The conflict resulted in lots of deaths and injuries. The poets of the time have seen the horrors of the war, of which they exposed the cruelty and meaninglessness. The Twenties and the Thirties During World War I, men had to fight in the trenches, causing a lack of labour force: for this reason women took their place in the factories. Most of them took part in a movement, called Women’s Suffrage Movement, which aimed at the right to vote: they were called Suffragettes, and were led by Emmeline Pankhurst and her two daughters (Sylvia and Christabel). In 1918, all men aged 21 and women over 30 were allowed to vote: this meant that the number of voters grew, and most of them were workers. This is the reason why the first Labour government was created in 1924. The Second World War When George V died, his son Edward VIII came to the throne. Britain liked him, but he abdicated to marry an American divorcee, Wallis Simpson. He was succeeded by his brother, George VI, who ruled Britain during World War II. The Modern Age This period was characterized by a disillusioned and cynical mood: in fact, because of the war, nothing seemed to be right or certain, making people lose faith in anything like religion, art, phylosophy or even science. Einstein published his theory of relativity, making science a substitute for religion in giving a satisfactory explanation of the universe. He also discarded the concepts of time and space, which he conceived as subjective dimensions. Nietzsche declared that «God was dead», meaning the values which supported Christian culture were coming to an end: thanks to this, people became aware that there were alternatives to Christianity. Freud introduced some theories about the structure and working of the human mind, known as psychoanalysis: this involved dreams and the concept of «free associations». Freud showed that the human mind has many layers, some of which are hidden: in it, the past coexisted with the present. He also believed that each individual responded to reality according to his/her personal history. His theories were very important to writers, because they gave them something to hold on in the chaos of modern life. James Joyce Joyce was born in Dublin. He attended a Jesuit school, in which education was very strict: that is why he hated religion. Also his relationship with his homeland was complicated: he rejected everything related to Ireland, but at the same time all of his works were set in this country. He went in self- imposed exile: this was necessary to write about Ireland with emotional and intellectual detachment. He wrote Dubliners (a collection of short stories), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (in which he announces his conception of art and artists: art should be impersonal, the artist should be detached from his country), Ulysses (story of the day on which Joyce met his wife) and Finnegans Wake (story of a dream in the protagonist’s mind). Dubliners This is a collection of 15 short stories. Joyce wanted to write about the moral history of Ireland: he chose Dublin as set because he considered this