Letteratura inglese 2

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English Literature 2 - Written by Bresciani Umberto
http://digilander.iol.it/umbecr
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1. Thomas Hardy
2. Charles Dickens
3. Oscar Wilde
4. George Bernard Shaw
5. David Herbert Lawrence
a. Sons And Lovers
6. James Joyce
a. Eveline
7. Virginia Woolf
8. Wilfred Owen
a. Futility
9. Wystan Hugh Auden
a. Musйe Des Beaux Arts
b. Refugee Blues
10. Samuel Beckett
a. Waiting For Godot
1. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
Hardy's long life makes him a Victorian writer and a modern one. He started to practise architecture in London, because his father was a mason and a small builder. After his first literary succes he gave up his career in architecture to devote himself to writing. He had been married twice: when his first wife Emma Gifford died in 1912 he married Florence Emily Dugdale. Both marriages were childless. His novel are called "Wessex novels" from the name of the rural area where they are set; Wessex is Hardy's fictional name for the south-western English counties, in particular his native Dorset. His first popular success was Far from the Madding Crowd. His best-known novels are The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. Victorian readers refused and criticized his novels because of their frankness in dealing with the aspects of Victorian life. In fact Hardy represented life in some of its most sombre and cruel aspects. All his works are permeated by a deep pessimism. Most of his novels are set in the countryside and show his affection for the vanishing agricultural world in the face of increasing urbanisation. In his earlier novels he laments the universe's indifference to man. In his later novels he recognises that man-made laws are partly responsible for the unhappiness and sufferings inflicted on the individual.
Tess (the protagonist of Tess of The d'Ubervilles) is an indictment of the abject treatment of women and socially underpriviledged people in Victorian society. Hardy does not believe in the existence of a loving God and has a pessimistic and fatalistic outlook on life. According to him, the world is governed by forces that seem to enjoy inflicting endless suffering on a helpless creature like Tess. The premonitory incidents in the story of Tess of the d'Urbervilles show how Tess's destiny is predetermined by fate.
2. Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
He was born at Landport, in the south of England, in 1812. When he was a child he had to work in a shoe-blacking factory in London for a few months while his father was in prison for debt. At the age of sixteen he gave up studying law and learned shorthand to become a reporter in the courts of law. These two experiences provided material for his novels (the conditions of exploited children and the description of lawyers and their world and the abuses of law). He had ten children and he died in 1870, broken down by strain and exhaustion. His first fictional work, Sketches by Boz (1836), and the publication of Pickwick Papers (1836-37) made him famous. He wrote fourteen novels (Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, Hard Times, Great Expectations...), all characterised by elaborate plots and a unique sense of humour. His literary influences are the tradition of the "picaresque" novel for his use of humour and story planning and Walter Scott for his descriptive techniques for people and landscapes. His interest in the theatre gave him a flair for dialogue and provided many of the melodramatic devices he used in his plots. Dickens attacked what he considered the worst social abuses of Victorian society. His most recurrent themes are: the exploitation of child labour, the ill-treatment of pupils in hideous schools, unsafe factory conditions, injustices caused by the ferocious penal code, imprisonment for debt, the unsanitary slums, the greediness and selfishness of the rich upper classes, the plight of the working class. Oliver Twist, an exploited infant, is Dicken's most succesfull type of character. Reality is the starting point, but his great imagination creates richly detailed settings. He doesn't give a realistic description of settings because he describes places with exaggerated details. His fictional world is populated by flawed human beings who are "flat" characters, larger-than-life figures or grotesque caricatures. Generally in his novels he uses an omniscient third person narrator. Dickens is the one truly universal and popular genius English literature has produced since Shakespeare. Yet literary critics have long found fault with his novel because of the sentimental and sensational elements in them. Today his genius has been unanimously acknowledged.
3. Oscar Wilde (1856-1900)
In the last decade of the 19th century, literary London was scandaliseb by an Irishman, Oscar Wilde, a disciple of aestheticism, whose slogan was "art for art's sake", a socialist and an open antagonist of the prevailing moral and religious code. He was born in Dublin in 1856 into an upper middle-class family. After attending Portora Royal School, one of the best Protestant schools in Ireland, Wilde went to Trinity College, Dublin, and then won a scholarship to Oxford University where he took an honours degree in classics. At Oxford, he lived as a "dandy": he created the image of eccentricity which was later to inspire both bigoted disapproval and bewildered admiration in London society. He dressed extravagantly and paid great attention to the elegance of his lodgings. His conversation was brilliant and full of memorable witticism. The image of himself that he created was based on the belief that in life, as in art, the artist's duty was to cultivate beauty and give aesthetic pleasure. In 1888 he published a volume of fairy-stories written for his children, The Happy Prince and Other Tales. In the same period he wrote The Canterville Ghost and Lord Arthur Savile's Crime. Especially succesful was The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), a short novel combining goticism with aestheticism. It tells the story of a "fallen" dandy who corrupts all the people who fall under his spell, murders the friend who acts as the voice of Gray's conscience and finally punishes himself by committing suicide. The book caused a scandal but sold very well. His trial for homosexuality and his subsequent imprisonment saddened the last part of his life. The epistle De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol belong to this sad period. Today his literary reputation has been assessed on the basis of his artistic merit because homosexuality has ceased to be a crime or a source of scandal. With comic flat characters Wilde displays his best talent as a playwright.
4. George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
George Bernard Shaw was a leading figure in British drama for over fifty years. He was born in Dublin in 1856, into a family with aristocratic connections but in steady decline because of his father's alcoholism. At the age of sixteen the family's poverty, which was a source of great frustration to him, obliged him to take a job in an office. At the age of twenty he followed his mother to London. Working as a journalist he earned a living in London. He was interested beside literature in music and in art and theatre criticism. His first literary works - novels serialised in magazines - were a failure. He then turned to the theatre. He wanted to emulate the achievement of Henrik Ibsen, the Norwegian dramatist. Ibsen's plays, which exposed the hypocrisy and corruption of the middle class, convinced him that art was "the most effective instrument of moral propaganda". He called Ibsen a social reformer, misunderstanding his main theme which was the psychological conflict between one's duty to society and one's duty to oneself. In his first plays he showed a corrupt ruling class prospering by exploiting the lower classes. Shaw started writing plays because he believed in the stage as a powerful force for awakening people's social conscience. He wrote about fifty plays. Critics have often attacked Shaw for putting social propaganda before dramatic art in his early plays. His characters are brilliant orators but lack the warmth of human beings. He had few imitators as a dramatist but helped to pave the way for the modern theatre of ideas. He developed a new kind of dramatic prose which is clear, vigorous and witty. In 1898 Shaw married Charlotte Payne Townsend, a well-to-do Irish woman who provided him with the personal and financial security necessary to devote himself exclusively to writing. In 1925 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Although he never renounced his socialist creed (in 1884 he had joined the Fabian Society), in the 1920s and 1930s he expressed admiration for totalitarian leaders like Mussolini and Hitler.
5. David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930)
David Herbert Lawrence had a negative view of his father, a miner with a large family. His mother, an ex-school teacher, and a rather refined woman, encouraged him at school. He was deeply fond of her, and her death was very painful for him. When he was 15 he left school to start working as a clerk in a surgical goods factory. In 1908 he became a teacher. In 1912 he gave up teaching because of health problems and started to support himself by writing. In 1913 he published his major novel, Sons and Lovers, and two years later he married Frieda Weekley. They travelled all over the world. Lawrence was deeply opposed to the industrial civilization of his time. He believed that the suppression of natural instincts and emotions in modern man and the mechanised, cerebral character of modern civilization had a destructive effect on the life of the spirit. According to him, modern civilization had trasformed human beings: they had become slaves to the routine of work. He had costant problems with censorship because his main themes were basic human passions: the relationships between man and woman and between human beings and the environment.
5a. Sons And Lovers
The main theme of Sons and Lovers is the psychological and emotional relationship between Mrs Morel, an unhappily married mother, and her sons. Paul and his brother William are to some extent bound to their mother by an Oedipus complex, as suggested by the title. In the novel Paul tries to escape from the obsessive relationship with his mother through fulfilling sexual relationships with other women. The novel is a fictional version of the novelist's childhood and youth. Lawrence drew Mrs Morel's and Paul's characters from his personal experience. An autobiographical element is also the contrast between the vitality of Paul's working-class father and the middle-class gentily of his mother. Lawrence's language has poetic and symbolic energy, and an imaginative power rarely equalled in the 20th century. It is reminescent in its rhytms and use of repetition of the language used in the 17th century Authorized Version of the Bible, which was such an important influence in his childhood. Lawrence didn't write only novels. He was a gifted poet, as well as a novelist, and a gifted critic, letter and travel writer too.
6. James Joyce (1882-1941)
James Joyce was the first and the most important among the great experimentalists of the 20th century. He was born in Dublin from a good family in decline and was educated in his native town at Jesuit schools and University College. The situation of his family deteriorated partly as a result of the decline in the fortunes of Charles Parnell, one of the leading supporters of Home Rule for Ireland, of whom Joyce's father was a great supporter. The Catholic Church turned against Parnell because of the scandal caused by his affair with a married woman, Katharine O'Shea. He took no part in the Irish literary revival, which accompanied Irish political nationalism, because he felt the Irish environment frustrating and provincial. Although he loved Ireland he saw patriotism as a backward movement which paralysed the development of a free spirit in Ireland. He refused the stagnant and stifling atmosphere of Dublin and in 1904 he left Ireland.
6a. Eveline (1914)
Eveline belongs to a collection of fifteen short stories which was completed in 1904, but not published until 1914, under the title Dubliners. As the title suggests, the stories are set in Dublin. In these stories Joyce describes the "paralysis" of his native city and the sense of stagnation which entrappes its inhabitants.
Each story portrays either a failure or a defeat of its main character. In this short story Eveline, the protagonist, is defeated by resignation: she dreams of escaping from her ugly life, but at the crucial moment she is powerless to act.
The story deals with Eveline's past, present and future. In the present Eveline lives with her father, her younger brother and her sister. She is fed up with her life: her family is quite poor, her father is violent, her mother is died and she doesn't like her job (she works as a shop assistant). Eveline's past is different from the present: in the past she was quite happy: her father was not bad and her mother was still alive.
She has a fiancй, Frank, who represents her hope for a change. She likes him, but I think that she doesn't really love him ("Frank would save her. He would give her life, perhaps love, too"). She is planning to marry him and elope with him in order to leave home and escape from her unhappy and hard life. In her future life she will be Frank's wife and she will start a new life in Buenos Ayres.
Eveline is facing a dilemma of reality (her present life) vs dream (her future life). Her dilemma is also one of prison vs liberty: in some ways Dublin is a prison because of its paralyzing effects on its inhabitants and Buenos Ayres represents the freedom.
Her attitude towards her life changes during the story: at first she doesn't like her present life, but at the end she doesn't mind it. When she is in her living room waiting for the time to leave some memories of her past come before her: the games she used to play with her friends, the different attitude of her father and her mother's death. She also remembers that she promised her mother that she would look after her family after her death.
Later she goes to meet Frank at the quay. When the moment comes to go on board the ship, she changes her mind and refuses to go. She can't find the courage to cut with the past. The sense of resignation which has kept her at home up to now triumphs over her desire to escape. There is an antithesis between Eveline's and Frank's actions in the last part of the story: stillness / movement and passivity / activity. The epiphany (= manifestation) in this story is Eveline's incapability to escape. It shows her passivity and her uncertainly.
At the beginning of the story Joyce uses an omniscient third-person narrator that throughout the story is replaced by a third-person narration from Eveline point of view. He uses the following devices:
- interior monologue and point of view shifting from external narration to inside Eveline's mind, referring her thoughts ("Was that wise?" (30), "Escape! She must escape!"(110));
- flashback, when he talks about Eveline's past.
Shift in time are very often (for example: "Home! She looked round the room, reviewing all its familiar objects which she had dusted once a week for so many years. [...] Perhaps she would never see again those familiar objects from which she had never dreamed of being divided").
The language reproduces the plain vocabulary and simple syntax of the character.
7. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
She lived in a highly intellectual atmosphere at home, as her father was friendly with many of the main literary figures of the period, among them Henry James. She was probably also influenced by the aestheticism of the 1890s which valued form over content. She was educated at home. After her mother's death she had the first of a series of nervous breakdowns which affected all her life. When her father died in 1904, she moved with her sister Vanessa and two brothers to a new area of London, Bloomsbury, where she founded a close circle of intellectuals, who became known as the Bloomsbury Group. Among them were Leonard Woolf, who later became her husband, the essayist Lytton Strachey and the novelist E. M. Forster, besides painters and art critics. They rejected many of the conventional standards of contemporary society and literature. They emphasised the importance of subjectivity, aesthetic enjoyment, personal ties of affection, and intellectual honesty. With her husband Leonard, she founded in 1917 the Hogarth Press which specialised in the publication of new and experimental work.
Mrs Dalloway (1925) is her first succesful Modernist novel, which is also one of the most popular and accessible. She developed her experimentation in To the Lighthouse (1927), The Waves (1931), The Years (1937) and Between the Acts (1941).
Virginia Woolf is of a great importance in the history of the novel because of her experiments with narration, characterisation and style. She deliberately rejected what for many readers was the main aim of the novel, namely the telling of a story. For her, events were not important in themselves. What was important was the impression they made on the characters who experienced them. Since she valued the subjectivity of experience more highly than the objectivity of events, she could not use the traditional omniscient narrator. The great technical innovation she introduced was to shift the point of view inside her characters' minds, so revealing them through their own thoughts, sensations and impressions. This led to the abandonment of another traditional convention of the novel, that of the chronological ordering of events. In following the processes of the characters' s mind, her novels involve constant shifting backwards and forwards in time according to the sensations and recollections aroused in the characters by the events they are experiencing. Her fiction is often characterised by two levels of narration, one of external events arranged in chronological order and one of the flux of thoughts arranged according to the association of ideas. Virginia Woolf's main aim in writing fiction was to convey through words the nature of human consciousness. Her prose is characterised by few subordinate sentences and is often broken by semicolons or dashes to convey what, according to her, was the typical feminine way of building the sentence as it develops in the mind. Her novels rely on very flimsy plots. They focus on internal thoughts, feelings and reaction in a highly evocative and figurative language which follows the random association of ideas as they come up. Objects and events often take a symbolic meaning.
7a. Mrs Dalloway (1925)
The work exemplifies an experiment in narrative tecnique. In the novel there are two levels of narration: an external narrative of physical actions and an internal narrative of thoughts and memories. The first one is related to the narrator's point of view and the second one evolves in Mrs Dalloway's consciousness by way of a free and random association of ideas. The shifting of the point of view is one of the features of modern novelists. This narrative technique, where the narrator follows different points of view, is called stream of consciousness. The time of narration has no relation with chronological time because most of what is told takes place in Mrs Dalloway's mind: her memories go beyond chronological time.
Mrs Dalloway is a novel about an upper-class woman who is arranging a party in the evening and goes shopping. It is a plotless novel, because nothing relevant really happens in the 24 hours of the day. The story is set in London and takes place on a single day in June 1923. It starts with Mrs Dalloway going out to buy flowers for a party she is going to have that evening and ends with the party itself. It develops around Mrs Dalloway's feelings, reactions and recollections. The emphasis of the novel is on the internal lives of the characters and not on the external events.
8. Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
Wilfred Owen was born in Shripshire in 1893. He served in the threnches for five years and died at the age of 25 in 1918, a week before the end of the World War I. The horrors of war shocked him deeply. The poems for which Owen is now remembered were nearly all written between the summer of 1917 and the autumn of his death, but very few were published in his lifetime. In 1918 he began assembling them for a book for which he was considering a Preface which explains the purpose and subject-matter of his poems. Owen claims that the subject-matter of his poems is the reality of war, not the glorification of war, and its main theme is "pity", i.e. the poet's sadness at so much suffering and death. The role of the poet is to convey the horror of war to those who have no direct experience of war, so that future futile and destructive conflicts can be avoided. In such a context the poet's main concern is not with melodious language or perfection of form. The conventions of traditional poetry are not well-suited to the description of trench warfare or to protesting against the war's continuation. Owen was a skilful and varied versifier. His major technical innovation was the use of half-rhymes or para-rhymes.
8a. Futility (1918)
The poem refers to an incident in the trenches durign the Great War: an unknown young soldier is dead while fighting and nothing can bring him back to life. The poem is about any young man dead before his time and about the futility of human life that can be cut short so pointlessly by war. The title explains the absurdity and the meaninglessness of war. The word "fatous" (line 13) repeats the idea of the title.
In the poem there are three levels of time and space: the here/now of the dead soldier, his past life and the creation. The sun is the element that connects the individual to the creation. The poet believes that it can wake the soldier.
In the poem Owen uses pararhymes, because true rhymes describe something which has a positive connotation, while war is not beautiful. For example, he rhymes "seeds" with "sides", "star" with "stir". The effect is a sense of frustration in keeping with the tragic themes of war.
9. Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73)
He began to write poetry at Oxford. Later he travelled widely - to Berlin, Spain and China. In 1939 he went to live in the US and became a US citizen in 1946. His poetry changed during the years and it became more personal, "the speech of one person addressing one person, not a large audience". Auden's poetry of the Thirties - represented here by Refugee Blues - is topical, comprehensible and political. The role of the poet was to show man what he is and what he should become. Auden's language is both poetical and ordinary.
9a. Musйe Des Beaux Arts (1939)
The poem was inspired by the painting The Fall of Icarus (1555?) by the Flemish artist Bruegel the Elder (1525-69). In this painting the fall of Icarus has not the prominence that the title seems to indicate. Icarus, who is falling in the water, is an insignificant and irrelevant detail in a big landscape. People can barely see him. The key message is that ordinary people and nature seem to be insensitive to a tragic event that doesn't concern them. The ploughman in the foreground working in his his daily routine, the shepherd in the middleground looking up at the sky with his dog and his sheep and the people on the sailing ship in the background don't even notice Icarus's fall. The painter decided to represent them in order to show absent-mindedness of mankind when relevant events take place.
The poem begins with a general statement (men and nature are indifferent to individual human suffering) and then choose some examples to support it.
Beside describing Brueghel's Icarus the poem refers to two more pictures. When the "miraculous birth" (Auden probably refers to the Nativity) takes place uncarig children go on playing and when the "dreadful martyrdom" (Auden probably refers to the Crucifixion or the death of a saint) takes places an unaware dogs "go on with their doggy life" and "the torturer's horse scratches its innocent behind on a tree". In the second stanza the poet describes Brueghel's Icarus.
9b. Refugee Blues (1939)
The poem deals with the problem of the flight of Jews from Hitler's Germany to the US and other European countries. In the poem a refugee is talking to his wife. Each stanza outlines an aspect of refugees' plight - their being homeless, without a country to call their own, without passports and therefore "officially dead". The refugees are a social problem to the country to they have fled to. The bureaucrats of the committee and the citizens are unsympathetic to them because they are afraid that the refugee steal their "daily bread". The poem is built up through a series of contrasts between between those who are free (people and animals like fishes, birds, cats and dogs) and those who are not free (the Jews in a stranger country). The poem is an adaption of a blue lyric. Blues are folf songs which developed among the Negroes of the southern United States. They have three-line stanzas, are melancholy in tone and marked by frequent repetition.
10. Samuel Beckett
He was born in Dublin and educated at Trinity College. He lived a long time in Paris where he became a friend of James Joyce and soon became a member of his circle, acting for a while as his secretary. In this period his own literary career began with an essay on Joyce and his first published short story. Sometimes he wrote in French (Waiting for Godot, a trilogy in prose - Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable - and some short stories) and provided the English translation himself. During the World War II he joined the French Resistance against the Germans. He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1969. Beckett's most significant plays are Waiting for Godot, Krapp's Last Tape (1958), Happy Days (1961), Come and Go (1966), Not I (1973). They belong to The Theatre of the Absurd. His later plays seem to deny the notion of characters in interaction which had traditionally been defining characteristic of drama. They are mostly short one-acters revolving around a single character who hardly moves and speaks less and less. He wrote poetry, fiction, drama and radio plays (for the BBC Third Programme). He is the leading dramatist of his generation and had a major impact on the development of the 20th century theatre. He was the major representative of the Absurdist Drama and was also a gifted novelist and poet.
10a. Waiting For Godot (1955)
Waiting for Godot is a tragicomedy in two acts by Samuel Beckett. It was originally written in French in 1952 (French title: En Attendant Godot) and then traslated into English by the author himself.
The stage directions at the beginning of each act are not very detailed (Act I - A country road. A tree. Evening; Act II - Next day. Same time. Same place). The setting is simple and desolate: a little hill, a tree (a willow) and nothing else. It reflects the solitude of mankind in the universe. It is very similar to the landscapes after the World War II and perhaps it was inpired by the picture Two man observing the moon, painted in 1830-1835 by Caspar David Friedrich.
Estragon and Vladimir are two tramps who are waiting on a country road for someone named "Godot", from whom they expect some unspecified kind of help. We are not sure that they are really tramps, but we are sure that they represent the basic aspects of the human condition. They are symbols of a general human condition in which life consists of a boring routine of a meaningless events. The play is a metaphor of human existence.
The two vagabonds cannot leave, so they spend their days wandering aimless. Their only aim is "waiting for Godot". We are not sure who the Godot that never comes is, but it may be God himself or something that could give meaning to human life (a woman, power, money, fortune...) At the end of Act I, a boy arrives with the message that Mr Godot cannot come but that he will certainly come tomorrow. Act II shows Estragon and Vladimir waiting for another day until the same boy comes with the same message: Godot will not come today but he will come tomorrow. The two characters might be considered complementary: Vladimir, who is obsessed with his hat (he is the "philosopher") and Estragon is obsessed witn his boots (he is interested in survival needs). Their dialogue is simple, repetitive and sometimes banal and illogical. In their dialogue there are also tragic and comic elements mixed together. Silences and pauses, gestures and movements are important as words. What happens on the stage may contradict the words spoken by the characters. The language loses his communicative function.
The play is a typical example of the Theatre of the Absurd, because the play has no story nor plot in the traditional sense. There is no sequence of events, no beginning or end. Chronological time is meaningless because there is no progression but only repetition of the same actions and incidents with slight variations. In Act II Pozzo is blind and Lucky (his servant) is mute without reason. Perhaps it means that life is based on Fate (what life gives to man) and Luck. It reflects the anxiety and the pessimism of the author and the meaninglessness of life.