Psychological & Literary Influences on Modern Literature: Freud, Joyce, Woolf, Orwell, Schemi e mappe concettuali di Inglese

Scarica Psychological & Literary Influences on Modern Literature: Freud, Joyce, Woolf, Orwell e più Schemi e mappe concettuali in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! THE AGE OF ANXIETY The First World War left Britain in a disillusioned mood some soldiers celebrated their return home with pleasure, others with a sense of guilt for the horrors of trench. There was an increasing feeling of frustration, due to the dissolution of the Empire into the Commonwealth, led to a transformation of the notions of imperial hegemony and white superiority. Nothing seemed to be right or certain: scientists and philosophers destroyed the old, predictable universe which had sustained the Victorians in their optimistic outlook. The first set of new ideas had been introduced by Freud his view of the developing psyche emphasised the power of the unconscious to affect behaviour; the discovery that man's action could be motivated by irrational forces of which he might know nothing was very disturbing. He developped the importance of the libido, in which the child sees the father as a rival for his mother's affections. The effects in the sphere of family life were deep: the relationship between parents and children was altered. Freud also provided a new method of investigation of the human mind through the analysis of dreams and the concept of "free association'. Jung continued Freud's studies and added the concept of the collective unconscious, a sort of cultural memory containing the universal images and beliefs of humans, which operates on a symbolic level. This meant that some figures or objects of the everyday world had great symbolic power and people responded to them unconsciously. Only the poet could understand these symbols and explain them. Also the introduction of 'relativity by Einstein, which discarded the concepts of time and space. The world view lost its solidity. The idea of time was also questioned by the philosopher Bergson, he made a distinction between historical and psychological time historical time is external, measured in terms of the spatial distance travelled by a the hands of a clock, and psychological time is internal, measured by the emotional intensity of a moment. INTERIOR MONOLOGUE At the beginning of the 20 century, writers gave more importance to subiective consciousness. Novelists adopted the interior monologue to represent the activity of mind before it is ordered into speech. the interior monologue • It is the verbal expression of the stream of consciousness. • It is characterised by the frequent lack of chronological order. • Formal logical order may be lost. • The action takes place within the character's mind. • Speech may be immediate, without introductory expressions. • Types of interior monologue There are two kinds of interior monologue, indirect and direct. In the indirect monologue, the narrator never lets the character's thoughts flow without control, and maintains logical and grammatical organisation. The character's thoughts are presented directly and by explanatory or introductory phrases to guide the reader through the narration. The direct interior monologue is characterised by a mix of third-person narration, linked to an external time, and an interior narration linked to the concept of 'inner time, that is, the time of the character's mind. In the direct interior monologue with the mind level of narration, the character's thoughts flow freely, not interrupted by external events. JOYCE born in Dublin in 1882. He was educated at gesuit schools, before finally enroling at University College, Dublin. His interest was for a broader european culture, and this led him to begin to think of himself as a European rather than an Irishman In 1905 he settled in Trieste with his wife, Joyce began teaching English and made friends with Svevo. Joyce and Nora had two children. The years in Trieste were difficult, filled with financial problems; Dubliners, a collection of short stories all about Dublin and its life, was completed in 1905 but only published on the eve of WWI. In 1915 he moved to Zurich with his family. In 1920 he moved to Paris, where he was able to publish Ulysses. In 1940, when France was occupied by the Germans, Joyce returned to Zurich, where he died in January 1941. he set all his works in Ireland, he was influenced by the Symbolists, the artist's task was to render life objectively in order to give back to the readers a true image of it. This necessarily led to the isolation and detachment of the artist from society. His style, technique and language developed from the realism through an exploration of the characters' impressions, he uses the free direct speech, the interior monologue. DUBLINERS consists of 15 short stories. The opening stories deal with childhood in Dublin; the others, advancing in time and expanding in scope, concern the middle years of characters and their social, political affairs. The stories are arranged into four groups, as Joyce explained: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. the characters are part of lower-middle-class in Dublin. Everyone in Dublin seems to be caught up in an endless web of despair. Even when they want to escape, they are unable to because they are spiritually weak. The description in each story is realistic and concise, with lots of details. The use of realism is mixed with symbolism, since external details generally have a deeper meaning. Joyce thought that the function of symbolism was to take the reader beyond the usual aspects of life through the analysis of the particular he employed a technique called epiphany, that is, the spiritual manifestation caused by an external object or a banal situation, which reveals the character's inner truths. His style in Dubliners is characterised by the interior monologue and repetition of images, chiasmus. In the first three short stories, Joyce employs a first person narrator, who remains nameless and not identified who describes events from the point of view of the young boy. For the other stories a third-person narrator is employed. He tends to use the free direct speech: the protagonists thoughts are introduced without any reporting verbs. The language of Dubliners appears simple, objective, it is adapted to the characters according to their age, social class. Paralysis it is present from beginning to end and becomes gradually more powerful and universal. Joyce's Dubliners accept their condition because they are not aware of it or because they lack the courage to break the chains that bind them. The opposite of paralysis is the escape and its consequent failure. It originates from an impulse caused by a sense of enclosure, but no one succeeds in freeing themselves.