<p> 1 1. Introduction to 20th century British literature mind and world: trend from the objective to the subjective: „everything is in the mind”, examination topics and required reading at the back!!!!! only certainty: individual soul inward look: interest in unreality and dream, in psychology modernism (first 2-3 decades of the 20th century) (Freud) rejection of 19th century optimism in general Modernism in the ARTS in general in art: experimentalism, rejection of traditional forms Impressionism (Manet) Economic, social, intellectual changes: cubism, surrealism (Picasso, Gustave Klimt, Matisse) the Victorian age: stabilizing era expressionism: (Kandinsky) „positivism” (materialism, rationalism) in philosophy, „realism” in literature Arnold Schoenberg’s atonal music epistemological certainty the modernist artist: elitist, alienated from society Christian norms held up: God, Immortality, Duty the „Second Industrial Revolution (1865-1900): art = salvation, a substitute of faith industrial, economic and technological developments escape from history Mass production, mechanization of manufacture, employment for increasing numbers POETRY: Long Depression (1873-1896) * Rejection of prevalent Victorian values (also Romanticism) Second World War * social changes: widening gap between rich and poor, alienation, break- L’Art pour L’art: / Aesthetic Movement at the turn of the century (Walter Pater, up of traditional ties, individualism, the loneliness of the crowds Oscar Wilde) Art should be independent of all claptrap —should stand alone [...] and * intellectual changes: appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with . belief in progress, shattered emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism and rationalism questioned (Nietzsche, Kierkegaard) the like (James McNeill Whistler1834-1903) previous optimism questioned (Schopenhauer was labelled "pessimistic") divorce between art and nature (Baudelaire) Decadence (George Moore: Ode to a Dead Body) evolution by undermined religious certainty (Darwin: On the Impressionism Origin of Species: 1859) Karl Marx: contradictions within the "capitalist" system.. Symbolism: (W. B. Yeats, French symbolists) scepticism: no absolute certainty (Einstein’s theory of relativity, To name a thing is to do away with three quarters of your 1916), questioning coherence and meaning (Nietzsche) meaning (Mallarmé)</p><p> experience of time and space radically altered Imagism: (Ezra Pound): An image is that which presents an emotional and CHANGE is emphasized: Henri Bergson: existence = duration, intellectual complex in an instant of time (Ezra Pound) to exist = to change 2 2. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) No faery darts, no cherub air, Nor swan, nor dove Life: 14 novels, Are thine; but features pitiless, And iron daggers of distress," began to publish poetry in 1898 I said to Love. (918 poems altogether "Depart then, Love! . . . an architect, two unhappy marriages - Man's race shall end, dost threaten thou? (first ardent romance, 20 years later The age to come the man of now drifted into hostility) Know nothing of? - We fear not such a threat from thee; Age, background: We are too old in apathy! keen awareness of modern problems Mankind shall cease.--So let it be," I said to Love. collapse of values, starting point: Darwin! rise of agnosticism: (Thomas Henry) Huxley – love = an illusion, just a term for procreation agnosticism = everything outside scientific reach is unknowable (theology, God) Hardy: a religious man deprived of belief</p><p> morality: has no basis first belief in the notion of progress: „evolutionary meliorism” value of individual cannot be stated after the World War: consciousness is an accident, universe: a machine the reality of change:</p><p>I said to Love Then we looked closelier at Time, And saw his ghostly arms revolving I said to Love, To sweep off woeful things with prime, "It is not now as in old days Things sinister with things sublime When men adored thee and thy ways Alike dissolving (from ’Going and Staying’) All else above; Named thee the Boy, the Bright, the One Who spread a heaven beneath the sun," poems expressing his loss of religious faith: I said to Love. The Impercipient</p><p>I said to him, THAT from this bright believing band "We now know more of thee than then; An outcast I should be, We were but weak in judgment when, That faiths by which my comrades stand With hearts abrim, Seem fantasies to me, We clamoured thee that thou would'st please And mirage-mists their Shining Land, Inflict on us thine agonies," Is a drear destiny. I said to him. Why thus my soul should be consigned To infelicity, I said to Love, Why always I must feel as blind "Thou art not young, thou art not fair, To sights my brethren see, 3 Why joys they've found I cannot find, „if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Abides a mystery. worst.” Since heart of mine knows not that ease intensely personal Which they know; since it be That He who breathes All's Well to these language and style: Breathes no All's Well to me, doubts about language: verbal variety and richness sacrificed My lack might move their sympathies we are left with facts which set the mind in motion And Christian charity! a mute sense of the strangeness of everything I am like a gazer who should mark An inland company expressionism: sacrifices beauty for the expressive function Standing upfingered, with, "Hark! hark! (CONTRA previous poetry: John Keats: The The glorious distant sea!" great end of poetry is to lift the cares and sooth And feel, "Alas, 'tis but yon dark the heart of man. And wind-swept pine to me!"</p><p>1 Yet I would bear my shortcomings Hap (1866) With meet tranquillity, But for the charge that blessed things If but some vengeful god would call to me I'd liefer have unbe. From up the sky, and laugh: ’Thou suffering thing, O, doth a bird deprived of wings Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy, Go earth-bound wilfully! That thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting!’ . . . . Enough. As yet disquiet clings Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die About us. Rest shall we. Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited; Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I A Drizzling Easter Morning’ Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.</p><p>And he is risen? Well, be it so. . . . But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain, And still the pensive lands complain, And why unblooms the best hope ever sown? And dead men wait as long ago, - Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain, As if, much doubting, they would know And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. … What they are ransomed from, before Thes purblind Doomsters had as readily strown They pass again their sheltering door. Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.</p><p>I stand amid them in the rain, *expressive: see how consonant clusters, alliterations express alienation and While blusters vex the yew and vane; threat And on the road the weary wain *not really the thought that matters but the way the poem expresses it Plods forward, laden heavily; *bitter irony: it would be better to have a cruel but active, personal God than And toilers with their aches are fain to be at the mercy of „hap”, at the mercy of impersonal blind forces For endless rest—though risen is he. * Crass Casualty, dicing Time, purblind Doomsters = this is the new deliberately breaks the conventions of Easter poems mythology, the gods of modern humans a sombre and honest vision of life 1 The text of these poems are reproduced in my seminar course kit as well. 4 3. 3. Characterize the relationship of this couple. What are some of the poetic figures expressing that? What is the main source of the figures? 4. 4. Characterize the structure of the poem. It helps to compare thoroughly the first God for Hardy = Immanent Will: and last stanzas. What makes the last stanza special and different from all the See parallel with the famous novel: Tess of the D’Urbervilles: rest? Think about images and motifs that appear in both. What changes can you observe? (Look at the tenses of the verbs for example.) „The President of the Immortals finished his sport with Tess.” The Convergence of the Twain I Neutral Tones (1867) biblical idea: a cosmic wedding/marriage/union at the end of time (the Lamb [Christ] and his Bride [the church]; history has a purpose, an outcome We stood by a pont that winter day, this hope is bitterly parodied: the cosmic consummation consists of the encounter And the sun was white, as though chidden of God, between ship and iceberg And a few leaves lay on the starving sod; - They had fallen from an ash and were gray. Study Questions Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove 5. Structurally, the poem can be divided into two parts. Can you identify them? (A Over tedious riddles of years ago; grammatical change, among other things, indicates the shift.) And some words played between us to and fro 6. What is described in the first section? What is described in the second section? On which lost the more by our love. What does “she” refer to? (There is a clue later.) 7. Can you identify the historical event behind the poem? The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing 8. The poem contains a narrative but it does not follow the chronological order. Alive enough to have strenght to die; Can you reconstruct the proper chronology/timing? And a grin of bitterness swept thereby Like an ominous bird a-wing. 9. A contrast is set up in the first stanza which then dominates the poem. Point out the contrasting images in stanzas 1 to 5. Since then, keen lessons that love deceives, 10. Can you find the synonym of the expression “human vanity”? And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me 11. What philosophical/theological idea is parodied in the second section? In other Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree, words: a historical event is described, but extremely ironically. In what does the And a pond edged with grayish leaves irony lie? 12. Find the phrase which has the same referent as “Immanent Will.” *famous poem about the loss of love 13. Explain the title. *traditional devices of a love poem reversed 14. The irony is strenghtened by the use of a metaphor to describe the “august *hopelessness, faded energies event.” Consider the expressions. “prepared a mate”; “consummation.” Which lifeless inertia area of life do these images come from? * expressed by gray, faded colours * framed structure * a personal experience ultimately becomes a symbol of universal truth 3. William Butler Yeats (1865—1939) </p><p>1. 1. Establish the dominant meter of the poem by indicating stressed and his work: considered most important in the revival of Irish literature unstressed syllables (do this at least for the first stanza). central theme: Ireland, her history, folklore and contemporary public life 2. 2. How do we know that this text is a reversal of a love poem? How are the poetry, drama, criticism, essays, journalism, novels and occult writing traditional devices of a love poem reversed? 5 All's changed since I, hearing at twilight, Yeats and Endre Ady The first time on this shore, * national identity: crucial The bell-beat of their wings above my head, *symbolism Trod with a lighter tread. * the great cataclisms of their time, esp.first world war: Unwearied still, lover by lover, Yeats: „things fall apart; the centry cannot hold” (The They paddle in the cold Second Coming) Companionable streams or climb the air; Ady: „Minden egész eltörött” (Kocsiút az éjszakában) Their hearts have not grown old; Passion or conquest, wander where they will, Life (born in Dublin) Attend upon them still. triangle of three cities: Dublin-London-Sligo But now they drift on the still water, Mysterious, beautiful; Sligo: Celtic tradition Among what rushes will they build, London: cosmopolitan experience By what lake's edge or pool Delight men's eyes when I awake some day Dublin: a Romantic, nationalistic shelter To find they have flown away? important personalities in his life: Maud Gonne: frustrated love: unquenchable source for poetry elegiac, the anxiety of the aging poet memory of what Coole Part meant to him Lady Augusta Gregory: friend swans are traditionally symbolical of youth and ambitions a writer, dramatist, has a collection of Irish folk-tales he presents himself as subject to the ravages of time [The Wild Swans at Coole] symbolism: Yeats: chief representative THE trees are in their autumn beauty, The woodland paths are dry, Under the October twilight the water Mirrors a still sky; The Symbolism of Poetry (important esssay) Upon the brimming water among the stones Are nine-and-fifty Swans. * Romantic notion of art: poets (and painters and musicians) are continually making and The nineteenth autumn has come upon me unmaking the world Since I first made my count; It is indeed only those things which seem useless or very feeble that have any power I saw, before I had well finished, and all those htings that seem useful or strong (armies, architecture, reason) would have All suddenly mount been a little different if some mind long ago had not given itself to some emotion and And scatter wheeling in great broken rings shaped sounds or colours or forms or all of these, into a musical relation, that their Upon their clamorous wings. emotion might live in other minds.</p><p>I have looked upon those brilliant creatures, And now my heart is sore. 6 * the creative impulse: „makes and unmakes mankind and even the world I will arise and go now, itself, for does not ’the eye altering alter all’?” For always night and day I hear lake water lapping * advocates a return to the imagination! With low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway Or on the pavements gray, we would seek out those wavering, meditative, organic rhythms, which are the embodiments of the imagination that neither desires nor hates because it has done with I hear it in the deep heart's core (from The Rose, 1893) time and only wishes to gaze upon some reality, some beauty</p><p>* belief in a mythic unity of being (Romantics!) written in London: a trickling little fountain in a shopwindow * importance of form: „your words are as subtle, as complex, as full of wish to escape ( Romanticism and Celtic twilight) mysterious life as the body of a …. woman” directness of style and by simplicity woman (dancer): embodiment of poetry/art but also subtle poetic devices (rhythm, sound symbolism) complex symbolism: early poetry: nine: magic number, of birth, new life honey: reference to Canaan; glade to Greek mythology emphasis on the Romantic Pole: How do alliterations, metrical irregularities and other devices sweet melody, daydreaming express the direction of the poem towards a sense of calmness and Celtic twilight. peace? vague atmosphere, dream landscape: vaporous, gray; half lights change in Yeats’ poetry</p><p>The Lake Isle of Innisfree Abbey Theatre 1904 Yeats: manager, involved, more realism I will arise and go now, style: „talk”, much more vulgar, ugly and harsh And go to Innisfree, later: symbolism returns transformed (intensive and shocking) And a small cabin build there, Of clay and wattles made; [A Coat] Nine bean rows will I have there, A hive for the honey bee, I MADE my song a coat And live alone in the bee-loud glade Covered with embroideries Out of old mythologies And I shall have some peace there, For peace comes dropping slow, From heel to throat; Dropping from the veils of the morning But the fools caught it, To where the cricket sings; Wore it in the world's eyes There midnight's all a glimmer, As though they'd wrought it. And noon a purple glow, Song, let them take it, And evening full of the linnet's wings For there's more enterprise In walking naked. 7 second decade of the century: turbulent A shape with lion body and the head of a man, (Major Robert Gregory, husband shot in the war) A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, intensification of the independence movement Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Easter Rising 1916 Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, important event of Irish history (parallelling our ’56) Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? revolution galvanizes the whole Ireland followed by civil war written after 1919 declaration of the Irish Free State in 1921 (IRA, Black and Tans) the gyre: two whirling cones interpenetrating leaders = poets, teachers, dreamers, executed in history. two contradictory movements objectivity-subjectivity when subjectivity prevails: priority is given to the individual ’Easter 1916’ Byzantiam (era of the Justinians) for historical background see the Renaissance http://ireland.wlu.edu/landscape/Group2/Historical%20Background.htm the Irish 8th century objectivity: JC and middle ages elegiac feeling 20th cent: worst period of objectivity antithetical: a debate with himself: on the one hand: eulogistic, ordinary people are transformed by their general disintegration sacrifice the rhyming falls apart, dissonances on the other hand: an unnecessary tragedy? iambic rhythm but full of irregular caesuras</p><p> second coming: reference to parousia, Matthew 24: The Second Coming falcon –falconer: man disconnected from God TURNING and turning in the widening gyre ceremony of innocence: baptism The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Christ’s birth: reversed! Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The aging Yeats: The best lack all conviction, while the worst ’Sailing to Byzantium’, ’Byzantium’, ’Among Schoolchildren’ Are full of passionate intensity. (In The Tower, 1928)</p><p>Surely some revelation is at hand; How to escape from the body? How to overcome the confines of matter)? Surely the Second Coming is at hand. Growing preoccupation for the aging Yeats The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Two different solutions: Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert 8 1. Sailing to Byzantium: a complete rejection of nature, body and matter 1. Establish the dominant meter of the poem by indicating stressed and 2. Byzanthium and Among Schoolchildren: synthesis between the unstressed syllables (do this at least for the first stanza). spiritual and the physical/material 2. Contrasting stanzas 1-2 with 3-4. How would you describe the governing tension or contrast of this poem. Find references to the first part of the poem Sailing to Byzantium in the last two stanzas. I 3. What kind of quest does the poet undertake in this poem? What does the That is no country for old men. The young voyage symbolize? In one another's arms, birds in the trees 4. Contrast the last two lines of stanza 1 with the previous lines. What exactly --Those dying generations--at their song, is described in the first 6 lines? What are some of the poetic devices used? The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, 5. What is the dominant metaphor of stanza 2? Fish, flesh, or fowl commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. 6. What do you think fire can be a symbol for (stanza 3)? Caught in that sensual music all neglect 7. What kind of utterance is stanza 3? Monuments of unaging intellect. 8. What exactly does he want to become (in stanza 4) in ordet to defeat II mortality? An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing Byzantium: the glory of changeless metal (art, symbolized by the smithies) For every tatter in its mortal dress, opposed to „mire and the blood” Nor is there singing school but studying Monuments of its own magnificence; And therefore I have sailed the seas and come Byzantium and Among Schoolchildren: To the holy city of Byzantium. III O sages standing in God's holy fire great synthesis is achieved As in the gold mosaic of a wall, vision of unity: artist becomes one with the creative process, thus overcoming Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre, human limitations And be the singing-masters of my soul. Consume my heart away; sick with desire (last stanza of Among Schoolchildren) And fastened to a dying animal Labour is blossoming or dancing where It knows not what it is; and gather me The body is not bruised to pleasure soul. Into the artifice of eternity. Nor beauty born out of its own despair, IV Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil. Once out of nature I shall never take O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer, My bodily form from any natural thing, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, Of hammered gold and gold enamelling How can we know the dancer from the dance? To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come 4. Joseph Conrad and the beginnings of modernist prose Study Questions 9</p><p>Victorian age: epistemological optimism impressionistic style: recording impressions, not facts narrative method: typically intrusive omniscient godlike narrator: eminently reliable I want to make you hear, I want to make you feel, and impression of a reality fully understood and transparently presented above all I want to make you see (From the Preface to The Niger of the Narcissus) modernism: agnosticism and scepticism: no absolute certainty world as chaos: authority and tradition: increasingly undermined: no established truth, effects of first world war authority, no common ground between reader and modern artist departure from chronological story-telling: history of the world is not teleological (has no mind and world: purpose) stories and plots do not express heightened concern with individual, subjective consciousness anything essential about it attention is directed to processes in the mind narration in Lord Jim: ruled by memory and No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life- associations sensation of any given epoch of one's existence, --that fiction: often unresolved which makes its truth, its meaning--its subtle and (D. H. Lawrence: Women in penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we Love: dream--alone. . . ." Ursula isolated, broken)</p><p>The mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. but: need for transcendence: ecstatic vision and Joseph Conrad: Heart of order (or at least its memory) Darkness before modernism: the order (unity, cohesion, coherence based upon the order of nature/society) no privileged point of view: no divine perspective, no omniscient narrator for the Modernist: order is extrinsic, imposed by myth, time, psychological patterns) Conrad: Lord Jim escape from history through such mythic vision: the desertion of his ship, Patna sense of timeless and transcendental order (but imposed by myth, psychic patterns etc. the opacity of the main character various points of views are directed at Jim great literature freedom from Jim’s nature difficult to define, mysterious: space and time (see also the It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate motto of imagism!) need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of JOSEPH CONRAD (1857−1924) the stars and the warmth of the sun. (Lord Jim) 10 Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski „Kurtz’s savage career is every man’s wish-fulfillment” Frederick R. Carl Life of Conrad Marlow: a morally sensitive, decent, naive liberal Englishman with 19th born in Poland (now part of Ukraine) century certainties enters an avaricious, predatory, almost psychopatic father Apollo: a revolutionary and a man of letters world. involvement in political conspiracy resulted in an exile in Russia „He matures. The 19th century becomes the 20th century.” F. R. parents die, uncle his guardian Carl Marseilles: 20 years of sea career Narration: In 1878: service on English ships first person narration: otherwise story would appear too distant from the naturalized British subject in 1886 immediate experience also: a story within a story – there is a first narrator telling us how expedition into Africa Marlow narrated his story to a group of British listeners (drawn largely source for Heart of darkness from the business world, thus connected to empire and individualism) This turned him to writing although Marlow does not question imperialism first novel 1894 – altogether 31 novels yet: the story: acted out for a set of like-minded British hearers isolated from principal writers or movements and limited to that situation friends: old-fashioned writers a narrative bound to a particular time, a particular place, neither no contact with the modernists, unaware of Freud unconditional nor unqualifiedly certain (Edward Said) Heart of Darkness 1899! Postcolonial critique: Plot: The narrator Marlow (an Englishman) recounts his adventure into the Chinua Achebe: "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's 'Heart Congo to a group of men aboard a ship (Nellie) anchored in the Thames of Darkness'" Massachusetts Review. 18. estuary. (full text at Marlow takes a foreign assignment as a ferry-boat captain, employed by a http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/wyrick/debclass/achcon.htm) Belgian trading company, employed to transport ivory down the Congo river; and to return the mysterious Kurtz to civilization. what is displayed in Heart of Darkness: Kurtz: an ivory trader, initially high colonizing ideals but turning savage and amoral during his long stay in Africa the desire -- one might indeed say the need -- in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe, as a place of interest in inner, spiritual realities: negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison Conrad and Freud pioneers in stressing the irrational elements in human with which Europe's own state of spiritual grace will be manifest behaviour They howled and leaped and spun and made horrid faces, but Marlow’s journey is symbolical/spiritual: recognition of an obscure link what thrilled you, was just the thought of their humanity -- like between himself and the manifestation of evil yours -- the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough, but if you were darkness: personified by Kurtz, which every human being may be forced man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you to meet within himself just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which 11 you -- you so remote from the night of first ages -- could comprehend. Herein lies the meaning of Heart of Darkness and the fascination it holds over the Western mind: "What thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity -- like yours .... Ugly." when the dying black helmsman gives Marlow a disquieting look, „like a claim of kinship affirmed in a supreme moment”, Marlow is frightened and fascinated by this claim. Africa as „setting and backdrop” eliminates the African as a human factor</p><p>Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind? But that is not even the point. The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the world. And the question is whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art. 12 5. T. S. Eliot (1888--1965) a private paper written in his sixties: enormous influence in 20th century: a poet, a dramatist, a literary critic and a "I came to persuade myself that I was in love with Vivienne publisher simply because I wanted to burn my boats and commit myself to Let us go then, you and I, staying in England. And she persuaded herself (also under the When the evening is spread out against the sky influence of Pound) that she would save the poet by keeping him in Like a patient etherised upon a table England. To her, the marriage brought no happiness. To me, it (’The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’) brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land." ordinary language, conversational style wife committed to a private mental hospital in 1938 surprise, incongruance: a cold, medical image intruding Eliot legally separated from her in 1933. sarcastic, urban irony second marriage to Valerie Fletcher and spent the last years of his life happy juxtapose and fuse the opposite or the discordant Wasteland: 1922: recovering from a nervous breakdown precise image grasping a mood Ezra Pound’s editorial advice</p><p>And indeed there will be time in London: book reviews, schoolteacher, worked for a bank (for several years) For the yellow smoke that slides along the street Rubbing its back upon the window-panes; editor of a newly founded quarterly: There will be time, there will be time The Criterion (publishing Proust, Gide, Thomas Mann) To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; 1922-1939 There will be time to murder and create… (’Prufrock’) The Waste Land: in first issue of Criterion</p><p>[C. S. Lewis on T. S. E.] Faber and Faber: became its director The poetry of Milton is like the great wall of China. Inside is aiding many young poets, writers (Pound, Auden, Joyce) civilization. Outside are the barbarians or those like Mr. T. S. Eliot who have gone out into the wilderness to fast and pray. in 1927: joined the Church of England: conversion to Christianity, important outcome of a long spiritual quest disparate cultural and stylistic registers: prophetic and sarcastic [Craig Raine in The Guardian, January 6, 2007. reference to the Old Testament (http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1983084,00.html#article_continue)] conversational tone In June 1927 Eliot was received into the Church of England, and in November became a mixture of levity and seriousness (Dante and modern urban life) naturalised British citizen. Virginia Woolf writes of Eliot "in his four-piece suit" - plastic metaphor! repressed, reserved, buttoned-up. If we concentrate too much on the Lloyds banker in his urban irony: unromantic middle-aged alienated „hero” pin-striped trousers, the London publisher with his bowler hat and rolled umbrella, and Eliot's own ironic self-portrait as the circumspect pedant - "Restricted to What Life: Precisely / And If and Perhaps and But" - we are likely to overlook the man whose born in USA, St. Louis, Unitarian family religious conversion first announced itself in the Vatican when Eliot fell to his knees in graduated from Harvard front of Michelangelo's Pietà to the amazement of his brother Henry Ware Eliot. Eliot isn't the dry old stick of his self-caricature. This is Robert Lowell describing Eliot left the USA in 1914: settled in England dancing with Valerie, his new bride and second wife, 40 years younger than himself, and in London: Vivien Haywood, first wife – disastrous marriage 13 married in secret at the age of 69: "they danced so dashingly at the Charles River man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly boatclub brawl that he was called 'Elbows Eliot'. will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material. (’Tradition and Individual Talent’, 1919) declared himself “classical in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo- he poet has not a ’personality’ to express, but a particular medium, Catholic in religion.” which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and turn to theatre: rejects earlier elitism experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways (ibid.) (Murder in the Cathedral: written for Edinburgh church it is not the ’greatness’, the intensity of the emotions, the festival, 1935) components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts. (ibid.) reasons for his present unpopularity: * rejection of conservative commitments * evaporation of seriousness about literature and culture. „objective correlative” (in Eliot’s essay on Hamlet): * later poems: religious, regarded to be ideological by many to dramatize emotion in art (translate it into sg. objective) (Prufrock: dramatizes the emotional plight of a answer to the complaints: in a letter to Paul Elmer wasted life „when I am pinned and wriggling on More in 1929: “rather trying to be supposed to have the wall”) settled oneself in an easy chair, when one has just begun a long journey afoot.” b) The importance of the literary tradition * against the requirement of originality: poets are required to develop Nobel prize: 1948, died at the age of 77 a sense of tradition/history „the importance of the relation of the poem to other poems by other authors” Critical ideas: „the conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written” (ibid) a) the impersonality of poetry and the „objective correlative” * against the Romantic cult of personality and subjectivism: c) disassociation of sensibility: (Wordsworth: poetry = spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”) until 17th century: thought and feeling (emotion and wit) -- one later a split between the two „prosaic” quality of the 18th century, and the the mind of the mature poet differs from that of the immature one „too poetical” Romantic reaction not precisely in any valuation of "personality," not being necessarily more interesting, or having "more to say," but rather by being a more aim: find a way to reunite „disassociated aspect of processes” finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair liberty to enter into new combinations. The analogy was that of the Spread out in fiery points catalyst. When the two gases previously mentioned are mixed in the Glowed into words, then would be savagely still presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This from The Wasteland (II. combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the Game of Chess) newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected; has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the The Wasteland 1922 more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the 14 Five chapters: I. The Burial of the Dead, II. A Game of Chess, III. The Fire king chief – regarded as god Sermon, IV. Death by Water, V. The Thunder Said fertility of the land related to the health of the man-god (king) wasteland = modern world transfer the soul of king into a young and vigorous successor futility, barrenness-infertility (physical and spiritual), alienation dying god mythology (Greek, Phoenician, Egyptian etc.): Attis, Adonis, Osiris principally expressed through the alienation of the sexes: a three-day ritual: a god associated with vegetation put to death on the first day, is My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me 'Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak buried, disappears and his absence is mourned on the second, and risen on the 'What are you thinking of? What thinking? What, third 'I never know what you are thinking. Think.' from A Game of Chess 2. Jessie Weston: From Ritual to Romance (1920) structured by a spiritual quest for renewal or rebirth) the quest for the Holy Grail (cup with Christ’s blood) (Gawain, Perceval, resisted by indifferent, apathetic, alienated modern people Galahad) APRIL is the cruellest month, old and ailing king = Fisher king breeding aim of quest: to restore the king and the land! Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing (by finding the Grail, by asking the king questions concerning the Grail) Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain in earliest version: woes of the land directly connected with the sickness of king from The Burial of the Dead Life Cult, a nature ritual central figure: Fisher King: semi-divine, semi-human, Humankind cannot bear very much reality FISH = life symbol: all life comes from water from Murder in the Cathedral Christian version a descent to the zero point (the lowest point) old helpless king = Adam (fallen man) first to the earth (The Burial of the Dead) sea monster ravaging the land = monster is the sterility of the land descent under water = zero point hero arrives = Messiah; kills dragon (evil) reached in The Fire Sermon and Death by Water marries king’s daughter = church / soul beginning of an ascent: What the Thunder Said fertility comes from UNION with the divine life structure borrowed from ancient and Christian mythology: union by eating (sacramental food symbolism) unless one first spiritually dies one cannot experience spiritual rebirth and union by sex/love (sexual symbolism) fulfillment, ascent only after descent</p><p>Sources:</p><p>1.) Sir James Frazer: The Golden Bough (1890-1915)</p><p> antropologist studying ancient fertility rituals 15 (From the Fire Sermon) But when I look ahead up the white road At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives D A At the violet hour, when the eyes and back There is always another one walking beside you Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea, Datta: what have we given? Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine ….. The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, My friend, blood shaking my heart waits Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves lights The awful daring of a moment's surrender Like a taxi throbbing waiting, Waited for rain, while the black clouds Her stove, and lays out food in tins. Which an age of prudence can never retract I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two Gathered far distant, over Himavant. Out of the window perilously spread By this, and this only, we have existed lives, The jungle crouched, humped in silence. Her drying combinations touched by the sun's last Which is not to be found in our obituaries Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see Then spoke the thunder rays, Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives D A On the divan are piled (at night her bed) Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea, Datta: what have we given? Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays. In our empty rooms The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, My friend, blood shaking my heart I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs D A lights The awful daring of a moment's surrender Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest— Dayadhvam: I have heard the key Her stove, and lays out food in tins. Which an age of prudence can never retract I too awaited the expected guest. Turn in the door once and turn once only Out of the window perilously spread By this, and this only, we have existed He, the young man carbuncular, arrives, We think of the key, each in his prison Her drying combinations touched by the sun's last Which is not to be found in our obituaries A small house agent's clerk, with one bold stare, Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison rays, Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider One of the low on whom assurance sits Only at nightfall, aetherial rumours On the divan are piled (at night her bed) Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire. Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays. In our empty rooms The time is now propitious, as he guesses, D A I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs D A The meal is ended, she is bored and tired, Damyata: The boat responded Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest— Dayadhvam: I have heard the key Endeavours to engage her in caresses Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar I too awaited the expected guest. Turn in the door once and turn once only Which still are unreproved, if undesired. The sea was calm, your heart would have responded He, the young man carbuncular, arrives, We think of the key, each in his prison Flushed and decided, he assaults at once; Gaily, when invited, beating obedient A small house agent's clerk, with one bold stare, Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison Exploring hands encounter no defence; To controlling hands One of the low on whom assurance sits Only at nightfall, aetherial rumours His vanity requires no response, As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire. Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus And makes a welcome of indifference. I sat upon the shore The time is now propitious, as he guesses, D A (And I Tiresias have foresuffered all Fishing, with the arid plain behind me The meal is ended, she is bored and tired, Damyata: The boat responded Enacted on this same divan or bed; Shall I at least set my lands in order? Endeavours to engage her in caresses Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar I who have sat by Thebes below the wall Which still are unreproved, if undesired. The sea was calm, your heart would have responded And walked among the lowest of the dead.) London Bridge is falling down falling down falling Flushed and decided, he assaults at once; Gaily, when invited, beating obedient Bestows on final patronising kiss, down Exploring hands encounter no defence; To controlling hands And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit... His vanity requires no response, …...' Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina And makes a welcome of indifference. I sat upon the shore Quando fiam ceu chelidon—O swallow swallow (And I Tiresias have foresuffered all Fishing, with the arid plain behind me Le Prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie Enacted on this same divan or bed; Shall I at least set my lands in order? (From What the Thunder Said) These fragments I have shored against my ruins I who have sat by Thebes below the wall Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe. And walked among the lowest of the dead.) London Bridge is falling down falling down falling Here is no water but only rock Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Bestows on final patronising kiss, down Rock and no water and the sandy road And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit... The road winding above among the mountains Shantih shantih shantih …...' Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina Which are mountains of rock without water Quando fiam ceu chelidon—O swallow swallow If there were water we should stop and drink Le Prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think (From What the Thunder Said) These fragments I have shored against my ruins Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe. If there were only water amongst the rock… Here is no water but only rock Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Rock and no water and the sandy road Who is the third who walks always beside you? The road winding above among the mountains Shantih shantih shantih When I count, there are only you and I together Which are mountains of rock without water (From the Fire Sermon) But when I look ahead up the white road If there were water we should stop and drink At the violet hour, when the eyes and back There is always another one walking beside you Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine ….. Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand waits Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves If there were only water amongst the rock… Like a taxi throbbing waiting, Waited for rain, while the black clouds I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two Gathered far distant, over Himavant. Who is the third who walks always beside you? lives, The jungle crouched, humped in silence. When I count, there are only you and I together Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see Then spoke the thunder 16</p><p>Eliot’s late work 6. Introduction to 20th century British drama G. B. Shaw, J. M. Synge, W. B. Yeats explicitly Christian, religious poems and plays</p><p> poems: drama in the 19th century: Journey of the Magi two main trends: frivolous entertainment, Ash Wednesday book drama: not meant to be acted Four Quartets [Remember at least one of the three titles] revival of drama at the beginning of 20th century: two directions: Four Quartets: a quest for spiritual renewal 1. Irish revival (renaissance) high poetic quality mystical, meditative quest: how to find fulfillment by union 2. reappearance of the drama of ideas (G. B. Shaw) with the divine formulated in Christian theological terms, but other religious George Bernard Shaw (1856--1950) traditions also present Life: central theme: incarnation born in Ireland father: businessman, a drunkard mother: a professional singer, moved to London grasped only through paradoxes Shaw in Dublin with father incarnation = still point of the turning world joined his mother at the age of twenty where the divine and the human are joined dependant on his mum, bohemian, later interested in politics: socialist ideas At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Fabian Society: middle class organization Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, established in 1884 to promote the gradual spread But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor of socialism by peaceful means towards, Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, married a fellow-Fabian: Charlotte Payne- There would be no dance, and there is only the dance. Townshend from Four Quartets working: reviewer most famous theatrical play: Murder in the Cathedral drama criticism: literary realism! (inspired by the martyrdom of St. Thomas Beckett in the 12th century, written for main source: Ibsen Edinburgh church festival famous pamphlet: ’The Quintessence of Ibsenism’ the idealists: deceive themselves the majority who don’t care: the philistines the realists: who see through all this Shaw’s aim in theatre: destroy illusions, ideals, masks 17 plays exhibiting this philosophy: Man and Superman drama: a forum for considering moral, social, political issues (parody of parliamentary democracy, attack on Fabian socialism, (Widowers’ Houses: the abominable housing conditions in England; Mrs plot: flows Don Giovanni, but the woman takes the initiative) Warren’s Profession: prostitution) Back to Methuselah</p><p> heighten the awareness of the audience Saint Joan a writer of comedies! his humour unmatched by his long preface contemporaries 20th century recast of St. Joan unwomanly woman, masculinity overemphasized, modern Mrs Warren’s Profession dialectical view of history: Joan = an agent of history/life force (progressive and regressive forces) not performed for 8 years (1894--1902), bad reputation not a tragedy: in the long run Joan will be justified basic conflict between mother and daughter! questionable financial foundations of mother’s wealth the revival of Irish drama Mrs Warren: a prostitute (operated on the contintent, Vienna, Bp, English morality, more hypocritical) poetry brought back influenced by Irish nationalism tension: Mrs W: uses corruption and at the same time wants to rise above it? turns to Irish past for writing material Irish mythology, the legends of pre- and early Christian era later: returns to the Fabian position: you you stay within the system and one central hero: Cuchulain, defender of Ulster, known reform it gradually from within for his terrifying battle frenzy theme: rural life, peasantry serious moral concern language of the peasants art is justified by affecting the morals of society aim: shock the audience, make them uncomfortable, make them In writing ’The Playboy of the Western World’ as in think my other plays, I have used on or two words only that I have not heard among the country people of Ireland, or spoken in my own nursery …. Later phase: in countries where the imagination of the people, and the language no longer believes world can be changed socially they use, is rich and living, it is possible for a writer to be rich and salvation in the personal, biological sphere copious in his words, and at the same time to give the reality, which is the root of all poetry, in a comprehensive and natural form. influenced by Henri Bergson (Creative Evolution) Nietzsche, Hegel, In Ireland .. .we have a popular imagination that is fiery, and Schopenhauer magnificent, and tender; so that those of us who wish to write start with life itself is a mysterious, impersonal force = life force a chance that is not given to writers in places where the springtime of objective of this life force = greater and greater understanding of itself the local life has been forgotten, and the harvest is a memory only, and woman: special role – primary helper the straw has been turned into brick of the life force, bearing children from J. M. Synge’s Preface to The Playboy of the Western World 18 [National Literary Society (1892)] also several village women aim: to promote Irish literature, music, art Christy: Well, it’s a clean bed and soft with it, and it’s great luck lectures, concerts, lending libraries and company I’ve won me in the end of time – two fine women fighting Abbey Theatre: 1904 for the like of me – till I’m thinking this night wasn’t I a foolish fellow W. B. Yeats: his manager not to kill my father in the years gone by. dramatists of the revival: Yeats, Sean O’Casey, J. M. Synge, Lady Gregory In act 2 father turns up and destroys the illusion Christy created Old Mahon: Running wild, is it? If he seen a red petticoat coming W. B. Yeats’ dramas swinging over the hill, he’d be off to hide in the sticks, and you’d see all of them in verse, short one-act plays him shouting out his sheep’s eyes between the little twigs and the leaves, and his two ears rising like a hare looking out through a gap. early phase: longing desire, search for ideal beauty Girls, indeed! first play: Countess Cathleen Countess offers her soul to save the poor villagers turn against him sacriligious act: but she will be admitted to he attempts to kill his father a second time to regain his popularity heaven = embodiment of self-sacrifice and beauty reception: nationalistic riots in Dublin poet in the drama: Aleel = biographical depiction of Irish peasants Cathleen Ní Houlihan unsettling: subversion of accepted sexual roles spirit of Ireland personified by an old woman who antithetical to the Abey Theatre’s mission ??? rouses her people to the national struggle ambivalent reference to the poet-figure: Christy presented as a poet: second phase: international, interest in Japanese drama (Noh drama) Pegeen: it’s the poets are your like – fine, fiery fellows with great rages no setting, no expensive props, dependant on actor and words when their temper’s roused</p><p> also: truly ambiguous and ironic idea of heros and heroism John Millington Synge great talkers are synonymous with bravery and heroism </p><p>The Playboy of the Western World: performed at the Abbey Theatre in 1907 fantasy and reality: What matters? Words or deeds? tragicomedy (3 acts) set in Michael James Flaherty’s public house on the west use of imagination to escape from reality coast of Ireland villagers: unable to accept the fact that they have created the Language a dynamic force to transform life fantasy and now it has become reality.</p><p> insignificant Christy Mahon appears in the village, claiming he killed his own father by driving a spade (’loy’) into his head celebration of the villagers Bravery is a treasure in a lonesome place and a lad would kill his father, I ’m thinking, would face a foxy divil with a pitchpike on the flags of hell. the pubkeeper’s daughter Pegeen falls in love with him 19 6. Virginia Woolf: modernism, feminism, impressionism (1882— 1941) imaginary life of Shakespeare’s sister: emphasis on financial independence and autonomous space</p><p>Life: 2. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can father: editor and critic Leslie Stephen, London we generate this imponderable quality which is yet so invaluable, educated at home in a highly intellectual environment most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. traumatic adolescence: death of mother when she was 13 ….. Hence the enormous importance to a patriarch who has to half sister Stella two years later: breakdowns for the rest of her life conquer, who has to rule, of feeling that great numbers of people, half Father died 1904, favourite brother: two years later provoked an the human race indeed, are by nature inferior to himself. … Women alarming collapse have served all these centuries as looking-glassess possessing the also possible sexual abuse by half brothers George and Gerald magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its Cornvall: memories of a lighthouse natural size. …. mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action. … if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he going to go on part of Bloomsbury Group with sister, painter Vanessa Bell (E. M. giving judgement, civilizing natives, making laws, writing books, Forster, biographer and essayist Lytton Stratchey, famous dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at economist John Maynard Keynes) breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is? Here met Leonard Woolf, married: 1912 Hogarth Press: 1917 women as mirrors reflecting the figure of man at twice his natural size (hindering Lesbian relationship with Vita-Sackville West the improvement of the situation of women) 1941: drowned herself 3. Her last letter to her husband: But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally, this is so. I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible Yet it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing and sport are ’important’; the worship of fashion, the buying of what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been clothes ’trivial’. … This is an insignificant book because it deals with in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier 'til this the feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene in a battlefield is terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me more important than a scene in a shop … you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and assumption of women’s „difference” incredibly good. I want to say that — everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would concept of a female literary tradition have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. The weight, the pace, the stride of a man’s mind are too unlike her own for her to lift anything substantial from him successfully.</p><p>Theories of maleness and femaleness (feminism) difference. cultural rather than biological two books of feminist polemic: Room of One’s Own, Three Guineas need for „the study of the psychology of women by a woman”</p><p>Room of One’s Own 1. 4. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well if one has not dined well. And there is the girl behind the counter too – I would as soon have A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write her true history as the hundred and fiftieth life of Napoleon or fiction 20 seventieth study of Keats … All these infinitely obscure lives remain accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance to be recorded came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could exploration of the private sphere: „women have sat indoors all these millions of base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there years, the very walls are permeated by their creative force” would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or Mrs Dalloway (1925) one day of an average society lady: „Mrs catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi- anticipating postmodern views transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. 5. in each of us two powers reside, one male, one female; and in the Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in man’s brain the man predominates over the woman, and in the which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and woman’s brain the woman predominates over the man. The normal incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon and comfortable state of being is when the two live in harmony the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more together, spiritually cooperating. Coleridge perhaps meant this when fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly he said that the great mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion thought small. takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties. from the essay ’Modern Fiction’</p><p> androgynous mind: modernist desire for totality, unity: attention to details, nuances, processes rather than hard facts, descriptions Tiresias in Eliot’s The Waste Land Orlando (1928): fantastical biography „materialist” opposed to the „spiritual writer”: „the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain”, in her age men are now writing only with the male side of their brains disregard of standard narrative conventions such as coherence, probability also political implications: connection between „pure, self-assertive virility” and fascism in her novels:  narratives are uneventful, common place, hardly any plot (Mrs Dalloway: how a reflection in Mrs Dalloway (1925): middle-aged housewife prepares for her evening party) the typical male associated with the aggressive aspects of  narrative filtered through, even dissolved in the characters’ consciousness Western civilisation: power, dominance, colonisation (first  intensely lyrical prose: abundant with auditive and visual impressions world war: To the Lighthouse, 1928) also: with language, words and reason but lacking intuition and sensitivity Mrs Dalloway 1925 questions for study: Identify some such male characters. How do they exhibit these characteristics? Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Can you identify symbolical objects associated with For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken male self-assertion? What kind of human qualities are off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought contrasted with male aggression and who exhibit Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a them? beach. What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, Literary impressionism, poetic style (the essay: ’Modern fiction’) with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the 21 looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the questions: Which objects might symbolize rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing efficiency, civilization? Which character admires among the vegetables?”—was that it?—“I prefer men to cauliflowers”— civilization the most? How does Septimus react to was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had these aspects of the world? How does he ultimately gone out on to the terrace—Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully help Clarissa experience life on a deeper level? dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished— how strange it was!—a few sayings like this about cabbages.</p><p>(at the party towards the end) narrative technique: free indirect discourse Then (she had felt it only this morning) there was the terror; the overwhelming incapacity, one’s  narrated in the third person singular, but author and parents giving it into one’s hands, this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there character discourse merges (stream-of-consciousness was in the depths of her heart an awful fear. Even now, quite often if Richard had not been there technique) reading the Times, so that she could crouch like a bird and gradually revive, send roaring up that  dominated by the workings of the mind: memories immeasurable delight, rubbing stick to stick, one thing with another, she must have perished. But  time-span: one day, but memories embrace a whole that young man had killed himself. life: especially one summer at Bourton Somehow it was her disaster—her disgrace. It was her punishment to see sink and disappear here a  literary cubism: several perspectives in play man, there a woman, in this profound darkness, and she forced to stand here in her evening dress. no „reliable knowledge”: only impressions of the She had schemed; she had pilfered. She was never wholly admirable. She had wanted success. different characters about each other Lady Bexborough and the rest of it. And once she had walked on the terrace at Bourton.</p><p>She would not say of any one in the world now that they ….. were this or were that.... she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that The clock began striking. The young man had killed himself; but she did not pity him; with the clock striking the hour, one, two, three, she did not pity him, with all this going on. There! the old important themes: lady had put out her light! the whole house was dark now with this going on, she repeated, and the  aging and death words came to her, Fear no more the heat of the sun. She must go back to them. But what an lives of men and women: different possibilities and perspectives extraordinary night! She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself. She  alienation: especially male-female felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in contrasted with an idealized female-female relationship which the air. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun. But she must go back. She must assemble. She must find Sally and Peter. And she came in from the little room. psychologically corresponds to pre-Odipal mother-daughter relationship, and is looked for in the past Mrs Dalloway: Clarissa and Sally Seton in To the Lighthouse: Mrs Ramsay and Lily Briscoe (males: always an intrusion)  sensitivity: to experience life to the full, the role of the artist Septimus Warren Smith: a war veteran, shell shock, psychologically unstable, commits suicide parallels between Clarissa and Septimus! question: Find parallels as you are reading the novel! contrast: Clarissa is in love with civilization, refusing to acknowledge the aggressive, masculine aspect of the world 22 7. THEATRE OF THE ABSURD about the time, how many days have passed etc.) * even basic causality frequently breaks down. (Birthday P: "Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose.... Cut off We don’t know what Goldberg and McCann want from from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, Stanley) man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, * Meaningless plots, repetitive or nonsensical dialogue useless" (Martin Esslin). * dream-like, or even nightmare-like moods. (Estragon: “Absurd Theatre can be seen as an attempt to restore several dreams; Birthday Party = a nightmare) the importance of myth and ritual to our age, by making man aware of the ultimate realities of his condition, by Samuel Beckett: 1906-1989 (Nobel prize: 1969) instilling in him again the lost sense of cosmic wonder and primeval anguish. The Absurd Theatre hopes to achieve this by shocking man out of an existence that has become trite, Life: Irish Protestant well-to-do family (born on a Good Friday, 13, Friday) mechanical and complacent. It is felt that there is mystical Relations with women: complex, often abortive experience in confronting the limits of human condition.” Postgraduate studies: in Paris (dissertation on Proust) (Jan Kulik) influenced by Joyce After death of father: settled in Paris, active in French resistance philosophical roots: existentialism Earlier work: fiercely difficult emphasises action, freedom and decision as fundamental to human 1930: Whoroscope, a verse monologue in the voice of René Descartes existence 1938: first novel: Murphy opposed to the rationalist tradition and to positivism. indifferent, objective, "absurd" universe without a given meaning After 1940: write about impotence and ignorance, essential experience of human life "The Theatre of the Absurd”: European plays in the late 1940s, 1950s, and abandon rhetoric and virtuosity 1960s, also: a particular style of theatre clean and analytical French, three novels: Molly, Malone Dies and The Unnameable (1946-50) term coined by critic Martin Esslin,. Waiting for Godot: Departure from traditional theatrical conventions: French premier: 1953, English: 1955 growing artistic „asceticism”  realistic characters: antecedents. * characters appear as automatons speaking in clichés Extension of the symbolist line in British poetic drama (from Yeats to E) * failing memories fail (in Godot they are not sure who Minimalism of his work: derive from Yeats Noh plays Pozzo is when he turns up the second time) French existentialism (Sartre and Camus) and surrealism (André Breton) * they hardly remember their past (in Godot: fragments about a warm summer day; Birthday P: Stanley has illogical, "You ask me for my ideas on Waiting for Godot and my ideas on the incoherent memories) theatre," he wrote to Michel Polac on Godot's publication a year before it was * recognition scenes, discursive thought ruled out produced. "I have no ideas on the theatre. I know nothing about it. I never go.  realistic situations: That's reasonable. What is rather less so," he added, "is . . . to write a play, and * Time, place and identity: ambiguous and fluid (we don’t then to have no ideas on that either." know where Godot takes place; the characters are not sure 23 "I know no more about this play than anyone who just reads it attentively," everyday conversation, BUT a darker sense of a Beckett wrote. "I don't know what spirit I wrote it in. I know no more about the man’s insecurity, aggressiveness characters than what they say, what they do and what happens to them . . . everything I have been able to learn, I have shown. It's not a great deal. But it's enough for me, quite enough. I'd go so far as to say that I would have been Birthday Party 1957 content with less . . . Estragon, Vladimir, Pozzo, Lucky, I have only been able to know them a little, from far off, out of a need to understand them. They owe genre: tragicomedy? „comedy of menace” you some explanations, perhaps. Let them unravel. Without me. Them and Me, conventional structure of Greek tragedy we're quits." but: comic stock characters "If by Godot I had meant God I would have said God, and not Godot." [godillot = boot] theme: how a helpless individual, a one time artist is depressed, brainwashed and subdued: by what / whom? (Question: What may the two intruders theme: meaninglessness of human existence symbolize?) What is the purpose of life: To grow old!!!! To pass the time experience of time: circular, repetitive plot: unsociable boarding-house resident (Stanley) is terrorized by two sinister men (Goldberg and McCann) who have come in search of him, represented by the structure: symmetrical reduced to blind violence at a birthday party thrown for him by his landlady Christian hope is parodied by the waiting in the play and taken away by them the next morning, incapable of speech or resistance Was I sleeping while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow when I wake, or think but ’reorientated’ and ’integrated’ in a respectable suit and white collar I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon, my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably. But in fear hugely pervasive in Western culture: all that what truth will there be? (ESTRAGON, having struggled with his boots in vain, is dozing „somebody will come at get you”: the bogeyman story off again. VLADIMIR looks at him.) He’ll know nothing. He’ll tell me about the blows he received a crime or misdeed in the past comes to haunt the present and I’ll give him a carrot. (Pause.) Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave-digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. (He listens.) But habit is a great deadener. (He looks again at Estragon.) At me too someone figure of Stanley: ambivalent, multpile layers of interpretation are possible: is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on. (Pause.) I can’t go on! (Pause.) What have I said? the persecuted victim of modern literature (Kafka: The Trial) HAROLD PINTER (1930) the individual (typical of the 20th century) alienated from the centres born in a lower middle class Jewish family in London of power, authority he offended against „Holy Authority”: individual is crushed below the compared to Beckett his dramatic world is firmly grounded in contemporary weight of social expectations society or simply: his crime is his being born at all Pinter’s plays: interested in the nature of power, of power structures or: ust an undefined, existential angst (feeling of terror) * dominance, control, exploitation, victimization * number of his figures: related to the arts (Stanley: a the underlying fear a sensitive individual has of the outside world concert pianist, victimized by society) * the psychology of power </p><p> expressed by means of pinteresque dialogue: 24 8. James Joyce (1882-1941) (letter to Grant Richards, 23 June 1906, SL 89-90)</p><p>Irish novelist, short story writer and poet attention on lower middle class undisputed influence the ruling elite: the Protestant minority, Catholics – low-paid jobs especially women (Ireland = image as wronged woman) Life: the source of most misery: English domination, the Protestants and mostly outside Ireland: still Dublin provides the setting for all his works the Holy Roman, Catholic and Apostolic Church: born in middle class family in Dublin, exercising an even more disabling, because first comfortable, well to do, but father squandered their money unopposed authority Catholic family of strong nationalist outlook Jesuit boarding school, but had to leave it fairly conventional in technique Jesuit Belvedere College, Dublin (join the order) but also: uncertainties of human consciousness University of Dublin, studying modern languages. free indirect discourse When mother was dying of cancer, he refused to kneel and pray to individualize a fictional portrait (Maria and the use of the word ’nice’) fragments of human experience: ambiguities, uncertainties In 1904 he met Nora Barnacle and on June the 16th (!): first date From 1904-1920 he and Nora lived in Trieste Zürich a synthesis of irony and compassion from 1920-1941: in Paris and Zürich two children: Giorgio and Lucia The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) difficulties with making money; Joyce teaching English in schools and also a biographical novel: the story of the personal development of the artist privately interior monologue, interest in psychic reality financial difficulties ceased by the last 25 years of his life: Harriet Shaw focus on a single mind: Stephen Dedalus (English feminist and publisher) his patron elevation of art as the supreme value: prototypical tale of the modernist artist after undergoing surgery for a perforated ulcer, he died relying on the supreme principle of individualism: the Irish government denied Nora permission to repatriate his remains aim: to find his private vision never before known or imagined Dubliners (1914) absolute, total honesty short stories: about Dublin with clinical dispassion and realism And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a influenced by Ibsen lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too (Stephen in My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the Portrait) scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis. I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. ... I I fear more than that the chemical action which would be set up in my have written it for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness and with the conviction that he is soul by a false homage to a symbol behind which are massed twenty a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen centuries of authority and veneration and heard.’ (letter to Grant Richards, 5 May 1906, Selected Letters 83) ultimate value: freedom, liberation; isolated, lonely individual It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories. I „the enemy of Bright Young Rebels for more than a century had been seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish other people” (Wayne Booth) people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass.” 25 representative modern moment: Stephen seeks to „learn in my own life and each event is related to typical events in human history, literature away from home and friends what the heart is and how it feels” and myth: orchestration!</p><p>Theory of art: epiphany * Two myths of Western culture (symbolic, esoteric level and realistic level): Odyssey to seek the spiritual in the invisible world but in the ordinary world The Father and the Son (Christian) analogue with the Eucharist: archetypal story of wondering and homecoming the artist: „a priest of the eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread In the climactic Circe chapter Bloom meets the drunken Stephen in a brothel, of experience into the radiant body of everliving life” (Portrait) they leave together, but Stephen finds himself in a street fight from which Bloom saves him and takes him home. As Bloom gazes on the unconscious Stephen, he epiphany: a sudden spiritual transformation in the course of which everyday experiences a vision about his dead son, Rudy. realities become radiant and signficiant My head is full of pebbles and rubbish and broken matches and bits of glass picked up 'most everywhere. The task I set myself technically in writing a book from eighteen different points of view and in as many styles, all apparently unknown or undiscovered by Ulysses 1922 my fellow tradesmen, that and the nature of the legend chosen would be enough to upset I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it anyone's mental balance. will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing (Letters, 24 June 1921) over what I meant, and that's the only way of * Literary „cubism” insuring one's immortality. (Joyce cited in Richard Ellmann's James Joyce) Eighteen different perspectives: there are different ways of seeing chapter 17 (Ithaca): Bloom and Stephens heading for * Set in Dublin, events unfold over 24 hours, beginning on the morning of home: apparently a narrative of severe objectivity Thursday 16th June 1904. The work has 18 chapters which „correspond” to in reality a parody of scientific objectivity episodes in The Odyssey of Homer. What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning? It is the epic of two races (Israel-Ireland) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day (life)... It is also a kind of encyclopaedia. My intention is not only to Starting united both at normal walking pace from Beresford place they render the myth sub specie temporis nostri but also to allow each adventure (that is, every hour, followed in the order named Lower and Middle Gardiner streets and every organ, every art being interconnected and interrelated in the somatic scheme of the whole) to Mountjoy square, west: then, at reduced pace, each bearing left, condition and even to create its own technique. (James Joyce, Letters, 21st September 1920) Gardiner's place by an inadvertence as far as the farther corner of Temple street: then, at reduced pace with interruptions of halt, bearing * greatest totalizing effort of modernist literature: right, Temple street, north, as far as Hardwicke place. Approaching, the individual = microcosm disparate, at relaxed walking pace they crossed both the circus before Three protagonists = story of the complete „man” George's church diametrically, the chord in any circle being less than the arc which it subtends. Stephen Dedalus: „the artist” = Ireland Leopold Bloom: „everyman” = Israel (also outsider, alien) Of what did the duumvirate deliberate during their itinerary? Molly Bloom: the woman and wife and whore Music, literature, Ireland, Dublin, Paris, friendship, woman, prostitution, diet, the influence of gaslight or the light of arc and one day = a whole lifetime glowlamps on the growth of adjoining paraheliotropic trees, exposed different organs = total man corporation emergency dustbuckets, the Roman catholic church, different arts = sum total of human activity ecclesiastical celibacy, the Irish nation, jesuit education, careers, the 26 study of medicine, the past day, the maleficent influence of the chapter 7 (Aeolus): newspaper-office scene: we someting presabbath, Stephen's collapse. of both Did Bloom discover common factors of similarity between their respective in following episodes: unconsciously chase each other; like and unlike reactions to experience? sometimes appearing together for a moment Both were sensitive to artistic impressions, musical in preference to chapter 14 (Oxen of the Sun) (the parody of 9 different prose plastic or pictorial. Both preferred a continental to an insular manner styles): takes place in a hospital where both Bloom and Stephens of life, a cisatlantic to a transatlantic place of residence. Both indurated by early domestic training and an inherited tenacity of et al. go visiting: Bloom is invited to their party heterodox resistance professed their disbelief in many orthodox chapter 15: (Circe), night town scene: their association religious, national, social and ethical doctrines. Both admitted the alternately stimulating and obtunding influence of heterosexual reaches a climax (see above) magnetism. (beginning of chapter 17, Ithaca) 16—17: joint journey home</p><p>* language draws attention to itself: not a transparent medium style is all: style takes the place of moral attitude, of any normative view CYCLOPS and its antecedents Bloom is going to a pub named Barney Kiernan's to meet a lawyer, Martin Cunningham and to discuss the affairs of the Dignam family. There was a funeral Structure: earlier in the day, and Bloom wants to help the widow arrange affairs of inheritance. Section I: Telemachiad (focusing on Stephen Dedalus: story of „Telemachus” longing for his father) It is helpful to know that in the previous Bloom-episodes we have spent the 1 Telemachus day within the mind of Bloom, which means we have been admitted into the 2 Nestor closest intimacy not only with his private thoughts but with his bodily life and 3 Proteus physiological processes. As in the present chapter Bloom’s discrimination as a Jew will be in focus, it is helpful to be aware that the reader has already become Section II (focusing on Leopold Bloom: his wonderings in Dublin; sympathetic with him not only in his failures and frustrations, but also in his the story of Odysseus” deprived of his wife and experiences of exclusion. An important antecedent in this respect is the ’Aeolus’ son, longing for home) episode. The reader has already been acquainted with Bloom’s chief domestic 4--15 frustration (Molly’s infidelity), but it is Aeolus that the painful experience of his being also a social outsider is driven home. Section III Nostos or return: they go home together to wife, Molly 16 Eumaeus Aeolus takes place at the newspaper office of the Freeman’s journal which 17 Ithaca Bloom visits and attempts, unsuccessfully, to complete an advertising contract. Chapter 18 Penelope: focusing on Molly Bloom: stream of Here he finds himself excluded and treated as an outsider by a group of Irish consciousness intellectuals (including Stephen). In this episode contempt hovers in the air: from otherwise insignificant comments or incidents, but most of all, from Bloom’s relationship of Stephen and Bloom insecurity, the reader is made increasingly aware that Bloom, the Jew is but first 3 chapters: Stephen and his companions tolerable. Being acquainted with Bloom’s stream of consciousness, the reader is prepared to identify him in situations in which he is made to feel out of place. second 3 chapters: Bloom 27 Homeric parallel: Odysseus’s adventures with the one-eyed giant question: What effect does such a narrative viewpoint possibly have on readers? Story: At the pub Bloom is provoked, insulted and chased out by an obnoxious Irish nationalist, the Citizen (presented in a farcical, 2) other „voice”: the first narration is interrupted by passages sarcastic manner as the passion of Jesus Christ) in vastly different styles („interpolations”, „asides”) caricatures of vastly different styles: the legal, the journalistic, study of the development of racial (anti-semitic) prejudice the scientific, the biblical etc. question: Why do you think the title is Cyclops? Who do you Question: if the first narrator criticises the vices of think is associated with the Cyclops and what does that tell us individuals, what is/are the target/s of these parodistic about the person’s way of seeing the world? interpolations?</p><p>Narrative techniqe: two thoroughly unharmonious voices Chapter 18 (Penelope) 1) a debt-collector, socially low: malevolent, satirical: keeping equal distance authorial presence apparently disappears: we enter into Molly’s mind which is [366] So we turned into Barney Kiernan's and there sure enough was the citizen up in like a flowing river (no punctuation marks, no selection, no comment) the corner having a great confab with himself and that bloody mangy mongrel, Garryowen, and he waiting for what the sky would drop in the way of drink. There he is, says I, in his gloryhole, with his cruiskeen lawn and his load of papers, Molly is lying in bed thinking about her past and present, Bloom and her other working for the cause. lovers The bloody mongrel let a grouse out of him would give you the creeps. Be a corporal work of mercy if someone would take the life of that bloody dog. I'm told for a fact he 8 gigantic, incomplete sentences (lurid pornographic details as well) ate a good part of the breeches off a constabulary man in Santry that came round one time with a blue paper about a licence. flow = flow of nature flow of urine (water and blood) [402] Those are nice things, says the citizen, coming over here to Ireland filling the country with bugs. Joyce’s presentation of „the eternal feminine” (8: laid on its side, the sign of So Bloom lets on he heard nothing and he starts talking with Joe telling him he needn't infinity), trouble about that little matter till the first but if he would just say a word to Mr Crawford. And so Joe swore high and holy by this and by that he'd do the devil and all. Woman = great cycle of nature, a home to return to -- Because you see, says Bloom, for an advertisement you must have repetition. That's the whole secret. last sentence: she is planning to give Bloom one more chance to reestablish -- Rely on me, says Joe. full sexual relations with her -- Swindling the peasants, says the citizen, and the poor of Ireland. We want no more strangers in our house. -- O I'm sure that will be all right, Hynes, says Bloom. It's just that Keyes you see. chapter begins and ends with YES (a female word according to Joyce) -- Consider that done, says Joe. -- Very kind of you, says Bloom. I love flowers Id love to have the whole place swimming in -- The strangers, says the citizen. Our own fault. We let them come in. We brought roses God of heaven theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then them. The adulteress and her paramour brought the Saxon robbers here. the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with the fields -- Decree nisi, says J. J. of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going And Bloom letting on to be awfully deeply interested in nothing, a spider's web in the corner behind the barrel, and the citizen scowling after him and the old dog at his feet about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers looking up to know who to bite and when. all sorts of shapes and smells and colours springing up even out of the ditches primroses and violets nature it is as for them saying theres no God I wouldnt give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning why 28 dont they go and create something I often asked him atheists or whatever and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and they call themselves go and wash the cobbles off themselves first then his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. they go howling for the priest and they dying and why why because theyre afraid of hell on account of their bad conscience ah yes I know them well who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made it all who ah that they dont know neither do I so there you are they might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas 2 glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes 29 9. British fiction after the War; postmodernism  James/Jim Dixon, a young lecturer at the history department under Professor Welch  British fiction in the 50s: return to realism and Englishness  exposure of the hypocrisy of academic life, seen through the eyes of  traditional 19th themes: interest in social relations Dixon  violent reaction against modernist technical innovations:  Dixon: a double life, a double perspective symbolized by his „public” . „Writing is not a private game to be played at a private face and his „private” faces party.” „Chinese mandarin face”  fiction becomes parochial: no traumatic experiences of totalitarianism or „Martian invader face” defeat in war, continuities undisturbed  conscious derivation from major novelist of the past borrowings and huge gap between private and public faces: allusions in public hypocritical, also insincere in his love life,  rebellion against the establishment and the traditional class system: Whatever passably decent treatment Margaret had had from „anger” him was the result of a temporary victory of fear over examples: irritation, and pity over boredom.” Osborne: Look back in anger: class antagonism as major conflict (a play) one possible interpretation: Kingsley Amis: Lucky Jim: anger manifest in the relentless Dixon’s advance to his own true self and his true feelings exposure of hypocrisy, comic climax: his working-class novel: more committed and value-centred: but paradoxically: his boldness is rewarded by winning Christine and Allan Sillitoe The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner: a a better job sense of „them” and „us”: „have”s and „have-nots”, the powerful and the powerless Philosophy of the novel? you simply need luck in life?  interest in moral issues „Nice things are nicer than nasty things.” Christian doctrine of human depravity : William Golding: Lord of the Flies (1954): the fragility comic effects: of human civilization mostly linguistic: Anthony Burgess: Clockwork Orange (1962): men do heroes: imitating various styles evil because the choose to, and enjoy doing it Kingsley Amis moral issues: a matter for debate and POSTMODERN FICTION speculation 1. „postmodernism” in general: the ’structure of feeling’ has changed (the Kingsley Amis: Lucky Jim 80s)</p><p>Amis: admittedly anti-modern, anti-experimental, anti-cosmopolitan (The rise of postmodern architecture in the seventies VERSUS high modernist Movement) buildings instead of the inhuman, mathematically precise „high modernist” buildings  traditionally English social comedy, 18th c. tradition, Fielding ornamented tower blocks  university in a country town imitation medieval squares and fishing villages, 30 renovated factories and warehouses and rehabilitated landscapes „pluralistic” and „organic” strategies modernism postmodernism urban development as a ’collage’ of highly differentiated spaces: „collage city, urban revitalization” metaphysics, transcendence irony, immanence widespread doubt in and questioning of the Enlightenment legacy: creation/totalization/synthesis creation/deconstruction/antithesis</p><p> end of modernity = end of scientific positivism (end of Enlightenment centring dispersal certitudes) „pure reason”, „objectivity” is impossible, knowledge is human and genre/boundary text/intertext mediated (see Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1964) interpretation/reading against interpretation/misreading  reason (intellectual know-how and its resultant technology) has failed to deliver the good life art object/finished work process/performance/happening the belief in progress shattered (Western culture no longer privileged)  questioning of metanarratives: deep aversion to universal emancipation (metanarratives: broad interpretative schemas) the political promise of the Enlightenment has failed instead: there has to be a plurality of language games  link between power and truth/knowledge (Michel Foucault): there is no objectivity: no neutral reason: reason often becomes the instrument for power, institutions, organisations exercies control over language games, closed systems of knowledge = „fascism in the head”  concern with „otherness” (based on pluralism): all groups have a right to speak for themselves (colonized people, blacks and gays, women, religious groups etc.)  the collapse of time horizons, of historical continuity: no „centred self” but fragmented self (modernism: alienation) experience = a series of pure and unrelated presents, preoccupation with instantaneity history plundered  superficiality, loss of depth (no continuity of values and beliefs), images, appearance, attachment to surfaces</p><p>2. Postmodern literary theory, postmodern literature and fiction</p><p>(Ihab Hassan’s table, 1985) 31 10. Poetry before and after the II. World War; Philip Larkin the 1950s: and Seamus Heaney Ted Hughes (1930—1998) and Philip Larkin (1928—1985) Ted Hughes: neo-Romantic (poet = shaman) Introduction to mid 20th century literature and art friend and translator of János Pilinszky. See his article on Pilinszky: central event: second world war http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=6300 fascism and communism husband of Sylvia Plath social, economic and political turmoil problem/plight of modern man is that his rational and cognitive powers are reaction against high modernism cultivated too exclusively; How to turn instinctive, natural energies creative? the 1930s and 40s: artists sensitive to the problems of the time: ANIMALS: manifestation of a life force, non-human, non-rational Great Depression (1929) the rise of Fascism PHILIP LARKIN (1928—1985) the Spanish Civil War They fuck you up, your mum and dad. But they were fucked up in their turn necessity of commitment: They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had Virginia Woolf The Leaning Tower And add some extra, just for you By fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another's throats.</p><p>EITHER left wing sympathies (V. Woolf, W. H. Auden, C. D. Lewis) Man hands on misery to man. OR: authoritarianism, conservativism (Roman Catholicism) It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don't have any kids yourself. Wystan Hugh Auden [with Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis and Louis MacNeice] New Country Poets) Life: graduated at Oxford (English literature) interested in history, politics a librarian, writer of novels, reviewer of poetry „I am your choice, your decision” (Spain, 1937): third volume of poetry (The Less Deceived, 1955): the preeminent poet of his says „history” to people generation belief in the ethical nature of poetry: to hold up human values in the midst of inhumanity (paradox: „poetry The Movement: a loose grouping of the 50s, based on key friendships (Larkin and Amis) makes nothing happens” YET: the poet should „persuade * concerned with the Englishness of their work us to rejoice” and „In the desert of the heart / let the * respect for clarity, intelligibility: hostile to modernist literature, doubt about Eliot * bored by the political preoccupations of the forties, even more by the dispair of the healing fountains start” (’In Memory of W. B. Yeats’) forties, not interested in suffering * nine writers: Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, Donald Davie, John Holloway, after the war in the 40s: a movement of new romantic poetry Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin, John Wain, Thom Gunn, Iris Murdoch main representative: Dylan Thomas (of Welsh origin) interested in spirituality, religion, nature (not in politics and society) Church Going (in the volume: The Less Deceived 1955) 32 * Movement identity characterized by an oscillation between agnosticism and a When I see a couple of kids sensitivity to the Christian tradition: And guess he's fucking her and she's * CG: articulates this tension in three steps! Composite tension made up of layers of Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, contrast (modern sporty cyclist VERSUS tradition; past and present, secularism and I know this is paradise religious belief, nature and culture Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives-- Once I am sure there's nothing going on Bonds and gestures pushed to one side I step inside, letting the door thud shut. Like an outdated combine harvester, Another church: matting, seats, and stone, And everyone young going down the long slide And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if Up at the holy end; the small neat organ; Anyone looked at me, forty years back, And a tense, musty, unignorable silence, And thought, That'll be the life; Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off No God any more, or sweating in the dark My cycle-clips in awkward reverence, (first stanza) About hell and that, or having to hide What you think of the priest. He * initial personal experience broadened into sg. universal: the need for transcendence and And his lot will all go down the long slide the loss of an organized framework of connection with it Like free bloody birds. And immediately A serious house on serious earth it is, In whose blent air all our compulsions meet, Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: Are recognised, and robed as destinies. The sun-comprehending glass, And that much never can be obsolete And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows (last stanza) Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.</p><p>* irony: each move towards a positive statement is cancelled Study Questions 1. How old is the speaker? * Movement: not antiChristian: still a sense of their parents’ tradition 2. The basis of the poem is a comparison: a very common contrast or tension in human * „all negatives in poetry, once stated, become a special kind of poetic positive” life (society). What is it? (Barbara Everett) 3. The poem is structured by two movements. Can you identify them? How does this affect the meaning of the poem? Study Questions 4. How is the speaker’s ambivalent attitude to modern emancipation expressed? 1. Who is the speaker? What do we learn about him from the first stanza? 5. What can the windows symbolize? 2. Characterize his attitude towards the church and what it represents as it is expressed in the first two stanzas. How does the style express the attitude (note the syntax of the * young lovers and older speaker: modernity, the break with religion and with sentences in stanza 1) tradition described ambivalently (symbolic directions, down and up, indicate this) 3. How many structural units can we divide this poem into? * ’four letter word’ modernity VERSUS the exaltation of the close! 4. What cultural process is described in stanzas 3-5? What are its steps? What is * window in French symbolism (Baudelaire, Mallarmé): necessity and absence of the symbolized by the invasion of the church by nature? ideal, an ideal we imprint on the void sky by the intensity of our longing 5. What are some of the ambivalences and ironies of the last two stanzas? How does irony question even the positive statements?</p><p>High Windows 33 Seamus Heaney 1939-213 fascination for the darkness and the depths (Door into the Dark) communion with „the mystery”: Irish, Nobel Prize in 1995. the dark, violent aspect of nature a „feared, maternal darkness Irish and not British: "Be advised, my passport's green / No glass of ours was ever expressed through raised / To toast the Queen." peering down wells Only the very stupid or the very deprived can any longer help knowing that the documents of Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime, civilization have been written in blood and tears, blood and tears no less real for being very To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring remote. And when this intellectual predisposition co-exists with the actualities of Ulster and Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme Israel and Bosnia and Rwanda and a host of other wounded spots on the face of the earth, the To see myself, to set the darkness echoing. inclination is not only not to credit human nature with much constructive potential but not to (’Personal Helicon’) credit anything too positive in the work of art. (from Nobel Lecture, 1995) digging (’Digging’) fishing (’The Casualty’) but also: poetry "the ship and the anchor" of our spirit within an ocean of violent, divisive exhumation world politics rescuing from oblivion probing of secrecy and inwardness Life: concern with the subaqueous and subterranean (’Bogland’, born near Castledawson, County Derry (orthern Ireland) ’Punishment’) grew up on his father's cattle farm.. eldest in a Catholic family of nine children. the bog: central symbol graduating from Queen's University, Belfast, the starting point for the exploration of the past secondary school teacher, university lecturer (second place: Queen Univ. Belfast) in several works Heaney has returned to the "bog people", bodies guest professor at American universities, preserved in the soil of Denmark and Ireland Living in Dublin he divides his time between America and Ireland popular public readings (pop-music fanaticism) (because of its chemical composition, peat has a preserving effect, mummifying corpses and ancient objects a researcher of Old English: retranslated Beowulf; 2004 EU Enlargement (a poem) „I had been vaguely wishing to write a poem about bogland, chiefly because it is a landscape that has strange assuaging effect on Main themes: me, one with associations reaching back into early childhood. We  1) exploration of the deep (based on personal memories and the Irish heritage) used to hear about bog-butter, butter kept fresh for a great number of  2) violence and social injustice years under the peat. Then when I was at school the skeleton of an elk  3) individualistic and meditative (his own poetry) had been taken out of a bog nearb and a few of our neighbours had got ther photographs in the paper, peering out across its antlers. So I began to get an idea of bog as the memory of the landscape, or as a 1.) first volumes: Death of a Naturalist, Door into the dark landscape that remembered everything that happened in and to it. In fact, if you go round the National Museum in Dublin, you will realize personal memories combined with images of Irish heritage and the landscape of Northern that a great proportion of th most cherished material heritage of Ireland (’Digging,’ ’Bogland’) Ireland was „found in a bog’ (from Feeling into Words)</p><p>Digging: explores the poet’s relationship with his family and national heritage bog = memory of the landscape digging up potatoes (father’s and grandfather’s work) is paralleled with congruence between bogland – a repository of the past and the internal world of the the poet’s „digging with his pen” into the national heritage poet’s preserving, shaping imagination, and, the national consciousness drawing on myth and unique aspects of Irish experience 34 bog = significant Irish myth (equivalent to the frontier and the West in American 2) violence (e. g. North, 1975) consciousness) social injustice and violent history of his country violence: also a permanent, mythic quality, as a constant of human history ’Bogland’ historical background: 1968-69: 'The Troubles'. We have no prairies To slice a big sun at evening-- * sectarian violence in Ireland, addressing specific revenge killings Everywhere the eye concedes to Encrouching horizon, 'Casualty': about Louis O’Neill, fisherman 'The Strand at Lough Beg': Heaney’s cousin Is wooed into the cyclops' eye Of a tarn.2 Our unfenced country * the Bog poems: based on the bodies recovered in the peat of Jutland Is bog that keeps crusting 'Punishment' Between the sights of the sun. 'The Tollund Man' </p><p>They've taken the skeleton * religious prohibitions on sex that are the cause of children being killed or hidden away Of the Great Irish Elk 'Limbo' Out of the peat3, set it up An astounding crate full of air. 'Bye Child' </p><p>Butter sunk under public events, the statistics, intersect with the personal life of the poet More than a hundred years in ’Punishment’: Was recovered salty and white. depicts a tribal revenge of adultery, but confesses his own powerlessness in front of The ground itself is kind, black butter ancient, violent forces.</p><p>Melting and opening underfoot, 3) later works (Station Island, Sweeney Astray) Missing its last definition strong individualistic, meditative mood By millions of years. They'll never dig coal here,4 Station Island: a poetic pilgrimage, encounter with twelve ghosts Only the waterlogged trunks a questioning of his actions and the purpose of his art Of great firs, soft as pulp. seriously self-critical and ironical: Our pioneers keep striking poetry may not affect major or immediate change in that land or eyond, but Inwards and downwards, the positive values of poetic vision as determined and honest as Heaney’s are compelling. Every layer they strip Seems camped on before. At one minute you are drawn towards the old vortex of racial or religious instinct, at The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage. another time you seek the mean of human love and reason. The wet centre is bottomless.5</p><p>2 Mountain lake or pool; the mythical cyclops had only one eye. 3 Carbonized vegetable tissue in the ground 4 Because the ground is too wet for it to form. 5 Older people were afraid we might fall into the pools in the old workings (excavations for mining or quarrying) so they put it about (and we believed them) that there was no bottom in the bog-holes. Little did they – or I – know that I would filch it for the last line of a book” (Heaney, Feeling into Words) 35 11. POSTMODERN LITERARY THEORY, POSTMODERN FICTION „a large number of fragmentary possible worlds coexist SALMAN RUSHDIE, KAZUO ISHIGURO in an impossible space” (McHale) poliphony (Mihail Bakhtin) postmodern turn: in France and the United States rather than in England detective story: modernism 1. Theory science fiction: postmodernism</p><p>(Ihab Hassan’s table, 1985) if reality is constructed (humanly, socially constructed): there is any number of possible worlds modernism postmodernism John Fowles: The French Lieutenant’s Woman: metaphysics, transcendence irony, immanence three alternative endings self-consuming text, self-erasure (Derrida), to impose order no centre, no totality, fragments artist: dead serious self-irony and play Magic realism: the fantastic (= coined by German art critic Franz Roh in elitism democratization of taste 1925) aesthetic craftsmanship television, internet, pop culture* ontological landscapes: double (sacred- profane) creation/totalization/synthesis creation/deconstruction/antithesis single (hardscore positivism) (centring dispersal) plural (postmodern: anarchic landscape of worlds) genre/boundary text/intertext reality between fact (or history) and fiction: blurred interpretation/reading against interpretation/misreading the real is combined with the inexplicable and the fantastic (and sometimes art object/finished work process/performance/happening with the Gothic) postmodernists fictionalize history: is history itself a form of fiction?</p><p>* Television is the first cultural medium in the whole of history to present the artistic achievements of the past as a stitched together collage of equi-important and simultaneously Salman Rushdie: Midnight Children (1981) existing phenomena, largely divorced from geography and material history and transported to the Gabriel García Márquez: Cien aňos de soledad (1967) living rooms and studios of the West in a more or less uninterrupted flow. It posits a viewer, Mihail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita (1966) furthermore, who shares the medium’s own perception of history as an endless reserve of equal events. It is hardly surprising that the artist’s relation to history (the peculiar historicism we have already noted) has shifted, that in the era of mass television there has emerged an attachment to rhetoric of contrastive banality: surfaces rather than roots, to collage rather than in-depth work, to super-imposed quoted images rather than worked surfaces, to a collapsed sense of time and space rather than solidly achieved Midnight’s Children: historical fantasy: integrating the historical and the cultural artefact. And these are all vital aspects of artistic practice in the post-modern condition. fantastic (From David Harvey: Condition of Postmodernity) official version of history VERSUS alternative, secret history</p><p>2. Postmodernist fiction (Brian McHale, 1987) Indian history linked to the fates of children born at the same time (midnight, August 15, 1947: the day of Indian independence) i. „Real, compared to what?” narrator: Saleem Sinai modernism: multiple perspectives on the same reality postmodern novels: a plurality of worlds (is there a single reality?) 36 the children: microcosms of the Indian macrocosm, paralleling or mirroring (new owner, Farraday): „You are the real thing aren’t you? That’s public history in their private histories what I wanted, isn’t that what I have?”  postimperial transformations: the leveling of social hierarchy, the loss of ii. Literature in English imperial identity, movement from Empire to globalized web)</p><p> cosmopolitan concept of literature written in English) the inward look: journey into the past: the dominant role of the West, esp. orientalism questioned Steven’s motoring trip = symbol for a trip into his (and the national) past</p><p>(Colin MacCabe, 1981): „the multiplication of Englishes  first person narration: combination of reminiscences, flashbacks, throughout the world and their attendant literatures”; straightforward narrative „English literature is dead – long live writing in English”  the impossibility of reconciling professional duties with private (emotional) life examples for literature in English:  two irrevocable choices: rejected his housekeeper’s (Miss Kenton’s) Salman Rushdie: Midnight’s Children approach Kazuo Ishiguro: Remains of the Day uncritical support to Lord Darlington’s sentimental attempt to appease the Nazis Kazuo Ishiguro (1954)  contradictions: both proud and ashamed of LD makes much of the fact that by serving born in Nagasaki, Japan, family moved to England in 1960. Darlington he participated in the making of lives in London, British wife history neither English, nor Japanese: an outsider  postmodern perspective: tension between the grand narratives of the war and the minor subjective narrative of Stevens (macronarratives and the Novels: micronarrative)  studies of character, of human failings  great empathy, subtle depiction of the inner world of the protagonists (the butler’s) style: again subtle ambiguity combined with subtle irony dignified, aesthetic, civil and fluent or is it the parody of that?  first person narratives which recollect emotional extremes and traumatic events ending on a note of melancholy resignation: characters facing and But I see I am becoming preoccupied with these memories and this accepting their past is perhaps a little foolish. This present trip represents, after all, a rare opportunity for me to savour to the full the many splendours of the Remains of the Day 1989 English contryside, and I know I shall greatly regret it later if I allow myself to be unduly diverted. the first person narration of Stevens, Lord Darlington’s butler Ishiguro: to examine the extent to which such a style „is indeed dignified and social, cultural changes to what an extent it is a form of cowardice”  disappearance of old, aristocratic values: civility, dignity, professional perfection  commercialization of the values of the past: „the head servant is part of the package” 37 EXAMINATION TOPICS (only British)  Thomas Hardy: ‘Hap,’ ’Neutral Tones’, ‘Convergence of the Twain’  W. B. Yeats: ‘Easter 1916’; ‘The Second Coming’; ‘Sailing to Byzantium OR Among Schoolchildren’  T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land: ‘The Burial of the Dead’; ‘Game of Chess’  Philip Larkin: ‘Church Going’, ‘High Windows’ 1. Transition to modernism: Thomas Hardy’s poetry  Seamus Heaney: ‘Bogland,’ ‘Digging’ </p><p>2. Modernist Poetry: Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot Drama: 3. The Modernist Novel: Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce  Harold Pinter: The Birthday Party OR Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot 4. Absurd Drama: Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter 5. Poetry after the II. World War: Philip Larkin and Seamus Heaney Prose fiction:  Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness OR Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway 6. The postmodern novel: Kazuo Ishiguro or Salman Rushdie (http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91md/)  Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day OR Salman Rushdie: Midnight Children</p><p>RECOMMENDED READING:</p><p>Randall Stevenson: Modernist Fiction: an Introduction. Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992. Brian McHale: Postmodernist Fiction. Routhledge, London and NY, 1987.</p><p>Malcolm Bradbury: The Modern British Novel, 1993. Innes, Christopher, Modern British Drama, 1890-1990. Cambridge, 1992. Esslin, Martin, The Theatre of the Absurd. Harmondsworth, 1968 (1961). Perkins, David, A History of Modern Poetry. 2 vols. Cambridge MA, 1976 and 1987. </p><p>Required Reading</p><p>Poetry: </p>