The 20th century literary production, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica The 20th century literary production e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! The 20th century literary production Prose A complex age like the 20th century, upset by two World Wars and marked by unrest and ferments, could not as a result produce anything but complex art, mainly resulting from experimentation. As a matter of fact, the cultural and literary movement that spread in England and America during the first half of the XXth century goes under the name of MODERNISM whose historical context was characterised by the two world wars. Modernism appeared first in art in many European capitals, especially in Paris. After World War I, it spread to the cities of the United States and South America. Its highest point was reached with World War II. Modernism started by influencing painting first and then its manifestations appeared in literature thanks to such writers as Ezra Pound, Filippo Marinetti, James Joyce and Guillame Apollinaire that translated the experimentation of visual arts into literature with the common aim to break with the past conventions and create something absolutely original. New revolutionary ideas in philosophy, antropology, psychology, politcs, and science widespread. Karl Marx with his The Communist Manifesto challanged the Victorian belief that social classes were inhereted from nature and he also warned about the risk of alienation and class struggle. In these years of changes, ideas of time and space were also questioned. The French philosopher Henri Bergson maintained that in the process of understanding reality, immediate experience and intuition were more efficient than rationalism and science. Challanging the traditional idea of time, he introduced the notion of duration which is the individual’s intuition of the continuous flow of reality. It is what he calls the time of science and the time of conscience. The former is external, linear and measured in the spatial distance travelled by the hands of a clock, while the latter is internal, subjective and measured by the relative emotional intensity of a moment This process of relativisation of the experience of reality was taken to its extremes by Albert Einstein, who introduced his theory of relativity, suggesting that time and space are not fixed. However, it was the Viennese psychiatrist Sigmund Freud who mostly transformed the way individuals are perceived. In his Interpretation of Dreams, he advanced a three-part model of the psyche, consisting of the id (the unconscious, impulsive and child-like portion of the psyche), the ego (the rational component of the psyche), and the super-ego (the moral component of the psyche). All these theories deeply influenced the development of modernist fiction and inspired writers to develop new techniques to represent these new perceptions of subjective reality. As a matter of fact, the search for new forms of expression, which affected all branches of literature, was carried on first of all in fiction. Before the 20th century novelists had concentrated above all on plots and on the characters particularly described in their relation with the society in which they lived. As a matter of fact, the function of the novel was to present people in a social context, so that they become mirrors of their own age. In the 20th century, instead, attention began to shift from society to man himself, to his inner self (this particularly thanks to Freud’s studies in psychoanalysis), to his dissatisfaction and anxiety caused by the social and political events that had followed the First World War. All this led to a collapse of all established principles which in the field of fiction led modern novelists to search for new contents and forms. In particular, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, maintained that modern novel should pay attention to the complex mixture of past and present, of feelings and memories that human mind produces every day, every second, rather than what happens in the traditional novel focused on the predictable sequence of hours and days. James Joyce Joyce’s Irish origins are very important to understand the author’s position towards his native country. Also his Jesuit education influenced the first chapters of his novel ‘’A portrait of the artist as a young man’’, even if he later abandoned the Catholic Church because he considered it guilty of the Irish backwardness, but also because of his choice of an artistic career after a period in which Joyce took interest in the Irish nationalism and in the Irish life (Charles Parnell that had strongly supported the Irish cause for independence with the Home Rule died). As a consequence of this, Joyce had great problems in publishing his works because of Irish hostility. Thus, he chose voluntary exile after his graduation and spent most of his life in Italy. In Trieste he was a teacher and Ettore Schmitz-Italo Svevo was one of his pupils and in France he was influenced by French philosophy and literature from Montaigne to Flaubert and Mallarmè. When the Second World War broke out, in 1939 Joyce moved to Zurich where he died in 1941. Joyce can be classified in either realism as symbolism, since both of them are combined in his works. As a realist he supported the idea that literature and consequently the artist must promote awareness in the reader. In this connection the artist must be objective and independent from moral, religious