Letteratura inglese del primo Novecento

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Testo

Modernism and the “stream-of-consciousness” technique

After the 1910 in English litterature it were a revolution ,which some critics have later named “Modernism”. The main characteristic of these novels is the focusing on the mental processes that develop in the human mind , and the attempting to explore them through what is called the “Stream of consciousness” technique. Other characteristics of these novels are the abscence of plot and the complete absence of a protagonist.
In this period Freud studied Psychoanalisis and his theories about inconsciuos influenced all this litherary production, there is a new conception of interior time and clock time.
There are some methods to depict consciousness because of it often combines past-present-future.These methods are for example flashbacks fade-out or slow-up , the use of similes and metaphors or particoular forms of punctuation.

Interior monologue

The basic and the most used method is the use of “interior monologue” that is different from “the stream of consciousness” since the first is refered to mental activity itself and the second term is the instrument used to translate this phenomenon into words; infact in the interior monologue we can see how words are apparently illogical and apparently disconnected when through this method the author can give the idea of a chaotic sequence of thoughts. We can find these method in Virginia Woolf and James Joyce for example “Molly’s Monologue” in which we can notice the total absence of punctuation. We can say also that while in Virginia Woolf we can understand when an interior monologue is going to begin thanks to clauses like “ He said, he decided, he thought...”, in Joyce the monologue starts without any introduction.

James Joyce

He was born in Dublin in 1882 in a catholic family that in 1888 sended it to a boarding school, a school managed by the Jesuits that followed him and his education even at University and from this experience he tried some chapters for his autobiographical novel “A portait of the artist as a young man”. An important influence in his life was the meeting with the Irish Nationalist politics, that in future it would cause problems to Joyce’s career.after the degree , he travelled so much but when his mother died he turn back in Ireland and began to drink and conduce a dissolute life. After the meeting with the “woman of his life” he began to travel in many places to escape from the stagnancy of Dublin , during these travels he went in Italy where he met Italo Svevo. After the first World War, he went in Paris, that while had begun the intellectual capital of Europe, and he worked to his second work, Ulysses. He died in 1941.

WORKS
Dubliners: a collection of fifteen short stories dealing with life in Dublin. The stories are divided into 4 sections : childhood, adolescence( Eveline), maturity, public life and epilogue. The stile of the collection is essentially realistic with a scropolous catoliguing of detalis. The characteristic of Joyce’s art is the epiphany, that is the result of the mental activity of stream of consciousness caused by a common object.

A portrait of the artist as a young man: deals with the growth to maturity of a young Irish man and his dedication to art. It is an autobiographical novel in which the central figure is Stephen Dedalus that is Joyce itself.

Ulysses :that is generally regarded as Joyce’s masterpiece.

FEATURES AND THEMES
Joyce thought that the artist had to be invisible in his works, not expressing his viewpoint and he advocated the objectivity of the artist and his indipendence from all moral, religious and political pressures and he was also influenced by Freud’s theories.

Yeats

He was born in Dublin in 1865,his father was a painter, a keen intellectual and sceptic. When he was 9 he went to London where he was influenced by the Pre- Raphaelites movement. He was also interested in spiritualism, occultism, magic and theosophy. After a love disappointment, his style changed and it began hard and bitter,he turned to drama and his main topics became politics, metaphysics and art. He married a young spiritualist medium and he resumed his studies in occultism and neoplatonic philosophy. In his last years, he wrote some of his greatest novels.He died in 1939.
He has a particular conception of history. For Yeats, in the sequence of historical ages, history mirrors the life of man. He sees history as formed by a series of opposite cycles ( something like Vico’s repetition of historical phenomena or corsi e ricorsi) and Yeats calls each cycle Magnum Annus or Great Year. Every age is opposite to the previous one, an age of rule will be followed by an age of violence. It can be graphically represented by interpenetrating cones, the point of one cone touching the base of the other. We can see this theory in the “Second Coming”, in which it talks about the second coming of another Messiah, opposite to Jesus.

Eliot

Thomas Eliot is the inventor of the objective correlative. It consists in a situation, a landskape or a common object used to talk about a particoular theme, but it is different from symbolism because of its impersonality. In fact he thought that the authour had to be invisible in the novel. He firmly believed in traditions and he thought that past was always better than present. Dante was his master. He thought that poetry must communicate something, even before being understood, first of all through its rhythm and musicality.
His most recurring themes are:
1. lack of love
2. lack of communication
3. sterilty of our civilization
4. repetition
But repetion is not like in Beckett, in which there are repeted scenes, he inserts words and uses of other cultures. He sees London realty as fragmentary and in his “ The waste land” it is possible to see this fragmentariness, in fact in this poem only Tyresias can reunify this situation because he believed in traditions

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