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The Modern Age - Coggle Diagram

- - - - His People's Budget was rejected by the Conservative House of Lords, so Liberals decided to reform the House of Lords. Parliament Act of 1911 removed right to veto money bills by the Lords and established elections every 5 years
  - - - In 1918, the Sinn Féin party (leftist) won the elections except in Ulster and set up and independent parliament in Dublin ("Dail"). Irish volunteers set up the IRA (Irish Republican Army) and declared war on Britain. During Bloody Sunday in 1920, during a football match, British soldiers killed a dozen Irish people to avenge the death of a dozen British spies. In 1921 an Irish Free State was founded: a civil war broke out between Irish people who accepted and those who didn't, then Ireland was divided between Ulster and Eire.
    - - USA President Wilson presented a plan to create the League of Nation, but it failed
  - - - 1929: Wall Street crash (Black Thursday) led to worldwide economic crisis (The Great Depression), shutting down of factories and banks. Great Plains region devastated by a drought which led to the Dust Bowl and the migration of farmers towards California.
        
        1932: President Roosevelt enforced the New Deal, with 3 aims: relief, recovery, reform (relief for the unemployed, public works, natural resources, farm rehabilitation)
        
        WWII: neutrality, BUT joined it in 1941 + Manhattan Project (research project to test atomic bomb, also involving Enrico Fermi)
- - - - name < title of the anthology "Georgian Poetry", published during George V. es Rupert Brooke: specifically English, countryside, convention of diction
    - - WWI:young men volunteered for military service to reach noble ends. After British defeat at the Battle of Somme in 1916, there was disillusionment. Some improvised verses in the trenches: some supported war and believed in honour and pride, others represented war in a realistic and crude way to awaken the conscience of readers
        
        Rupert Brooke
        
        good student and athlete, handsome, joined WWI at the beginning but died soon in 1915 so he didn't fight a lot. Wrote 5 sonnets in 1914, ex. The soldier with an idealistic spirit about war and death as a reward. Traditional form and sentimental attitude. Became symbol of "young romantic hero"
        
        Wilfred Owen
        
        teacher of English in France, visited a hospital for the wounded and came back to England to enlist in the armym in 1917 went to an hospital for shell shock where he met Sassoon (who supported Owen and introduced him to a literary circle), returned to the front in 1918 and died. In his poems, ex Dulce et decorum est , he represents war, gas casualties, mad men, he invented "pararhymes" (half rhymes with the same consonants but different vowels). In the preface to Disabled and other poems, he writes that his book is not about heroes but about the pity of war and the role of the poet is to warn.
        
        Siegfried Sassoon
        
        wrote romantic verse and then joined the war and was sent to France, wrote ironical and sardonic poems about war, publicly protested against war and in the House of Commons in 1917 and was saved by a friend who convinced everyone he was mad, so he was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital where he met Owen.
    - - < free subject, short poems, no moral comment, choice of a precise image or subject, no metrical regularity in rhythm, precision
    - - < Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal: indirect statements, images to evoke, sound of words conveying ideas, quotations from other literatures, free verse, free choice of meaning by the reader. poet as an explorer of experience, language to create meanings
        
        T. S. Eliot
        
        born in Missouri, English and European cultural background, studied Metaphisical poets and rehabilitated them, studied John Donne and Dante (who best expressed a universal situation with clear images and compressed and lucid style), studied in Paris and met Bergson and read works by Symbolists, married a mentally unstable woman and poetry became his refuge, became director of the publisher Faber&Faber and published the young Pound and Auden, became a British citizen and joined the Anglican Church as an answer to modern aridity (wrote Catholic poems such as Ash Wednesday and Four Quartets and plays as Murder in the Cathedral), separated from his wife and committed her to a mental asylum (with a terrible sense of guilt), his writing became more ethical and pjilosophical, Nobel prize for literature
        
        2 periods: before the conversion (about aridity of the world, hopelessness, loss of values), after the conversion
        
        artist had to be impersonal and was separated from his product, the emotion of art is impersonal, his characters are archetypes of 20th century people who turn their personal emotions into universal ones for everyone to identify with
        
        The waste land: preceded by a Latin and Greek epigraph from "the satyricon" by Petronius and the dedication to Ezra Pound ("il miglior fabbro"). 5 sections. One: the burial of the Dead (4 scenes: a lady remembers childhood, invitation to journey to the desert, a clairvoyant does tarot reading and makes predictions that will come true in the following scenes, a man encounters in a ghostly London a man he had once fought in battle). Two: a game of chess (2 scenes: a woman waits for her lover and her thoughts become increasingly neurotic, two women talk about another woman saying that she has to become more beautiful otherwise her husband will leave her). Three: The fire sermon (sermon given by Buddha) (Tiresias meets the merchant of the tarot cards and is invited into a hotel for homosexuals, here he foretells a squalid sexual approach between a typist and a clerk, Queen Elizabeth I doesn't care about love declarations). Four: Death by water (Phlebas the Phoenician drowns and dies, forgetting worldly problems). Five: What the thunder said. (People suffering in Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna and London, which are destroyed and then rebuilt and destroyed again. In India, in the Ganges, the thunder of the Upanishad rumbles and gives three commands: to give, to be compassionate and to restrain.
        
        no order or unity, fragmentary collection of various states of mind and impressions, speaking voice looks beyond the limits of space and time and should be Tiresias (Sophocle's blind prophet that has lived as both sexes)
        
        main theme: fertility of mythical past vs sterility of the present after WWI
        
        allusions and quotations from literary and religious works from different cultures. History is the repetition of the same events and a premise for the present and still exists in the present (past and present exist simultaneously and shifts are caused by free associations of the mind and evoked by the poet through myths)
        
        style: poetic (blank verse, ode, quatrain) + free verse. Complex style and technique of implication that requires active participation by the public. Objective correlative: a set of objects or a situation is the formula for a particular emotion (source of the emotion is not the single object but their pairing), juxtaposition of poetic and squalid images, repetition of images or phrase
    - - left-wing poets who met at Oxford: Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis, MacNiece, Spender. Concerned with political and social aspects ex Unemployement, Fascism, Nazism. vs TS Eliot's complexity. Used slang, jazz rhythm, simple language to communicate with fellow men moral messages
        
        Auden
        
        loved reading fairy tales, myths and legends, psychology, technical works. Studied at Oxford and became the leader of the Oxford poets, went to Berlin and witnessed the rise of Nazism, served as ambulance driver during Spanish Civil War, was homosexual and moved to America in 1939 to avoid criminal offence, his political period of poetry ended and his social and anti-political poetry started, acquired British citizenship
        
        2 periods: English period (< Freud and psychanalisis BUT in relation to society and not only to individual, < Marx. Poetry has to tell stories about parrticular people and experiences from which each person must draw their own conclusions. American period (no more political commitment and social leadership, disillusionment with politics after Republican defeat in Spain, Moscow purge trials by Stailn, Soviet-German non aggression pact of 1939. Style inspired by different cultures, improvement from the self and not from society
        
        themes: love (cannot be achieved without sorrow), modern suffering, unfaithfulness, passing of time, greed, religious doubt, death and mourning, politics, social concerns, citizenship, vs State that reduces citizens to statistics, horrors of war and totalitarianisms, quest (English: for a new society and self; American: for a new life and better future)
        
        style: experimentation in language, tradition, free verse, metre, rhyme. Poet's task: public voice to analyse social, political and economical problems
        
        Another time: collection of poems written and published at the beginning of WWII when he moved to USA. He enters "another time" because of the exile and shares it with other refugees. Turn from political to ethical themes. 3 sections: "People and places" (meditative, relationship man-nature), "Lighter poems" (light comic tone, domesticity"), "Occasional poems" (celebrates deaths of great figures like Freud and Yeats and interprets great historical events like German invasion of Poland
    - - vs intellectualism of Oxford poets. They talked about love, birth, death, sex. ex Dylan Thomas
    - - born in Dublin but grew up in London (he felt both British and Irish), studied old Celtic heroic tales, was a nationalist and fought for the idea of a distinctive Irish literature, bought a medieval tower that will recurr as a symbol in his work, became a senator for the Irish free state and sided with the Protestant minority
      - 3 periods: early period (Romantic and Decadent, Irish folklore, symbolism <French symbolists), middle period (more modern and flexible style, symbols to evoke universal myths), later period (maturity, passionate intensity)
      - role of the artist: creation of a new culture with Irish basis to be shared by Irish people (Irish cultural renaissance). Idea of history: 2000-year cycles of civilizations going from bestial to intellectual to anarchical.
      - joined a mystical society (the Theosophical Society), where he studied Tybetan mysteries and Buddhism, magic and esoteric symbols as a way to have clues about ther unconscious mind
      - themes: beauty and eternity of art, relationship between Irish people and tradition, age, clash between failing body and willing heart, death (unlike animals, man dies many times before his death), every defeat is a series of deaths and rebirths, heroic individual, lonely heroes
      - 2 kinds of symbols: emotional (evoke emotions), intellectual (evoke ideas). Symbols and images penetrate the Great Memory (similar to Jung's collective unconscious) and and embody great truths and revelations (visionary dimension)
      - style: antithesis, oxymoron, paradox, long sentences, frequent enjambements, words referring to senses and motion verbs, bird imagery (falcon: violence and freedom, swan: perfection or divine violence) or other imagery (tower: loneliness and reclusion, dark future)
      - gyre: similar to a funnel or a double vortex with two opposite spirals that grow and go back when they have reached the climax of maximum expansion. Human's mind evolution is a process towards the climax and back when there is a sudden revelation so that the centre cannot hold anymore
  - - - psychological: development of character's mind, human relationships
        
        Conrad
        
        duplicity in life and works: born in Poland (partitioned between Russia, Prussia and Austria) and was exiled to Russia with family, parents died and he was brought up by an uncle in France. Trained as a mariner in English ships and learnt English and became a British subject, met people from different social classes and backgrounds, journeyed to Congo in Africa (published his journal, The Congo diary, about the brutality of colonialism), became a writer.
        
        role of the writer (described in preface to The nigger of the narcissus): to record the complex pattern of life as he saw it and to explore the meaning of human condition
        
        he set his stories at sea or in exotic places to hisolate characters and make their problems stand out. Heroes are solitary with ambiguous past and uncertain future, viewed externally through the eyes of other characters, honest and virtuous vs external evil that makes them powerless, conflict between personal feelings and professional duties
        
        no chronological order, yes time shifts. Various narrative techniques: 1st person narrator, invisible narrator, journals, letters, use of different povs (to let the reader weigh morality and showing its relativism. Linking narrator of his stories is oftern Marlow.
        
        wrote in English (1st language Polish, 2nd French) because it was the ideal expression for the complexity of life. Idiomatic dialogues with question and exclamation marks, interjections, various adjectives and complex syntax
        
        Heart of darkness: at the end of the 19th century, Marlow and the sailors are waiting for the tide that will direct them to London, meanwhile he talks to his mates about his first voyage to the Congo River to carry ivory for a Belgian company. He was disillusioned with colonial exploitation and heard about the Company agent Kurtz who became an idol for the natives but fell ill and lost himself ("exterminate all the brutes"), so he had to rescue him. Kurtz died whispering "The horror, the horror", but Marlow tells his girlfriend his last words were her name.
        
        King Leopold II of Belgium had claimed the Congo region in the name of philantropy and anti-slavery and to civilize Africa, but he set up concession companies to exploit rubber and ivory
        
        Kurtz is progressive and liberal, he goes to Congo to manage an ivory station, but he doesn't really know himself so he loses himself in the darkness of the jungle and becomes mad and dies. Marlow doesn't transgress his limits and comes back without fully understanding his limits.
        
        themes: attack on the brutality of colonialism, journey of the self (Marlow), death as the end of life and civility, impossibility of penetrating the surface of reality
        
        frame narrative: anonymous narrator on board of the boat in the present introduces Marlow and closes the narrative; minor characters tell their story; shifts backwards and forwards in Marlow's narrative.
        
        imagery and symbolism, parallels (Thames-Congo RIver, Marlow-Kurtz, black-white, light-dark (meaning different than tradition: Marlow discovers that black in Africa is positive and noble, while white is mean and related to colonialism, violence and expolitation)
        
        D.H. Lawrence
        
        tacher and writer, lost his brother and became his mother's focus, mother died, was both novelist and poet, trevelled through Italy, Australia, Mexico, France. His novel Lady Chatterley''s lover of 1928 was censored for obscenity and published only in the 1960s.
        
        revolutionary (differently from Joyce and Woolf) not in form but in his view of life: vs mechanical and artificial aspects of life, vs industrialization, personal analysis of relationship between the sexes and focus on emotional life. Man is made of: biology+culture. "mind knowledge" (separation between flesh and mind) can lead to act wrongly and to degeneration. The strongest impulse is the sexual one: humanity can be saved by a new man-woman relationship based on sex.
        
        woman is only an instrument for man's happiness, who was intellectually and sexually superior (backward idea contrasting with the actual condition of emancipation during WWI)
        
        traditional omniscient narrator but limiting interventions and mainly presenting characters' pov
        
        Sons and lovers: Morel family has 4 children, the mother and the father don't manage to communicate, the mother transfers her love to their first son but he moves to London, so she starts loving her other son Paul and is jealous of all of his girlfriends, the son has a conflict between love for his mother and love for another woman, the mother dies and the son feels that he has to go ahead.
        
        autobiographical novel and meditation on the Oedipus complex
        
        Paul is son of a miner and a high social class mother. Mr Morel is estranged from family and wife because of this social and cultural difference and domestic violence on his part. Mrs Morel is educated and symbolises Paul's hopes, she is rich but alone and his jealous of younger women who can exploit their intellect
        
        themes: fascination with primitive sexual passions, fear of modern civilization, admiration of nature (ex. rose bush), body vs mind about nature of desire, couples made by people who are opposite
        
        3rd person narrator through Paul's pov
        
        Lady Chatterley's lover: Constance Chatterly is frustrated because her husband has come back from the war important and paralyzed, so she has an affair with another man and becomes pregnant, the husband keeps her but she secretly hopes to be reunited with her love affair.
        
        Feminine consciousness, choice between the Old order and the New Order, sexual freedom.
        
        Forster
        
        father died and mother brought him up in London, lived for a time in Italy and often set novels there (analyzing opposition between English strictness vs Italian relax), went to India. Died in 1970 and in 1971 his 1910 novel Maurice with an homosexual protagonist was published.
        
        bridged the gap between Victorian and early Modern ages. Victorian elements are: plot arrangement, omniscient narrator, no technical innovations. Modern elements are: optimism about the future is questioned through irony (similar to Austen), characters in conflict with their own societies and culture (to which they still remain attached), focus on personal relationships and desire to find harmony in the face of a lost world.
        
        A passage to India: Adela goes to India (in the fictional town of Chandrapore) with her future husband Ronnie's mother Mrs Moore to meet him. Mrs Moore makes friends with Dr Aziz and he leads them to the Marabar Caves. She has a nervous breakdown and Dr Aziz and Adela remain alone, but she accuses doctor Aziz of having attempted to rape her. After a trial that shows racism and prejudices, the woman retracts her accusation but her engagement is broken off, she is rejected by her own people and the doctor career is ruined. Two years later, Dr Aziz hates all English people and believes that only if the English will abandon India these two people could be friends, but not yet.
        
        Indian landscape challenges Western values, it is indifferent and vast, it has no privacy, it disrupts human relationships and awakens desire, it challenges order. The Marabar Caves (in Hindu mythology: womb of the universe; in psychology: unconscious) are a black hole around which the plot revolves and where both Mrs Moore and Adela have traumatic experiences.
        
        Dr Aziz is a Muslim doctor and a widower that loves poetry and is emotional and generous BUT becomes anti-Brisith. Mrs Moore is twice married and represents Christian spirituality and kindness, BUT in the caves her confidence is shaken.
        
        themes: connection between individuals, desire to overcome racial and social differences (title after Whitman's poem, about celebration for the opening of the Suez Canal between Europe and India), belief in goodwill (both relihious and secular), dissolution of British power in India and India's transformation into a new country and development of a national consciousness.
        
        3 parts: Mosque (=knowledge), Caves (=work), Temple (=love). Omniscient narrator and variable pov.
      - experimentation with subjective narrative techniques, exploration of character's mind
        
        Joyce
        
        Born in Dublin, studied modern languages at University college in Dublin, felt more European than Irishn and loved European culture (vs Yeats), believed to increase awareness of Ireland the writer had to portray it from a European and cosmopolitan viewpoint. In Dublin he published his first short story (then opening story of his collection) The sisters, fell in love with Nora Barnacle on 16th June 1904 (the future Bloomsday of Ulysses). In 1905 they went to Trieste and he taught English and met Svevo, in 1914 he published Dubliners and in 1916, with the help of Ezra Pound that loved his unconventional style, his semi-autobiographical novel A portrait of the artist as a young man. Since during WWI Trieste was occupied by the Austrians, he moved to Zurich in 1915 and started writing Ulysses and publishing it in serial form thanks to anonymous donations. In 1920 he moved to Paris and the American bookseller Sylvia Beach published Ulysses in 1922, which was loved by TS Eliot and Yeats; in 1939 he published Finnegans wake. In 1940 (WWII), France was occupied by the Germans and he moved to Zurich where he died.
        
        set all his works in Dublin and Ireland and wanted to realistically portray the life of ordinary people. Style is more important than facts, which appear confused and presented as clues from different povs that trigger some internal reaction in the characters. Works often open in medias res and time is subjective and guided by the character's mind.
        
        vs Church that according to him had possessed Irish minds.
        
        believed in impersonality of the artist (influenced by French Symbolists) that had to render life objectively, artist was detatched and isolated from society
        
        style varied: disciplined and realistic prose of Dubliners with free direct speech, interior monologue with two levels of narration, extreme interior monologue with puns and without punctuation.
        
        Dubliners: 15 short stories which lack action and lead to a moral or spiritual revelation. Divided into 4 sections: childhood (3: the first is The sisters), adolescence (4), maturity (4), public life (4: the last story is The Dead and was a late addition and his first masterpiece, anticipating a move towards the novel).
        
        themes: vs city because it degraded its citizens, Dublin is made by selfish people without true feelings or compassion for the others and it's the centre of paralysis (physical, moral, religious, political, cultural), characters are frozen and enchained and want to escape but can't (awareness marks the climax of the stories)
        
        relistic and coincise descriptions that are juxtaposed with symbolism (details have a deeper meaning), names of objects are carefully chosen, religious symbolism, colour symbolism (ex. grey, yellow and brown stand for despair)
        
        epiphany: sudden spiritual revelation caused by a trivial object or situation which reveals the character's truths
        
        Interior monologue (without reporting verbs), chiasmus, 1st person narrator (for childhood section) and 3rd person narrator (for other sections), simple language that fits characters
        
        A portrait of the artist as a young man: focus on the mind of the protagonist Stephen Dedalus and its development (Bildungsroman/novel of education). He is a young Irish writer in search of experience and he is portrayed from childhood to adolescence until he is 20. H eis the son of a poor father and a Catholic mother and goes to University College in Dublin (like Joyce), he rebels against family, religion and nation and goes to Paris.
        
        the name Stephen Dedalus stands for the first Christian martyr (in this case a martyr for art) and a man that has to escape the labyrinth of Dublin's life. He is transformed from a little boy to a bright student, to corruption (he sleeps with a prostitute), to a devout Catholic (when he hears a priest speak), finally to a devout to art and beauty after his epiphany on the beach.
        
        begins with a 3rd person narrator and ends with a 1st person narrator who employs free direct speech, represents complex inner lives of different characters and filtered through Stephen's unifying consciousness, language develops from the simple one of a child to the articulate one of an artist
        
        Ulysses: set in a single day 16 June 1904, rewrites Homer's Odissey in a anti-heroic and modern way (modern epic), about Leopold Bloom (Ulysses), Molly Bloom (Penelope) and Stephen Dedalus (Telemachus who wants a home and a father).
        
        Stream of consciousness technique, third person narration, dialogues, invention of new words.
        
        Woolf
        
        born in Lonon, daughter of the important man of letters Leslie Stephen so she grew up in am intellectual atmosphere, studied Greek and read books from father's library, spent summers in Cornwall and the sea would be a recurrent element in her literature, mother died when she was 13 and she had the first nervous breakdown, after father's death she moved to Bloomsbury with her sister and painter Vanessa Bell and founded the Bloomsbury Group (vs traditional Victorian morality and sexual codes, vs artistic conventions, vs war, they adopted unconventional sexual practices and were socialists and pacifists). She married Leonard Woolf and they founded the Hogarth Press in 1917. In 1929 she delivered two lectures at Cambridge University, which will then be pulished into A room of one's own. After WWII her mental health worsened and she drowned herself into the River Ouse.
        
        human personality is a continuous shift of impressions and emotions, so the writer focused on them rather than on the events that had provoked them. POV inside charachter's mind through flashbacks, association of ideas, etc.
        
        essay Modern novels: "examine...an ordinary mind on an ordinary day,...receives a myriad of impressions,....an incessant shower of innumerable atoms,...so...if a writer...could write what eh chose...there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe..."
        
        Mrs Dalloway: at 10am of a Wednesday of June 1923, Clarissa Dalloway enetrs a flowers shop in Bond street to buy flowers for that evening's party. She hears a noise and in the street outside there are Septimus Warren Smith and his wife Lucretia walking beside a fancy car. He is a shell shocked soldiers who came back from WWI. Meanwhile, Clarissa receives the visit by her former lover Peter Walsh, who then leaves and sees the Warren Smiths who are going to Dr Bradshaw. Septimus jumps from a window and dies. Clarissa learns about the news by the Bradshaws at the party and feels a strong connection with Septimus.
        
        set in a single ordinary day in a small area of London, focus on ordinary humanity of characters and through the "tunnelling technique" lets the readers experience the character's recollection of his past, the party is the climax
        
        characters from the upper-middle class. Clarissa is 51 and is the wife of the conservative MP Richard Dalloway, she had a possessive father and she refused Peter Walsh who would have wanted to share everything: she is split between need for freedom and class consciousness and she restricts her feelings. Septimus WS is a poet and a soldier and comes back shell-shocked from WWI, losing his best friend whose spectre haunts him. Their connection is not in the plot but in: physical response to experiences, reliance on partner for stability, BUT he doesn't distinguish between internal and external reality, while Clarissa does and is able to accept, decaying and death and goes on.
        
        cinematic devices: close-ups, flashbacks, tracking shots (es. following Clarissa along Bond Street and recording her thoughts, observations, memories and perceptions). Clocks (es. Big Ben) striking are a symbol of death.
        
        stream of consciousness technique (but never without control, always logical and organized), 3rd person past tense narrative, "moments of being" (similar to epiphanies, when the character is able to see the reality behind appearances)
      - focus on social and political problems of the 1930s, with Marxist sympathies
        
        Orwell
        
        born Eric Blair in India, moved to England with his mother, hated pressure to conform and humiliating punishments by the English, became atheist and socialist and acquired an independent personality, enlisted in the Indian Imperial Police and never came back, he was vs English Imperialism in India and vs any form of man’s dominion over man, went back to London and started living in common lodging-houses and wore second-hand clothes to directly experience poverty and to understwnd how institutions for the poor worked, invented his pseudonym (George: link to plain English and common sense, Orwell: name of a reader he loved), was commissioned by a publisher to investigate condition of the miners and factory workers and unemployed, he also went to Spain to report on the Civil War and started believing in Socialism and brotherhood. After WWII he moved to London and joined the BBC where he broadcasted cultural programmes to India and he wrote his masterpieces.
        
        understood the English character (common sense, fair play) and studied it from the outside, unresolved conflict between his middle class background and his identification with the working class
        
        role of the writer: social commitment, left wing sympathies, to interpret reality and had a social function, political, was independent and untied from political parties
        
        1984: written in 1948 imagines the future in 1984, the world is divided into 3 blocks (Oceania, Eurasia, Eastasia) and Oceania is ruled by The Party of the dictator Big Brother who is at war with the other 2 states and controls everything through screens and microphones and the "Thought Police". It represses free thought, sex, individuality. Winston works for the ministry of truth and has to match the official history of the party with the real historical records, he hates the party and illegally keeps a diary and also starts a forbidden relationship with Julia. They are discovered by O'Brien, who pretends to overthrow the Party but he is actually a spy, and are tortured (Winston has to face his worst fear, rats)and brainwashed in Room 101 and eventually they forget each other and adore the Big Brother.
        
        written in 1948 it is linked to the state of the world during WWII, the 3 countries are maybe linked to USA-Britain-URSS, it is a reflection on totalitarianisms (ex. Spain, URSS, Germany), it shows descriptions of hunger, forced labour, mass torture, imprisonment, abuse of power
        
        Oceania includes USA-Atlantic islands-Australia-south Africa. In Oceania there is the country Airstrip One, England's alter ego. The Party is divided into 3 parts: the Inner Party (ruling class), the Outer Party (educated workers), the Proles (proletariat)
        
        Winston Smith (name comes from Chruchill's patriotic appeals for "blood, toil, tears and sweat" during WWII + the commonest English surname) is the last man to believe in human values, he is 39 and alienated from society. Julia is naive and pessimistic, she believes it's impossible to overthrow the Party. O'Brien is mysterious and with no background.
        
        themes: satire on totalitarianisms that destroy fraternity and humanity, memory (linked to morality), trust, language (called Newspeak, so limited that thinking is impossible)
        
        dystopia
        
        Huxley
    - - interior monologue: verbal expression of stream of consciousness, no chronological order, not necessarily logical order, action in the mind
        
        direct interior monologue: no narrator, directly presents character's mind. 3 kinds: two levels of narration (3rd person external narration+ internal to character's mind, ex. Joyce's Ulysses'- Leopold Bloom making breakfast and speaking to his cat), mind level of narration (free flow of thoughts ex. Joyce's Ulysses-Molly's monologue), extreme interior monologue (mind of the character who is dreaming, fusion of words and new expressions)
        
        indirect interior monologue: maintains logical and grammatical organization, descriptions, introductory phrases. ex. Woolf's To the lighthouse
  - - - Fitzgerald
        
        born in Minnesota, associated with rich young men and joined the army during WWI, wrote This side of Paradise, where he described the lifestyle of young people during the Roaring twenties and the sense of loss and emptiness behind money and materialism. He led a glamorous life, full of drugs, alcohol and parties; went to Paris where he finished writing The Great Gatsby, which marked the decline of his popularity. In Tender is the night, he depicts the failure of the dreams and ideals of the 20s.
        
        The Great Gatsby: set in the summer of 1922 in NY and on Long Island, in the fictional areas of West Egg and East Egg. The student Nick Carraway has rented a house in East Egg and is neighbour is the mysterious and rich Jay Gatsby, who gives fabulous parties in his mansion. Nick's cousin Daisy and her husband Tom, introduce Nick to the beautiful but cynical Jordan and they start dating. Jordan tells Nick that Tom has a mistress, Myrtle. Nick is invited to one of Gatsby's parties and learns that he changed his name to rise above and that he had loved Daisy, who loved him back but preferred to marry Tom. Nick makes it possible for Gatsby and Daisy to meet again and to begin an affair. When Tom discovers it, Daisy escapes but accidentally runs over Myrtle, so the woman's husband shoots Gatsby (because Daisy had used his car) and then himself. Tom and Daisy make up, nobody comes to Gatsby's funeral. Nick leaves Jordan and goes back home. The American Dream has failed.
        
        Jay Gatsby is mysterious and organizes parties he seldom attends, he is a self-made man and rich and attractive, with past secrets (like a Romantic hero) who dies for his dream. Nick Carraway is both and observer and a participant and the only character with morals, he is the outsider, he represents the contrast between East and West and at the end he goes back to the West (considered more moral by Fitzgerald). Tom Buchanan is wealthy, unfaithful, arrogant and aggressive. Daisy represents the object of desire and the American Dream, she is moody and impulsive, careless and not loyal. The American dream is based on the false ideas that Gatsby has formed about Daisy.
        
        Nick is a retrospective narrator, book is narrated through is POV, no chronological order, fragmented time and flashbacks, appeal to senses, colours, repetition, simile, metaphor, realism+symbolism
        
        Symbolic images: car (=destructive power of modern society and money), "the valley of ashes" (=stretch of land full of rubbish), Gatsby's house (when it is full=fun and parties; when it is empty: melancholy and loneliness), the green light at the end of Daisy's dock (=Gatsby's hopes), blindness (=characters don't want to see and get drunk, drive carelessely, seek pleasure. Only Nick truly sees and represents Gatsby)
    - - Hemingway
        
        born in Illinois, spent childhood hunting and fishing in the Great Lakes region, boxing or playing rugby. Became a reporter. He mastered "pure objective writing": declarative sentences without any unnecessary words or clichés. USA entered WWI and he tried to join the army but didn't manage to do it, however he joined the Red Cross as ambulance driver in 1918 and was wounded in Italy. Back in the USA he became a foreign correspondent in Paris where he joined the Lost Generation with Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. Loved exotic settings and extreme situations where violent actions reveal people's virtues, courage and comradeship.
        
        tried to starts from his personal experienced and gave them a universal value. The key of his childhood was the encounter with nature, linked to his passion for hunting and fishing which are forms of struggle against nature where man is rewarded for his courage and skill. Life and death are driving and mysterious forces of existence. Life is a set of actions and beyond it there is nothingness and death.
        
        "Hemingway hero" (remains basically the same in every book): modelled closely upon himself, he is an outdoorsman who is sensitive to the chaotic world and would like to be braver, he does his best in stressful circumstances. In contrast, there is the "code hero", who is beyond the ordinary, honourable and courageous, not afraid to face death.
        
        dry, essential style, simple syntax, colloquial and concise dialogue, brief descriptions. Characters revealed through dialogue and descriptive passages, little introspection
        
        fascination with death and suicide (5 of his novels end with the death of his protagonist), he suffered from depression and his father had committed suicide. The author's injury on the Italian front was the trigger for many of his texts: to face his trauma, he tested his courage by climbing into bullrings, hunting and facing fire during wars
        
        A farewell to arms: the love affair of Frederick, an injured USA soldier, and Catherine, his British nurse during WWI in Italy. Frederick is called back to the front and deserts after the Italian defeat at Caporetto, in order to be with Catherine, who dies after giving birth to a dead child.
        
        Frederick is the classical Hemingway hero who does his duty without complaint and thinks men should keep away from passion, believes that war is necessary BUT then becomes pessimistic and his beliefs about Church, State, patriotism and love are shaken
        
        themes: war and its brutality (even soldiers crumble and lose reason) BUT it is inevitable since it is a cruel world, love (temporary happiness and relief), loyalty (linked more to love and friendship than to political alignments or philosophies
        
        1st person narrator, simple language BUT with a lot of free direct speech (which requires a deep attention by the reader)
    - - determined the psychology of the New Negro, a self-assertive, racially conscious and articulate Afro-American man who explores themes such as alienation and marginalization. ex Langston Hughes who talks about problem of self-definition through re-evaluation of the past and the Afro-American culture (orality, Jazz, dialect, blues)
        
        Langston Hughes
        
        poet, short-story writer, novelist, author of a biography and children's books, playwright, editor of literary African American anthologies, lyricist for operas and musicals and tv scripts, essayist. Born in Missouri, went to Kansans to live with mother and grandmother, who taught him art, poetry and theatre and he learnt about stories of slavery and his ethnic heritage. Worked in a farm and felt close to the spirit of Walt Whitman and his Leaves of Grass. Went to Paris and back to USA was introduced to a circle of poets, thus contributing to the Harlem Renaissance
        
        Whitman's influence: the writer had to share the common man's experience and become his spokesman (BUT Hughes mainly focused on the black masses, not on all humanity). Saw USA as a nation in progress, free choice of subjects (even unsuitable for poetry), faith in the American dream, breaking down of the distinction between poetry and prose, not only entertainment but also will to change the world, use of the collective "I"
        
        poet of the people, he organized poetry readings with jazz accompaniment. He used music to go back to black roots: the spiritual of the South sung by slaves during work int he fields (cathartic effect) and its modification into the blues under the influence of the city, music and its function for slaves, etc. Music, especially Jazz (whose standard was established by Louis Armstrong), became the paradigm of black experience: jazz was free from construction (partly planned and partly spontaneous), linked to joy, rebellion in a puritanical society and search for an alternative way of living
        
        Africa is a symbol of lost roots, black had to be exhalted: "Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro - and beautiful"
    - - Steinbeck
        
        born in California, came from a family of moderate means, went to New York where he tried to become a free-lance writer, but he failed and returned to California. After the rough and earthy humour of Tortilla Flat, he moved on to more serious fiction, often aggressive in its social criticism, which dealt with the strikes of the migratory fruit pickers on California plantations. In 1939 he published The Grapes of Wrath.Travels with Charley (1962) is a travelogue about his impressions during a three-month tour in a truck that led him through 40 USA states.
        
        The Grapes of Wrath: Tom Joad has been in a penitentiary for killing a man for self-defense, when he gets out and he is going back home he meets the former preacher Jim Casy and they go to the Joads' house, but they are gone to look for jobs. They meet and decide to move to California: grandpa dies of a stroke, Noah runs away, grandma dies, Rose of Sharon is pregnant and abandoned by her husband. They do not find any job and move into Hooverville, a migrant camp, but a fight ensues and Tom escapes leaving Jim Casy in charge. The Joads reach a camp where workers are protesting vs unfair wages and exploitation, led by Casy who is killed and Tom substitutes him. The Joads move again and the rainy season begins, they reach a barn and they find a boy with a starving father, who Rose of Sharon feeds with the milk from her breasts.
        
        title < American patriotic song The battle Hymn of the Republic, written by an abolitionist during the Civil War about the Lord coming from darkness to show his truth (moment of change) and to punish those who have caused damage to the land and its people (in Steinbeck's novels the promised land is California, where the grapes of hope become grapes of wrath)
        
        setting covers 7 states from Oklahoma to California, during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, leading to workers and especially farmers suffering from hunger, being dispossessed of lands and having to move to new lands (in the book California where, instead of hope and jobs, they find rage, violence and murders)
        
        Tom Joad is dedicated to his family and focused on the present, as a migrant he loses dignity in order to survive, he can't stand injustices and adopts Jim Casy's ideas to organize migrants and make them recover dignity and respect. Jim Casy is a former preacher who understand that faith can no longer help men, everyone has to cooperate and no one can achieve holiness alone.
        
        other themes: device of the journey as a quest of a better land, belief in humanity (people are more important than things), tendency to respond to hardships by focusing on one's own needs vs helping others for the common good, power of family and brotherhood (migrant survival depends on union)
        
        anonymous and outside narrator who sides with the workers and the dispossessed, sometimens POVs shifts to other migrants' experiences. No psychological insight: type more than individuals.