Riassunto di inglese di 5, Schemi e mappe concettuali di Inglese

Scarica Riassunto di inglese di 5 e più Schemi e mappe concettuali in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! QUEEN VICTORIA’S REIGN Queen Victoria—> came to the throne in 1837 at 18 years. She was to rule for almost 64 years and grave her name to an age of economic and scientific progress and reforms. Her own sense of duty made her the ideal head of a constitutional monarchy. In 1840 she married Prince Albert of Sake-Coburg-Gotha and they had 9 children; in 1857 she gave him the title of Prince Consort. An age of reform—> the 1830s was called as “age of reform”. The first was the Great Reform Act (1832), had transferred voting privileges from the small boroughs to the large industrial towns. The Factory Act (1833) established that children can’t worked more than forty-eight hours a week. The Poor Law Amendment Act (1834) had reformed the old Poor Laws, dating from Elizabeth I. Workhouses—> the term "workhouses" indicates structures in which poor people could find accommodation and work, sometimes they were also called "poorhouses". Initially hiding in 1300 due to the lack of work caused by the black plague in England. The workhouses became shelters for the elderly, infirm and sick. During the Victorian age, government commissioners lashed out at the workhouses and insisted on their replacement. They complained that in most cases they were large hospices where young people were influenced by ignorance and vice. After 1835 many workhouses were rebuilt and there was a division between men, women and children, the elderly. Chartism—> in 1838a group of working-class radicals drew up a People’s Charter demanding universal manhood suffrage and a secret ballot. No one in power was ready for such democracy and the Chartist movement failed. In 1867 the Second Reform Act a franchised part of the urban male working class in England and Wales for the first time and in 1872 the secret ballot was introduced with the Ballot Act. The Irish Potato Famine—> in 1845 bad weather devasted the potato crops and a lot of people died and many emigrated. The Irish crisis forced the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, to abolish the Corn Laws in 1846. Technological progress—> in the mid-years of the 19th century in England cultural and architectural change. In Europe monarchies were toppled by revolutions in 1848. In 1851a Great Exhibition organised by Prince Albert, showed the world Britain’s industrial and economic power; it was housed at the Crystal Palace, a huge structure of glass and steel designed and erected by Sir Joseph Paxton and Hyde Park. The building of the London Underground and railways began in 1860. Foreign policy—> in the mid-19th century, England was involved in the 2 Opium Wars against China, which was trying to suppress the opium trade. England gained access to 5 Chinese ports and control of Hong Kong. The most important colony of the British empire was India. In 1857 there was the Indian Mutiny against British rule after which the Indian administration was given fewer responsibilities. Britain supported liberal causes like the Italian independence from the Austrians. Russia became too powerful against the weak Turkish empire, the Crimean War was fought. The Liberal and the Conservative Parties—> when Prince Albert died from typhoid in 1861, queen Victoria withdrew from society and spent 10 years in mourning. The Liberal Party included the former Whigs, some Radicals and a minority of businessmen; the party was led by William Gladstone. The Conservative Party which had evolved from the Tories, reaffirmed its position under the leadership of Benjamin Disraeli. Benjamin Disraeli—> Disraeli governments passed an Artisans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Act (1875), which allowed local public authorities to clear the slums. A Public Health Act (1875), provided sanitation as well as running water. A Factory Act (1878), limited the working hours a week. In 1875 encouraged the purchase of more shares in the Suez Canal Company to protect Britain’s route to the East. William Gladstone—> was Prime Minister 4 times starting in 1864. Reforming legislation focused on education; elementary schools were organised by the Church; the 1870 Education Act introducing ‘board schools’ in the poorer areas of the towns. Other reforms: the Trade Union Act (1871), legalised the unions of trade; the Ballot Act (1872), introduction of the secret ballot at RIPASS . { elections. The Third Reform Act of 1884 extended voting to all male householders, including miners, mill-workers and farm labourers. The Irish Parliamentary Party led by Charles Stewart Parnell, demanded sel-government for Ireland, called Home Rule, for Gladstone the Home Rule was the way to bring peace to Ireland. The Anglo-Boer Wars—> in South Africa the British controlled 2 colonies, while che Dutch settlers (the Boers) had the 2 republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Britain took over Transvaal in 1877 and the Boers rebelled. The Boer Wars ended in 1902 (started in 1880) with a British victory. Empress of India—> in 1877 Queen Victoria was given a title of Empress of India; the British Empire occupied a large area and was becoming more difficult to control. There was a growing sense of “white man’s burden” (the white man is superior and must carry the values of his own civilisation). India was economically important as a market for British goods and strategically necessary to British control of Asia from Persian Gulf to Shangai. By 1850 the East India Company directly ruled of northern, central and south-eastern India. The end of an era—> the Victorian Age came to an end with the death of Queen Victoria in 1901. Her Golden and Diamond Jubilees for 50 and 60 years on the throne had been celebrated with parades and for her funeral London streets were packed with mourners. She was buried in the Frogmore mausoleum at Windsor Castle. THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE A complex age—> the Victorian Age was marked by complexity, was a period of contradictions. In this age progress, reforms and political stability coexisted with poverty and injustice.listening to sermons was a pastime; modernity was praised but there was a revival of Gothic and Classicims in art. Religion was important: Evangelicalism inspired by John Wesley and his brother, founded the Methodism, that encouraged public and political action and created a lot of charities. Philanthropy let to the creation of societies which addressed every kind of poverty and depended on the voluntary of the middle-class women. The Victorians believed in God, but also in the science. Freedom was regarded as freedom of conscience with optimism over economic and political progress. Respectability—> education and hygiene were encouraged to improve health care. There was general agreement on the virtues of asserting a social status, keeping up appearances and looking after a family. These thing were “respectable”, however respectability was a mixture of morality and hypocrisy. There was emphasis on the duty of men to respect ad protect women, seen as physically and morally superior divine guides. Women controlled the family budget and brought up the children. Attitudes to sex were an aspect of respectability, with a concern for female chastity, and single women with a child were called “fallen women”. Sexuality was repressed in both its public and private forms. VICTORIAN THINKERS JEREMY BENTHAM: Jeremy Bentham’s principles are the basis of utilitarianism; for utilitarianism an action is morally right if it leads to happiness, it is wrong if it causes the opposite. Institutions are useful if they provide material happiness to the greatest number of people. Utilitarianism responds to the interests of the middle class. STUART MILL: Stuart Mill, the major figure in British empiricism, believed that legislation should help people to develop their talents and personalities. He believed that progress was born of mental energy, which is why the arts and institutions were important. He promoted a series of reforms such as: • The causes of popular education • Trade union organisation • Development of cooperatives • Extension of representation to all citizen • Emancipation of women - pass) RIPASS. E I 8 • Realistic novel: it deals with a society linked to a growing crisis in the moral and religious fields. Their structure was influenced by Darwin’s evolution theory. The main rappresentative novelists were Thomas Hardy and George Eliot. • Psychological novel: the main rappresentative novelist was Stevenson who tried, with his novel, to capture the illogical aspects of life and described the double nature of Victorian society, where aristocracy was only superficially kind and refined , but hid dark secrets in their beautiful houses. • Colonial literature: the influence of colonialism can be found in the work of Kipling that exalted the British imperial power in the poem “The White man’s Burden”; the white man is superior and must carry the values of his own civilization. AMERICAN RENAISSANCE The period from 1830 to the end of the American Civil world is known as the “New England Renaissance”. The term indicates the beginning of a truly American literature with themes and style of its own. This literature was influenced by Puritan Doctrine; this influence could be traced in the flourishing of emblems and symbols, like the use of allegory. AESTHETICISM AND DECADENCE The Aesthetic Movement began in France with Gautier by 1811 to 1872. It reflected the artist's reaction against materialism and the restrictive moral code. French artists escaped into aesthetic isolation, defined “Art for art’s Sake” by Gautier. The bohemien led an existence pursuing excess and cultivating art and beauty. The English Aesthetic Movement began with John Keats and Rossetti, but the main theorist of this movement is Walter Paper. He wrote “Studies in the History of the Renaissance” and “Marius the Epicurean” that had a demoralising message. He refused the religious faith and believed that art was the only means to halt the passage of time. He believed that life should be lived as a “work of art”, with intense experience. The task of the artist was to feel sensation and transcribe his sense of the world. Art had no reference to life, it had nothing to do with morality and did not need to be didactic. Walter paper influenced more poets like Oscar Wilde. With his group of artists published the periodical “The Yellow Book” that reflected “decadent” taste. The term decadent implied a process of decline of values. The features of Aesthetic work are: • excessive attention to the self • hedonistic and sensuous attitude • Perversity in subject matter • Disenchantment with contemporary society • Evocative use of language VICTORIAN DRAMA Victorian drama developed between 1700 and the late 19 century. William Congreve was the only artist who wrote plays after the Elizabethan times. Several factors can explain this situation: • The rise of novel • The power of theatrical managers • The presence of great actors and actress • The fact that the rich middle class did not appreciate drama as a form of art. In the Elizabethan period the theaters were built outside the cities, while the new theaters were built in London and other cities; in the second half of the Victorian period theaters were made more comfortable, the new methods of lighting the stage producing realistic effects. Actors were given more freedom to perform. The stage direction of Victorian plays were longer and detailed; the development in stage techniques meant that theater productions were more complicated and instructions were needed. When the electric lighting was introduced the actors were performed in bright light in front of an audience hidden in darkness. So the viewer’s experience has become individual rather than communal. The types of theatrical performances represented in the Victorian era were: music hall, pantomime, farce and melodrama. The ingredients were: heroines in danger, villains and happy ending with the triumph of true love. The main important playwrights were Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. Wilde wrote comedies whose main feature was dialog full of humor that showed the hypocrisy of his age. George used drama as a vehicle for presenting his views on social institutions and human experience. He was influenced by the Norwegian playwright, Ibsen who opened up new dramatic possibilities and his example encouraged writers to concern themselves with social and personal problems. CHARLES DICKENS LIFE AND WORKS: Dickens was born in Portsmouth (England); he had an unhappy childhood. His father was imprisoned for debt and at the age of 12 he was put to work in a factory. He was sent to a school in London and at 15 he found employment as an office boy and studied shorthand at night. By 1832 he had become a very successful shorthand reporter of parliamentary debates in the House of Commons, and began to work as a reporter for a newspaper. In 1836 he adopted the pen name “Boz”, publishing “Sketches by Boz” a collection of articles and tales describing London’s people and scene, written for the periodical Monthly Magazine. It was followed by The Pickwick Papers, which was published in instalments and revealed Dickens’s humoristic and satirical qualities. Dickens married Catherine Hogarth in 1836, during the same year he became editor of Bentley’s Miscellany and published the second series of “Sketches by Boz”; Dickens started a full-time career as novelist and he also continued his journalistic and editorial activities. He was republican, but he took strongly against the United States when he visited the country. His “American Notes” appeared in 1842, he advocated international copyright and the abolition of slavery. He published in 1845 his Christmas’s book “A Christmas Carol”. The protagonists of his autobiographical novels, “Oliver Twist”, “David Copperfield”, “Little Dorrit” became the symbols of an exploited childhood. Other works include “Bleak House”, “Hard Times”, “Great Expectations” which deal with the conditions of the poor and the working class. Dickens died in 1870 and he was buried in Westminster Abbey. CHARACTERS: Dickens shifted the social frontiers of the novel: the 18th century realistic, middle class world was replaced by the one of the lower orders. He was the creator of characters and caricatures: Mr Pickwick, Mr Gradgrind, Scrooge. His aim was to arouse the reader’s interest by exaggerating his characters’ habits. He was always on the side of the poor, the outcast and also the working class. Children are often the most important characters: children become the moral teachers instead of the taught, the examples instead of the imitators. The novelist’s ability lay both in making his readers love his children and putting them forward as models of the way people ought to behave to one another. A DIDACTIC AIM: this didactic stance was very effective, the wealthier classes acquired knowledge about their poorer neighbours. Dickens’s task was to make the ruling classes aware of the social problems without offending his middle-class readers. STYLE AND REPUTATION: Dickens employed the most effective language and accomplished the most graphic and powerful descriptions of life and character ever attempted by any novelist. He is considered as the greatest novelist in the English language. DICKENS’S NARRATIVE: Dickens’s novels were influenced by the Bible, fairy tales, fables and nursery rhymes, by the 18th-century novelists and essayists, and by Gothic novels. His plots are well-planned even if at times they appear a bit artificial, sentimental and episodic. London was the setting of most of his novels. He did not become a revolutionary, thinker. He was aware of the spiritual and material corruption of daily reality under the impact of industrialism; the result was an increasingly critical attitude towards his society. In fact, in his mature works Dickens succeeded in drawing popular attention to public abuses, evils and wrongs by mingling terrible descriptions of London misery and crime. HARD TIMES This novel is set in an imaginary industrial town named Coketown. Thomas Gradgrind, an educator who believes in facts and statistics, has founded a school and he brings up his two children, Louisa and Tom, in the same way, repressing their imagination and feelings. He marries his daughter to Bounderby, a rich banker, 30 years older than she is. The girl consents since she wishes to help = her brother, who is given a job in Bounderby's bank. Tom, who is lazy and selfish, robs his employer. At first he succeeds in throwing the suspicion on an honest workman, but he is finally discovered and obliged to leave the country. In the end Mr Gradgrind gives up his narrow-minded, materialistic philosophy. The fictional city of Coketown stands for a real industrial mill town in mid-19th-century Victorian England. It is a sort of brick jungle: the machines of factories are like mad elephants, and their smoke looks like serpents. All the buildings are covered with soot coming from the coal burnt in factories, nothing seems to bother the mill owners. They seem to be proud of the polluted air of Coketown. The black residue that wraps up the town may symbolise productivity and industry “Hard Times” is divided into 3 section: - Book 1, “Sowing”, shows us the seeds planted by the Gradgrind/Bounderby education; - Book 2, “Reaping”, reveals the harvesting of these seeds; - Book 3, “Garnering”, is linked to a dominant symbol which is no longer the solid 'ground' upon which Mr Gradgrind's system once stood. The philosophy of utilitarianism emerges in the actions of Mr. Gradgrind and Bounderby: the former educates his children and his school through facts, the latter treats the workers of his factory as emotionless objects that are exploited for the own personal interest. Mr Gradgrind believes that human nature can be measured, quantified and governed entirely by reason; his school tries to turn children into little machines. Dickens's primary aim in Hard Times is to illustrate the dangers of the teaching method called 'object lesson', a method of education arising from children's own experiences. A CRITIQUE OF MATERIALISM: “Hard Times” focuses on the difference between factory owners and workers. Workers had few options for improving their terrible living and working conditions. This novel uses its characters and stories to denounce the gap between the rich and the poor and to criticise the materialism and narrow-mindedness of Utilitarianism. MR GRADGRIND: The scene takes place inside a classroom which is as austere and plain as the teacher's teaching style. The teacher, Mr Thomas Gradgrind introduced himself to the schoolchildren with the exclamation “Now, what I want is Facts”. He states that the formation of a child's mind must be routed in the study of facts. There is only proof not poetry for him. He wants to sow the seeds of fact, not fancy of sense, not sentimentality. His very description is essentially factual: “square forefinger”, “square wall of a forehead”, “square coat”, “square leqs” and “square shoulders”. COKETOWN The city of coketown, which means town of coal, is an imaginary city inspired by Manchester, that stands a real industrial mill town in mid 19 century Victorian England. It is a city of red bricks that, covered by smoke and pollution, turn black like the painted faces of savages, the Indians who live in colonies; this is a reference to British imperialism. Coketown is compared to a jungle: the machines of factories are like mad elephants and their smoke looks like serpents. It is a town full of pollution, it's a city full of pollution it had a black canal and river that ran purple with stinky dye. It is an industrial city far from the reality in which the upper middle class could live In the city everything was the same: the streets were the same, the people were all the same, they out at the same times with the same sound on the same pavements, they did the same job. Every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow. The churches had to be built all the same, except one The new church, and the buildings were not distinguished, hospitals and prisons were the same. It was a city of facts, the school of M'Choakumchild was also a fact, a new school whose name means child who suffocates because the situation of the environment was harmful to men. The city had many problems. There were eighteen religious sects followed by everyone but not by the workers; on Sundays all the followers went to mass. The temperance society showed by its statistics that many people got drunk due to their bad conditions; while the pharmacist showed that when people did not drink they took opium. The idea of time was questioned by the American philosopher James and the french philosopher Bergson. James held that mind record single experience as a continuous flow of “the already” into “the not yet”. Bergson made a distinction between psychological time, that is internal, subjective and measured by emotional of a moment and historical time, that is external, linear and measured with a pendulum or clock. The anthropological studies helped undermine the absolute truth of the religious and ethical system in favour of the relativist standpoint. Primitive societies gained importance. There was a new picture of man: to Freud man was a part of nature, a biological and phenomenon; to Marx was a social and economic forces. The philosopher Nietzsche, had declared that “God is dead” and had substituted Christian morality with a belief in human power. THE INTER-WAR YEARS In 1926 Commonwealth was born from the dominions of the British Empire of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. In 1931 the Statue of Westminster granted the sovereign right of each dominion to control its own domestic and foreign affairs. India and the Natiolanist Congress Party supported each other. Steps towards self-government were being taken under the pressure from Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement. In the 1918 election in Ireland, the Sinn Fein party won almost all the seats except in Ulster and it set up an independent Parliament in Dublin, the Dail, in 1919. The Irish Volunteers (IRA= Irish Republican Army)) declared open war on Britain in 1920 under Michael Collins. The IRA terrorist attacks were met to buy “Black and Tan” police auxiliaries, culminating with Bloody Sunday, when. They shot 12 dead at a football match in Dublin. An Anglo-Irish treaty established the Irish Free State, under Eamon de Valera, as a independent State within the Commonwealth. Only 6 counties remained a self-government province of the United Kingdom. A civil war broke out in Ireland between those who accepted the Anglo-Irish Treaty and those who didn’t. The anti-Treaty faction, who wanted the inclusion of the 6 counties of Ulster in the Republican Ireland, was defeated. During the aftermath of Word War I, in Britain started a house-building programme and there were improvements in public health. After the Wall Street Crash, banks went bankrupt across Europe. The war had damaged Britain’s position as the biggest exporter because production had been turned to the war effort. There were miners’ strikes and a General Strike. The once powerful industrial North became depressed and challenged by new growing automobile, chemical and electrical goods industries in the South and the Midlands. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin led a Conservative government. Edward VII succeeded his father George V, wanted to marry a twice divorced American woman. Baldwin forced his abdication on the grounds he could not marry her and keep the throne. Adolf Hitler, whose Nazi Party had come to power in Germany in 1933, sent troops into the Rhineland in 1936. A three-year long civil war started in Spain between Nationalists and Republicans. Hitler invaded Austria and proclaiming its union with Germany and breaking the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler signed in Prague the secret Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact with Stalin and on 1st September he invaded Poland. 2 days later Britain and France declared war on Germany. t 1 MODERNISM The term “Modernism” refers to an international movement which involved Western literature. Modernism is associated with the period after World War I; the horror of the war produced a sense of disillusionment. New ideas in the field of psychology, philosophy and political theory encouraged a search of new modes of expression. The modernist expressed the desire to break with the past and find new fields of investigations, such as urbanisation, technology, war, speed and mass communication. Main features of modernism: - Distortion of shape, as in the Cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque; - Breaking down of limitations in space and time and disruption of the linear flow of narrative verse; - Emphasis on subjectivity; omniscient third-person narrator was abandoned in favour of the stream of consciousness (narrate following our thoughts); - Use of allusive language and association of words; - Isolated “moment” to provide a true insight into the nature of things; - Importance of unconscious (Freud); - Reflected the complexity of modern urban life in artistic form. Novelists and poets drew inspiration from classical, from Buddhist sources, from Metaphysical poets, from Dante or from Freud and Bergson. Absorbing the influence of the past and contemporary ascendancy; English modern literature was becoming cosmopolitan. THE MODERN NOVEL The origins of the English novel were bourgeois and the novel was deeply connected to society. The novelist was a mediator between the characters and the reader, relating significant events in chronological order in a more or less objective way. The linear structure of the novel remained unaltered until the second decade of the 20th century. He shift from Victorian to the modern novel was caused by a transformation of British society: the urgency for social change, the pressing need for different forms of expression, the novelist highlighting the complexity of the unconscious. This new “realism”, influenced by French and Russian writers (like Proust, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy), tended to shift from society to the individual. There were 2 new factors: the new concept of time and the new theory of the unconscious from the Freudian influence. The modern novelists rejected omniscient narration and they used a new methods with the viewpoint shifted from the external world to the internal. Joyce used a narrative technique called “epiphany”: the sudden revelation of an interior reality caused by trivial events of everyday life. Another technique was the stream of consciousness: the continuous flow of thoughts and sensation that characterise the human mind. There are 3 groups of novelists: 1. The psychological novelists. Who focused on the development of the character’s mind and on human relationships (Conrad). 2. The novelists who experimented with subjective narrative techniques, exploring the minds of characters and giving voice to their thoughts (Joyce). 3. The novelists that were committed to the social and political problems of 1930s (Orwell). THE INTERIOR MONOLOGUE The interior monologue was a narrative technique and represent the unspoken activity of the mind before it is ordered into speech. It is a verbal expression of a psych phenomenon, the action takes place within the character’s mind, speech may be immediate. THE WAR POETS When the First World War broke out, thousands of young men volunteered for military service; they regarded the conflict as an adventure for noble ends. But during the war this sense of pride was replaced by doubt and disillusionment. Life in trenches was hell because of the rain and mud, the decaying bodies that rats fed on the repeated bombings and the use of poison gas. There was a group of pots who volunteered to fight in the Great War and a lot of them lost the life. The War Poets wrote poetry whose value lies in the unconventional, anti-rhetorical way they dealt with the horrors of modern warfare, which emerged in the choice of a violent, everyday language. Their poetry can be considered modern because its subject-matter could not be conveyed in the poetic conventions. M T n me I C -> ·ë RUPERT BROOKE: was born in 1887 and he was educated at Rugby School , then went to King’s College, Cambridge. He was a good student and athlete and became popular for his handsome looks. He joined up at the beginning of the conflict but saw little combat since he contracted blood poisoning and died in April 1915 on the Aegean Sea; he was buried on the Greek Island of Skyros. He wrote 5 sonnets of 1914, in which he advanced the idea that war is clean and cleansing. He think that only thing can suffer is the body, and even death is seen as a reward. In his poems were traditional form and sentimental attitude, in contrast to other war poets that shows the horrors of trenches. He became the new symbol of the “young romantic hero” who inspired patriotism. WILFRED OWEN: was born in 1893, he was working as a teacher of English in France when he visited a hospital for the wounded and decided to return in England and enlist. In march he was injured and sent to a war hospital in Edinburgh; there he met Sassoon, a poet and he read Owen’s poems and encouraged him to continue to write. He return to the front and on 4th November 1918 he was killed in a German machine gun attack. His poems are painful in their accurate accounts of gas casualties, men who have gone mad and men who are clinically alive, but their bodies were destroyed. He used the pararhymes. In June 1918 Owen was preparing “Disabled and Other Poems” for publication and was writing the “Preface” to the book in which affirmed that the book is not about heroes, deeds, lands, glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, but was about War and the pity of War. This elegies weren’t consolatory for this generation. All a poet can do today is warn; the true poets must be truthful. 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 honourable" and it is a quotation from the latin poet Horace who had said "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" borrowing the line from the Greek poet Tyrtaeus. Owen describes how some soldiers are marching: with their backpacks, in the mud, almost asleep and blind, drunk of fatigue. In the second part there is some poison gas: the soldiers can't see anything, some of them are yelling and stumbling (inciampare) and one is chocking and drowning. Owen uses onomatopoeia, alliteration and metaphors. In the third part Owen talks to the reader saying: if you could see when we put the dead soldier in the wagon and in what conditions he was, you wouldn't say to soldiers who wants to fight for the country the Old Lie: it is sweet and honourable to die for the country. STANZA - STANZA - STYLE —> Joyce believed in the impersonality of the artist. The artist’s task was to render life objectively, this led to the isolation of the artist from society. Joyce used different point of view and narrative techniques appropriate to the characters portrayed. His style developed from the realism and the disciplined prose of Dubliners to the extreme interior monologue so language was a succession of words without punctuation or grammatical connections and infinite puns. PERCEPTION OF TIME —> Joyce was a modernism writer his themes are reworked to became less relevant then the narrative “itself”. The facts became confused, are explored from different points of view and are presented as “clues”. Joyce transcends photographic realism, he analyses the impressions that an outer events as caused in the inner world of the characters. Joyce’s novels open in medias res with the analysis of a particular moment and the portrait of the characters is based on introspection. Time is not perceived as objective but subjective, leading to psychological changes so the description of Dublin is not derived from external reality but from the character’s mind. DUBLINERS Dubliners consists of 15 short stories , they all lack of action but lead to a moral, social or spiritual revelation. The opening stories deal with childhood in Dublin, the others concern the middle years of characters and their social, political or religious affairs. Joyce was hostile to the city life finding that it degraded its citizen. In fact Dublin is a place where true feeling and compassion for others do not exist. The stories are arranges into 4 groups: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The last story “The dead” was a late addition and can be considered Joyce first masterpiece. It summarises themes of the other 14 stories but it functions as an epilogue. It also anticipates Joyce’s move away from the short story toward the novel. Joyce to give a psychologically realistic picture of Dubliners as afflicted people took inspiration from the oppressive effects of religious, political, cultural and economic forces on the life of the lower middle class. Everyone in Dublin seems to be caught up in an endless web of despair. When they want to escape are unable because they are spiritually weak (Evelyn). The description is realistic and concise with external details. The us e of realism is mixed with symbolism because external details have a deeper meaning. The name of objects is carefully chosen, for example the choice of the term “street organ” also called “harmonium” in Evelyn. Religious symbolism can also be found like the holy chalice in “The sisters” also Joyce use colour symbolism: brown, grey and yellow suggest the atmosphere of despair and paralysis. Joyce use the technique of epiphany to take the reader beyond the usual aspects of life. The epiphany is the sudden spiritual manifestation caused by an external object or a banal situation. His style in Dubliners is characterised by 2 distinct elements: the interior monologue and the chiasmus, the patterned repetition of images. In the first free short stories Joyce use a first person narrator who remains anonymous, this narrator allows the reader to penetrate the boys mind. For the others 12 stories use a third person narrator. The narrator tense to disappear in the interior monologue which is in the form of free direct speech. The protagonist thoughts are introduced without verbs which implies the disappearance of the narration. The language appears simple, objective and neutral. Chiasmus can created melodic effect. PARALYSIS—> in Dubliners is present the them of paralysis that was both physical resulting from external forces and the moral linked to religion, politics and culture. Joyce’s Dubliners accept their condition because they are not aware of it or because they lack che courage to break che chains. However the moral centre of Dubliners is the revelation of the victims of paralysis; knowing oneself is a basis of morality. The main theme is the failure to find a way out of paralysis. The opposite of paralysis is escape and its consequent failure. -S [ THE SECOND WORLD WAR THE BEGINNING OF THE WAR: when war began in 1939, in Britain evacuation schemes were organised to move people, especially children, from the towns and cities; hospital patients were sent home to release beds; the paintings of the National Gallery were put in mines and underground stations soon became shelters for civilians during night-time raids. The United Kingdome sent British troops to aid the defence of France. In April 1940 Hitler invaded Norway and Denmark by sea and air, because a third of German's iron ore supply came from Scandinavia. In May Germany attacked Holland and Belgium and was heading to Paris. British Prime Minister Chamberlain resigned in 1940 and Sir Winston Churchill took over. The British ordered the retreat of their troops to Dunkirk. Meanwhile Japan invaded Hong Kong and Burma and began to threaten Singapore and India. American kept aloof despite Churchill's constant calls for help. OPERATION SEA LION: Hitler was planning the invasion of Britain with the Operation Sea Lion. This attempt wasn't successful for the Germans. Many British people died, in particular because of the bombing of civilian targets in London and other cities, but the British people did not fall into submission. OPERATION BARBAROSSA: in 1941 the Germans advanced south and east and in Africa the British army was forced to retreat. In June Hitler decided to declare war on the Soviet Union because he wanted to get the oilfields in the Caucasus region. This was the so-called Operation Barbarossa. AMERICA JOINED THE WAR: in December 1941 Japan bombed the US fleet in Pearl Harbour, Hawaii. President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared war on Japan, and Germany declared war on America. In July 1943 the Allies landed in Sicily led by General Patton, and a long fight up Italian territory began. The Allies continued to score victories against the Germans, also helped by science and new technologies, like sonar and radars. In 1944 the Allies entered Rome. OPERATION OVERLORD: The greatest force in history arrived on the beaches of Normandy on 6th June 1944, also known as D-Day. The Germans retreated across France and counter-attacked at the Battle of the Bulge in the Belgian Ardennes in December 1944. THE END OF THE WAR: the Soviet Red Army was advancing, liberating Poland, Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Austria and the eastern parts of Germany. On 30th April 1945 Hitler committed suicide and Berlin fell on 2nd May. At the Yalta Conference in Crimea in February 1945, US President Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Churchill and Soviet Premier Stalin made important decisions concerning the future progress of the war and the post-war world. The war ended in Europe on 8th May 1945 but it took another 3 months to defeat Japan. Victory came only with the explosion of two atomic bombs on the Japanese towns of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6th and 9th August. The atomic bombs ended World War II and began a new age. WINSTON CHURCHILL: his memorable speeches managed to appeal to national spirit, becoming the inspirational force that guided Britain through its darkest hour to victory. GEORGE ORWELL EARLY LIFE: born Eric Blair in India in 1903, George Orwell was son of a colonial official. He was taken to England by his mother, where he was educated. He could not stand the lack of privacy, the humiliating punishments, the pressure to conform to the values of the English public school tradition and to the prevailing moral code. At Eton school he began to develop an independent- minded personality, indifference to accepted values and he professed atheism and socialism. Then he joined the Indian Imperial Police, opting to serve in Burma where he remained from 1922 to 1927. In 1927 he left and decided not to return. It was not just that he wished to break away - - - - - - - - - I I - - e about - e - - - - - - from British imperialism in India: he wished to "escape from every form of man's dominion over man", as he said in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). FIRST-HAND EXPERIENCES: back in London, he stated a social experiment: wearing second- hand clothes, he spent short periods living in common lodging-houses, searching the company of "down-and-outs". In this way he directly experienced poverty and learned how institutions for the poor worked. After a period in Paris, where he worked as a dishwasher, he decided to begin publishing his works with the pseudonym of George Orwell. He chose "George" because it had an Englishness about it and "Orwell" because it was the name of a river he was attached to. Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) was his first non-fiction narrative, in which he described his experiences among the poor. It was followed by Burmese Days (1934), a book based on his experience in the colonial service. In 1936 he got married with a girl, Eileen, who shared his interests in literature and socialism. Then Orwell was commissioned by a left-wing publisher to investigate conditions among the miners, factory workers and unemployed in the industrial North. His report, The Road to Wigan Pier was published in 1937. In December 1936 Orwell went to Catalonia with his wife to report on the Spanish Civil War. In Barcelona he joined the militia of the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) and fought in the trenches. In Homage to Catalonia (1938) he remembered this experience as the time of his true conversion to socialism and the ideals of brotherhood and equality. Back in England, he adopted an infant child, Richard, he suffered bronchitis and pneumonia and his wife died during an operation in 1945. AN INFLUENTIAL VOICE OF THE 20TH CENTURY: when 2ww broke out, Orwell moved to London and in 1941 he joined the BBC, broadcasting cultural and political programmes to India. In 1943 he left and became the literary editor of The Tribune, a socialist weekly. He also began writing Animal Farm, which was published in 1945 and made Orwell internationally known and financially secure. Orwell’s last book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, was his most original novel, it was published in 1949 and soon became a bestseller. He died of tuberculosis in 1950. THE ARTIST'S DEVELOPMENT: Orwell had a deep understanding of the English character but his various experiences abroad contributed to his unusual ability to see his country from the outside and to judge its strengths and weaknesses. He rejected his background and established a separate identity of his own (he wasn't a patriot or a nationalist) so he was open to new ideas and impressions. Orwell's life and works were marked by the unresolved conflict between his middle-class background and education and his emotional identification with the working class. In the essay Inside the Whale (1940), Orwell tried to define the role of the writer by considering the literature of the 1920s and 1930s. The writers of the 1920s had concerned themselves with language and form to express the post-war pessimism; those of the 1930s had valued social commitment and content over form and had left-wing sympathies (also Dickens had social commitment but with no revolutionary aim). Orwell believed that the writing interpreted reality and so it had a useful social function (writing was a mission: to inform others about reality), in fact his most successful works had political themes. Orwell believed that the writer should be independent and that no good writing could come from following a party line. SOCIAL THEMES: Orwell was a book-reviewer, critic, political journalist and pamphleteer (scrittore di opuscoli) in the tradition of Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift. As Charles Dickens he chose social themes and used a realistic and factual language. Orwell communicated a vision of human fraternity and of the misery caused by poverty and deprivation. He insisted on tolerance and justice in human relationships and warned against the increasing artificiality of urban civilisation. He strongly criticised totalitarianism, warning against the violation of liberty and helping his readers to recognise tyranny in all its forms. NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR and 2 I I - - - - - - d 188L e - - - -E- --