Modernist Literature and Its Influential Figures: Eliot, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, and Yeats, Appunti di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica Modernist Literature and Its Influential Figures: Eliot, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, and Yeats e più Appunti in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! HENRY JAMES. Forerunner of all this new literary current, he lived a little at the turn of 1843-1916. His writing belongs. again to the previous current but introduces this interest for the psychological deepening of the character.. It begins to delve. The plot has a number of possible interpretations. There is only one possibility. It is not possible to take in full the essence of thiswoman. Relationship between America and the Old Continent (Europe), study of the American in Europe. He highlights how Americans compared to Europeans are innocent and ignore all European beliefs. They are genuine people making a number of mistakes (gaffes). Theme of the artist in conflict with society (which is corrupt). He brings a whole series of innovations that are not really modernist but that anticipate it (Chinese box structure=start from a distance and then arrive at the center of the work). The same type of present structure as Frankenstein: external narrator then intemal and then by the person who experienced them firsthand. For example, just think of Clarissa, who is described through a multiplicity of points of view the reader is able to make an understanding of the character itself even if not entirely truthful but more complete. “The Turn of the Sque" haunted house where the reader can not quite understand if they are real or ifthey are only a series of mental disorders of the protagonist. DAISY MILLER JOSEPH CONRAD. He is a particular author, he is a Pole who later settled in England. He writes in a language that is not his language mother. Here too we have a plant that is still traditional but we already have a number of elements that anticipate modernism, such as the fact that there are a multiplicity of storytellers and views. HEART OF DARKNESS It describes the world of the sea, Marlow who tells events in which he took part, in others in which he witnessed and in others tells things that have been told to her by other sailors. To what extent is this narrator credible? When and how is? Nostromo wrote; Secret Agent" but the most famous one is definitely "Art of Darkness". In it Marlow tells his journey in the river Congo starting from the Thames but as it flows he transforms and we take a trip together with them in the Underworld (which is the blackest part of Africa) and assumes a significant symbolic value because becomes a descent into the Unconscious (in the darkest part) so much so that once you get there you find a character which represents the Westemer who in contact with Africa divests himself of all rationality and regresses to a state of nature (from Super lo to Id) made of violence and oppression without inhibitions. At the same time evokes the Dantesque joumey and the descent into hell. You understand well how Conrad has marked Eliot in fact wanted to pay him a tribute with the famous phrase "Mr. Cruts are met again". It's a book that can be read at different levels, it talks about the colonization of the white man in Africa, but it's also a a book about the human psyche and a whole series of other allegorical elements. D. H. LAVRENCE bom in english midland Contemporary of Joyce Woolf Eliot and so on but it is a personality that keeps away from all this modernistmovement and remains very much critical from Proust onwards. He says that these writers have focused too much on the formal element (narrator, point of view etc.) while for him the important thing was the message that the work wanted to give. Maintains a traditional structure but still speaks ofthe characters also from a psychological point of view. What he does is a harsh criticism of the period since the Revolution An industrialist who changed everyone’s lives, especially men. He evokes this return to nature, to the sense of communion with nature. uses the Mythical Method because he was a traveller, with the sole purpose of discovering new things and falls in love with the part of ancient civilizations (rituals). Through the cultures of Central America he elaborates in his novels a new vision of life and humanity based on natural rhythms. It does not only deal with issues related to sex but it does so within an overall context that goes to the complete restructuring of society in a perspective more inherent to the human being. His speech is based on the repressed sexuality of that period, during Capitalism. Man is downgraded to a mere consumer when he is not, making him the link in a production chain and nothing more. Lawrence is a socialist rests his reflections on the reading of Freud; Marx; Engels everything that in those years was agitating and developing. Reflections aimed at dismantling which led then to those after the period of the World War. He wrote many Short Stories, many travel diaries fact was also in Italy (Sardinia; Tuscany); Mourn in Mexico where he describes this important joumey.He as well as his colleagues Woolf and Joyce writes some essays,SONS AND LOVERS and "A propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover" where he comes criticized for the present sexual scene. It is a profound criticism of the society of the time. He however tries to defend his actions. Although he is not interested in formal research, in fact he explicitly says it, he focuses on the full description ofthe company using the characters to convey the message (uses the Paralysis).Communion with nature takes on mystical traits that reveal elements of religiosity and importance of instinct as a source of instinct. FOSTER. He is part of the Bloomsbury group and criticizes contemporary values with a transgressive code for the time. He is one of the writers who begins to deal much more openly with various topics including homosexuality. In fact also tells his story with a young Morise. If you think of his predecessor Oscar Wilde let's see how the themes are always more accentuated. It also deals with the theme of colonialism, criticize the English presence in India (A passage in India) and does a psychoanalytic analysis; a doctor very popular and peaceful but his reputation is ruined in the moment in which it expresses a negative judgment with a girl because during a visit in the caves the girl a When she got out, she screamed that this doctor had raped her. Racial prejudice because Aziz being Indian is not believed while the girl even not knowing her is believed to be with closed eyes.He makes an analysis of prejudice and reconstructs everything that happens to the doctor and eventually the truth It will come out, but it will be a man completely tried by this hard experience.He also wrote an essay Aspects of the novel in which he analyzes all the elements of a novel: characters, environments, narration etc. first attempt of deep analysis of the founding elements of the narration. To him famous are the characters in the round (round characters evolve over the course of history, first in away and then in another) and the characters plans (stock characters that you have especially in the theater since they cover a only role). THE DYSTOPIAN NOVEL - ORWELL, HUXLEY After World War II, following totalitarianism, a series of themes had emerged that needed to be explored necessarily. UTOPIA: you see the future in a positive way and DYSTOPIA: you see the future with an understanding of the negative. Thomas More’s novel "Utopia" where he describes an ideal world in which everything works perfectly, an impossible thing to achieve. Thomas himself knows that Utopia is something difficult to achieve, because nature man is what is, however, represents that perfect ideal towards which one must tend (City of the sun to example). After the World War there was a very critical situation as a result of totalitarianism and the media conditioned the thought of man. Dystopia consists in exasperating the data of the present in a society not ideal but "nightmarish" that must serve essential and minimal wealth. Play in two acts that begin and end the same way. There are two bums waiting for Godot, act that takes place in the expectation. At the end of the first act comes a guy who says that he will not come that night but the day next. In the second act there are these two bums waiting in a scene made by country and a tree who talk to each other and yet this Godot does not arrive. Sense of immobilism of paralysis (Let's go? but then do not move= movement that does not translate into action). The central word in the title is not Godot, because we do not know who it is if it really exists because it does not appear in the scene. The central word is just waiting because according to Beckett represents the essence of human life. In our life we do not enjoy anything because we always expect something else.We spend our time doing actions just like that, away to cheat the wait. For example Happy Days monologue of a female character and as she speaks she is gradually buried away, as if it sinks into quicksand until only the head remains visible and she tells a series of anecdotes about his life and so on. Another example is Krapp in "Last Tape" where he finds recordings with his voice as a young man and listening to them realizes how empty his life has been. In 1969 he won the Nobel Prize for literature. Godot’s themes are the monotony of life and the circular organization of events; incommunicability meaning deep because the western man has attributed to the language the only element that is to communicate only through words, but this is not the case because communication takes place in different ways. Sense of time is very slow in waiting because at the moment when nothing is done time seems to pass a lot slowly. T.S. ELIOT Nacque a Saint Louis (Missouri), negli Stati Uniti, nel 1888. Studiò a Harvard, a Boston, a Parigi, facendo esperienze culturali molto varie e interessandosi moltissimo alla letteratura dei secoli passati, nello stesso tempo legandosi di amicizia con molti esponenti delle avanguardie francesi. Nel 1915 si stabilì a Londra dove rimase tutta la vita e dove, nel 1927, ottenne la cittadinanza inglese. Per questo Eliot è considerato più un poeta inglese che americano. Nei primi anni del suo soggiorno in Inghilterra lavorò come impiegato alla Lloyds Bank, ma presto di dedicò soltanto alla letteratura. Nel 1923 dopo i primi successi letterari, divenne direttore della rivista The Criterion e, poco più tardi, della casa editrice Faber and Faber. Nel 1927, dopo anni di ripensamenti e di ricerca spirituale, si convertì all'anglicanesimo e questa svolta religiosa ebbe una notevole influenza anche sulla sua opera di scrittore e sulla sua visione della vita che divenne un po' meno amara. Le opere che maggiormente risentono del suo cambiamento sono quelle per il teatro (specialmente Assassinio nella cattedrale) e l'ultima raccolta poetica Quattro Quartetti. Nel 1948 ottenne il premio Nobel per la letteratura. Morì a Londra nel 1965. JOYCE: Nato a Dublino, nel 1882, da famiglia cattolica, Joyce si formò presso scuole cattoliche; allo University College di Dublino studiò con passione numerose lingue straniere. Nel 1900 iniziò la stesura del romanzo Stefano eroe, pubblicato postumo solo nel 1944. Si laureò nel 1902, quando ormai aveva perso la fede religiosa dell'infanzia. In seguito, insofferente verso il cattolicesimo e il nazionalismo irlandesi, partì per Parigi, Capitale dell'avanguardia culturale di allora. La morte della madre lo richiamò però a Dublino. Nel 1904 lasciò per sempre l'Irlanda (a eccezione di un breve ritorno a Dublino nel 1912). Si stabilì a Trieste, dove insegnò inglese alla Berlitz School; fra i suoi allievi vi fu Italo Svevo, con cui Joyce strinse amicizia. Nel 1907 pubblicò a Londra le poesie di Musica da camera; nel 1914 uscì la raccolta di racconti Gente di Dublino: quindici brevi storie dedicate a personaggi dublinesi. Nello stesso 1914 apparve a stampe il romanzo Dedalus. Ritratto dell'artista da giovane, che descrive, con numerosi richiami autobiografici, le esperienze spirituali e sessuali dell'inguieto Stephen Dedalus. Allo scoppio della prima guerra mondiale Joyce si trasferì a Zurigo (dove fu rappresentato il suo dramma Esuli), poi a Locamo e infine (dal 1920) a Parigi. Pur afflitto da una malattia agli occhi, portò a termine il romanzo Ulisse, pubblicato a Parigi nel 1922. In Inghilterra e negli Stati Uniti l'opera fu sequestrata con l'accusa di pornografia. Joyce morì a Zurigo nel 1941, lontano da quell'Irlanda a cui lo legava un intenso rapporto di odio amore. Due anni prima, nel 1939, era uscito l'ultimo suo romanzo., Finnegans Wake (La veglia di Finnegan), composto in un linguaggio quasi incomprensibile, forgiato da Joyce a partire da una sessantina di lingue diverse: in esso il protagonista, gestore di un locale irlandese, ripercorre come nel delirio la storia del genere umano. WOOLF Nacque a Londra nel 1882 da una famiglia in cui fu sempre tenuta in gran conto la letteratura; il padre Leslie Stephen fu critico e storico molto apprezzato. Cresciuta in questo ambiente colto e avviata dagli stessi genitori (non frequentò nessuna scuola) allo studio del latino e dei classici, Virginia rivelò assai presto le sue inclinazioni letterarie. Nel 1910, insieme con la sorella Vanessa, fondò il circolo letterario di Bloomsbury che fu frequentato da personaggi di grande rilievo e fu un centro assai vivace della cultura inglese fino gli anni trenta. Nel 1912 Virginia sposò Leonard Woolf, giornalista e politico, e con lui nel 1917 fondò la casa editrice Hogarth Press che fu specialmente impegnata a pubblicare di nuovi scrittori. Il primo romanzo della Woolf uscì nel 1919 — Notte e giorno — e pur non essendo molto originale, manifestava già le doti di lirico impressionismo della scrittrice che continuò, poi, con opere di maggiore freschezza e originalità, tanto che nel 1927 già pubblicava il suo capolavoro, Gita al faro. L’attività della Woolf continuò anche nel campo della saggistica e della critica e si interruppe solo con la morte della scrittrice che si uccise, nel marzo 1941, gettandosi nel fiume Ouse; da tempo soffriva di crisi depressive ed era spaventata da una infermità mentale di cui aveva avuto alcuni sintomi. YEATS bom in dublin into an anglo irish protestant family in contact with pre raphealits and aestetic ideas poetry should be dreamy and evocative first collection of poetry: crossways pound introduced him to modemism and japanease poetry thanks to it he wrote his collection of play for dancers a vision :teories revealed to him by her wife's extrasensories faculties and he worked on them publishing them it is divided in section and here the poet reejcts the XX century ortodoxies of cristianity and modernis, POUND american but he moved to europe with the declared intention of studying poetry and art, giving himself cultural roots. , founded movements like imagism first collection: garret: the garret of the title is a small room in the roof of a house where the poet used to live CANTOS: his masterpiece the first 3 came out in 1917 they represent one the the few attempt to epic poetry in his century poud defined them as poetry including history they are referred to western and oriental culture contaning direct and disguised quotations lines of music and chinese ideograms with moments of intense liricism. after world war 2 he was in prison in pisa into a concentration camp so he also wrote PISAN CANTOS vividly recordind his imprisonment.