The 20th century, Eliot, Woolf, Joyce, Beckett, Pinter, Appunti di Inglese

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THE MODERN AGE - 1901-1945 THE EDWARDIAN AGE HISTORICAL POINT OF VIEW - when Queen Victoria died in 1901, her son began to reign until 1910 as Edward VII - he was interested principally in foreign policy, but also in the internal policy there were some changes - the liberals won the general elections in 1906 and they introduced some reforms to help three groups of people: 1- children from poor families + free school meals, free school medical inspections, the Children’s Charter gave children some legal protection and restricted the sale of alcohol and cigarettes 2- old people + introduction of the Old-Age Pensions Act, which introduced pensions for people over 70 3- workers + introduction of the National Insurance Act, which gave people the right to free medical treatment and unemployment pay - this age was important because it was accompanied by a series of strikes, and also because there was the birth of some movements, one of which was the Suffragettes - the Suffragettes > women that asked the right to vote and wanted to be free to follow their studies (in fact, they couldn’t attend all kind of subjects at university, for example) — they began a campaign of vandalism because they wanted to draw attention - with the break of the First World War (1914-1918), these new reforms and changes in the internal policy were stopped SOCIAL AND LITERAL POINT OF VIEW - World War I was also important, from a literary and social point of view, for several reasons: the war established a sense of general crisis and left the country in a disillusioned and cynical mood - at the same time, writers and painters, realised that it was important to change their way of looking at reality, to escape from this mood and to find out a new way to consider life (a sort of awakening) - this period was important because it permitted to both writers and painters to change and to escape from the cultural cages of the Victorian Age (the social conventions, the strict rules) - two men gave a great contribution to this change: Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein SIGMUND FREUD - he was a doctor and he was interested in the complex operations of the mind - he created a structural model of the psyche where he identified three main parts: the ID, the ego and the super-ego + this division was important to better analyse and understand the behaviour of both children and adults —- THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS - in this essay, which is Freud’s most famous work, we can find the explanation and division of dreams — dreams are: the fulfilment of a wish; the disguised fulfilment of a wish; the disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish; the disguised fulfilment of a repressed, infantile wish - the development of the human psyche is affected by the subconscious - man's action could be motivated by irrational forces and in this way the super-ego can profoundly distort man’s behaviour - the effects of his theories were deep and important because they changed our vision of life + his theories concentrated on three main aspects 1- the relationship between parents and children 2- the theme of sexuality 3- the relationship between the sexes — he explained these theories through the investigation method, through the analysis of dreams and through the concept of free association (which influenced the modern writers) ALBERT EINSTEIN - he developed the theory of relativity, according to which the observed gravitational attraction between masses results from the warping of space and time by those masses - he introduced a new concept of time which was, soon after, replaced by the ideas of two philosophers: the American William James and the French Henri Bergson + they both said that there are two concepts of time: the historical time and the psychological time , , the time of the clock, which regulates the time of the mind; it is internal, our daily life; it is external, linear and subjective and measured by the relative measured in terms of the spatial emotional intensity of a moment distance travelled by a pendulum or the hand of a clock; objective time =>> these concepts are important to analyse all the artistic forms that we can find in the first part of the 20" century, but also to better understand the development of literature MODERNISM - there isn’t a name that identifies this century just because it was an age of experimentation, an age where all the artistic forms had the principal intent to erase/destroy what came from the immediate past, in particular form the Victorian time + it was adopted the term modernism, which is the general term just to underline the consideration that both the artists and writers had about the previous past - modernism was building something new + this new had to be completely different but, above all, it had to be completely free from the conventions of the past - modernism was influenced by art and it is considered the real reaction to the Victorian age + this reaction was underlined by the reaction of the individual against society - common features: 1- the intentional distortion of shapes + it was not important to present the reality of the time because everyone could know how it was 2- the breaking down of limitations in space and time — it was not important because people knew what was the real space and the real time — it was important to underline the internal time of the mind, the reflection of men's limits and possibility 3- emphasis on subjectivity — it was not important to speak about social problems because people already knew 4- new literary techniques such as the stream-of-conciousness + it is a flow of our thoughts and dreams, which are not ordered, but they have to be expressed how they come, without any social convention => sometimes these thoughts were associated together through words/sounds so men had to be free to express and think all these emotions - it was a period of experimentation + we can see all these experiments if we consider the artistic movements that were born in this period (surrealism, dadaism, cubism, expressionism) — all these movements started and had a very brief life because they started a new way of considering art/reality, but when all the painters began to use the same techniques and the same way to represent this reality, inevitably, they introduced a rule + this was against the main liberty that they wanted to have, so another movement started - the same happened in literature, especially poetry, in fact at the beginning we can find different literary movements (e.g. the Georgian poetry, the symbolist poetry, the imagist poetry, the war poetry) — the main intent in doing that was to let the reader be free to analyse and express his own emotions and ideas - the main intention of the poet was to awake the reader because one of the main effects of the First World War was a great fear of the external world, present in the individual - the effects of the First World War were really important because they established a new target of the individual, who remained close to all the new proposals and preferred not to look for something new/different - we generally divide his works into two parts: before the conversion and after the conversion > his most famous work, “The Waste Land”, is in the middle, in the sense that after its publication Eliot decided to convert into the catholic religion > for us, it’s not important his conversion, but his particular vision of the world — before the conversion: chaotic, pessimistic, futile, unstable world, without faith and moral values, without personal identity + after the conversion: meaningful, optimistic, stable world, with faith in progress and with moral values, characterised by purification, hope and joy, with a clear sense of identity - he had a particular vision of the artist, in the sense that the artist had to be impersonal and to separate “the man who suffers” from “the mind which creates” — in this way the reader could be free to imagine and evoke personal feelings THE WASTE LAND, ELIOT (1922) —CONTENT - it is an autobiography written in a moment of crisis in the poet’s life - it consists of five sections; it reflects the fragmented experience of the 20" century sensibility of the great modern cities of the West - it is basically the voyage of a man who wants to save his own soul; this voyage is made through the representation of past and present situations where the different happenings contribute to understand the crisis and to find a way to escape from this situation - it is composed by a series of fragments taken from mythology, past events, present situations - there are many speakers — this is important to recreate the chaotic vision of Eliot’s world - it is a collection of indeterminate states of the mind, hallucinations, situations and personalities —THEMES - there are a lot of themes but they all have in common the disillusionment of men between the two World Wars - there is a contrast between the past fertility and the present sterility - it is important to look at the past, but not all the past history, just some aspects: in particular, Eliot focuses on mythology because it helps men to escape from the general crisis of the period —STYLE - there is a mixture of different poetic styles > together with the speakers and the themes, this helps to underline the chaotic vision of the world - use of free verse - use of the objective correlative = a pattern of objects, events, actions, or a situation that can serve effectively to awaken in the reader an emotional response without being a direct statement of that subjective emotion + in other words: poetry must not express emotions but find a daily reality in objects, situations, or events able to evoke them - there are many quotations from different languages and literary works; repetitions of words, images and phrases used to increase musicality; association of ideas; universality of myth —1ST SECTION: THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD - the title is a line from the Anglican burial service; it can be seen as the burial of the image of God, who is the symbol of rebirth; it also refers to the burial of men who live in the Waste Land and don’t want to wake up - the setting is the city of London, peopled by the ghosts of the dead — compared to Baudelaire’s “Les Fleurs du Mal” and Dickens’ industrialised settings - there are 4 speakers that speak their own language, creating a sort of chaos which is the typical chaos that gives us the illusion of a bubble tower - Eliot wants to analyse what are the main reason why men don’t want to awake from the crisis and change their destiny, and he does it through the analysis of both past and present events + he says that we mustn’t forget our past because it’s important to understand our present and create our future =>> at the end Eliot says that he has found his own solution, and everybody has to find their own through this work THE MODERN NOVEL - the novels of the 19" century had a final message for everybody # in the 20" century there is no message, or better the message is the writer himself - the role of the omniscient narrator changes: in the 19" century it gave more objectivity to the work, while in the 20" century it has to give a different perspective > we can find many more perspectives and the reader can make his own - time of the mind + there is no chronological order, no plot (p 322 libro Micol) - stream of consciousness technique - men focus on themselves, have no certainties and live in an isolated way + their feelings become the only certainty for them (=time of the mind) =>> this is what both James Joyce and Virginia Woolf want to express MRS DALLOWAY, VIRGINIA WOOLF (1925) - it was written in 1925, during a particular time in England, a period of experimentation where there was the Bloomsbury Group — group formed by artists, poets, novelists who met in a building in front of the British Museum in London to discuss about the new forms of experimentation =>> Virgina Woolf belonged to this group and wanted to express her disappointment towards the traditional way of narration - itis setin London+ we can understand it through some elements but it is not explicitly said - the story happens in a single day - all the novel is based on the preparation for a party - critics said that it is an autobiographical novel, it is an example of the stream of consciousness, is the alter ego of Septimus and the real protagonist is the time + they are all right but if we consider the novel from a general point of view, we must recognise that the way of narration and the consideration of the individual are going to change (no traditional way of narration) - there is an interior monologue, but not in 1° person because there is an omniscient narrator + it is an indirect interior monologue - the reader has false expectations reading the titles (a walk through the park, death in the middle of life) because, while reading, he understands that the real protagonist is something else JAMES JOYCE (1882-1941) - most of his works had the same setting, which is Ireland, especially Dublin even if he moved from Dublin when he was young and never returned (only for the death of his mother), he always put Dublin as the central setting because he wanted to have an external perspective of that city - he was one of the most powerful writers of the first part of the 20th century, because, together with Virginia Woolf, he tried to give a new imput to the novels of that time, in fact they used new techniques, such as the stream of consciousness and the interior monologue (even if this was used in a different way as Virginia Woolf) - Dublin is the centre of his setting and through this city he tried to give an explanation of the static life that Dubliners lived - all the facts in his narration are given from different points of view, different perspectives — in this way, the reader is free to analyse the situation better and, at the same time, has a general vision of the plot - as Virginia Woolf, also Joyce gives much importance to the inner world of the characters (= the feelings) and there is the division of the time between time of the mind and time of the clock (even if, differently from Virginia Woolf, he adopted more the time of the mind because he perceived it as subjective and in this way he could better analyse the inner world of the characters) - the characters of Joyce are generally isolated and detached from society - through his works we have an analysis of this isolation and detachment because he tried to give his personal explanation of the situation — here we can understand why there are many points of view - he always used realism in all his works but, through them, we have a sort of development of the speech, of the language used + this is the reason why the critics call it “free direct speech”, which is a sort of interior monologue with words sometimes invented just to transmit something that is connected with the inner world of the characters DUBLINERS, JAMES JOYCE (1914) - Dubliners is a collection of 15 short, separated stories - the setting is Dublin, even if each short story has its own singular location - all the people who are present in these stories are afflicted because the city of Dublin seems to be the centre of paralysis, which is the inability of Dubliners to change their lives + through these stories he analysed step by step which could be the possible cause of it (of the paralysis) - the stories are not connected one to another but they talk in order about childhood, adolescence, mature life and public life, so we can say that all the individual’s life is analysed - in all these stories there is also the escape, which is the possibility to change, that each individual has in his life + but all these stories, at the end, return into the paralysis, which means that the characters return into the initial situation =>> as if to underline the circularity of paralysis - each story opens in medias res and the tenses used are generally connected with the state of mind of the characters - together with the theme of paralysis we find the theme of epiphany —itis a little bit similar to the “moments of being” of Virginia Woolf in the sense that the epiphany is a sudden spiritual manifestation, it is a sort of revelation which makes the individual think that there is a way to escape from paralysis (the epiphany is an object or a person) — understanding the epiphany in each story is the key to the story itself - in each story we can find the sense of paralysis, the epiphany and the escape + all the stories have more less the same structure - Joyce recognises two types of paralysis: 1) the physical paralysis, caused by external forces (= fear of the war, political instability in fact Ireland was fighting for independence) 2) the moral paralysis, linked to religion (= Joyce accused the Catholic Church because of its dogmas), politics and culture (= Joyce said that Ireland was a closed country and it needed to open its mind to look at what other countries could offer) - the escape is an alternative to paralysis, but this escape always leads to failure because of the mental paralysis of Dubliners THE THEATRE OF ABSURD - first of all, we must say that we are after the Second World War, in the 1950s — normally the 50s were a period of reconstruction, wellness, welfare, so it's quite unusual to find the theatre of absurd, which wanted to focus on the absurdity of life - what happened before the 50s was two world wars and all the aspects present during the Victorian age were completely swept away by these two wars + if before and between these two wars there were writers/poets who tried to find a way to escape from the sense of anguish and isolation, and they tried to give their personal opinion or their personal way to escape from that sense of isolation, after the Second World War all these aspects were completely erased — we assist at the decline of the religious beliefs — there are also the dictatorship and totalitarian system, which occurred to manifest this sense of disillusionment — on the other side, with a period of reconstruction, we have the materialism and consumerism of the contemporary society =>> we have two opposite elements that went together during the 50s - in this period we speak about the post war drama + drama = classical term for theatre that appeared at the beginning of classical time with Aristotele, who used the unites of time and place, and then we arrived in the middle age where theatre was determined by the noun “plays” since the main aim was to entertain people # in the 20th century the noun used is “drama” because we cannot