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ENG45C, Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of…
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Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
All the characters in Mrs. Dalloway are navigating postwar life, but Septimus experiences the greatest trauma from being a WWI veteran. He suffers from shell shock and eventually commits suicide, showing how the war had deep lasting effects on the people involved even after it was over.
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Woolf writes Mrs. Dalloway in a new style, using free indirect discourse and stream of consciousness to reveal the inner thoughts of multiple characters and jump between the past and present.
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Despite being surrounded by others, many characters in Mrs. Dalloway feel extremely isolated and disconnected from society. Everyone has their internal struggles, but they don't show their vulnerability to to their community.
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Clarissa is preoccupied with thoughts of aging and is very reminiscent of her past, constantly thinking of her younger self. She becomes more aware of the passage of her life and reflects on its meaning.
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T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
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Prufrock is a nervous, indecisive character that contemplates doing many things but never takes any action because he constantly doubts himself
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Prufrock compares himself to David, the perfect male form, and feels insecurity about his appearance. Much of this insecurity has to do with signs of old age, such as his thinning hair and skin.
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Hermann Melville, "Bartleby, the Scrivener"
Bartleby's "I would prefer not to" is a purposeful act of inaction where he refuses to be confined to modern expecations of the workplace.
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The story takes place on Wall Street, highlighting the prominence of capitalism and valuing of efficient work over humanity. This represents alienation created by a modern, mechanized society only interested in work and profit.
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Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
Gothic style
Edgar Allan Poe, "Man of the Crowd"
urbanization
As a result of industrialization, the urban city center emerged and transformed society completely.
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James helps transition between realism and modernism, using new techniques like the frame narrative and an unreliable narrative.
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William Faulkner, "The Sound and the Fury"
internal collapse
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Achebe uses orality to reflect traditional Igbo storytelling, recreating rhythms of their speech
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Things Fall Apart is a postcolonial work, depicting the collapse of traditional Igbo society as a result of European colonization.
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Achebe tells history from the Indigenous African perspective, not from the colonizer's perspective.
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Published during the Jim Crow era, "The Sound and the Fury" depicts the Compson family's struggles and decline after the American Civil War and Reconstruction. The abolition of slavery resulted in the Great Migration of Black southerners to the north, resulting in a huge labor shortage for the agrarian economy of the South. Not only were the Compsons financially declining, their family was falling apart emotionally due to Caddy's pregnancy out of wedlock and Quentin's suicide. Rather than growing as time goes on, the Compsons regress.
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James Joyce, "The Dead"
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Gabriel is the only person at the party that wants to forget his Irish heritage and acclimate to the continent, and he is seen as a West Briton
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Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Hurston was a leading figure in the Harlem renaissance, focusing on folklore and Black life in the rural South.
Harlem Renaissance
Industrialization and WWI created the need for Black labor in the north, giving rise to an explosion of Black culture and art centered in Harlem, NY.
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INNER vs. OUTER SELF: characters in these texts struggle with the difference between the people they appear to be in public and their true selves they only show in private
W.B. Yeats, "Easter, 1916"
Written about the Easter Rising Irish rebellion against the British, "Easter 1916" honors the sacrifice of Irish revolutionaries and was the start of Yeats' political writing
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T.S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent"
Eliot argues the importance of understanding new poetry as it relates to literary tradition and historical sense
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Samuel Beckett, "Waiting for Godot"
Beckett wrote this tragicomedy to showcase the existentialism, hopelessness, and deep loss stemming from WWII
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Vladimir and Estragon are the embodiment of inaction, as they spend the entire play waiting for a figure that never shows up and stay stationary even when they agree to leave
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W.B. Yeats, "Sailing to Byzantium"
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W.B. Yeats, "The Second Coming"
After the unprecedented mass killing and devastation of WWI, Yeats utilizes vivid imagery in his poetry to represent the desperation and crisis of a postwar world, comparing it to the second coming of Jesus and the apocalypse that accompanies it.
World War I
war & destruction
While the start of the 20th century was supposed to bring major improvements to society and modern progress, the events of several wars proved the opposite. Mass destruction and death created a crisis for many people who had to deal with the trauma and fallout from these wars.
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"The Weary Blues"
Langston Hughes
Hughes was a preeminent poet of the Harlem renaissance, writing about the Black working class and everyday life.
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W. B. Yeats, "The Lake Isle of Innisfree"
The narrator seeks peace on an isolated island, far from the "pavements grey" of the city and his present life
escaping modernity
Many works during this time period are characterized by a longing for the past instead of welcoming the changing present
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"Spring and All"
William Carlos Williams
Prominent Imagist, wrote about ordinary objects
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