THE MODERNISM - THE STREAM OF CONSCIUSNESS

THE STREAM OF CONSCIUSNESS

One philosopher (William James) had stated that consciousness flows like a river or stream. The term consciousness indicates the entire area of mental attention. The stream of consciousness can be concerned with that area which is beyond communication. An easy example could be that of an iceberg, of which only the summit is visible, while the biggest part is submerged. The stream of consciousness is concerned with the part that lies below the surface. The novelist has to explore what constitutes the mental process and how it works.

XX CENTURY PROSE

The XX century, upset by the world wars, was an age from experimentation: search of new form of expression. The main preoccupation of the novelists was the role of the characters in the society, because they became mirrors of their age. But the preoccupation began to shift from the society to the man. The main causes of dissatisfaction with traditional forms are:

• The social and political events and the consequent economic crisis, that create a sense of anxiety;
• The collapse of all established principles;
• A larger number of betters readers;
• Freud's theory of the unconscious;
• The influence of such writers Dostoevskij and Proust;
• The development of radio and film techniques.

The modernism seemed to transform every aspect of art. His rejection of realism made a new kind of abstraction and experimentation.

POETI DEL XX SECOLO

The first world war was a turning point for Joyce and Woolf. Each writer leads us towards the major sources of a deeply troubled modernity. Joyce was a typical example of a man that was exiled from the society because he offends the sexual ethos. He register a common sense of isolation from a dominant culture. His modernism consists in exposing the retrogressive nature of a falsely modern civilization. For Woolf, she thinks that her novels are only for a few enlightened fellow minds. She feels also a sense of isolation towards the world outside for its vulgarity.

TECHNIQUES

There are two levels of consciousness. The stream of consciousness is under the surface of an iceberg. The techniques used by authors are:

• Montage
• Flashbacks
• Fade out
• Slow up
• Similes and metaphors
• Particular and punctuations.
• Interior monologue (is not the stream of consciousness). The stream of consciousness is the psychic phenomenon, and the interior monologue is the instrument used to translate phenomenon into words. Joyce and Wool used the interior monologue in different ways:

• Joyce uses the direct i.m. without punctuation, connection of verb or subject.
• Woolf uses indirect i.m. that is a monologue introduced by "he thought" "he decided".

POETRY

• From 1885 to the twenties there is a transition period, in which new ingredients are introduced to replace the ones of Victorianism;
• The Georgian poetry lost his importance when the first world war brake out. It is full of imitation of romantic poetry;
• The symbolism developed in France in the second half of the 19th century. They use the free verse, symbols and image to express what is beyond the language;
• The imagism is an anti-romantic Anglo-American literary movement. They use a constant use of language of common speech, the creation of new rhythms to express new moods, freedom in the choice of subject matter, presentation of precise image, creation of hard and clear poetry.

VIRGINIA WOOLF

Her house in Bloomsbury became the centre of the Bloomsbury group, that reject the old taboos. This group was an expression of the new tendencies, in which moral was drastically changed. She worked in the movement for women's suffrage and saw as an injustice, the subordinate condition of women. In all her life she has a strong feeling of anxiety and the only remedy is the work, because she feels free and far from the terrible social condition of her time. According to her, the novel has to explore man's mental experience and his complex consciousness. For she, in our mind, the present and the past are blended (mischiate) together. The past explains the present and the present helps us to know the past experience.

Woolf was interested in giving voice to the complex inner world of feeling and memory. For she, the human personality is a continuous shift of impressions and emotions.

In Woolf novels the omniscient narrator disappears and the point of view shift inside the characters minds trough flashbacks and flux of thoughts. She gives an impression of simultaneous connections between the inner and the outer world. Similar to Joyce's epiphanies are Woolf's moments of being, rare moments insight during her characters daily lives when they can see reality behind appearances.

Woolf's technique has been defined impressionist. Her use of words are allusive and emotional. Rhyme, refrain and metaphor are the main features of her poetic style.

Mrs Dalloway

Virginia Woolf shows life as changing endlessly from moment to moment. The range of characters is small: they belong to the upper-middle class. The story takes place on a single ordinary day, and it follows the protagonist trough a very small area of London, from the morning to the night of the day on which she gives a large formal party. Clarissa is characterized by opposing feelings: her dependence and her class consciousness. One part of her lives in helpless, enforced isolation; while the other lives protective self-glorification; and both parts are contradictory.

Septimus is inability to feel, because his friend is dead. He is a shell shock, a victim of the industrialized war. He suffers from headaches and insomnia and he cannot stand the idea of having a child because he is impotent.

JAMES JOYCE

He has a negative and painful vision of the man human being's condition. Dublin, his home town, is the centre of the paralysis, the condition of the man living in a modern town. The artist has to be objective and he has not to express his point of view, but he try to express in his works the thoughts and experience of other men.

Dublin and Irish life were the symbol of this stagnant situation of man. He refused to be associated to any literary movement. With his new technique he express the sad condition of Dubliners or the European society. Joyce was interested in mind, because it is the centre of man's experience and it gives us a clear image of his situation and his personal history. For him the stream of consciousness is a psychological category which indicates the flow of thoughts of a man who is thinking freely, leaving his mind to flow unruled. This technique makes the reader know a character very deeply, because he can discover the inner side of a personality.

The epiphanies are moments of sudden revelation, the moment in a novel story when things, details, thoughts come together to produce a sudden awareness.

A Portrait of an artist as a young man

This story talks about Stephen Dedalus that is standing on the steps of the university and watching some birds flying above is head. This reminds him of the greek Dedalus and causes him to think of leaving his family, his church and country.

The writer calls his hero, Stephen because he is the first Christian martyr to art. Then Dedalus, because he must escape from the social, political labyrinth of Dublin's life in order to reach the neutrality of art.

The technique used is the stream of consciousness. The language develops from simple, from the first chapter, to complex, in the last chapter. The birds in the story represent the freedom.

The title underlines the portrait of Joyce and not of another person.

Ulysses

Ulysses was a new form of prose based in the "mythical method". Stephen Dedalus, Mr and Mrs Bloom represent two aspects of human nature. Stephen is pure intellect, Mrs Bloom is sensual nature and fecundity and Mr Bloom is the mankind. The theme of the novel is moral: human life means suffering, failing but also struggling to rise and seek goodness. Characters are not followed from birth to death, or for a numbers of years. This story represents the allegorically journey of every man trough life. The first word in Ulysses is "man". In Ulysses the theme is the man's failure to escape from the paralysis which is the typical living condition in a modern city. The language rejects logical sequences and conventional syntax. The work is about thousand pages, but it takes a single day (24/6/1904). In the story, Bloom, finds a son and Stephen Dedalus finds a father, but they are not really father and son an the meet in a brothel. At home there is not a faithful Penelope, but an unfaithful Molly. In the Ulysses there are a variety of styles: a language that recalls the Anglo-saxon and Middle-English alliterative style, rich in compound words, and others which reproduce the language of Romantic novels or melodrama. Molly's mind is an unbroken river but they have a form because they begin and end with "Yes". Her thought flow in a circle, that is a symbol of perfection. In "Yes I Said Yes I will Yes" the stream of consciousness is taken to its extreme: no external events are described, no third-person narrator to tell us what is happening, no paragraphs, no punctuation. The last words of Molly represent the climax of both her stream of consciousness and her erotic fantasies.

The obsession of Joyce with realistic details of Dublin means Ulysses is a supreme exercise in realism.

THE MODERNIST POETRY

Thomas Stearn Eliot

LIFE

Eliot was born in 1888 in St. Louis, into a distinguished New England family, the son of a businessman and a poet. He was educated at Harvard University. When the World War I begin in 1914, he decided to take up permanent residence in England and he became a resident of London in 1915 and a naturalized British citizen in 1927. Between 1915 and 1919 Eliot held various positions, including those of teacher, bank clerk, and assistant editor of the literary magazine Egoist.

He wants to resolve these problems:

• Modern man's alienation from society;
• Time versus eternity;
• The question of personal identity;
• The problem of faith (fede) in modern civilization;
• The sense that the present is inferior to the past;
• The fear of living;
• The moral, spiritual and sentimental emptiness of our time.

Features:

• The poetry expresses the other people's feelings and not the feelings of the poet. He introduced the objective impersonality of art that led him to avoid the use of first time singular to privilege the dramatic monologues and interior monologues, which are dialogues between two halves of the same person;
• The poetry must communicate something, even before being understood, trough its rhythm and musicality (some of his poetry are structured as musical pieces);
• With the technique of the objective correlative he conveys all the emotions and feelings to an object, a situation or a series of events. So, this object reminds a particular emotion;
• The poetry has to change and find new expressions to describe emptiness, pessimism of the contemporary world and must become more comprehensive, allusive and indirect in order to force language to his meaning
• Eliot revaluated the importance of tradition and he said that present and past coexist in man and the past is an active part of the present.
• He learnt from Ezra Pound and the imaginists how to avoid uselessly decorative rhetoric and replace it with clear precise images, using the minimum of words;
• When he studied the French symbolists, he was impressed by the use of free verse and by the way he looked at life. Trough Baudelaire he discovered the poetic possibilities of the ugliness and sterility of modern metropolis;
• His interests focuses on John Donne and Metaphysicals, who influenced him with their complexity of the poetry;
• Dante influences him, because he his the poet who best expressed a universal situation. He wants establish some relationship between the medieval inferno and the modern life. Eliot said that the Divine Comedy expressed everything in the way of emotion.

Poetry is divided in two phases:

He focuses on the squallor of our society and the urban life. He reaches a more universal vision of a spiritually dead world in The Waste Land

After his conversion in 1927 he began to write a new sort of poetry concerned more with the inner life of the spirit than with the outer world. He now seems to find an answer to his gloomy vision of the modern world. He his purificated

THE WASTE LAND

The Waste Land (1922) is an amazing anthology of indeterminate states of mind, impressions, hallucinations and expresses his conception of the sterility of modern society in contrast with societies of the past. Eliot believed that modern society lacked (mancasse) a vital sense of community. In Eliot's poem, human beings are isolated, and sexual relations are sterile and meaningless.

Eliot uses myth, structuring his poem in terms of the Grail quest. Through the use of myth, he is able to make his poem more universal and give his subject the importance of an epic. However, it seems more likely that the use of myth is very deliberately used to elevate the stature of the work. It is especially through the Mythical allusion that the contrast between present and past appears: to the meaningless, to the "waste" life of the present, Eliot opposes allusion of the Holy Grail , a metaphor for men's search for spiritual salvation.

The style is fragmentary because of the mixture of different poetic styles, such as blank verse and free verse that reproduce chaos of present civilization. He uses the objective correlative.

THE BURIAL DEATH

It presents the voice of a countess (contessa) looking back on her pre-World War I youth as a lovelier, freer, more romantic time. Her voice is followed by a solemn description of present dryness (aridità) when "the dead tree gives no shelter (protezione)." Then the poem returns to a fragmentary love scene of the past, perhaps the countess's. The scene shifts (cambia) to a fortune-teller (cassiere) who reads the tarot cards and warns (avverte) of death. The final section of part presents a contemporary image of London crowds (folla) moving along the streets blankly (vuota), as if dead.

THE LOVE SONG OF PRUFROCK

There are four parts:

1. Prufrock is isolated in time and feels the emptiness all around him. He imagines the possibility of life in heroic terms but he recognised the futility of his daily life;
2. The failure of Prufrock will change his world;
3. Emphasizes the contrast between Prufrock's interior and exterior reality. He can not act because he fears that nothing in the outer world will correspond to his perception of reality;
4. There is an acknowledgement  of failure. He can not escape his life but he can only imagine a different existence.

The form of this poet is the dramatic monologue. The metre is the iambic pentameter distorted into free verse. The stanzas are connected trough repetition of words. Prufrock is a middle-aged self conscious person. He is always a minor character, who will never be the protagonist of his own destiny. Eliot suggests that it is impossible for a modern man to be a hero. This theme of the desolate insignificance of modern man is also developed in The Waste Land. The language of the poem reproduces Prufrock's confusion between his sensations and his thoughts. The Rhythm is fast and hammering in the first stanza and more relaxing in the other parts. The choice of free verse wants to represent the themes of contemporary man in an adequately renewed form. Eliot sees the contemporary man as being paralysed by fear and condemned to inactivity, which he considers immoral.

THE SYMBOLIST POETRY

William Butler Yeats

THE SECOND COMING

The poem is divided in two parts of unequal length. In the first stanza the poet describes the present condition of the world in symbolic terms. The first image is the falcon that fly away. These represent anarchy and the loss of a central belief. The birth is not a divine one but a monstrous one, that of the Anti-christ that want to destroy twenty centuries of Christian civilization. The poem alluded to the situation of Ireland in 1919 when there are political problems. Yeats takes inspiration from the second coming of Christ announced in St Matthew Gospel and from St john's vision of the coming of the Anti-Christ. According to the poet history develops trough cycles and each of them lasts about two thousands years. Every cycle forms a gyre.

It express a pessimistic view of the modern world. The new era is characterised by the coming of the Antichrist, that would profane the holy cradle. The poet is written when was the collapse of the Russia in 1917. There is full of symbolism, metaphors and images

The first stanza represents the state of our civilization in anarchy. The falcon can not hear the falconer, is the symbol of the violence and is a cruel rapacity which has broken free from control. The poem is divided in two parts of unequal length. In the first stanza the poet describes the present condition of the world in symbolic terms. The first image is the falcon that fly away. These represent anarchy and the loss of a central belief. The birth is not a divine one but a monstrous one, that of the Anti-Christ that want to destroy twenty centuries of Christian civilization. The poem alluded to the situation of Ireland in 1919 when there are political problems. Then two cones follow the same movement for 2000 years and then they reverse their movement. This moment is called Great Year. The two gyres are called Primary and Antithetical and each of them contains something of the other.

CONTEMPORARY FEMINISM: WOMEN'S WIEV OF THE WORLD

Women said that in the past the world has been explained only by men and they do not consider the difference between men and women. Traditional ideas about women are that they can not share power with men. In societies in which power depend on the ability of physical force, there were reasons for assigning women to different roles. But in the modern society, in which physical strength do not have importance, the biological differences have less importance. As regards the psychology, Freud said that in the women there is the lack of something. Freud is regarded as conservative by contemporary feminists, because the women are passive and only a sexual desire.

YOUTH CULTURE: STREET STYLE IN BRITAIN

The post war period there was a new youth period. The street became a focus of life.

The body symbolism of the Teddy Boys was adapted from an upper-class dress-style, which came to be known as "Edwardian". The Ted's uniform consisted of drape jackets, long pointed shoes with laces, and they wore their hair very short at the back and raised at the front. They had a reputation of violence and they became synonymous with juvenile delinquency and racism - "We are not against the Blacks, let's just say we are not with them".

The Rockers were a similar group: they wore black jackets, battered clothes. They were outsiders, staged drag races down the street and made crude advances to local women. They tended to regard women and coloured immigrants as inferior categories.

The Hippies were the youthful version of the middle-class individualism, simply devoted to the achievement of new levels of consciousness than to material success. They monopolized particular places, pubs and houses. They refused to be subjected to the normal time and threw away their watches. Their dresses were handmade from natural materials. The hippies age was the age of Beatles and Bob Dylan. The texts of these songs was "Love and War". Taking drugs was an aid (aiuto) to consciousness.

The Skinheads had an aggressive behaviour: they wore heavy boots, donkey jackets, tattoos and shaved heads. They welcome conflict and aggression. In the group there were no girls and they think they are a second-rate.

In 1976 it was time for a new "youth revolution": the Punks. Nothing was holy to them and their movement was neither mystical, communistic nor anarchistic. They spat (sputare) on everything, including themselves, their symbols. The hair were yellow, orange or green. Their music differed from mainstream rock and pop. The name of the groups (the Rejects, the Worst, the Unwanted.) reflected the tendencies of outcast status.

EXISTENTIALISM

Existentialism is a philosophical movement and developed especially the mood of the time, the feeling of uncertainly which followed the atrocities of the Holocaust. It influenced particularly the literature, art and youth culture of the sixties. Its main theses, in contrast with rationalist traditions, are that is no purpose or order in the world; that the universe is hostile; that the truths about the world are revealed most clearly in moments of unfocused psychological anxiety or dread. The recurring themes of existentialism are freedom, decision, responsibility, alienation, guilty and death.

SYLVIA PLATH

Sylvia Plath has become the emblem of feminism and the victim of a male dominated society. She had not a good relationship with her father and was in continuous competition with her husband. Plath's poetry belong to the confessional poetry, because reveals the most subjective feelings, the deepest emotion, as in a confession. Many of them are dramatic monologues voiced by a character that is not necessarily the poet. They are written in free verses and as they were fragments of consciousness. She used metaphors, symbols and flashbacks. She was never satisfied with the result she obtained. In her works she was in contrast: in the letter to the mother she appears enthusiastic and in the poems she is tormented and oppressed. Death is a key word an is the separation and total negation, but also a unique truth and a means of affirming and unifying herself going beyond the limits of life to arrive at a sort of ultimate knowledge. It represented also a sort of challenge that obsessed her. This obsession come probably form the premature death of her father, and after that, her husband abandoned her. She was linked to him by a relationship of love and hate. She did not even consider the possibility of a new life after death. She regarded existentialism as the most honest way to live. Plath's poems are concerned with the search for a personal identity trough awareness of the weight of taboos, of the existence of a gap between individuals. She was interested in the condition of the woman but she did not consider she was a feminist. The tone in her poems is ironic and even sarcastic and the poems had no kind of sentimentality. Some of her poems are a warning against consumerism.

DADDY

The father had neat moustache, Aryan eye, bright blue. He was a man in black with a Meinkampf look. He was a teacher with a brute character. He was a panzer man. He is the typical image of the Nazi.

In the poem the dominant colour is black that suggests oppression, despair, death.

LADY LAZARUS

She tried to kill herself many times but she is still alive (phoenix).She regarded death as a means of rebirth and purification. The woman is the phoenix. The poem is built up on a metaphorical level: the speaker is "the phoenix". The poem must criticise an immoral consumer society, a world where values have been turned upside down and considers dying as a form of entertainment. She has come once again into the world of male savagery.

The speaker describes herself in terms of a concentration camp who has become dehumanised and turned into commodities for practical usage.

The most feature of the woman's determination to revenge herself on those responsible for her torture. God and Lucifer are both addressed as "Herr", in a deliberate attempt to emphasise theit male-ness. God, that represent extreme perfection is identified with extreme evil, because extreme perfection turns out to be a torment for those who are victims. The intensity of revenge is justified by the equality intense abuse of man by man, the anger is directed against the world which stands by and allows this to happen.

Plath handles the theme of religion. She turns one of the most famous episodes of St. John's Gospel, the resurrection of Lazarus, into a grotesque show. Then the victim is turned into a persecutor through the metaphor of the phoenix.

LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER

Trough the relationship between Constance and Mellors, Lawrence celebrates the purify of sexual passion, which becomes a metaphor of freedom. Mellors, like a romantic hero, has chosen to live alone within the nature to escape from the rule of the society. Constance, confused, seeks refused in the wood and in sexual experience. The wood become the symbol of life and natural order as opposed to the emptiness and sterility of Wragby Hall. The style of the novel is characterised by a mixture of realism and symbolism and by a remarkable variety of linguistic registers. For instance, Mellors sometimes uses dialect as a weapon against Constance to stress the social gap between them.

Clifford represents the Victorian's figure of the man that is paralised and a victim of a war. Together with the industrialisation, there is a close relationship that represents emptiness. Constance refused Victorian's reality. Constance is a woman, difference of the others, thanks to her strong education. She can express her point of view.

HOWARDS END

There is the contrast between the lifestyle of the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes, between culture and materialism. The master theme is harmony. The idea of a possible harmony appears in a variety of ways: it is explored trough the private lives of individuals, trough the conflict of classes. The Wilcoxes in business, belong to a world of "telegrams and anger"; they are sharp with the lower orders, deferential towards social formalities. Their household is masculine. The Schlegels's household is female; Margaret and Helen are emancipated, modern, humane, concerned with the arts, responsive to the suffering of those less fortunate. All the characters are, in some sense, in search of a spiritual home. But homes are made only by people capable of love and affection and inspired with a vision of continuity. The novel opens informally, with a casual sentence followed by letters and telegrams which enable Forster to introduce the main themes of the novel and to filter the first picture he gives of the Wilcoxes through their values. Forster turns away from chronological order, makes use of various points of view, adds the comments of the autobiographical voice, and creates a subtle questioning tone shifting from the comic tone, to the poetic tone.

Helen is considered like a bridge between the two families. At the beginning she loved the family but then understood that they are sharp with the lower orders and, when Paul was frightened, she decided to return home.

The war poets

Different attitudes to war: The first world war was welcomed with enthusiasm. Thousands of young men volunteered for military service. They did this for noble ends. But the toll (prezzo) in human lives was terrible. For the soldiers, life in the trenches was hell because of the rain and mud (fango). The common soldiers were the first to apprehend the horror and suffering of the war. But the officers, thanks to their position of privilege and responsibility, saw the conflict in a more heroic light. However there was a group of poets who actually experienced the fighting, an in most cases lost their lives in the conflict, who managed to represent modern warfare in a realistic and unconventional way, and to awaken the conscience of the readers to the horrors of the war. Their poetry is modern because forced the poetic conventions to find another mode of expression.

Rupert Brooke: He thought that war is clean and cleansing. He tried to testify the safeness of war, in which the only thing that can suffer is the body, and even death is seen as the safest shelter of all against the dangers of life. Traditional not only in form, his poems were the last to express idealistic patriotism also because, unlike the other war poets.

Wilfred Owen: he works at the positive emotions of love, compassion, admiration, joy. He started to write under Keats's sensuous style. The war matured him; he was a shell-shock and produced his most brilliant poems when he met Sassoon. His poems are painful and speak about men who have gone mad, men who are clinically alive although their body was destroyed. He used the para-rhymes, assonance and alliteration.

The Soldier

The poet is speaking. He is not afraid of death. His grave is in a foreign land and his corpse will became dust and enrich the soul. He has an idealistic view of war.

The poem is a Petrarchan sonnet and the first four verses are like a Hymne. There is then the personification of England, that is like a mother. To die in battle is a noble act and the soldier is proud to die for his land. The poem is like a celebration of the world war and the poem give an idealistic view of war. The theme is the beauty to die for the patria (like "dulce et decorum est pro patria mori"). The poem is opposite to the poem of Owen.

In the war, the first who joined the army were volunteers that have patriotic ideas.

Dulce et decorum est

The war is like a degradation. Owen gives importance to the psychological sphere. The themes are the alienation and the dehumanisation. Dulce et decorum est is a lie (bugia) and it is a realistic vision. This poem is probably addressed those people who think that the war is a noble adventure. In the poem WE and I represents the soldiers, HIM, a friend of the poet and YOU, the reader.

The poem is also full of enjambment, alliteration and onomatopoeia.

The metaphors "blood-shed"-"drunk with fatigue"-"ecstasy of fumbling" belong to the world of supernatural or fantastic. They draw from the areas of illness and disease. The poet wants to underline that there is nothing noble in the war. He used irony. The poem is a manifesto against the war. Owen thinks that the message of poetry is stronger than the poetry. He wants the people to feel the pity of war, that is something poetic.

In the first stanza there is the introduction of the situation and description of the soldiers. In the second stanza there is described the gas attack, the third, the poet's dream and in the fourth a nightmarish vision. There is the description of the friend's death and of the poem refers to the politics men.

Ernest Hemingway

The experiences of his life: he rarely wrote in an explicit autobiographical way, but he went back to the most important experiences of his life. The key experience of his childhood were his encounters with the nature, because he has the passion of haunting and fishing, seen as forms of struggle against the nature. In this struggle, life and death are presented as the driving and mysterious forces of existence. The real prize for victory is the moral reward for having fought well and having been regenerated by an immersion in nature. Life is identified with a codified set of actions which gives man the measure of his control over events.

The meanignlessness of love: love is meaningless, because the relationship between a man and a woman is a game with fixed rules and once the game is over, it has no sense at all. There is not a true society, but only a combination of individual units, alienated man, who are unable to know themeselves or each other.

The first world war: in the trenches Hemingway understood that the only chance of escaping the horror of death was the pursuit (inseguimento) of manly qualities such as: strength, sexual powerlack of sentimentalism and the ability to react. His heroes are man of simple characters and primitive emotions.

Style: the style is simple, primitive, colloquial, colorful, dialogue and brief descriptions. There is very little introspection or analysis of personal feelings and sensations. Hemingway's prose creates great emotions in the reader.

His narrative method is a mixture of realism and symbolism. In his works he presents "what really happened in action" in a precise, almost naturalistic way. His characters are in some way representatives of humanity, his landcapes may work as a symbols of death, desolation, loneliness, his concrete object and situations may serve as symbols of sterility and disease. He used laconic spare prose and short declarative sentences simply joined by conjunction "and". He repeated key words and used "staccato".

The themes consists in physical strength, impulse to seek sensations. Action is seen as a form of ritual. Lide is a ritual whose rules must be respected. For Hemingway's hero, action leads him to exercise his will, to choose his destiny, to conrol life.

Farewell to Arms

The characters: Henry Frederich is full of nobles ideals when he joins the army, but his experience durino the war shaker his belief in church, state, patriotism and love. At the end of the novel, he understands that his subjectivity is always tempered and modified by his relation to others.

Themes: War and love are the most important themes in the book and the relationship between them isi explored by Hemingway through the protagonist. In the first two books, the narrator recreates the fear, the comradenship, the courage of soldiers living in the trenches. In the last two books love is overwhelming, even if it is tinged with war. The third book centres on the escape.

Style: Hemingway employs the technique of the first-person narrator. The language is simple and straightforward (schietto) but the active participation of the reader in the act of understanding is required. He uses frequently the direct speech and omissions.

There is nothing worse than war

Passini His attitude is realistic. According to him there is nothing worse than war. For him defeat is nothing, he wants to return home. There is no end to a war. War is not won by victory but it ends when one side stops fighting. Everybody hates war, and the stupidity of the ruling class demand this war. He was wounded (ferito).

Manera He does not accept this war. His attitude is realistic. The class who governs this country is stupid and wants this war to go on.

Henry: getting war over by fighting the enemy and beating him; his attitude is idealistic. The war does not end if someone stops fighting. Defeat is worse than the war! The italian soldiers do not know nothing about being conquered; that is why they think it would not be bad.

When the bomb exploded he saw a flash and heard a roar. He could not breath and he thought he was dead. The ground was torn up and he had been hurt on his knee. He felt warn and wet and does not shoot on Passini because he was almost dead. At the end Henry abandoned his ideals of "getting the war over" because he has experienced suffering and death.

The flash of the bomb explosion is compared to a blast-furnace door swinging open. It conveys a feeling of destruction and death; highlights the quality of this destruction, which is linked to fire and hell.

Hemingway used the modernist technique of free direct speech. In contrast with the stream of consciousnees technique, the reader is allowed to know the most intimate thoughts of the character.

Ungaretti used isolated words to describe the terrible reality of war and death. Hemingway described war by audiovisual rendering of the actions of war.

The golden strings

Henry is a short, fat, not young man, a lieutnant-colonel, arrested because he is not with his troops. He thinks that the carabinieri and the officials are cowards, conceited (presuntuosi), religious and not very clever; but he feels pity and simpaty.

The tone of the story is ironic or sarcastic because the narration insists on such a display of police against a defenceless man (They were all young man and they are saving their country).

This story reveals the unheroic, unromantic aspect of real welfare (bene), the horror of it; the cruelty, loss of humanity, which shocked the writer and completely destroyed the abstract ideals with which he had entered in war. He saw the life in terms of struggle against a universe marked by violence and destruction (like the world of Yeats).

IL TEATRO, THE TEATRE OF ABSURD

Waiting for Godot SAMUEL BECKETT pp. 103

"Waiting for Godot" was written by Samuel Beckett, and is the first play of the so called "Theatre of Absurd". The writers of the "T.o.A." have the belief that man's life appears to be meaningless and purposeless, and that human beings cannot communicate and understand each other.

STRUCTURE: On first seeing we understand that Waiting for Godot is not an ordinary play:

it has no development in time (there is no past or future, just a repetitive present);

it has no setting (stage is a country road divided in two by a tree);

it has no plot;

it has no characters in the traditional sense (no personality to represent);

it has no action (static situation of waiting is described);

no dialogue in the traditional sense(characters aren't able to inform each other of the their present situation);

SIMMETRIC STRUCTURE:

The play is divided into two acts symmetrically built.

The stage is divided into two halves by tree

Human race is divided into two: Vladimir - Estragon(Didi - Gogo), Pozzo - Lucky

SETTING: desert country road, it is very anonymous stands for any place in the world, allusive to the desolate condition of mankind

LANGUAGE:

This is next to me the strangest thing: the characters talk, but the language does not serve the purpose of communication. They only follow their own thoughts trying to fill the silence and kill the time. The language used is extreme essentially, informal and to reach this simplicity the author decided to write the play, throughout his mother language was English, in French, because it compelled him to think simpler.

CHARACTERS:

The main characters of the play are two tramps: Vladimir and Estragon, can't live alone even if they quarrelled each day, help each otherThey are complementary, because they represent two sides of a single whole, the human being. (Estragon is the subconscious, a dreamer and Vladimir the rational side, more practical). They have an appointment with Mr. Godot, who will not arrive that day, nor probably on any day of the future. But this appointment gives a reason to their lives: waiting. Waiting means making the experience of the flow of time, and time becomes the object of all their thoughts. We don't know who Godot is, but we may say that it stands for "little God" (God + "ot" french religious intrepretation). Talk without reaching a target

The other two characters are Pozzo and Lucky: they are complementary too, but their relationship is more primitive. They are physically linked to each other, by a rope as well by a tyrannical relationship of master and servant. Lucky: slave and represents the power of the mind( proletarian), and Pozzo: he oppressor and power of the body(capitalist). Represent negative aspect of mankind, don't help each other

LACK OF COHERENCE: Absurd as the essence of human condition, they are searching for a meaning in their life. No heroism is allowed, only reality is that of waiting.

COMIC AND TRAGIC: grotesque humor. Pessimism: men cannot understand the force that regulate the universe + meaningless of human lifE. Nothing can be done except of waiting

TEXT ANALYSIS:

Estragon and Vladimir are waiting for godot, who sent a boy to postpone the appointment. Decide to commit suicide by hanging but they don't manage it. If godot come next day they won't hang

Repetitions+ ready-made pharases+ pauses and silence

Pirandello+Brecht+Beckett: social revolution, sentences destroyed by 2.W.W. , mistrust in rationalism as a way to explain reality , disillusion with the socialism

WAITING: make the experience of the flow o the time. While we are waiting for s.one or s.thing, time becames the main object of all our thoughts. Waiting for all our life for something that will never happen, all change being illusory

IL TEATRO, THE ANGRY YOUNG MEN

Look back in Anger JOHN OSBORNE pp. 120 G

"Look back in Anger", written by John Osborne in the fifties, became immediately a kind of myth and turned Osborne into one of the spokesmen of the so-called "Angry Young Man".

It was a genuine drama, about real events and people: an authentic picture of the younger generation in the post-war English society, who identified with the protagonist, Jimmy Porter, who raged against all middle-class values and social injustices.

The consequences of the general feeling of disillusionment and impotence were often empty rage, social irresponsibility, political cynism, self-centred attitudes, insolent bad manners and so on.

STRUCTURE: three-act play, took place in a single, naturalistic setting. Monologes + silence

JIMMI PORTER THE ANTI-HERO:Jimmy is the prototype of the "angry young man": he is angry, impatient, irritating and revengeful, and so he emerges as the representative of the frustrated British youth of the 1950s. His anger lie in the past: in his father's premature death. He is an outsider in rebellion against the whole establishment, which he sees identified with his wife and his family; he is the embodiment of the "protester" without a clear cause to fight for.He is an anti-hero, since he only speaks but never acts consequence of a childhood trauma, a sense of personal failure, persecution complex, sexually immature. He has established a love-hate relationship with his wife since he wants to posses her, but he is afraid of her and tries to destroy their relationship. He is angry, impatient, unpleasant, restless, domineering, irritating, frustrating, pessimistic, violent, revengeful and committed. He is angry at everyone and everything. Think that nothing has really changed and everything is controlled by the same establishment as it was before

2 FEMALE CHARACTER:Alison: she is Jimmy's victim, but she is so by her own choice, so she is the stronger of the two. Helena, like Alison came from the upper-class, honest.

CLIFF: working class uneducated man, a pleasant person

STYLE: The language is the most innovative element: it is spontaneous and vital, crude and violent, provoking and revolutionary. Jimmi's vulgar slang expressions can be understood by everybody. But this does not mean that the characters are uneducated: they are all well-educated, and when they use vulgar or dialect expressions they always do it consciously and for a purpose. The structure is highly formal and ever old fashioned, in spite of the novelty of the theme and the language.

THIS TEXT REFLECTS: social revolution and the changing values of Britain in the 50's, destruction of certainties and basic assumption of the previous age, which were slept away by the 2 W.W., decline of religious belief, mistrust in rationalism, disillusionment with the social ideals brought about the totalitarianism, materialism of contemporary society.

MAIN THEMES: isolation and frustration. Jimmi is a visionary looking forward to some unknown ideals; what shatters him is the tension of his present, since he is forced to seek out and established relationships in a society which has no their comprehension sick.

Plot: consequential, true-to-life

Setting: realistic and related to working class

Theme: social critic against middle-class

Stage: detailed, informative, clear

Language: everyday, simple, clear, immediate

Jimmi criticises cliff's ignorance and compares him to a peasent. This criticism reveals a social barrier between the upper-class band the common people. Jimmi used the snobbish tone of the Sunday papers.

Relation Jimmi-Alison: he treat his wife so badly because her lack of response and affection towards him. She always remain indifferent both to Jimmi's attack and pleas.

Action: reading+ironing sunday boring conservative england nothing has changed

THE THEATER OF ANGER + THE ANGRY YOUNG MEN

Revolutionary phase that began in 50's whith Look back in Anger. This text reflect the social revolution and the changing values of Britain in the 50's, destruction of certainties and basic assumption of the previous age, which were slept away by the 2 W.W., decline of religious belief, mistrust in rationalism, disillusionment with the social ideals brought about the totalitarianism, materialism of contemporary society. This group of intellectual and writers gave voice to the cultural disillusionment of young generation who reacted against establishment (classe dirigente).want to establish the youth culture, they present anti-heroes, using raw, colloquial language really spoken by average (media) people. They don't know how to substitute the establishment.

Features of theeter of anger:

Realistic setting

Logical, easy-to-follow plot

Outspoken language (schietto)

Presence of working-class anti-heroes

IL RIBELLE

The Catcher in the Rye JEROME DAVID SALINGER pp.146 G

PLOT: Narrator and protagonist is an unhappy and sensitive 16 year-old American boy, Holden Caufield.

He talks about his last day at school, before being expelled because of his bad marks, and about his few days spent in New York before going back home to inform his parents and go back home. He is very dissatisfied with the middle class values of his expensive private school and the model of success of his brother represents. Feeling more and more depressed, he goes back home where his little sister, Phoebe, saves him from despair. They dream of a simple country life together.

PROTAGONIST: Holden is intelligent, but also sensitive and vulnerable so that he struggles against the society he belongs to and which he considers extremely false, corrupt and hypocritical (phoeny = s.thing opposite to my way of living). Looks for authentic friends and values. He is not a rebel in the real sense: he expresses his wish to become a "catcher in the rye", that is somebody who catches children playing in a field of rye and prevents them from falling over. The figure of the catcher has often been interpreted as Holden's projection of his idela father figure.

THE STYLE: The style is conversational: Salinger uses slang words, swear words, hyperbole and meaningless expressions to represent the rebellion of the American teenagers of the fifties.

It is a critic against the false, corrupt, hypocrite society he belongs to (= against the establishment)

Dislikes his schoolmates who are insincere and unkind to him. He criticises their habit of not allowing dull fellow with pimples to join their meeting

Refuses his schoolmates, his teachers and school in general, hin father and lawyers

Still likes his dead brother Allie more than the alive people around him

Prefers to speak with the sister than with adults ( phoeny)

Against lawyer who make a lot of money and spent a lot of time playing golf and bridge, buying cars and drinking Martinis. They want to save other people's life only to increase their importance

Refuse false values of the old American society.

Sister: ih the only person he cares for and is not in conflict with

Wants to be "the catcher in the ray", reveals the lack of communication between Holden and the world of adult

Immediate success, even if it was attacked by critics because it was incensurate and too vulgar in the language.

Book was a literary phenomenon: the adolescents saw an image of themselves in the young Holden.

It is S.'s ability to get inside the teenagers' mind and to imitate the colloquial language and the cynical tone of many American adolescents.

La questione irlandese:

Sinn Féin (noi stessi) era il nome del movimento indipendentista irlandese nato agli inizi del , presieduto da Michael Collins.Il movimento si smembrò in seguito alla firma del "patto di Londra", che comportava grosse limitazioni territoriali e di sovranità per la neonata repubblica, in quanto l'Ulster rimaneva sotto la completa giurisdizione britannica, mentre la sovranità formale del resto dell'isola restava nelle mani della corona inglese. De Valera si staccò quindi dallo Sinn Féin, dando inizio alla tragica guerra civile irlandese, in cui morì lo stesso Michael Collins.

L'Insurrezione di Pasqua (Easter Rising)

Michael Collins divenne conosciuto per la prima volta durante l'Insurrezione di Pasqua nel . La rivolta fu (come ci si era aspettato) un disastro militare. Mentre molti celebravano il fatto che l'Insurrezione era in effetti avvenuta, credendo nella teoria del sacrificio di sangue (cioè che le morti dei capi dell'Insurrezione avrebbero ispirato altri), Collins era contrario a quello che percepiva come un ham-twisted amateurism, contro l'occupazione di edifici prominenti come quello del GPO (General Post Office) che erano impossibili da difendere, impossibili da abbandonare e difficili da rifornire. (Durante la Guerra di Indipendenza fece in modo di evitare queste tattiche di "diventare bersagli fissi", facendo operare i suoi soldati come colonne volanti che intrapresero una guerriglia contro gli Inglesi, attaccando all'improvviso e poi ritirandosi altrettanto velocemente, minimizzando le perdite e massimizzandone l'effetto). Collins, come molti altri partecipanti dell'Insurrezione, fu arrestato e mandato in un campo di internamento in Galles. Lì, come si aspettavano i suoi contemporanei, mostrò le sue doti di leadership. Al suo rilascio, Collins era già diventato una delle figure più prominenti del Sinn Féin dopo-Insurrezione, un piccolo partito nazionalista che il governo inglese e i media irlandesi incolparono a torto dell'Insurrezione, a causa della sua infiltrazione tra i sopravvissuti della rivolta, così da capitalizzare sulla "notorietà" che il movimento innocente aveva guadagnato attraverso gli attacchi inglesi. Ad Ottobre , grazie alle sue doti e la sua abilità, Collins era salito a diventare un membro dell'esecutivo del Sinn Féin e Direttore dell'Organizzazione dei Volontari Irlandesi; Eamon de Valera era presidente di entrambe le organizzazioni.

Seamus Heaney - Punishment (48G)

"The bog people" was a book dealing with the discovery in peat bogs of the preserved bodies of people sacrificed during tribal rituals. In the poet's mind the Bog People became a metaphor for the atrocities and rituals of the political and religious "troubles" in Ireland.

Life > was born in 1939 in a farm of northern island, catholic upbringing. At school became aware of the religious and cultural division of Ulster.

Style > his poetry is characterized by a metaphorical vitality, uses enjambments, refers to Anglo-Saxon knowledge, uses north dialect and words from the Gaelic.

Details of the punishment: naked front, ribs (costole), rods and bought (bastoni e rami), stubble (stoppia) of black corn her blindfold (benda per gli occhi), punished you >> the girl was executed.

To keep the body inside the bog, a big stone and some trenches of a tree were laid upon it (l. 9-12), when the poet faced with the newly retrieved (ritrovati) body he feels sympathy (solidarietà), tenderness and pity.

Form: 11 four-line stanzas; length: not regular, most lines are short; use of punctuation: run on line, commas, semicolons (;), or full stops at the end of each stanza; rhyme: not regular, free verse; words: mainly monosyllabic.

Metaphor referring to the girl: she was a barked sapling (alberello scortecciato), oak bones (ossa di quercia) (images of Anglo-Saxon kennings), brain-firkin (barillotto, contenitore) >> explanation: the metaphors refers to the fragility, helplessness of the girl. Contrast with the beauty of the girls describes at lines 25-28

Analogy between the bog girl and the catholic girl punished in northern Ireland during the 1970s for going out with british soldiers: l. 38-42

How the poet defines himself: I am the artful voyeur (scaltro guardone), I who have stood dumb

The last quatrain is ambiguous: because it is based on semantic opposition (connive civilized, understand revenge) > contrast between rational and instinctive attitude.

Heaney and Yeats :

Upbringing: H: brought up in rural environment, spend childhood in the country side, catholic family

Y: spend long periods in the rural west of Ireland, belonged to anglo-irish protestant

Interest: H: experienced the cultural division of Ulster at school

Y: minority

Themes: H: interest in civil rights movement, archaeology

Y: irish revival, myth, mystical doctrines and magic

Imagery: H: rural life, human isolation, irish history, draws his images from country life and archaeology

Y: art, beauty, eternity, tradition, death, draws his images from nature and mith

Aim: H: his poetry aims (mirare) at enlarging (ampliamento) consciousness and bringing about a new 

knowledge

Y: aimed at reviving irish culture

Seamus Deane - Reading in the dark (95G)

He comes from northern Ireland, schoolmate of the poet Heaney. The story gives an idea of what growing up in post-war northern Ireland was like.

The boy enjoys reading novels and tales when he is in bed at night: now he is reading a novel called "The poor old woman", that belonged his mother. This novel is about the great rebellion of 1978, and the protagonists are two lovers, Ann and Robert. In the second section the english teacher of the boy reads another novel, written by a country boy. It is about everyday-life, and the boy feels embarrassed because in his novels he writes only about rebellions, love affairs and fights.

Plot: Narrator: young boy, born into a catholic working-class family, tries to unravel (districare) the mystery hiding in his family's politically active past. The more he learns about the past, the more complex becomes the relationship with his parents. His uncle joined the IRA and disappeared during the 1922 Irish civil war.

Double narrative: the novel consist of short and carefully dated chapters which established a historical perspective. The narrator is never given a name. The narration goes forward and backward: the narrator looks back to tell the story and goes forward to grow up and understand.

Themes: shows the in northern Ireland the political and private are bound together. The church plays an important and ambiguous rule in the play [shares (condivide) the people's sense of injustice, accomplice (complice) of the Government by controlling education and teaching the bots acceptance and inner peace]. The experience of brutal violence (brutal beating of narrator and the father by the police).

The language: detailed and poetic, but never sentimental, sometimes allows the elements of parody and humour.

Division of the story: l: 1-22 + 32-40 + 54-64 main narrative; l: 23-31 1° story; l: 41-53 2° story >> 1-37: 1°section: at home at night; 38-62 2° section: at school during the lesson

Date: October 1948 > established a historical perspective

Narrator: he likes reading and would probably like to become a writer. He's imaginative and perceives there is a mystery concerning his mother and family

Mother: she wrote the shopping list, counted up the grocer's book (droghiere), rolled (roteare) her eyes, the boy said prayers or aspiration under her breath. The realistic portrait is modified by the sense of mystery conveyed (suggerire) through the boy's discovery of her past as a young girl. Terms which reinforced the idea: faded (sbaidito), seemed, strange, vague

Embedded narrative: 2° story > 1° story > main narrative technique (come 3 rettangoli uno dentro l'altro...)

The narrator draws inspiration for his essay, from the first novel he had read (mother's book). The boys imagination works through memory. He re-imagines and changes what he has read.

All the chapters in the novel ends with a powerful image. The words "sibilant, wispy, aching" sums up the spirit of Ireland: this spirit is made up of the hard life of the country people and a latent rebellion spirit. The life of the country is made of secrets, danger and suffering

Contextualization:

on a superficial level this story refers to the narrator's habit of reading in the evening,

on a deeper level, it refers to his habit of re-reading a story in his mind through infinities possibilities

the title refers to the narrator's reading into the mysterious past of his family and his parallel development into ad adult person

Pistol (98G)

Being suspected of hiding a gun, the narrator watches his house ransacked (messa a soqquadro) and the brutally beaten by the police.

The narrator did not hear the policeman's voice because he was terribly scared, the pistol the boy show his friends had been given to his father by a German prisoner. The boy had been warned not to mention the gun because the police kept watch on his family.

McKeever was a police informer, was a young man of twenty with a bright smile, looked the soul of candour (sincerità)

The boy hid the gun in a newspaper and buried (seppelllire) it in a stone trenches up the field.

The father, Liam and the boy were driven to the police station

The police beat the father and the boys too

When the boy looked at his father, he could not understand if there were tears on his eyes or if he was winking (fare occhiolino) at him

This experience continue to hunt the boy: he woke up, sweating (sudando) and asking the same questions the police had asked him. He felt like shocking, was obsessed.

The narrator: third-person narrator inside the story, boy's point of view, the narration is going backward.

Contrast of the 1st paragraph: dark-light, black-white, shouting-silence, on and off, opening and closing.

"landed like spaceship": the author uses a poetic device, a simile (similitudine) to convey the working of the child's imagination

the informer, F. McKeever looks very neat (elegante) and friendly, a very respectable person. Deane is here hinting (accennare) at the problem of truth and false appearance.

Search of the house by the police is connoted by a burst of violence: splintered open (fatta a pezzi, frantumata), ripped of(squarciato), crowbarred up(assi del pavimento sollevate con un piede di porco), wallpaper slashed(tapezzeria tagliata), split open(lacerando)

Boy's perspective: the yellow scimitar line, white cloud, his boots sticking to the slimy lino and the cement falling from him in white flakes, objects seemed to be floating, free of gravity, as a polished gleam in the slates that fled (tegole che volavano)

The final image is that of the boy's having nightmare, the haunting(ossessionato) presence of the police, represented by the term "smell", deprives the air of oxygen, metaphor for freedom, Deane's word well expressed what living in a police culture is like.

Contextualization: even if Deane does not give any historical information, he expects(esigere) the reader to know that 1922 was a crucial date in the history of Ireland; it was the time which marked the beginning of a political identity. The war with England ended in a treaty which led to the partition of the island, with the Ulster's Catholic separated into what would soon became a police state, where they were discriminated against an armed protestant minority

Bobby Sands - My day will come (scheda)

Living condition: Privation of any form of right: it is cold, is in a small area, a dirty place. Has nothing to do (boredom=noia) > to kill the time he count how many hours must he wait to the next visit. He could not communicate with other people. Slept on the mattress lying in the floor. He refused to wear the uniform > was covered only with a blanket and a towel (was naked). The only thought that comforted him is the thought of seeing is family > could met his parents once a month, each visit lasted half an hour.

"my journey to nowhere" : use this express because he is in a prison, in a very small cell.

In the other wings (ali) of the prison the police started to block up the cell windows with iron and timber(legno) > they blocked out the sunlight and the sky > to make the prisoner condition worse than before

From his window he sees birds, the night sky, clouds, and now the snow > represent s.thing different

He need for freedom.. The English are bastard: they created a concentration camp.

The cell: is dirty, decaying (avariato) food were scattered in the corners of the floor. On the ceiling (soffitto) there were tee-stained.

Prisoners: in this case are the naked republican political prisoners-of-war: they were condemned to darkness, intense cold, an empty stomachs and the four walls were dirty, condemned to burden (peso) of torture, continue boredom, tension and fear, privation of basic necessities like exercise and fresh air, no association with other human beings except a shout from behind a closed heavy steel door, depression, cold, beating.

Bobby: wants to preserve his own identity, consider himself as a political prisoner, does not recognise England as an authority, an enemy and so he does not put the uniform of a prisoner >>> England could never destroy our spirit even if it has a big power with his arsenal. Describes its cell like a tomb in order to make the reader visualise his life in prison better.

Prison: nothing was real, everything reminds of a nightmare: the setting, the terrible cold, the absence of any human being and inhuman life condition. Life is like in a concentration camp.

W.B. Yeats - Easter 1916 (45F)

He was born in Dublin in 1865 into a professional middle-class family and inheritated the dilemma of the Anglo-Irish Protestant minority to which his parents belonged to, feeling Irish as much as British.

He belonged to the Irish Republican Brotherhood.

Little by little the disenchantment with the nationalism moved increased since he saw it dominated by the values of the catholic middle classes. The heavy-handed treatment by British authorities of the Easter Rebellion in 1916 brought about a change in his political attitude. He gradually placed his sympathies with the "moderate" members of the government, and early in 1922 he became a senator in the upper house of the Dial.

Date:Questione irlandese 

:Enrico VIII diventa re d'Inghilterra (nel 1541 si proclama Re d'Irlanda), avvia una dura repressione del Cattolicesimo e la distruzione degli insediamenti monastici.

Dopo numerose ribellioni, duramente represse de Cromwell, espropriazione delle terre a favore dei proprietari protestanti.

Leggi che vietano il possesso della terra da parte dei cattolici.

"Act of Union", che sopprime il parlamento di Dublino e l'Irlanda diventa parte del Regno Unito.

Daniel O'Connel, leader degli Irlandesi cattolici, con la sua "Catholic Emancipation" ottiene l'emancipazione dei cattolici.

La "Grande carestia"(potatoes famy), dovuta a una malattia delle patate (e dalla deliberata volontà del governo Britannico di non aiutare i vicini irlandesi) alla morte di più di un milione di persone e all'emigrazione di altrettante (per lo più negli USA).

Gli Irlandesi d'America fondano la Irish Republican Brotherhood (i membri sono detti "feniani") con il dichiarato obiettivo di ottenere l'indipendenza del paese.

Charles Stuart Parnell, rappresentante Irlandese alla camera dei comuni, chiede "l'Home rule" (autonomia dell'Irlanda nell'ambito dell'impero Britannico).

Viene fondata la Gaelic League, per restituire dignità alla cultura Gaelica.

Aprile 1916:Rivolta di Pasqua (Easter Rising): a Dublino gli indipendentisti repubblicani dell'Irish Republican Brotherhood (Fratellanza Repubblicana Irlandese) organizzano l'insurrezione, cui partecipano i Volontari Irlandesi e l'ICA. Viene proclamata Repubblica d'Irlanda, che ha vita breve a seguito della dura repressione inglese.

Guerra d'indipendenza irlandese avviata dall'Irish Republican Army (Esercito Repubblicano Irlandese) con il sostegno politico del Sinn Fein (Noi Stessi) che termina la firma del Trattato di Pace Anglo-Irlandese che sancisce la partizione dell'Irlanda: le 6 contee nord-orientali dell'isola (ritagliate artificialmente in modo da avervi una maggioranza precostituita di Unionisti) restano parte del 6 Dicembre 1921 Regno Unito, con un Governo e un Parlamento autonomi; le 26 contee del resto del paese formano lo Stato Libero d'Irlanda entro il Commonwealth britannico.

Guerra civile nelle 26 contee irlandesi tra sostenitori e oppositori del Trattato di Pace Anglo-Irlandese.

Maggio 1923:Cessa la guerra civile con la vittoria dei sostenitori del Trattato di Pace Anglo-Irlandese.

Eamon de Valera fonda il Fianna Fáil.

Elezioni Generali nello Stato Libero. Eamon de Valera diviene primo ministro per la prima volta.

L'Irish Republican Army (IRA) viene dichiarato illegale nello Stato Libero d'Irlanda.

Viene approvata la costituzione irlandese attraverso un referendum. La costituzione (articoli 2 e 3) rivendica la sovranità sull'intera isola di Irlanda.

Nella Seconda guerra mondiale il Governo De Valera mantiene la neutralità dello Stato Libero d'Irlanda.

Lo Stato Libero d'Irlanda diviene ufficialmente Repubblica d'Irlanda, ed esce dal Commonwealth. L'Ireland Act garantisce la permanenza dell'Irlanda del Nord all'interno del Regno Unito.

:L'IRA avvia la cosiddetta "border campaign". La campagna cessa a causa della mancanza di un valido supporto.

Eamon de Valera diviene Presidente dell'Irlanda.

Il governo Inglese invia proprie truppe in Irlanda del Nord per "ristabilire l'ordine".

Nel clima di tensione politico e sociale si ricostruisce l'IRA (definita provisionals in contrapposizione agli Officials, che diverranno sempre più marginali),

Repressione dell'IRA e violenze dell'esercito inglese contro i civili cattolici.

30 Gennaio 1972:Domenica di Sangue (Bloody Sunday): i paracadutisti britannici uccidono a Derry 14 dimostranti disarmati.

Il conflitto si inasprisce il Governo britannico abolisce Governo e Parlamento dell'Irlanda del Nord.

Durissime lotte dei prigionieri politici irlandesi con il sostegno di massa dei cattolici nord irlandesi, che avranno il loro culmine con lo sciopero della fame al oltranza che porterà alla morte di Bobby Sands e altri 9 prigionieri.

L'IRA si ristruttura. Il governo Thatcher non riesce a piegare la resistenza irlandese (che compie dure azioni anche in territorio inglese).

Il governo inglese di John Mayor (con il pieno consenso dell'amministrazione USA) lancia segnali distensivi alle forze repubblicane.

31 Agosto 1994:L'IRA proclama un cessate il fuoco unilaterale per favorire l'apertura di negoziati ufficiali.

Lo stagnamento dei negoziati spinge l'IRA a riaprire le ostilità

Tony Blair riapre negoziati ufficiali includendo anche il Sinn Fein.

10 Aprile 1998:Dopo una lunga serie di traversie vengono firmati l'Accordo Multipartito e l'Accordo Britannico-Irlandese

RACISM AND DISCRIMINATION:

DIVERSITY: a range of differences of condition, quality or type

Are those elements, features because of discrimination: ≠culture, tradition, language. Way of behave, food, dress, faith

PREJUDICE: it involves a feeling favourable (favorevole) or unfavourable toward a person, a thing, a group of people

RACIAL DISCRIMINATION: the practice of treating one person or group less fairly(imparzialmente) or less well then other people or groups. It is the formulation of opinions about others not based on their individual merits but rather(piuttosto) on their membership in a group with assumed characteristics

RACIAL STEREOTYPES: a fixed general image that a lot of people believe to represent a particular racial group of people

Racism implies a set of assumptions about the superiority of one's own race or ethnic group often accompanied by prejudice against members of other racial or ethnic groups different in terms of their biological, physical or cultural characteristics. Racism may be used to justify discrimination, verbal or physical abuse, or even genocide as in Nazi-Germany, or as practised by European settlers against American Indians.

In any age or country, otherness and diversity have always represented either a potential danger to get rid of or the object of awe, if not admiration.

In the last decades racism and discrimination have increased dramatically both in Europe and in the USA. The superiority of one race has often been accompanied by violent prejudices against members of other racial or ethnic groups different in terms of their biological, physical or cultural characteristics.

The negro speaks of river, LANGSTON HUGHES pp. 220

FEATURES: Hughes + Whitman:

saw America as a nation in progress and approached the writing of their poems in a non-traditional way

Free in choice of subjects and wrote about matters traditionally non-suitable for poetry

American dream

Change the world through poetry

Chose to speak the mask of I , that wasn t individual but collective

Hughes became the poet of the black masses, choose to go back to the roots of blackness, to deal with his conflicts and contradictions, drawing(estraendo) from the folk tradition (the Spiritual + blues)

Music had served as an escape, an affirmation of the beauty in life, a metaphor of human life

JAZZ (solo + improvisation) represent the rebellion in a puritan society, the vision of an alternative way of life.

Question of racial identity: Africa as a symbol of lost roots, of a lost past.

Exalted the colour of his skin express his will to preserve and exalt the characteristics of people + search for a black aesthetic

Text: he search an answer to question of the Afro-American s identity

Meditative and thoughtful tone, alternance of short and long sections, repetition like in black music, free verse, 5 parts.

Sound device: refrain(ritornello),repetition

I is collective. The soul of black people has changed in times like rivers revaluating his African roots

Actions: I ve known rivers, I bathed, I built, looked upon the Nile, I heard, I ve seen

Result of action: my soul has gronw deep like the rivers.

Rivers are the symbol of eternity, to bathe, to drink his water => became immortal, the soul grow deep

The rivers: Euphrates: ancient + beginning of civilization, freedom.

Congo: blackrace, beginning of black race, freedom

Nile: slavery, (jews+black),

Mississipi: emancipation of black america, cotton field, passage from slavery to freedom

Refugee blues WYSTAN HUGH AUDEN pp.81 F

FEATURES:

Auden is one of the so called "Oxford poets" who in thirties used poetry to discuss ideas and to try to improve the world they lived in. he thought the role of poetry is : to tell stories of particular people and experiences, from which each according to his own immediate and particular need may draw(tracciare) his own conclusion. The poet task is to act as a public voice to support the cause for freedom against tyranny, to express the anxieties of the contemporary left-wing(di sinistra) intellectuals.

Influenced by Marx (man's alienation under capitalism)

" by Freud, Eliot (his poetry as a revelation)

" by Bertold Brecht

Thirties as a "low dishonest decade"

Mode: fictional, didactic, comic, contemplative poetry

Form: free verse, used simple popular forms as ballads and songs

Wants a new society, a new self, a new life

Blues:(one voice) reflects the sadness and the tribulation of the Afro-American on a secular level, as opposed to the Ghospel (chorus) songs.

It is a private and personal which the anguished (tormentato) one directs his sorrow into a song and find happiness in release(liberazione)

Is the philosophical expression of the individual contemplating his situation in relation to the condition surrounding him

University of the content that can be understand by everyone

Composed under the pressure of improvisation

Simple diction, repetitions, elementary rhyme scheme

Employs (impiega)a modified blues form to deal with the flight of Jewish refugees from Nazi's Germany

Poem:

Form: 3 lines stanzas with the third longer    Language: simple and colloquial

Rhyme: AAB    Ritm: slow due to he repetition and the long vowels

Tone: melancholy, resigned

Themes: homeless, social injustice, emargination, lack of solidarity

The poem reflects Auden's social and political awareness (consapevolezza) and his solidarity with the Jews persecuted by Hitler.

In June he married Thomas Mann's daughter just to ensure her escape from Germany

Refugees: force to leave his home, his country, because of war, political, religious, ideals, economical reason, have no passport, identity cards. Are homeless, seen as intrudersin the country they flee to. Pets are treated better then they are and enjoy greater freedom. They are persecuted. No identity, dignity, name.

Nazi's propaganda ( stanza 6)

Poetic: (stanza3, 7, last one)

Concentration camps+ghettos (11+12)

Contrasting images: Stanza 1: mansion vs. holes (case e buchi) rich vs. poor

Stanza 4: "officially dead. still alive" refugees are considered dead by the government of their country, but there are alive in body

Stanza 9: animal vs. refugees freedom of fishes and birds + loved showed towards pets + they  have a cover (riparo) vs. the refugee persecuted, homeless, hostility

I HAVE A DREAM, MARTIN LUTHER KING dalle schede

His speech is a pacific invitation to all, blacks and whites, to brake the wall of racism and discrimination, and to live together without prejudice.

He remembers that one hundred years before a great American had signed the Emancipation Proclamation, but at his time, a hundred years later the situation of Negro hasn't changed: "the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination.

The Constitution and the Declaration of Independence promised the equality of black and white, they said that the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness would have been guaranteed, but America didn't maintain his promise (he has given the Negro people a bad check which which has come back marked "insufficient founds").

Now is the time to "cash this check", and we remind America the fierce urgency of now. "There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges".

He remind Negro people not to achieve the justice and the equality with violent and wrong actions. "Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred...

Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force".

The destiny of black is connected with that of white, so the have to work together ("we cannot walk alone"). He concludes his speech talking about his dream, that in the future the discrimination will not more exist: "I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day".

Key words: brotherhood, dignity, no separation, human and civil rights

Vivid images used by the spekers to describe the negro's condition: in the flames of injustice, long night in captivity, the negro's life is crippled (menomata) by the manacles (manette)of segregation and the chains of discrimination, still not free, lives in a lonely island of poverty in the midst(centro) of a vast ocean of material prosperity, finds himself in exile in his own land

the author employs the semantic area of commerce, finance to point out that the black have gathered (raccogliere ) the injustice.

Appeal made by King: he appeals to the end of dark segregation, wants to the free the nation from racial injustice. Brotherhood has to born, appeals to negros' discontent, society has to change

Calls for a struggle made by a soul force, for a non-violence struggle, for a creative protest fight on the level discipline, dignity. He is evoking a protest avoiding physical violence

What he thinks of the white brothers: many are realizing that their destiny is linked to the freedom of blacks

His dream: the American dream ( a nation based on freedom in speech, press and religion, on equality, liberty, freedom), that all men are created equal, hopes for brotherhood, that Mississippi (a desert state) will become a oasis of freedom and justice, that the future generation will live in a nation where they will not be judge by the color of their skin, but by the content (contenuto) of their character.

Civil rights will be granted when negros will vote, travel everywhere like the withes do, no segregation more

D1O NIGHTMARE, MALCOLM X dalle schede

The 'X' also stood for the unknown original surname of the slaves from whom Malcolm X descended, in preference to continuing to use a name which would have been given by the slave owner. This rationale made many members of the Nation of Islam change their surnames to X.

Malcolm X, real name Malcolm Little, spent some years in prison where he joined the black muslim sect. Once released, he campaigned for black separatism, condoning violence in self-defence. He later modified his view preaching racial solidarity. Assassinated in 1965 by Black muslim opponents.

TEXT: while M. X's mother was pregnant the Ku Klux Klan surrounded the house asking for M's father (a Baptist minister) to come out. His mother stood at the door showing that she was pregnant ( she wants to provoke a sense of pity). The KKK gave a warning to M's mother: they had better to go away, to leave the town. Marcus Garvey's headquarter was in Harlem, NY, he exhorted the black masses to return to their ancestral African homeland, he was considered the most controversial black man on heart. Malcolm's father preached (predicare) Garvey's ideas. The father decided to wait until Malcolm's birth and then to move, he was not a frightened negro. He was a big, six-foot-four, very black man. Had only one eye, came from Georgia, M didn't know how he lost the eye. He believed, as Garvey did, that freedom, independence and self-respect could never be achieved by the Negro in America, negro should leave America, the father had devoted his life to disseminate this philosophy among his people. He had seen his six brother die by violence (he will die by the white man's hands ). Only one would die in bed.

Malcolm died by violence, his mother was born in Grenada, in the British West Indies, looked like a white woman (her father was white), she had straight black hair, her accent didn't sound like a negro's, she shamed about her white father. It was because of him that Malcolm had reddish-brown color of skin and hair. At first he accept this color like a status symbol, then he learn to hate every drop of that white rapist's blood that was in him.

DISGRACE, COETZEE dalle schede

Discrimination of blacks over whites. Coetzee wants to demonstrate that the political change can do almost nothing to eliminate human misery. Lucy, David's daughter, understand that to live where she lives means tolerating brutalization, humiliation and accepting racial discrimination, he cannot understand that. David is a professor in cape Town in newly post-apartheid South Africa. He is fired in disgrace after having an affair with one of this students, goes to stay with his daughter, who kennels dogs and grows flowers. He helps in the euthanasia and disposal (eliminazione) of sick and unwanted dogs. Lucy and David are attacked by three black men, one from whom rapes Lucy.

Three black men go in violently. David shivers, hops that they will not do harm to Lucy, he tries to speak Italian and French, is helpless, preys listening to the idiom, is like a missionary, a martyr. The men kill violently the dogs (climax) shouting at them. They sprinkle David with alcohol and set fire to him. He is afraid for violence above Lucy.

David's feelings: tension, fear, hope, attempt to save himself, desperation and awareness of total defeat.

The tree are violent unscrupulous men

At first David has a sense of hope that turns into desperation

The atmosphere is violent and menacing

Point of view: David's

Respond to the scene: strong sense of amnesia, speechless, angry, paralyzed, sense of inhumanity, men are worse than animal, no love humanity, no sense of guilty for what the tree are doing.

What the author wants to demonstrate: that the political change bought by Nelson Mandela can do nothing to eliminate human violence linked to racial prejudice

THE BLACKS AS INVISIBLE

Ellison plays off images of darkness and blindness on the one hand and light and vision on the other throughout the book. A related series of images concerns whiteness and blackness; for example, the black hero, who is the victim of a society that tries to destroy or deny his identity, works in a factory producing white paint. The main symbol is of course invisibility. The narrator's name is never revealed; he is invisible in that both blacks and whites ignore his individuality. Even the cellar where the hero lives may be regarded as the symbol of a fertile retreat from which he will emerge reborn, or, in Freudian terms, as a womb, or, in mythical terms, as a magical underground world. However, the book transcends local and ethnic aspects and focuses on problems shared by modern men of all races: the isolation of the individual in an impersonal city; the search for identity; the relationship between violence and guilt, reality and illusion.

INVISIBLE MAN : The nameless narrator is a black man who tries to find his identity in relation to white society. He is living in a forgotten basement on the outskirts of Harlem, illuminated by 1,369 bulbs, and he is draining off the power from Monopolated Light & Power without paying for it.

He relates his attempts to explore the depths of his consciousness in a narcotic dream induced by a blues record in which Louis Armstrong asks the ironic question: "What did I do to be so black and blue?". In this state of hibernation, the Invisible Man sets out to recount several episodes of his life up to the moment he looked for an underground refuge, and chose to remain there until he could emerge into real rather than artificial light.

LIVING UNDER GROUND: that extract is from the Prologue which opens the novel. A white man bumped into the protagonist, who feels like a phantom. He decides to receive the apologize from him but he want not. So they began to fight.

Chinua Achebe - Things of Fall apart (193G)

English colonization:

Was born in a small Nigerian village (ex-biafra) in 1930, he describes the gradual decay of the Ibo traditional society from colonial time to independence and neo-colonisation. He describes the arrival of whites in Nigeria, what the colonialism did, how it destroy the culture. He refused white imperialism, the names and the language that the white tried to impose. He denounced the beginning of European colonisation. In the "2nd class citizen", instead, Buchi describes the will to move to England, colonialism was widespread in Nigeria, Buchi shows the consequences of colonialism > destroy the tradition, the identity of Africa, the protagonist wants to improve her condition, to get in touch with the white people, theme of discrimination, of ghettos, of slavery under man and white.

PLOT: is a realistic novel, set in a fictional town, tells the story of Okonkwo, an important men in the Ibo tribe, from the days when white men appeared. The story is narrated in 3rd person, from the point of view adopted of a wise and sympathetic Ibo elder (anziano).

AIM OF THE NOVEL: the writer must help his people showing what happened and what was lost in the past. Thus (perciò) the development of a modern nation consciousness was Achebe's main aim.

MEANING OF THE TITLE: the title refers to the crumbling (sbriciolarsi) of African society in its encounter (incontro) with colonialism and Christianity at the turn of the 19th century and comes from W.B. Yeats's poem "the 2nd coming" , four lines of which are quoted (citate) on the title-page (frontespizio): "Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world". There are ironies and reversal (capovolgimento) in Achebe's appropriation of Yeats's imagery: for the cycle that is ending is, for Achebe, an age of autonomy in his Ibo homeland, and the cycle that will follow will be a Christian cycle, the cycle that, for Yeats is coming to the end
TEXT: the first encounter between whites and blacks in Nigeria.
Time: it was the time of the year when everybody was at home. The harvest (raccolto) was over.
Six missionaries(one was a white man) arrived at the village, this arrival caused a considerable stir (eccitazione). The white missionary spoke trough an interpreter, an Ibo, who speak a different dialect, people laughed at this dialect (there differences between blacks, used different expressions > there were different situations in Africa)
The bicycle of the missionary was seen as a "iron-horse", the bicycle was s.thing mysterious, unknown.
The white missionary told them about a new God, the Creator of all the world and men and women, they told that they worshipped (adorare) false gods, gods of wood and stone > Ibo's reaction: murmur (mormorio). He told that all dead people went before God for judgment, all evil men and the heathens (pagano) who worshipped to wood and stone were thrown into a fire that burned like palm-oil. The only salvation from this terrible destiny was this new god. The Ibo's gods weren't alive, have no power, were only piece of wood and stone >> The whites pretends to change the Ibo's beliefs, want them to believe in something they couldn't see, saying that their gods were false.
The Ibo's could not understand how this new god generated a son without a wife and so without a sexual act, could not understand the concept of the Holy Trinity > the protagonist, Okonkwo, thought the white man was mad and went away to drink palm-wine. Nwoye, Okonkwo's son, had been captivated (affascinato) by the magic of the holy trinity, he found a form of poetry in this new religion, maybe because he did not accept some aspects of the Ibo's religion (killing of the twins).
Point of view: natives' one > the reader shares the same sense of suspect and detachment (distacco) of the natives.
Main ≠: the Christian God loves all men like a father.
The 2 worlds are completely different. The encounter of natives with Christianity correspond to the crumbling (sbriciolarsi) of the traditional African society at the turning of the century.
Language: is realistic and concrete
Theme: effect of the European colonization on the African culture

Toni Morrison - Beloved (160G)
She was born into a black worker family in Ohio in 1931. She was educated at Lorian School and then at Howard University, and in 1955 she got her degree Master of Arts from Cornell University.
Her first novel deal with the misery and desperation of black communities in the 1920s and 1930s. then she wrote a novel about sex and violence. For "Beloved" a poem of 1987 she received the Pulitzer Price for Fiction in 1988.
Her novels explore the process of growing up black, female and poor, of the woman's struggle for freedom against racism and violent American society. She concentrates on the relation between the pressures of community, the patterns established within families, and on the developing sense of self. She succeeds in giving an insight into the problems of the human race: at the core of all her novels is a penetrating view of the heartbreaking dilemmas which torment people of all races.
Her most peculiar ability is to be able to create vivid, beautiful language and striking characters. She employs sophisticated narrative devices, like flash-backs and shifting points of view.

The protagonist is a proud, black woman, Sethe, who has escaped North from slavery to Sweet Home. Here she lives with her daughter, Denver, and an old friend of hers, Paul D.
The world of Sethe changes from one of love to one of violence and death when a beautiful young black woman, Beloved, mysteriously appears. Sethe give her hospitality but the girl turns out to became the real master of Sweet Home and succeeds in controlling Sethe, Denver and Paul D.
At the end we realize that the girl is Sethe's baby daughter, who died at her mother hands, who has returned to claim retribution.
The main themes are the racial issues (in fact the whole story revolves around the life of a former of slave and her attempts to get on with her life as best as she can), family relationships and memory.