Sanders letteratura vittoriana e dopo, Dispense di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica Sanders letteratura vittoriana e dopo e più Dispense in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! SANDERS 2 MODERNISMO E POST-MODERNISMO Chapter 7 to 10 Due correnti letterarie che avvengono dopo l’epoca vittoriana. The death of queen Victoria and 13 years later the beginning of WW2 marked the end of the Victorian age. At the turn of the century many intellectuals were dissatisfied with Victorian morality. Industrialization was considered Human alienation and death of spirit, also in WW1 more than a million soldier died, and this left the country in a cynical mood. Britain never recovered from its economic effects. The system of Victorian values had come to and end, and modernism was born as a reaction to Victorian values. Modernism is an international movement that originated at the beginning of the first half of the 20th century, and it broke away from tradition in all the arts (literature, painting, music…) Fiction Poetry thearee Virginia woolf Ezra pound t.s. eliot James joyce t.s. eliot William butler yeats Aldous Huxley William b. yeats George orwell At the beginning of the 20th century nothing seemed to be quite certain, not even science and religion seemed reliable. New views of men and universe emerged. There are new ideas in philosophical and scientific field. Sigmund freud Interpretation of dreams 1900 • The power of the unconscious affects man’s behaviour • The superego: the constrains of society, education, and moral laws can affect man’s behaviour • The libido: the danger of denying its demand can lead to neurosis • Analysis of dreams through the method of “free association”: new method of investigation on the human mind Albert Einstein Theory of relativity Time and space are subjective dimensions, the reflection on art is the rejection of perspective and realistic representation. Henry Bergson Historical time vs psychological time Linear subjective External internal Measurable immeasurable Friedrich nietzche • He declared god is dead • Substitution of Christian morality with the belief in human power and perfectibility The modern novel • Second decade of the 20th century • Transformation of Victorian society • Period of changing: need of different forms of expression • New theory of time + new theory of unconscious • No need of chronological sequence of events, the distinction between past and present became meaningless • Isolation and alienation of modern man Main characteristic • the focus is on the interior reality of the character (joyce called “epiphany” the sudden revelation of an interior reality caused by the most trivial events of everyday life) • The novelist rejected omniscient narration and experimented with new ways of portraying the individual consciousness, with a consequent shifting of viewpoint from external work to the internal word of a character’s mind • New narrative techniques: the stream of consciousness technique or the interior monoloque (to reproduce the flow of thoughs, memories, associations and emotions) Interior monologue • To represent the unspoken activity of the mind before it is ordered in specch Interior monologue: the verbal expression of a psychiic phenomenon, it usually follows grammatical rules. (ex. First chapter of “Mrs Dalloway” by Virginia Woolf) Stream of consciousness: the psychic phenomenon itself • Immediate • No interference by the narrator • freed from logical, chronological and formal structures, it is immediate • the stream of consciousness technique takes a reader inside a character’s mind to reveal perceptions, thoughts, and feelings on a conscious or unconscious level this technique suggests the flow of thought as well as its content; hence, complete sentences may give way to fragments as the character’s mind makes rapid associations free of conventional logic or transitions • (ex. Last Chapter of “Ulysses”: molly’s stream of consciousness. James joyce • born in Dublin • in 1904 he moevs to Trieste • interested in European Europe, non in irish (unlike eliot) • in Italy he finished to write Dubliners, a collection of 15 short stories about the life of people in Dublin • 1922 he published Ulysses • other works: portrait of the artis and finnegan’s wake Dubliners • a collection of 15 short stories about Dubliners • four groups: childhood, adolescence, mature life, public life • realistic picture of every day life in Dublin + moral history of the country • paralysis, hypocrisy and spiritual inactivity • joyce loved and hated his country at the same time, he rejects irish values, but all his works are set in Ireland and Dublin • use of epiphany: the sudden spiritual manifestation caused by a trivial gesture, an external object or a banal situation