(American)  T. S.

Eliot: The Waste Land: ‘The Burial of the Dead’; ‘Game

of Chess’ OR ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’
1.Henry James  Philip Larkin: ‘Church Going’, ‘High Windows’
 Seamus Heaney: ‘Bogland,’ ‘Digging’ OR ‘Punishment’
2. Alternatives of Modern Poetry:
Sandburg, Masters, Frost, Pound, Williams, Cummings, Stevens. (American)
3. The Lost Generation: Fitzgerald, Hemingway.  Robert Frost: “Design”, “Apple Picking,” “Stopping by
4. William Faulkner. The Harlem Renaissance. Woods on a Snowy Evening”
5. American Drama: O’Neill, Miller, T. Williams  Ezra Pound: “In a Station of the Metro”
6. Post-war Fiction and Poetry: Malamud, O’Connor, Carver,  William Carlos Williams: “The Young Housewife” OR
Nabokov, Vonnegut, Morrison; Ginsberg, Lowell, Plath “Spring and All”
 Allen Ginsberg: “A Supermarket in California”
 Robert Lowell: “For the Union Dead”
(British)
 Sylvia Plath: “Daddy”, “Lady Lazarus”
1. Transition to modernism: Thomas Hardy’s poetry
2. Modernist Poetry: W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot Drama:
3. The Modernist Novel: Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, James (British)
 Harold Pinter: The Birthday Party OR Samuel Beckett:
Joyce Waiting for Godot
4. Absurd Drama: Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter (American)
5. Poetry after the II. World War: Philip Larkin and Seamus Heaney  Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman
6. The postmodern novel: Kazuo Ishiguro or Salman Rushdie  Eugene O’Neill: Long Day’s Journey Into Night
 Tennessee Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire
Required Reading
Prose fiction:
Poetry: (British)
(British)  Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway OR Joseph Conrad: Heart
 Thomas Hardy: ‘Hap,’ ‘Convergence of the Twain’. ’Neutral of Darkness
Tones’ OR ’The Oxen’  Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day OR Salman
 W. B. Yeats: ‘Easter 1916’; ‘The Second Coming’; ‘Sailing Rushdie: Midnight Children
to Byzantium OR ’Leda and the Swan’
 (American)
(British )
 Henry James: “The Turn of the Screw” Malcolm Bradbury: The Modern British Novel, 1993.
 William Faulkner: “A Rose for Emily” Innes, Christopher, Modern British Drama, 1890-1990. Cambridge,
 Ernest Hemingway: The Snows of Kilimanjaro 1992.
 F. Scott Fitzgerald: Babylon Revisited Esslin, Martin, The Theatre of the Absurd. Harmondsworth, 1968
 Bernard Malamud: The Magic Barrel (1961).
 Flannery O’Çonnor: “A Good Man is Hard to Find” OR Perkins, David, A History of Modern Poetry. 2 vols. Cambridge MA,
Good Country People 1976 and 1987.
 Raymond Carver: “What We Talk About When We Talk
(American)
About Love”
Richard Ruland, Malcolm Bradbury: From Puritanism to
 Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita OR Toni Morrison: Beloved
Postmodernism: A History of American Literature. Routledge, 1991
OR Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse Five
Peter B. High: An Outline of American Literature (Longman Inc.,
New York, 1986)
Charles Altieri: The Art of 20th Century American Poetry:
RECOMMENDED READING:
Modernism and After. Blackwell, 2006.
Relevant Chapters from The Norton Anthology of American
Randall Stevenson: Modernist Fiction: an Introduction. Harvester
Literature (ed. Nina Baym, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New
Wheatsheaf, 1992.
York, 1998.)
Brian McHale: Postmodernist Fiction. Routhledge, London and NY,
1987.
 (existing between two becomes convinced that the admired Whitman, addresses the
nations) grounds are haunted. city in his most famous poem,
 Short stories and “Chicago”, rhetorical voice,
novels: Introduction to Modernist Poetry structure – shorter poems than
Whitman’s, but the diction is very
o 1879
Poe, Whitman and Dickinson flowing, a piece of Naturalism
Hawthorne (the idea of the survival of the
monography Walt Whitman had a huge impact
fittest) – finality is not taken into
o 1878 The on 20th century – he opened up the
consideration
verse, the poet is responsible for
HENRY JAMES (1843- Europeans – (the personified city would never
the poem
1916) sketch get old) – “Grass” – “Happiness”
o 1878 Daisy Dickinson’s condensed forms will (is it really about
Miller – study have an effect on Imagist poets Hungarians...? :D): happiness can
 Half English, half (eg. Pound) be presented, but not explained
American o 1881 The
Portrait of a Genteel tradition: literature is for Edgar Lee Masters (1869-
 “It is a complex faith
Lady - his ladies, far away from life, 1950): originally a lawyer, only
to be an American.” beautiful unlike real life -> this
‘second best’ wrote poems for himself until he
 American nationality degraded by the end of the 19th published a volume: “Spoon River
turning according to
century, with local colour writing, Anthology” – imaginary small
him
 Sensitive and refined naturalism, etc. – Literature has to town called Spoon River, dead
o 1888 Heart of
personality deal with real life, should be in people coming back from the
Fiction – essay unison with real-life problems
 All his life he’s been grave to talk about their lives –
o 1903 The the dead try to be sincere to
migrating between By the turn of the century,
the US and Britain Ambassadors themselves – huge criticism on
Chicago became the new cultural
 Friends with Emerson o 1902 The centre – unique throbbing the life of a small town (eg. Little
Wings of the discovered at the turn of the House on the Prairie-like
and Carlyle structure, a huge family) – very
 His brother, William Dove century, it became the heart of the
o 1904 The US rare examples of positive thinking
James – there is no communication
 Cosmopolitan Golden Bell Chicago Renaissance between dead people, they speak
education (school in The Turn of the Screw (1898) in monologues – death is not a
1912. Poetry – magazine, very
Switzerland) influential, like Nyugat – Harriet boundary of becoming wise, it’s
A gothic, horror novella just the boundary of becoming
 Nathaniel Hawthorne Classified as both gothic fiction and Monroe was the editor, in search
introduced the of new American voices sincere – “village virus”
a ghost story, the novella focuses
international theme on a governess who, caring for two
Carl Sandburg (1878-1967): Robert Frost (1874-1963) –
children at a remote estate, New England poet, very
the prototypical Chicago poet,
intellectual, excellent scholar – are modernists in the sense that Hemingway, Frost, D. H. dynamic. He translated Japanese
inherited a farm from his they are experiencing the Lawrence, etc. His death marked and Chinese poetry and drama.
grandfather, this is where he fragmentation of the universe – the end of the literary era of High-
Canto: his special genre –
broken images. Human experience Modernism. His interest was not
realised he wanted to be a poet – each of them wanted to revive
cannot be anything else but confined to American literature.
he needed a persona: a simple some kind of an ancient myth.
fragmentation. The world war
American farmer – wanted to It hadn’t happened before “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly”: a
made people realised that
that an American poet reflection on the World War, self-
write poems that could be actually everything was destroyed, wasted.
influenced European reflective, criticises himself – the
understood by simple farmers – This destruction cannot be placed
literature. old traditions are no longer
the wisdom of the farmers, in the same themes, patterns like
applicable on a world that has
before, new ones had to be He was born in Idaho,
however, his poems are not fallen apart. “Canto I.”: rewrites
created. raised in Pennsylvania. He studied
simple at all – he subverts basic the 8th book on the Odyssey – it is
Latin and tons about poetry. He
There is a very strong revived. The “dead art of poetry”
American ideas like progress and taught for four months but a
belief in poetry – it is still possible has to be brought back to life.
productivity - “Stopping by scandal happened and he was
to construct a kind of structure.
woods on a snowy evening” – dismissed. He got on a boat and After staying in Paris, he
They believed in the value of the
went to Venice where he went to Italy and got influenced
very song-like structure – but “the poems.
published his first collection of by the ideas of Mussolini. He was
woods are lovely, dark and deep” Legendary friendship: poetry. Then he went to London mislead completely, of course –
– stepping aside from a road, the edited each other’s poems. The and became one of the most huge break. Until then, he was
danger of another world – resists Wasteland – Pound cut several influential poets. Imagism: In the very generous, open-handed – but
temptation, the repetition of the lines from that poem and Elliot Station of the Metro – focusing on then, he started criticising
last line is convincing himself was very grateful for that. “To the one image. “Direct treatment of America and capitalism. After the
*Design Classical Modernism – better craftsman” – the poem was the thing either subjective or war, he was arrested for treason,
High-Modernism dedicated to Ezra Pound. Very objective” – follow the spoken even put in an open prison. In the
T. S. Elliot and Ezra Pound rare, exceptional friendship. language, don’t force the words Pisan prison, he kept writing.
into the rhythm of a metronome – In America, he was
Ezra Pound
Being a poet is an don’t be too abstract or you’ll declared to be mentally ill
international affair – followed the 1885-1972 never be understood – “Use either and put in a mental
thoughts of Poe – no emphasis on no ornaments or good ornaments”
The Father of Modernism asylum.
being American. Gathering
– he outlived several people he He was a very good editor
together everything that culture He was released
actually taught. He was very self- – but it was very difficult to find
had already accumulated and
confident, trusted in his sense of his own style and words. He from the asylum with
create something new from them.
quality. He helped Yeats perfect thought later that Imagist poetry is
The new text would revive the old the help of Elliot and
his poetry. He had faith in his not very good, since it’s too static
text – quoting from other poets
poets – helped to promote them – – he developed Vorticism (as in
and writers and referring to others
William Carlos Williams, Joyce, vortex): something has to be
as well to make them new. They
 Hemingway and he t Ezra Pound – he helped him to Matthew Arnold – 1822-1888: in
prove several poems. He was an an age when spiritual needs are
died in Italy. A Pact in editor of two magazines. His wife not very fulfilled, literature and
a was mentally unstable. poetry fulfils this need. Stevens
T was greatly influenced by this
ve He was hospitalised in
idea.
Switzerland after a nervous
.
ry breakdown. He compiled the Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
S. material for The Wasteland there.
dif He wrote 52 notes for the poem He was very far from poetry in
Ell and mentions two books: Jesse his everyday life.
fer
iot Weston – From Ritual to His first book of poets was
ent Romance on the Grail legends and published late in his life – it was
(1 Sir James Frazer – The Golden very badly criticised.
wa
Bough.
88 He has to set out a new
y. 1927. He was naturalised as a intelligence – new language,
8- British citizen. He turned Anglo- experimentation – strange style,
Poetry is an escape from
19 personality and emotions – but Catholic, and became a music of instruments – he thinks
only those can practice it, who Conservative the poem is a complex experience
65 have personality and emotions. Politian. He became a religious of music and images
poet – the religious experience is
) Objective correlative: He was trying to come to terms
more important than poetic
instead of talking about one’s own with the confusion of his times,
In experience.
emotions, one should pick the world wars, etc. He tried to
no something that correlates with the Wallace Stevens, William separate the unreal from real.
poet and the reader. The aim is to Carlos Williams & E. E. Supreme fiction: replacing
vat create an atmosphere. Cummings religion and the obsolete styles of
or, He was born in St Louis, literature – fulfilment is the
All the three of them had another
Missouri. His family was highly primary aim, the spiritual need of
lik occupation, were not full-time
intellectual and religious. He went the public (to satisfy, to suffice) –
poets: Stevens – businessman,
e to Harvard. He rediscovered some the old styles, old frameworks are
Williams – medical doctor,
poets whom were not very unable to do that, nor in literature
Cummings – painter
Po popular – eg. John Donne and the or in academic life as well
metaphysical poets. He went to They wanted to be more direct
un Of Modern Poetry: an essay in a
England before the World War and and wanted to change the
poem  Earlier the scene was set
d, was unable to go home. He meaning of literature for the
and there was a kind of repetition
became a banker. In 1917, he met general public
bu on what poetry could be, but then
came the war, and it set a new Colloquial, vernacular style speec
stage. The audience is invisible,
Long epic poem, published in h i
but there is definitely a presence –
instalments – Peterson (?)
the poet has to keep it in mind that He became enormously m
there are people reading his popular by the end of his
poems. The role of poetry is to expressions in poetry. Spontaneity life – high-modernism a
help the audience find itself, what is very important – he is a bit like
A Sort of a Song: a poem about g
they actually need to know about Whitman –
themselves, not so much to writing poems. Snake, a symbol
freed e
convey a message. “As of two of evil and cleverness – to wait
emotions becoming one.” Poetry for the perfect moment and strike.
poetry
can create a community – it is a A poet should be alert, aware. The
from organic and the inorganic – o
way of communication, it
resembles a string being played – through a metaphor, create a f
its harmony. Saxifrage = kövirózsa –
heartstrings  The subject-matter
of the poem is of secondary confin not very beautiful and not very
importance – the most important big, but if there are a lot of them,
es, a rock can break. t
thing is the poem to be satisfying.
comm A different attitude h
William Carlos onpla towards the human body, e
Williams(1883-1963)
ce humanity <- medical practice –
Ordinary life – ordinary
experience. Ameri Chekov, Csáth Géza E. E. p

The ideas should not be separated can Cummings (e. e. cummings) o

from the immediate experience. e
topics 1894-1962
Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle
simpl Only one official job for three m
Studied in Germany, came back months – too confining.
to New Jersey, practiced medicine e
– in the meantime, he wrote his verna i
poetry, while he remained a
doctor cular T s
1909. at his own cost, he Ameri h
published his first book of poetry
– only 4 copies sold can e v
e r 3
r e a .
y x p
p h T
i e y u
m r l
p i 1/a i
1
o m p
e
r e s
a
t n
f
a t a
n s f
n
a
t d
w l
l
– i C
t s/ one 1 iness
h
Harvard graduate
p h i
He was put in a concentration
a camp in France – wrote a novel m
about it – Lost Generation
i t n
n y e
t p 1 y
e o 9
r g 2 –
 e i  meanings of ’loss’: WWI.:
values, faith in progress,
h m e
identity, wasted talent,
i s t money, loss of a future 
term: Gertrude Stein /
s
Hemingway: A Moveable
U Feast
H  Ernest Hemingway, his
f n
e principles for writing
i i (iceberg theory, a ’true
r o sentence’), his typical hero
w (masculinity, strength,
s n
fight, contest, wound),
e
t . ’The Snows of
n Kilimanjaro’,
t autobiographical
v Eccentric and playful style, elements, flashbacks, past
deliberate grammatical tricks – vs. present, in relation to
o curiously conventional in his
t messages (quite simple) – writing (Harry: dying in
l
reviving commonplaces, since the his boots?), symbols:
o
u form he presented them in is very gangrene, animals, snow
new  F.Scott Fitzgerald, his role
m
t He was the only poet who spoke in ’the Jazz Age’, partying,
e up for the 1956 Hungarian fascination with richness,
h revolution – America should help, ’Babylon Revisited’,
or bury the Statue of Liberty autobiographical elements,
e
o In Just Spring symbolic name: Honoria,
f Topic 2.: The Lost possibility and
S Generation: Fitzgerald, impossibility of a future,
Hemingway. past vs.
o
p present
v
o
----------------------------------------- none of them has children, there's America, inhumane situation,
----------------------------------------- no next generation and continuity. creating equal individuals from
-------------------------- t
He is in love with a woman but people (the immigrant status
The lost generation they have no future together. The itself!) the Great Grander, U.S.A. a
The real enemy is the war mentality of these young people! Trilogy
machinery itself. Shock  these k
Gertrude Stem: she was the 2. Earnest Hemingway:
young people had to experience.
first that called Hemingway as a 1898~1961 e
The proximity of death was
always there: complex experience. member of the “Lost generation”
Theory of the iceberg: good story
the term itself comes from her! A tells you only the top of the
Hemingway: the intensity and the moveable feast garage keeper said iceberg which is above the water n
ordinariness were unrelatable (?) and after that she insisted to the but there are many things under
in human language. Soldier’s term because it can express the the “surface” o
home: He cannot communicate: characteristics of these people.
He cannot find himself after the Great test, Competition: huge t
animals big game hunting, always
war: after the war= a new Malcolm Cowley: being lost in so
struggling with forces (natural or h
America  these soldiers were many ways in life. He realized
human) violent theory
this was essentially an American
heroes. Or not? They felt like they i
expedience! Well organized state The old man and the sea: man
were broken and lost people! and purposes but the individual can be destroyed but not n
Nothing heroic! Shock and loss of doesn't have a special aim in life. defeated= there are 2 levels of a
their future, didn't know what to person: ethical nature, and g
do, many of these Americans 1. John Dos Passos-
physical loss but can be a
Three soldiers: wrote about champion of ethical nature ?
went back to Europe
the 1st World War experience, W
intellectual life. People started to
devastating, v
write about paint= express their
i
feelings, but still they didn't have Manhattan Transfer: a Pillsbury of i
aims and future, documentation, montage of New n
York life, and features of o
Hemingway- The sun also rises n
immigrants, the Great Side Maker l
(fiesta) everything is vanity but
(?), these people go through gates e
the sun also rises! Group of
as individuals and after that gain e
young people, they don't have r
the same life of immigrants in
aims, only intellectual life. And n
c t Hemingway was accused of being same time several wounds 
sexist, only 2 real female literally and physically too.
e y (Death and vulnerable.) Later
characters; most of his heroes are
father figure! For whom the bell
men go out of nature without
tolls
equipment, know how to hunt,
s He was a journalist, cabalist fight, drink... But also and artistic He became suicide. He never
language= like a telegram, only know how! Your life is a work of thought he achieved his aims. His
h the most important information, type of modernism from T.S. Eliot
art and the way you live it
Impressionism= be able to find or Pounds but: direct and simple
o the most appropriate word for the matters! Live it to the most, life at the same time. He had a great
impression,. your moment of the full. cult: noble prize.
w Everything can become a kind of
Vygnettes: violent events, f.e. 3. F. Scott Fitzgerald
ritual. You have a kind of dignity
s Public hanging of someone. 1896~1940
Brutal scenes. and ethical code in spite of that
the world is falling apart around Most of his works take place in
In war time 1924 you. Every situation is a challenge America, the Jazz Age or the
v whether you can create something
In our time 1925 comes from a “Roaring Ages”. Financial boom
u prayer. 6th story: after the 5th he unique. The snows of in everyday life: the attitude to
was wounded as a soldier  Nick Kilimanjaro. Compose in spite of money has changes, luxurious.
l everything, what is value. Life's aim is a great party. He
Adams only turns out in the end
of the story and he is the symbol celebrated beauty, something
n His style: not complicated, easy to
of his “lost” generation. In our read, Alfred K.: computing clan beautiful was really important to
e time doesn't really deal with Nick come into your mind: create a him, he compares these things to
Adam's story: later another book: transparent text! Cleanses purity, a butterfly. He is the chronicler of
r sterility what he is writing. Fish: his age and different from
A soldier in the war: the soldier image (kibelezett hal)???? Hemingway. Beautiful
a WHAT? XD
fell in love with a nurse, they descriptions!
decided to escape but during child
b Public image of him: champion
birth she dies, no happiness. The great Gatsby, passages
who struggles with strong forces
i Finding the right word is the aim  Success became corruption which are beautiful, uses
of writing. Write the truest until he started to write again (?) symbolic things: the green light.
l
sentence of you! Nick ... (?) He always felt that he
Public image of a strong man who
i keeps his life in order but at the was left out of the roaring
twenties. He was fascinated about Attitude: collecting saving disintegration of a value
money, and the rich are a kind money, virtue to save money, shift Topic 3.: William Faulkner. system.
different species. Valid is also came when the consumer attitude The Harlem Renaissance.  Racial discrimination int
measured by money. The value of was introduced in America. he South: Jim Crow laws
 Faulkner: loosely related  The Harlem Renaissance
money is the value of love. Enormous pleasure. Money is the
to the Lost Generation, 1920s, Harlem, New York:
solution: to solve problems. Only Southern past and
He wanted to go to the war, growth of African
thing that cannot be bought is problems of history
training camp. Zelda Zye: American population,
time. Money is time. Cannot buy
Fitzgerald proposed: she said not  Imaginary artists!
back time! This philosophy ’Yoknapatawpha County’,
until he becomes a famous writer. Night life, clubs: for a
occurs in many of his stories. ’Jefferson’, Mississippi white audience!
Great success: This side of
 Topics: decline of  W.E.B. DuBois ’The Souls
Paradise. After: she said yes.
Southern aristocracy, rise of Black Folks’, 
After the war he learned from
of the ’redneck’ Claude McKay: ’The
Pound and Hemingway. He
 Recurring characters, Harlem Dancer’
becomes more and more famous.
stories NAACP
In 1925: The Great Gatsby. Zelda
 Collective memory of a Hughes:’Song for a Dark Girl’, ’I,
had weak nerves. End of
community  ’Back to Africa’
family life and success.
 Storytelling: not linear, no movement too’
The great depression: great failure chronology; time layers:  P.L. Dunbar: ’We wear the
for him too. The idea of pulling mythical past (Civil War), Mask’  Zora Neale
himself together: but no. He could tragic past Hurston: Their Eyes
not bring the family back together. (Reconstruction), present Were
Flappers and Philosophers: (1920s) oscillating
flapper: not depending on a  Countee Cullen: ’Yet do I
 The Sound and the marvel’ Watching
husband or a father, independent
personality (New woman Fury, four sections, God
character) Compson family, different -----------------------------------------
viewpoints (Benjy, -----------------------------------------
Tales of the Jazz age Quentin, --------------------------
Jason, Authorial focusing William Faulkner (1898 –
The beautiful and the Damned
on Dilsey), Caddy’s role. 1962)
Tender is the Night Framework: religious
(Easter), secular (circus),
The last Tyeoth differences in style –
Nobel Prize winning author, 1949 Reconstruction period after Civil aristocrati 2. Reconstruction Era
War – Northern military – tragic past (1865- 1910s)
loosely part of the Lost c families
occupation – two choices: 3. present (1920s) – a
Generation never went to war – assimilation or death –
(Gone bit more objective, and also
futurelessness – the sense of being
no war-experience, since by the
doomed also develops a sense of with the humorous sometimes it is
time his training ended, the war community – tragic identity
without a future – suicidal, Wind) indicated by italics,
was over – he was disappointed
poisonous community sometimes not, but the
that he couldn’t write about the other main
in contrast of Hemingway’s clear sentences constantly switch
war since he had no experience world, Faulkner’s is poisonous, topic: “the
back and forth between these
Sherwood Anderson, excellent murky – very conventional writer rise of the three layers – the timeline is
short-story writer – 1925. advice
for Faulkner – focus on topics he as opposed to Hemingway and Redneck” not linear – very hard to set up
was familiar with: that is, the Fitzgerald – characters, sets – The a chronological order A Rose
South – very different area from “white trash” community: poor
Sound and the Fury: whites, even below slaves
the rest of the US in the South, for Emily – short story
people were more aware of family Yoknapatawpha County (inspired Rednecks: very racist, assimilated
to the North, but not out of Faulkner is extremely interested
history, had a more powerful by his own county, LaFayete in the past, you cannot live
sense of history – generation after patriotism, but out of wealth-
County, Mississippi) – Jefferson, seeking, selfish purposes without it
generation, history had been kept
– it was injured by the Civil War Mississippi (based of Oxford, “Jim Crowe Laws” – separation a great compression of time –
(1861-1865) – abolition of slavery Mississippi) Yoknapatawpha – almost 60 years – these layers can
and keeping the country together of black people recurring
– the future is hopeless as soon as Indian word, water on a flat land be applied to any country’s
characters – Balzac handling of
the country is torn – Civil War: all of his stories take place in history, but it usually takes
last traditional (in the sense that these two places time: very modern way – future is hundreds and hundreds of years –
they fought for a cause) and first
modern war (they realised that the main contained in the present, present cf. Hungarian history lot of
real enemy is not the other party is contained in the past, etc. complexity
but the war machinery itself) topic:
– three kinds of time layers can be Göncz’s translation of The Sound
Southerners were the losers – a disintegrat
distinguished: and the Fury
sense of defeat creates extremely
powerful sense of community ion of one 1. Civil War – further reading: As I Lay Dying, A
mythical past Rose for Emily, That Evening
time Sun,
Go Down, Moses – man in nature, Title comes from Macbeth – from 2. the narration of Quentin – That Evening Sun – the Compson
contrasting with the portrayal of the last monologue – signifies 1910 June 2 (Thursday -> family’s other appearance
Hemingway – lack of know-how, the Day of Ascension) –
nothing – that type of Southern Twilight – the working title of the
barefooted, barehanded, maybe a the eldest Compson boy – novel, now a short story – the
knife, BUT becomes one with value system he is writing about is he committed suicide – he whole novel grew out of the short
nature (Bear, Red Leaf) – a
not there anymore The novel was is a conscious narrator, story
human being confronted by a kind
of animal – the animal is related written in 1929. very intelligent, he was Faulkner considered all the four
to the human being, instead of a sent to Harvard – he sections failures
The main topic is the
prey, like with Hemingway is absolutely aware of the Religious framework (dates) –
disintegration of one-time value that is being lost –
not sterile – organic decay Secular framework (the circus
Southern aristocracy – his other he thinks that to prevent visiting the town) and they mirror
celebrated as beautiful – A Rose the value to getting lost,
theme is the rise of the redneck, each other
of Emily: necrophiliac, murderer he has to destroy himself –
who took advantage of the “idealistic suicide” to Benjy: childhood, innocence –
lady – fragrance of the rose and prove something, not to imagist style, he talks about
Reconstruction period (Jason
deny something immediate perceptions
the smell of a decaying body –
Compson) Four pillar structure: 3. the narration of Jason – Quentin: adolescence,
horrifying, but extremely 1928 April 6 (Friday ->
1. the narration of Benjy questioning, trying to make sense
beautiful at the same time organic (mentally retarded) – he is Good Friday) – the third of the world – poetry, no
feeling, fusion of beauty and the only character who Compson boy punctuation
cannot pretend, cannot lie 4. the narration of the author Jason: adulthood – vernacular
decay – it must be experienced
– his recordings are – third person singular as speech, prose
Marquez authentic – a huge trust is opposed to the latter
Author: objective, preacher
William Faulkner: The Sound needed from the reader to narrations (first person
and the Fury singular) – Dilsey is the French translator Maurice
handle such an
Coindreau even gave musical
unconventional beginning focaliser (the woman who
Very conservative and instructions to the characters:
conventional writer from one – Benjy is not the agent of basically raised the boys)
Benjy – moderato, Quentin –
sense and extremely innovative his own life (“the spoon – 1928 April 8 (Sunday adagio, Jason – allegro, Narrator –
from another. came”) – this section -> Easter) allegro furioso, andante religioso,
Keeps oscillating between the begins in 1928 April 7 Caddy has no separate section for allegro barbaro, lento
timelines – he gives an outlook of (Saturday -> Easter herself – her personality is not in Benjy doesn’t have a sense of the
the plot to help the reader look at Saturday), his 33th a focus – she is the representative past, the past is more present than
the novel from a distant. birthday (Christ Age) of the value that is in the the present – present is in italics,
background past is in normal type – Caddy
took care of him, she loved him otherwise when he proves that who really likes Jason – Benjy, became very popular during the
dearly – he misses Caddy, so the tragedy can be first-hand when he Quentin and Caddy are closer to roaring 20s – the term “jazz-age”
past when she was alive is more kills himself and his father loses their father
real to him than the present, his son (another proof of his was coined by Fitzgerald
By the end: Benjy is in an asylum,
which is in brackets basically suicide being positive) – his
Quentin dies, Caddy disappears Booker T. Washington and W. E.
character represents what the
Caddy losing her innocence – and Jason is poor – the white B. DuBois:
Southern system means: a sense
important for Benjy and Quentin community disintegrates
of belonging to the South – it is a
as well - the first two people who
place where it is impossible to But what about the black
Quentin reacts rationally and also live, but it is impossible to live community? Benjy is the only one basically started the
emotionally outside as well in the black service – innocence Harlem Renaissance
Even Jason loses the most might survive - DuBois: “The Souls of
Jason – the return of the
important thing for him, his grammatical structures :) – the Black Folk” (book) –
----------
money most unbearable character – founder of NAACP
vernacular prose representing a .After the Civil War and during - the problem of the 20th
Quentin’s last day – he may have
been in love with Caddy... incest? totally different attitude from the the Restoration, tension between century is the problem of
hm... according to Faulkner, the previous two – he is outside the white and black population “twoness” – every black
incest was not consummated, it is community of Quentin and Caddy peaked (Jim Crow laws). person has two identity -
only in Quentin’s mind – if Caddy – he is trying to represent
There is a past of African- DuBois was more
could keep her virginity, the normalcy, he is earning money, he
is trying to be a functioning American writing, however, radical, wanted to solve
symbol of their identity, their this identity problem as
individual, annoyed by the around the 20s they started to be
harmony as children, they could
rubbish of Southern value, beauty, regarded as artists. well
keep their value – when she loses
her virginity, she loses the etc. According to him, what really Harlem Renaissance - circle “The Talented Ten”
community of the South – counts is to earn money – little - black people should prove
Quentin lives with him – very- Harlem – New York
Quentin realises that he cannot that they are intellectually
prevent her from losing her very-very evil – he is a true (Remember the terms: American equal to white people
virginity, but in that case, he Compson though, since he loses
all his money, little Quentin takes Renaissance, Chicago - DuBois didn’t like those
should be the one who takes it, he
all of it and elopes with a movements that
believes – committing this taboo Renaissance, Southern Literary
and burning in hell is much more circusman represented the primitive
in value than a very cheap and Narrator: African Americans – Renaissance) Roaring 20s side of the black culture
contaminated story – his other they endured, they survived, the (back to Africa
Harlem Renaissance is the era
problem is with the disillusioned power of life is in them – Dilsey movements, jazz and
Mr. Compson: tragedy can be from the end of WWI until the blues, etc)
second-hand – he cannot accept brings up all of the children
Great Depression. Jazz and blue
this and he proves Mr. Compson instead of the neurotic mother
 - influenced Martin Luther should be speaking to his own drug addiction, humiliation. Possible
King, Malcolm X fellow black people, in a style tuberculosis; the role of ’wolves’: ageing, losing a
they understand quotations and the role of sense of humor, no future,
Marcus Garvey – the leader of the “Song for a Black Girl” – Dixie, a
Back to Africa movement literature in a family crisis empty life. Virginia Woolf:
pattern of a white song for his
Alain Locke – The New Negro  Arthur Miller: Death of a literature in general?
own poem
anthology Salesman – tragedy of Death wish? Imaginary
Topic 4.: American Drama:
O’Neill, Miller, T. Williams, the American dream, child killed in the end:
Paul Lawrence Dunbar – “We
wear the mask” – referring to Albee Willy Loman=’low man’, hope for a ’normal’ life?
the stereotypical blackface the average good-willing Or loss of all hopes?
portrayed by white people – it  why American drama was American, a victim of his -----------------------
is hard to see the individual not significant before the own ideals. Question of -----------------------
behind the mask of smiling 20th century success Present and past -----------------------
face  influence of European -----------------------
scenes separated on stage.
playwrights: Ibsen, ----------------
Claude McKay – Jamaican Miller’s essay: ’Tragedy The American Drama
origin – copying European Strindberg, Chekhov,
and the Common Man’
forms (he wrote several domestic plays, family American drama is basically non-
 T.Williams: South, A
Shakespearean sonnets) – units, life-lies  illusion existent until the 20th century –
Streetcar Named only propaganda dramas
“The Harlem Dancer” – “If vs. reality!
Desire -- conflicts
we must die” – “The  Eugene O’Neill: the Puritanism: no theatre at all,
between tradition vs.
burden and bliss of Irish banned – ritual aspect rejected
Lynching” The photo of a immigrant American
lynching origin, Long Day’s 18th century: propaganda plays
values, sensitivity vs.
Journey Into Night : didn’t become significant
Zora Neale Hurston – “Their violence, erudition vs.
autobiographical
Eyes were Watching God” – novel vulgarity, sanity vs. Broadway: large income – adjust
elements, the question of to the needs of the audience –
Jean Toomer – “Cane” – novel, madness; light and sound
performability (stage they wanted to be entertained, not
experimental effects, illusion vs. reality
directions, length, finding themselves in the theatre
He was not black, but one of  Edward Albee: absurd, experience
authenticity); special
his grandfather was black – if Who is Afraid of Virginia
’choreography’: the The beginning of the 20th century:
you have one drop of black Woolf – late night party, Chekov, Ibsen – European 19th
rhythm of offense and
blood, you are counted as one two childless marriages, century plays arrived – domestic
apology, loving one
Georgia old couple: more vitality, problems, an individual’s life is
another can also be a
games: torturing each based on an illusion – truth versus
Langston Hughes – He was the burden; tragic problems: illusion/pretension – problem is
first one who felt like he other and the guests,
whether the truth should come out Arthur Miller: Jewish origin – The playwriting didn’t flourish
or not – explosion of the family “Death of a Salesman” – Willy from the mainstream but from the
unit, of the individual – if the Loman – low-man – the illusion marginal
illusion is kept, the unit is also of American Dream: if you want
kept – middle-class and upper something, you can achieve
middle-class anything – innovation in staging:
a special place for Willy’s
The Little Theatre movement:
reminiscence – Linda, Biff,
1910s – formed out of university
Happy – life insurance doesn’t
playgroups
work after the suicide – “Tragedy
Off-off Broadway – Off- and the Common Man” an essay:
Broadway – Broadway - you don’t need to be a hero, you
Hollywood can be a common man, if you are
Film-making started around the willing to sacrifice your dignity, it
same time as playwriting – theatre is a tragedy – the tragic hero is not
had to compete with cinema passive – tragedy enlightens –
immediately pedagogical genre – tragedy leads
to a positive ending – “The
Eugene O’Neill: basically grew Crucible” = “Salemi
up in the theatre – after boszorkányok” in Hungarian -
hospitalized with TBC, he “un-American activity”, political
devoted his life to writing – one- witch-hunt
act theatre, experimentation: Tennessee Williams: Southern
psychology, black casting, writer, homosexual, his sister
simultaneous casting, ship – his
Rose was treated with lobotomy,
best works are his autobiographic
pieces: “Long Day’s Journey Into several of his female figures come
Night”: is there remedy in out of the figure of his sister,
literature? does it help or not? sensitivity, vulnerability, “A
From one sense, it doesn’t – the Streetcar Named Desire”, “The
family collapses nonetheless – Glass Menagerie”
From another sense, it does – the
family keeps talking to each other, Edward Albee: was an orphan,
in quotes, instead of being “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”,
isolated from each other – the absurdist of the American
tragedy: no alternative theatre, “The American Dream”
 planned or did things couple? Silence and Pilgrim: anti-hero,
Topic 5.: Post-war Fiction: happen by accident? darkness in the end, but: ’unstuck in time’.
Malamud, O’Connor, Carver,  Flannery O’Connor: heartbeat! Repetitions, ’so it goes’,
Nabokov, Vonnegut Catholic and Southern –  Post-modern fiction: ’poo-teeweet’
not pious, avoiding all intertextuality, metafiction -----------------------------------------
 short fiction: Ihab Hassan:
sentimentality! Grace: an (text refers to itself), no -----------------------------------------
Radical Innocence :
intrusion into everyday significance of the unity or --------------------------
Jewish American writers
lives, violence! ’A Good integrity of the work, Post-War American Literature
and Southern women
Man Is Hard to Find’ – ’faction’ (mixture of fact
writers became The short story seemed to be a
grotesque story, caricature and fiction), popular suitable genre to express
spokespersons of ’the
family – accident! genres involved, riddles American culture. After the shock
tragic underground’ of
(unsolved) of WWII (not as much of a shock
mainstream literature Characters become
 Vladimir Nabokov, writing as in Europe, but still), writers
 common elements: special ’humanized’ by death.
both in Russian and started to reflect on the
sense of humor and self- Theological questions devastation, the incredibility, the
English, Lolita ’a love-
irony, minority without while in the background, amount of deaths were incredible,
inferiority complex affair with the English
the family is killed. The it created a dubious feeling
(speaking in the name of language’, references to towards the world. Reality was no
Misfit (well chosen name)
humanity, not just in the Poe and many other longer something people agreed
vs. the Grandmother
name of the American, English, French upon – new genres emerged, very
(Southern lady) – moment
ethnic/regional authors – detective story: experimental.
community) of grace: a gesture!
crime – scandalous topic Short story started to flourish after
 Jewish American writers:  Raymond Carver:
calling attention to the the WWII.
different degrees of minimalism, dirty realism.
importance of beauty Jewish American writers: self-
assimilation; Jewish ’One More Thing’: ’low-
 Kurt Vonnegut (German irony, laughing with somebody,
tradition: special (selfish) rent tragedy’ – a family
ancestors, but didn’t speak always including yourself
intimacy with God; falling apart. Significance
Geman): humor, absurdity. - had a little tradition
Bernard Malamud of objects: fragility! ’What
Slaughterhouse Five – it - used to be marginal
(’teacher’): indirect ethical We Talk About When We
is only possible to talk - they became
lessons for life in his Talk About Love’ –
about mass massacres with spokespersons
stories. ’The Magic longing for spirituality, a
the help of another - assimilation (concerning
Barrel’ – match maker: sense of belonging. Heart
dimension: science fiction culture and language
poor, weak character vs. surgeon, problems of
(Tralfamadore). Billy usage)
magic power. Was it all hearts. Ideal love: old
- Isaac Singer - Saul Bellow - very strong and intimate Southern dialects – she – being a beloved is a
- Bernard Malamud: bond between the human was also a photographer – burden, it is better to be a
being and God optical metaphors: lover than a beloved –
“everybody is a Jew,
- suffering is the basis of “Petrified Man” – lacking Clock without Hands –
except they don’t know it” beauty, even the beauty
= to be a Jew is basically human life – if you live, another novel about a
parlour – caricature – calls
to be human - universalist you suffer – suffering also attention to basic loss of teenage girl in love with
view (many objected makes you laugh – very values – the women are her brother, Frankie (the
against that) understandable from the bread givers – a man we of me)
- specific language usage Eastern Europe turning into stone – Death
- Philip Roth of a Travelling Salesman - - Flannery O’Connor: the
a bit like a fairy tale: most talented of these
- Arthur Miller
Southern Women writers: varied palette of styles –
- some hardly ever mention three writers, Catholic
grotesque isolation, alienation,
Jewish traditions - Paul possibility of living a life writer in the South (not
Auster - region is still in the without loving someone very common, Bible Belt
- J. D. Salinger (doesn’t foreground, the nature, the Protestant congregations)
mention ever) landscape - Carson McCullers: she she was comfortable with
- Dixie Line: difference in started in the South and this – religious stories but
- Rebecca Goldstein
the attitude of Northerners moved elsewhere – not in the conventional
- Grace Paley
and Southerners became famous at the age way – tried to avoid
- all speak up for humanity
- very inclined to write of twenty – The Heart is a sentimentality, talks about
- question: to what extent a
about grotesque and Lonely Hunter, novel the intrusion of divine
community can speak for
impossible situations (MINDENKÉPP intervention – the moment
the whole of humanity?
- freak show: twisted OLVASD EL) – love in of grace sometimes causes
- in multiculturalism, take a
entertainment, human the focus, the difficulties harm, injury, even death –
story as information on
being shown in a distorted of love, unreciprocated full of violence – A Good
how that group of people
way, in vulnerability – it love – The Ballad of the Man is Hard to Find – no
live
makes you laugh and Sad Café: Miss Amelia, reassurance, except there
- Malamud: topics of
makes you cry falls in love with the is something elementary
alienation,
hunchback cousin, a energetic – a human being
unpredictability, etc. –
- Eudora Welty: Jackson, criminal is in love with her can reach beyond the
God can do whatever He
Mississippi all her life – – criminal destroys the limits – the Grandmother
likes
she wrote about Southern café with the help of the who touches the Misfit:
characters with perfect hunchback who loves him she exceeds the limit of
 her humanity, does Homelessness? Concern - after WWII, poetry went -> they wanted a society
something that is not about America, influence through a shock, in the based on American values
possible humanly because of buddhism and eatern same way as prose (absolutely traditional) ->
of the moment of grace – thinking, ’Sunflower - reality is questioned many spoke up against
Sutra’ nature vs junkyard
Good Country People: - huge change in university this squareness
wooden legged Helga,  Robert Lowell: eminent system – universities were - with the help of New
heroine – she wants to go New England family opened to a larger public – Criticism, they started to
against her mother, so she (heritage and burden), Civil Rights’ Movements: criticise criticism
named herself conscientious objector in women, Afro Americans - overall intellectual
the war: West Street prison - literature was found to be movement
– ’confessional’ poetry: a useless thing to study – - counter-culture developed
Ihab Hassan: Radical Innocence, kinda like today against the propaganda
Life Studies (most
“tragic underground” - new critical attitude to culture (interesting to see
important volume) ’For
study literature – New how Ginsberg for example
Topic 6.: Post-war Poetry: the Union Dead’ Boston
Criticism was rooted in is a classic – how would
Ginsberg, Lowell, Plath monument, past vs.
the Southern Literary he feel about it? :D)
present, black soldiers
 Beat generation: revolt Renaissance Movement - counter-culture is
fought for this?
against ’square’-ness of - New Criticism: more
incorporated into classic
post WWII. America. Sylvia Plath: Lowell’s student – about the dynamism of the
text, independent from the culture
(’beaten’, musical ’beat’, confessional: scrutiny of the self:
’beatus’=happy). Counter- destructive! Immense energy, life of the author – was - Robert Lowell (1917-
culture – by now: classics! tension. Husband: Ted Hughes. deemed too complex,
unnecessary by the newer 1977)
Images of the Holocaust – self-
 Allen Ginsberg: breath- students -> - New England family
victimization. Perpetrators: male!
units, ’A Supermarket in experimentation with a - aunt also was an Imagist
’Lady Lazarus’, ’Daddy’ –
California’: where is the new style, a new way of poet
Rhymes, form: as if it were ’light
role of poetry in a expressing themselves - many great ancestors
verse’.
consumer society? - after WWII – very strict - burden of the ancestors ->
Imaginary meeting with ----------------------------------------- political era – McCarthy he had to live up to them
Walt Whitman: parallels ----------------------------------------- Era (“un-American and he turned against them
and differences between -------------------------- activities”) - started at Harvard – left it
the two poets. - a set pattern of a family
Post-War Poetry (Robert Lowell, after 2 years - wrote in the
Alan Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath) was accepted, mainstream style of T.S. Elliot
- converted to Christianity - created several personas - spoken, oral language new values – they don’t
in 1940 – he cannot go to which are closer to the became much more seem to have any more
war – conscientious poet themselves important possessions than their own
objector (considered to be - “For the Union Dead”: - poetry readings in San bodies
a crime) – one year in historical poem, walking Francisco - they spoke up in the name
prison, New York through Boston, not really - “Howl”: of some kind of human
- this prison year changed is civilised – childhood http://www.poetryfoundati integrity
world-view memory of being on.org/poems-and- - “A Supermarket in
- change in view: American fascinated by the aquarium poets/poems/detail/49303 California”
history is a history – no longer there – it is - a bit like the Lost
Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)
towards Apocalypse – inadequate to have a statue Generation: they feel like
very contemporary, very there – black people who their thoughts are not - the territory of inner
up-todate died – no WWII statue – needed in America psyche
- he gradually became a photo of Hiroshima – the - only by destroying - “Lady Lazarus”
confessional poet money survived – what we themselves - confessional poetry
- he has to come to terms see is the jungle that is let - breath unit gives a - very early tragedy: the
with his own life – very loose in Boston – the pulsation death of Otto Plath
different from the savage servility remains - drugs - “Daddy” – Nazi imagery
confessional poetry of - he was inspired to write - the sin of the parent is that
- Allen Ginsberg (1926-
Dickinson – his poetry poetry under the influence the parent died
1997)
discovers the territory of of some psychedelic drug self-identification with a victim of
the psyche without - beat generation - counter – he saw William Blake the Holocaust
civilisation (that has no culture reciting his poem “The
future anyway) – no - beat = rhythm, beating Sunflower”
territory left to discover - beat music Postmodernism
- “Sunflower Sutra”:
but the inside - beatus (Latin) = happy - grotesque, surreal, beat
http://www.poetryfoundati
- it is not happy and - a poet has to use on.org/poems-and- generation, confession
enthusiastic – it is self- uncomplicated language to poets/poems/detail/49304 poetry, scrutinizing the
destructive – the self is be understood self resulting in
- energy of nature in spite
split, a fantastic energy is - say what you want to say destruction, letting loose
of everything
created (like radioactive naturally radiation, upsetting
- the beat generation is
energy) - Walt Whitman, William standards, subverting
“suffocating in junk” –
- Sylvia Plath’s teacher Wordsworth rules, rejection of
they have to find some
 expectation of others, – the narrator would the words, the action – events – it can be very
intertextuality (references somehow influence the you can see it from several amusing as well as
on others directly or reader, provoke them – points of views with annoying – enjoying and
indirectly), mixture of participation is required different interpretations – feeling horror at the same
styles - the definition is not ready it is a game that is time
- meta-fiction: the self- – it is being written enjoyable to play – of
referentiality of the fiction - the term is controversial – course, there is an intrinsic
– it is not truth, it is being different opinions how it horror and fear that Vladimir Nabokov (egyik doksi
written – Slaughterhouse differs from modernism nothing is important for us vége)
Five (first chapter) - the main difference – Kundera: The
- the author has the between Modernism and Unbearable Lightness of
authority to write Postmodernism is that Being – you can’t really
whatever they want – they Modernists feel the world grab an aspect from which
are not even obliged to is falling apart – still, for this and that is important,
finish the story - temporal them, the fact that the significant, and in the end,
distortion: no beginning, world has fallen apart is nothing is significant for
middle, ending, no significant as a you – the associations
coherence in time, non- phenomenon - the work seem to be accidental, the
linear born from this still has its intertextualities are
- faction: a mixture of fact integrity – the speaker distracting – the patterns
and fiction – is this the expresses the shock and cannot be understood – the
history or is this the thing the disaster work of art is broken up –
the author is making up? - in Postmodern times, there it is relative whether you
the disturbed sense is more playfulness and call it a work of art or not
- unreliable narrative less responsibility – this – the writer may call
fragmentedness is attention to the relativity
- involvement of popular
celebrated rather than of clues
literature, pop-culture –
regretted – the possibility - the aim of Postmodern is
not only literary pieces
of significance is to reveal the absurdity of
that are referred to –
questioned and the world that seems to be
intermingling of styles,
undermined – therefore, organised on the surface,
registers
there is no real but in fact, there is a total
- very intensive
significance or weight to chaos in the core of the
involvement of the reader
 most of his works are set in the Collective memory – you live He also sees and feels things
same place : together with your past others don’t yet. Most reliable
 Yoknapatwhpha Co. -> The constant vibration of time narrator because he records things
represented La Fayette Co. layers gives a great amount of and events. He is a child. His
 Yefferson, Miss. -> Oxford, Miss. energy to F.’s works. poetry is imagism.
His venture is conservative – 2. Quentin – June 2, 1910 – Thursday
many characters reappear in a He has 3 great topics: (ascention)
different light 1. decline of the Southern aristocratic Studies at Harvard. He imagines
 balzacian way – the author gets families – how the family standards an incestuous relationship with
mingled with the characters detoriate (The Compsons) his sister, Caddy. Her virginity
He was also experimental – 2. the rise of the redneck – white in the meant the pureness of being
doesn’t follow chronological South, not from an aristrocratic Southern to him. Commits
order family, they made use from the loss suicide. He is an adolescent, his
 the fragments are to be represented, of the war and became rich (The poetry is lyrical intensity.
but he also talks about the collective Snopes Family in Faulkner’s world) 3. Jason – April 6th, 1928 – Friday
memory 3. man in nature – Faulkner hero would He wants to get rid of his
Sense of belonging – rather a be an outdoor hero, part of nature, Southerness – becomes a redneck.
negative community, which doesn’t bring utensils to nature His mother loves him the most
William Faulkner because he is more like her
becomes unified because of the Faulkner’s writing represents sg.
Contemporaries with Fitzgerald family, not a Compson. Poetry:
loss of the C.W. (sense of doom that isn’t clear – murkiness
He was loosely connected to the prose poetry – vernacular. He is
like in Europe) The fact that he
Lost Generation because he didn’t
His mythology: rose as a major mythical past (the C.W.) 1861-65
share the experience of war. He
writer created a
felt it was a big drawback at the
certain Reanissance in the South an adult. In the end Jason loses
beginning of his career and he felt
(1920’s) – the intellectual life the most precoius thing to him: all
he had to write about this topic –
flourished of his money, and by this he truly
early works.
F’s works are mainly tragic becomes a Compson.
He was advised later to write 4. Authorial – focalizer: Dilsey (mother
about his own world, which was
The Sound and
the South. Despite slavery, most reconstruction period – recent past (tragic) military
the Fury
of the white people weren’t slave occupation by the North 1865 – 1910’s
Same story told
holders, they only fought for the present (late 1920’s) – from 4 different figure – servant slave)
maintenance of the hierarchial more objective and perspectives: All of the brothers have a special
society, rather than to keep the comical 1. Benjy – 1928.apr.1 – Saturday relationship with Caddy (her
slaves during the Civil War.
33rd birthday (Jesus was 33 when daughter is Miss Quentin)
Faulkner created a mythology of These layers are mixed he died) – his perception is
the C.W. in his works. He had the
different, the world comes to him.
greatest literary output in the era –
 French translator of the novel: -> the Americans realized that Tennessee Williams (1911 - James Jones and his novel stands
Maurice Coindreau – he stated they built their lives on a dream – 1983) – came from the South –
out: living up to the expectations
that he novel is like an orchestra: the audience were touched (the brought a new flavour: trap of
Benjy – moderato dream can become a nightmare) traditions (good background for in the war as a soldier is
Quentin – adagio the main tension)
Jason – allegro
impossible: destruction of the
Change happened in the 1910’s – A Streetcar Named Desire
Authorial – allegro furioso, andante small university group plays character – you can’t be heroic in
religioso, allegro barbaro, lento (Little Theatre Movement) with Edward Albee (1928 – 2016)
a war, your own army undoes you
American drama/theatre personal authors – dealt with Who is afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Why wasn’t it popular? American context (tradition is a -Univesity scenery Joseph Heller – Catch 22 (22-es
 First settlers didn’t think it was question, living up to the -Old couple: George and Martha –
csapdája)
important. According to the Puritan expectations) love each other, family illusion: they Kurt Vonnegut – Slaughterhouse-Five
leaders it created a community but Eugene O’Neill (1888 – 1953) – don’t have a child, but they are
know 2 plays for the exam from pretending they have one (Az ötös számú vágóhíd)
that can’t be elsewhere than in the
church, for a wholy purpose. him! -they are constantly playing games
 the society was always on the move, Roaring 20’s – booming literature with their guests
His themes: -special names for special games: 2. J
there was no need for a settled
community -> theaters not built, - the question of African humiliate the host etc. ewish – American literature
Americans – created a play with
mobile entertainment Many high prize winning writers
an all black cast
When the need come for theatre –
- Irish background – identity that Post WWII prose came from a non-English
mid 19th century
can’t be easily americanized
Entertainment became a business speaking country after WWII
- several personal tragedies in his
-> Broadway - people went there 1. F
own life: his best plays focuses on Ihab Hassan – critic – Radical
to laugh and not to feel down –
his own family, their tragedy ollowed the nationalistic tradition –
most shows were quite light. No Innocence – the Jewish writers
genuine American play became war novels
Arthur Miller (1915 – 2005) and the Southern women acted as
famous at the time, unlike in
He wrote in the McCarthy era – -Irving Shaw – The Young Lions
Europe (facing problems was an spokespersons of the „tragic
those who were suspected of not -Norman Mailer – The Naked and
unpleasant experience)
sharing the American ideology underground” of the mainstream
The movie industry started the Dead
were hunted down and questioned
flourishing at the same time as the -James Jones – From Here to Eternity culture
– he was one of these people too
drama – when a play became
because he questioned the Common characteristics: follow Bernard
successful it became a movie Double identity,
American ideology in his plays
Flourishing started on the the nationalistic tradition, it is Malamund question of
Tragedy and the Common Man,
influence of Chekov, Ibsen – main Philip Roth traditions
Death of a Salesman impossible to write about WWII.
theme: the average middle class Cynthia Ozick
home where is a big a lie usually
 alienation, alcohol, loss of Howl – explains how the he couldn’t come to terms with,
3. S communication generation has been destroyed burden of family history
 serious religius conversion
outhern Women - strong sense of Raymond Carver – What We Talk Sunflower Sutra –  consciencious objector -> in
belonging to a community About When We Talk About Love influence of Buddhism and prison for a while
Eastern thinking  met with the New Critics ->
Flannery O’Connor
Katherine Anne Porter 6. grotesque humour, A Supermarket in change in subject -> focus on
Carson McCullers alienation, isolation,
California – where is the role of everyday life
loneliness
poetry in consumer society? Night Sweat – midlife crisis
Multiculturalism
For the Union Dead
4. T 20th century literature grouped by
2. Confessional Poets
he New Yorker - Forum to discover the background of the writers
They focus on themselves, they Sylvia Plath
new talents: (native-Am., Spanish-Am., Asian-
create a poetic persona which is  loss of her father at a young
John Chever - master of short stories Am. etc.)
really similar to their own selves age (she turnes against him in her
– The Swimmer -> energy is gained from the poems because he died so early)
Shirley Jackson – The Lottery  several nervous breakdowns
J. D. Salinger – A Perfect Day for
Post WWII Poetry splitting of the self
-> serious treatment, hospitalized
Bananafish 1. B Their confessions are not pleasant  The Bell Jar –
eat Generation - favorize oral poetry confessions, rather self- autobiographical novel, discusses
5. M Jack Kerouac – being always on the destructive. The subject matter is her breakdown
inimalism their everyday lives -> biography  she married Ted Hughes
move, self destruction
Saying the max with the min Allen Ginsberg – he felt he was a (also a poet) – their marriage
is important.
amount of words spokesperson for the outcast couldn’t bear the intensity of their
Robert Lowell
He became a poet after having a poetry, Ted cheated on her – divorce
Dirty realist writers – focus on the  Came from a prestigious
dream vision of William Blake (2 children)
boring lifestyle, on the average Protestant family from New England.
 Tulips – the family brought
American lives – isolation whispering one of his poems to There were patterns in his life which
tulips to her after an operation
him
(when they were still together), the - no real significance or weight (KÁLLAY KIDOLGOZOTT great battlefields – power of
tulips represent life for her to human actions
nature “I am the grass. Let me
TÉTELEK)
- temporary patterns, the work.” grass: the fittest – survives
1. Alternatives of Modern Edgar Lee Masters (1869-1950)
clear understanding is impossible -> Poetry: Spoon River Anthology 1914
Post-modern artists – still not
relativity Sandburg, Masters, Frost, (influenced by a volume of Greek
clearly defined Pound, Williams, Cummings, epitaphs)
Is there anything at stake for the Stevens. dead people speak in a cemetery –
 intertextuality
 pastiche? - mixing of post-modernist writer? – death <- The Genteel Tradition (East coast, no conversation, monologues
distance between life and about their frustrations in life
different styles > love literature) important topic: American small
 metafiction – when fiction Against it: new voices: town! ideal social formation,
reflects itself naturalism in prose (harsh reality idyllic stereotypes – in reality:
Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) can be the subject matter of hypocrisy, suppressed frustrations,
 emphasizing the fictiveness
- emigrated to England and literature) secrets, unhappiness! Masters
of the characters poetry: Chicago (pulsating city, subverts the idyll.
 temporality – linearity of then to the U.S. new center, not only for industry hidden little tragedies of many
- only started writing in but for culture as well): people that were ignored by
timing is upset
 fact modernism English when he moved to the U.S. “The Chicago Renaissance”, previous writers, now critically
 unreliability of many Poetry, a Magazine of Verse, shown
Lolita – scandalous story (about 1912. Editor: Harriet Monroe “Elsa Wertman”, “Hamilton
narrators (comparable to the Hungarian Greene” (mother and son, the son
pedophilia) – only a French
 involvement of popular Nyugat) – aim: to collect new never knew)
publisher was willing to publish voices of American poetry “Lucinda Matlock” (the only
culture and the reader
it. It is a very interesting structural Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) person content with her life: “It
Voice: resembles Whitman’s takes life to love life”)
Differences between modernist play at the same time. We find “Chicago”: an ode to the city Robert Frost (1874-1963)
(1) and post-modernist(2) references to previous poems circular structure, celebrating the b. in San Francisco, but moved to
energy, action! New England, Harvard
1, Heap of broken images – fallen (Annabel Lee) and novels. Real city: compared to a young man, University, but after 2 years, got a
apart status of the univers love affair is on a literary level, laughing, “survival of the fittest” farm from his grandfather. Poetic
– maybe unpoetic and industrial, persona: a simple farmer.
2, The author is no longer sad between poetry and novels. (fb still young, brave, strong, healthy, Seemingly simple poems – but
about the fallen universe -> he csoportból –Hunor) surviving – knows no death they subvert basic American
“Grass”: counterpoint? ideals, e.g. productivity (“After
accepts and celebrates it Apple-Picking”), or progress
(“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy “In a Station of the Metro” comic, strange, bizarre – rewriting, refinement!) American
Evening”) translations of Chinese poetry and experimental styles, exotic vernacular language
discovered in England, by Ezra Japanese drama imagery, reflective poetry innovator: small range –
Pound “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”: long trying to come to terms with the openness!
“Design”: major philosophical poem after WWI, expression of confusions of his time “The Red Wheelbarrow”, “This Is
questions – simple observation his disillusionment inner world vs. outer world, Just To Say”, “The Young
white spider, white flower, white “A Pact” – coming to terms with subject vs. object, perceiver vs. Housewife”
moth: nature – death the heritage of Walt Whitman perceived, fiction vs. fact, e.e. cummings (1894-1962)
accidental or designed? cantos: his unique form, highly imagination vs. reality visual artist, painter (low-case
allusive poems, turning to a myth concept of a “supreme fiction”, letters)
Ezra Pound (1885-1972) and trying to revive it (e.g. Canto modern mythology – replacement Harvard, graduation –
discovering European cultural and I: Ulysses’ descent to the for the mythologies of the past, commencement address: “The
literary tradition and “making it underworld, rewriting Chapter XI new vision with “which men New Art”
new”! Leaving America for of the Odyssee) could propose to themselves a 1917: Europe, volunteer
Europe: Italy, England WWII: influenced by the ideas of fulfilment” ambulance driver (like many
father of modernism – fascism, saw a kind of “Of Modern Poetry”: what will members of the Lost Generation)
cosmopolitan version of American Renaissance hero in Mussolini – suffice – spiritual satisfaction imprisoned for 3 months (refused
high modernism: the world is turned anti-capitalist, anti- metaphors alluding to drama to say he hated the Germans, he
falling apart but it is still possible American. After the war: Pisa: (stage, insatiable actor) and music only admitted that he loved the
to write with the aim of war camp prison, tried for treason. (twanging an instrument) French) – dedication to individual
professional perfection Later: mental illness, asylum in later. turning more meditative, freedom, opposition to
legendary friendship with T.S. Washington D.C., after being philosophical – seen as an dehumanizing forces
Eliot (who dedicated “The Waste released. he went back to Italy intellectual elitist After WWI.: Europe, Paris,
Land” to him) William Carlos Williams (1883- studied painting, participated in
on the basis of artistic quality Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) 1963) the life of American expatriates
influenced and discovered many two seemingly incompatible medical doctor, Rutherford, New 1923: first volume of poetry:
other authors (Yeats, Eliot, D.H. careers: lawyer – poet Jersey (birthplace, where he Tulips and Chimneys
Lawrence, Joyce, Frost, vice-president of the Hartford returned to practice medicine for eccentric, playful style, unusual
Hemingway, etc) Accident and Indemnity Company 40 years) typography and spelling,
overseas editor of the Poetry First book of poetry: 1923 break away from poetic deliberate grammatical tricks
magazine: founder of imagism Harmonium, critical attention: convention, reproducing curiously conventional subject
(direct treatment of the subject, no only in 1931, immediate experience matter: love-poetry, romantic
word that does not contribute to rebelling against the “stale “no ideas but in things” tradition “in Just”, “1/a”,
the presentation, rhythm: in intelligence” of the past, setting simple, direct, seemingly formless satirical voice as well: “a
sequence of a musical phrase, not out “to make a new intelligence poetry, ‘nonliterary’ freshness, salesman is an it that stinks”,
the metronome, no abstractions, prevail” spontaneity (but: constant “buffalo bill’s defunct”
no ornaments)
 futurelessness, no their mothers: “flapper”, short
2. The Lost Generation: perspective “bobbed” hair, short skirt, Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961)
Fitzgerald, Hemingway independent, self-supporting - style: conscious study of
Malcolm Cowley (critic): woman (e.g. Jordan Baker in The writing: journalist,
term: coming from Gertrude Stein complex trauma: creative Great Gatsby) telegram-style, “vignettes”
: “une generation perdue” Fitzgerald’s life: in parallel with Flaubert: “le mot juste” –
impulse, inspiration! from
(described in Hemingway’s A the “boom and bust”: leading to Hemingway: “write a true
Moveable Feast) a distance they discover crisis (Great Depression)
how much ‘being lost’ is sentence”
first generation of American b. St Paul, Minnesota (middle Afred Kazin: “More than
writers that had a great influence part of the American class family), volunteer for WWI.:
on European literature military camp in Alabama – Zelda anyone else in that great
experience!
“getting lost”: many times! themes of American Sayre: a “Southern belle”: getting generation that believed in
 trauma: WWI. -- naturalism, elaborated in married after the publication of the religion of the word,
upbringing: progressivism, an intensive/poetic form, This Side of Paradise – fairy tale Hemingway managed, by
optimism, sense of duty; – but: excessive partying, one word after another, to
innovations in narrative
WWI: volunteers: collapse travelling, drinking, nervous make the world as linear
technique – modernists! breakdowns – heart attack age 44
of traditional values, big as his prose, as stripped as
words = big lies, no success: The Great Gatsby, 1925
re-enactment of the proximity of a prize ring, as clean as an
heroism, only the killing fascination with money and
death in powerful metaphors: operating room” (The
wealth – aesthetic value!
machine of the army – war John Dos Passos (1896-1970):
“Babylon Revisited” (1931) – Bright Book of Life, p.6.)
experience: double nature: “the great grinder” (Three the principle of the
later story, painfully
also a “study tour”, Soldiers , Manhattan Transfer)
autobiographical iceberg: to say the most
excitement, initiation into F.Scott Fitzgerald: “the great
Honoria: symbolic name, Charlie with the least amount of
manhood party” (waste of time, energy,
Wales would like to regain his words
 trauma 2: going home, money, life)
honor. Can the past be erased? Is in our time (1924): only
America has changed E. Hemingway: “the great
there a meaningful future?
(new conservativism, test/fight” (images of violence) the vignettes
Babylon: Paris: a city of great
In Our Time (1925):
banning of alcohol, etc) – culture and a city of sin
Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896- stories as well – powerful
celebrated as veterans, but. Marion and Lincoln: also victims
1940) collection! vignettes: one
no sense of being heroes. – is their home a more favorable
chronicler and embodiment of
War-experience: cannot be alternative? short scene of violence,
“The Jazz Age”
communicated Charlie: humor! strong affection seemingly not connected
America in the 1920s: economic
 trauma 3: back to Europe between him and his daughter – to the stories
boom: new attitude to money and
– they do not belong there, but: ghosts of the past: Dunc and title: from a prayer: “Give
wealth: beginnings of consumer
either Lorraine – ambivalent ending: us peace in our time”
ethics, new woman-image, in
total failure or some hope?
contrast with the generation of
 Nick Adams – a novel of anyone who wants to „positivism” (materialism, certainty (Darwin:
education? Nick is missing respect himself.” ((A rationalism) in philosophy, On the Origin of
Second Flowering, p. 50) : „realism” in literature Species: 1859)
from the middle of the epistemological certainty Karl Marx:
book –“ as if the novel life: ritual of the moment! Christian norms held up: contradictions within
were hit by a bomb” God, Immortality, Duty the "capitalist"
system..
- never relaxed, ever the „Second Industrial
- his type of hero: Revolution (1865-1900): scepticism: no
- y situation: a challenge,
outdoor/champion/artist of industrial, economic and absolute certainty
every challenge must be technological developments (Einstein’s theory of
life/man – but: wounded!
answered – but: “Winner Mass production, relativity, 1916),
(physically/spiritually:
Take Nothing” (title of one mechanization of questioning
“The Snows of
of his works); still: “Man manufacture, employment coherence and
Kilimanjaro”, The Sun for increasing numbers meaning (Nietzsche)
can be destroyed but not
Also Rises / A Farewell to Long Depression (1873-
defeated” (The Old Man experience of time
Arms) – women: 1896)
and the Sea) and space radically
submissive or “femme Second World War
altered
fatale” – debatable! His * social changes: widening CHANGE is
portrayal is not gap between rich and poor, emphasized: Henri
stereotypical!
1. Introduction to 20th alienation, break-up of Bergson: existence =
century British literature traditional ties, duration, to exist = to
- ethical code: the how of individualism, the loneliness change
examination topics and of the crowds
things: Malcolm Cowley: mind and world:
“His motto through life required reading at the * intellectual changes: trend from the
was […] ‘I want to know back!!!!! . belief in progress, objective to the
shattered subjective:
how’. How to write, first
modernism (first 2-3 decades of rationalism „everything is in the
of all, but also how to questioned mind”,
the 20th century)
fight, how to box, how to rejection of 19th century (Nietzsche, only certainty:
ski, how to act in the optimism in general Kierkegaard) individual soul
bullring, how to remember in art: experimentalism, rejection inward look: interest
his own sensation, how to of traditional forms previous optimism in unreality and
nurse his talent, how to questioned dream, in psychology
Economic, social, intellectual (Schopenhauer was (Freud)
live while learning to labelled
changes:
write, and more broadly "pessimistic") Modernism in the ARTS in general
how to live in the sense of the Victorian age: stabilizing
era Impressionism (Manet)
mastering the rules that evolution by
undermined religious cubism, surrealism (Picasso, Gustave
must be followed by
Klimt, Matisse)
expressionism: (Kandinsky) quarters of your Seem fantasies to me,
meaning (Mallarmé) a religious man deprived of And mirage-mists their Shining Land,
Arnold Schoenberg’s atonal music Is a drear destiny.
belief
the modernist artist: elitist, Imagism: (Ezra Pound): An image is first he believes in the notion of Why thus my soul should be consigned
alienated from society that which presents an emotional progress: „evolutionary To infelicity,
and intellectual complex in an meliorism” Why always I must feel as blind
To sights my brethren see,
art = instant of time (Ezra Pound) after the World War: Why joys they've found I cannot find,
salvation, a substitute of faith consciousness is an accident, Abides a mystery.
escape from universe: a machine
2. Thomas Hardy (1840- the only reality = change: Since heart of mine knows not that ease
history Which they know; since it be
1928) That He who breathes All's Well to these
POETRY: Then we looked Breathes no All's Well to me,
* Rejection of prevalent Victorian 1. Life: closelier at Time, My lack might move their sympathies
And saw his And Christian charity!
values (also Romanticism)
Born in Dorset, love of country, ghostly arms I am like a gazer who should mark
L’Art pour L’art: / Aesthetic architect, two unhappy marriages revolving An inland company
Movement at the turn of the century 14 novels (critical of Victorian To sweep off Standing upfingered, with, "Hark! hark!
society) The glorious distant sea!"
(Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde) woeful things with And feel, "Alas, 'tis but yon dark
Art should be began to publish poetry in 1898
prime, And wind-swept pine to me!"
independent of all ((918 poems altogether)
claptrap —should Things sinister
Yet I would bear my shortcomings
stand alone [...] and 2. Age, background: with things sublime With meet tranquillity,
appeal to the artistic Alike dissolving But for the charge that blessed things
sense of eye or ear, (from ’Going and I'd liefer have unbe.
awareness of modern problems:
without confounding Staying’)
this with emotions O, doth a bird deprived of wings
entirely foreign to it, as collapse of values, starting point: Go earth-bound wilfully!
Darwin modern: questioning age-old ....
devotion, pity, love, Enough. As yet disquiet clings
patriotism and the like rise of agnosticism: (Thomas conventions of poetry: About us. Rest shall we.
(James McNeill Henry) Huxley – „anti-religous” poems, „anti-
Whistler1834-1903) agnosticism = love” poems A Drizzling Easter Morning’
divorce between art and everything intensely personal
nature (Baudelaire) outside scientific expressionism: sacrifices beauty And he is risen? Well, be it so. . . .
Decadence (George Moore: reach is for the expressive function And still the pensive lands
Ode to a Dead Body) unknowable poems expressing his loss of complain,
Impressionism (theology, God)
religious faith: And dead men wait as long ago,
morality: has no basis
Symbolism: (W. B. Yeats, French value of individual cannot be The Impercipient
As if, much doubting, they would
symbolists) stated know
To name a thing is to THAT from this bright believing band What they are ransomed from,
An outcast I should be,
do away with three
That faiths by which my comrades stand
before
3. His philosophy and poetic style
They pass again their sheltering Steeled by the sense of ire See parallel with his famous novel:
door. unmerited; Tess of the D’Urbervilles: 1. Establish the dominant meter of
„The President of the poem by indicating stressed and
Half-eased in that a
the Immortals unstressed syllables (do this at least
I stand amid them in the rain, Powerfuller than I for the first stanza).
finished his sport
While blusters vex the yew and Had willed and meted me the 2. How do we know that this text is
with Tess.”
vane; tears I shed. a reversal of a love poem? How are
And on the road the weary wain the traditional devices of a love
Neutral Tones (1867) poem reversed?
Plods forward, laden heavily; But not so. How arrives it joy
3. Characterize the relationship of
And toilers with their aches are lies slain, We stood by a pont that winter day, this couple. What are some of the
fain And why unblooms the best And the sun was white, as though poetic figures expressing that? What
For endless rest—though risen is hope ever sown? chidden of God, is the main source of the figures?
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;
he. - Crass Casualty obstructs the 4. Characterize the structure of the
- They had fallen from an ash and
sun and rain, were gray. poem. It helps to compare
thoroughly the first and last stanzas.
deliberately breaks the And dicing Time for gladness What makes the last stanza special
Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
conventions of Easter poems, casts a moan. … Over tedious riddles of years ago; and different from all the rest? Think
ironical Thes purblind Doomsters had And some words played between us to about images and motifs that appear
speaker feels excluded from the joy as readily strown and fro in both. What changes can you
of Easter On which lost the more observe? (Look at the tenses of the
Blisses about my pilgrimage as by our love.
„if way to the Better verbs for example.)
pain.
there be, it exacts a The smile on your mouth was the deadest
full look at the thing The Convergence of the Twain
Questions: Alive enough to have strenght to die;
worst.”
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby I
1 What kind of a „god” does the Like an ominous bird a-wing. biblical idea: a cosmic
Hap (1866) speaker desire for himself and
Since then, keen lessons that love wedding/marriage/union at the end of
why? (first two stanzas) Why deceives, time (the Lamb [Christ] and his
If but some vengeful god would would he be „half-eased” by a And wrings with wrong, have shaped to Bride [the church]; history has a
call to me vengeful, cruel god? me purpose, an outcome
From up the sky, and laugh: What is the real nature of the Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a
tree,
’Thou suffering thing, universe (the real nature of And a pond edged with grayish this hope is bitterly parodied: the
Know that thy sorrow is my „god/s”) as described in the third leaves cosmic consummation consists of the
ecstasy, stanza? (Why the capital letters?) encounter between ship and iceberg
That thy love’s loss is my hate’s *famous poem about the loss of love
profiting!’ expressionism: consonant clusters, *traditional devices of a love poem Study Questions
alliterations, high-brow, latinized reversed Structurally, the poem can be
words express alienation and threat *hopelessness, expressed by gray, divided into two parts. Can you
Then would I bear it, clench
bitter irony (see questions) faded colours identify them? (A grammatical
myself, and die * framed structure change, among other things,
1 God for Hardy = „Immanent Will” * a personal experience becomes a indicates the shift.)
The text of these poems are reproduced
symbol of universal truth
in my seminar course kit as well.
What is described in the first *symbolism a complex of  Celtic twilight: vague
section? What is described in the * the great cataclisms of their metaphors/images, atmosphere, dream,
second section? What does “she” time, esp.first world war: evoking/conjuring up some  landscape: vaporous, gray;
refer to? (There is a clue later.) „things fall apart; the emotion half lights
Can you identify the historical event
centre cannot hold” (The emotion: NOT a feeling, it is
behind the poem?
The poem contains a narrative but it
Second Coming) a power that moves The Lake Isle of Innisfree
does not follow the chronological „Minden egész eltörött”
order. Can you reconstruct the (Kocsiút az éjszakában) a Romantic notion of art: I will arise and go now,
proper chronology/timing? poets (and painters and And go to Innisfree,
A contrast is set up in the first stanza 1. Life musicians) are continually And a small cabin build there,
which then dominates the poem. triangle of three cities: Dublin- making and unmaking the world
Point out the contrasting images in
Of clay and wattles made;
London-Sligo
stanzas 1 to 5. Nine bean rows will I have
It is indeed only those things
Can you find the synonym of the Sligo: Celtic tradition there,
which seem useless or very
expression “human vanity”? London: cosmopolitan experience A hive for the honey bee,
What philosophical/theological idea feeble that have any power and
Dublin: a Romantic, nationalistic And live alone in the bee-loud
is parodied in the second section? In all those htings that seem
shelter glade
other words: a historical event is useful or strong (armies,
described, but extremely ironically. architecture, reason) would
In what does the irony lie? important personalities in his life: And I shall have some peace
Maud Gonne: frustrated have been a little different if
Find the phrase which has the same there,
referent as “Immanent Will.” love: unquenchable source for some mind long ago had not
For peace comes dropping
Explain the title. poetry given itself to some emotion
slow,
The irony is strenghtened by the use and shaped sounds or colours
of a metaphor to describe the Dropping from the veils of the
Lady Augusta Gregory: friend or forms or all of these, into a
“august event.” Consider the a writer, morning
musical relation, that their
expressions. “prepared a mate”;
dramatist, To where the cricket sings;
“consummation.” Which area of life emotion might live in other
has a There midnight's all a glimmer,
do these images come from? minds.
collection of And noon a purple glow,
Irish folk- * belief in a mythic unity of being And evening full of the linnet's
tales (Romantics!) wings
3. William Butler Yeats * importance of form:
2. symbolism: I will arise and go now,
(1865—1939) „your words are as subtle, as
Important role in the revival of complex, as full of For always night and day
through the use of symbols poetry mysterious life as the body of I hear lake water lapping
Irish literature
helps you discover an unseen, a …. woman”
central theme: Ireland, her history, With low sounds by the shore;
spiritual world woman (dancer):
folklore and contemporary public While I stand on the roadway
life embodiment of poetry/art Or on the pavements gray,
The Symbolism of Poetry
(important esssay) I hear it in the deep heart's core
Yeats and Endre Ady: similarities 3. Early poetry:
(from The Rose,
* national identity: crucial  Romantic:sweet melody,
a symbol = 1893)
daydreaming
 Easter Rising 1916 (“the Irish The blood-dimmed tide is
written in London: ’56”) loosed, and everywhere the gyre: two whirling cones
wish to escape (influence of revolution and civil war, The ceremony of innocence is interpenetrating
Romanticism and “Celtic declaration of the Irish Free State drowned; complementary opposites (like
twilight”) in 1921 yin-yang)
The best lack all conviction,
directness of style and simplicity leaders = poets, teachers, narrowing VERSUS spreading
while the worst
but also subtle poetic devices dreamers, executed movement
(rhythm, sound symbolism) Are full of passionate intensity. subjectivity VERSUS objectivity
complex symbolism: ’Easter 1916’ inward VERSUS outward
nine: magic number, of birth, Surely some revelation is at movement
new life (last lines): hand; both
honey: reference to Canaan; I write it out in a verse— Surely the Second Coming is at in history and in the individual
glade to Greek mythology MacDonagh and MacBride hand.  general disintegration
How do alliterations, And Connolly and Pearse The Second Coming! Hardly  the rhyming falls apart,
metrical irregularities Now and in time to be, are those words out dissonances
and other devices express Wherever green is worn, When a vast image out of  iambic rhythm but full of
the direction of the poem Are changed, changed utterly: irregular caesuras
Spiritus Mundi
towards a sense of A terrible beauty is born. Troubles my sight: somewhere
calmness and peace?  falcon –falconer: man
in sands of the desert
elegiac feeling disconnected from God
4. Change in Yeats’ poetry: A shape with lion body and the
antithetical: a debate with  ceremony of innocence:
turbulent first decades of head of a man,
himself: baptism
the 20th century A gaze blank and pitiless as the
on the one hand:  beast to be born in
eulogistic, ordinary sun, Bethlehem = Christ’s birth:
Abbey Theatre 1904 people are transformed by Is moving its slow thighs, reversed!
Yeats: manager, involved, more their sacrifice, on the while all about it
realism other hand: an Reel shadows of the indignant 5. The aging Yeats
style: „talk”, much more vulgar, unnecessary tragedy? desert birds.
ugly and harsh The darkness drops again; but ’Sailing to Byzantium’,
later: symbolism returns ’Byzantium’, ’Among
now I know
transformed (intensive and “The Second Coming” Schoolchildren’
shocking) That twenty centuries of stony
sleep (In The Tower, 1928)
TURNING and turning in the Were vexed to nightmare by a
second decade of the century: How to escape from the body? How
widening gyre rocking cradle,
turbulent to overcome the confines of matter)?
(Major Robert Gregory, husband The falcon cannot hear the And what rough beast, its hour
falconer; Growing preoccupation for the aging
shot in the war) come round at last, Yeats
intensification of the Things fall apart; the centre Slouches towards Bethlehem to
independence movement cannot hold; be born? Two different solutions:
Mere anarchy is loosed upon
the world, written after 1919
 Sailing to Byzantium: a To the holy city of Byzantium. 2. Contrasting stanzas 1-2 with 3- midnight oil.
complete rejection of nature, III 4. How would you describe the O chestnut-tree, great-rooted
body and matter O sages standing in God's holy governing tension or contrast of blossomer,
Byzanthium and Among fire this poem. Find references to the Are you the leaf, the blossom
Schoolchildren: synthesis first part of the poem in the last
As in the gold mosaic of a wall, or the bole?
between the spiritual and the two stanzas.
Come from the holy fire, perne in O body swayed to music, O
physical/material 3. What kind of quest does the
a gyre, poet undertake in this poem? brightening glance,
“Sailing to Byzantium” And be the singing-masters of my What does the voyage symbolize? How can we know the dancer
I soul. 4. Contrast the last two lines of from the dance?
That is no country for old men. Consume my heart away; sick stanza 1 with the previous lines.
The young with desire What exactly is described in the
In one another's arms, birds in the And fastened to a dying animal first 6 lines? What are some of the 4. T. S. Eliot (1888--1965)
It knows not what it is; and gather poetic devices used?
trees
me 5. What is the dominant metaphor Let
--Those dying generations--at of stanza 2?
their song, Into the artifice of eternity. us
6. What do you think fire can be a go
The salmon-falls, the mackerel- IV
symbol for (stanza 3)? then
crowded seas, Once out of nature I shall never 7. What kind of utterance is
Fish, flesh, or fowl commend all take ,
stanza 3?
summer long My bodily form from any natural you
8. What exactly does he want to
Whatever is begotten, born, and thing, become (in stanza 4) in ordet to and
dies. But such a form as Grecian defeat mortality? I,
Caught in that sensual music all goldsmiths make Whe
neglect Of hammered gold and gold “Byzantium” and “Among n
Monuments of unaging intellect. enamelling Schoolchildren”: the
To keep a drowsy Emperor great synthesis is achieved even
II vision of unity: artist becomes
An aged man is but a paltry thing, awake; ing
one with the creative process, thus is
A tattered coat upon a stick, Or set upon a golden bough to
overcoming human limitations spre
unless sing
Soul clap its hands and sing, and To lords and ladies of Byzantium ad
(last stanza of Among
louder sing Of what is past, or passing, or to out
Schoolchildren)
For every tatter in its mortal dress, come Labour is blossoming or agai
Nor is there singing school but dancing where nst
studying Study Questions
The body is not bruised to the
1. Establish the dominant meter of sky
Monuments of its own the poem by indicating stressed
pleasure soul.
magnificence; Nor beauty born out of its own Like
and unstressed syllables (do this a
And therefore I have sailed the at least for the first stanza). despair,
seas and come Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of pati
ent
 ethe  second late marriage Edinburgh church the artistic
rise with secretary Valerie festival, 1935) process, the
d Fletcher pressure, so to
upo  Nobel prize: 1948, died at speak, under
na  Wasteland: 1922: the age of 77 which the fusion
tabl recovering from a takes place, that
nervous breakdown
e 3. Critical ideas:
counts.
Ezra Pound’s editorial advice
(’The
Love  in London: book reviews, a) the impersonality of poetry and
schoolteacher, worked for (’Tradition
Song the „objective correlative”
a bank (for several years) and Individual
of J. * against the Romantic
 editor of a newly founded Talent’, 1919)
Alfre cult of personality and
d quarterly: The Criterion subjectivism:
(publishing Proust, Gide, (Wordsworth: poetry = b) The importance of the literary
Prufr
Thomas Mann) 1922- spontaneous overflow of tradition
ock’) 1939
1. What makes it “modernist”? powerful feelings”) originality: not to be
The Waste Land: in valued, poets are part of a
 ordinary language, first issue of Criterion the more perfect living literary tradition
conversational style  director of Faber and
 surprise, incongruance: a the artist, the
Faber:
cold, medical image more completely
aiding many young 4. The Wasteland (1922)
intruding poets, writers (Pound, Auden, separate in him
 sarcastic, urban irony Joyce) will be the man Five chapters: I. The Burial of the
 juxtapose and fuse the  in 1927: joined the who suffers and Dead, II. A Game of Chess, III.
opposite or the discordant Church of England: the mind which The Fire Sermon, IV. Death by
 precise image grasping a conversion to creates; the Water, V. The Thunder Said
mood Christianity, important more perfectly
outcome of a long will the mind wasteland = modern world
2. Life: spiritual quest digest and futility, barrenness-
 born in USA, St.  declared himself transmute the infertility (physical and spiritual),
Louis, Unitarian “classical in literature, alienation
passions which
family royalist in politics, and principally expressed
are its material.
 Harvard: philosophy Anglo-Catholic in through the alienation of the
+ doctoral studies religion.” it is not the sexes:
 Paris - Sorbonne ’greatness’, the My
 left the USA in 1914:  turn to theatre: rejects intensity of the nerves are bad to-night. Yes,
settled in England earlier elitism emotions, the bad. Stay with me
 in London: Vivien (Murder in the components, but 'Spe
Haywood, first wife – Cathedral: the intensity of ak
disastrous marriage written for
to Thin many religions and rituals involve a symbols:
me. k.' sacrificial death union by eating
Why from (sacramental food
do Game of a) Greek, Phoenician, Egyptian symbolism)
dying god mythology: Attis, union by sex/love
you Chess
Adonis, Osiris (sexual symbolism)
neve three-day ritual: a god
r structured by a spiritual quest for
associated with vegetation is alienated, apathetic modern people:
spea renewal or rebirth)
usually put to death on the spiritual journey resisted
k? a descent to the zero point
first day, is buried, no rebirth in the Waste Land
(the lowest point)
Spe disappears and his absence is Waste Landers are not aware
ak mourned on the second, and of this dimension of life
first to the
'Wh earth (The
risen on the third not aware of sacred subtext
at Burial of the
are b) the quest for the Holy Grail O the moon shone bright on Mrs
Dead)
you (cup with Christ’s blood) Porter
descent
(Gawain, Perceval, Galahad) And on her daughter
thin under water = zero point
old and ailing king = Fisher They wash their feet in soda water
king reached in
king = Adam (fallen man)
of? The Fire
(it can be dead king, O the moon shone bright on Mrs
Wha Sermon and
wounded king, sick king or Porter
t Death by
extremely old) And on her daughter
Water
thin aim of quest: to restore the They wash their feet in soda water
beginning of
king king and the land by finding the
an ascent: What the Thunder Said
? Grail prostitutes washing themselves after
Wha the visit – subtext: ancient spring rite
structure borrowed from
t, the hero who comes, the
ancient and Christian mythology: (From the Fire Sermon)
'I knight, the saviour – (= Orpheus and
unless one first At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Christ)
neve spiritually dies one Turn upward from the desk, when the human
hero and sick king in one engine waits
r cannot experience
(Christ = „Ecce homo” = Adam) Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
kno spiritual rebirth and
a mediator - so he is also a I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between
w fulfillment two lives,
fisher
wha first: the worst has to Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can
be faced (about oneself and the see
t ancient symbol of the At the violet hour, the evening hour that
world)
you fish/fisher – who fishes strives
are humanity out of the chaotic Homeward, and brings the sailor home from
cycle of nature provides the sea,
thin waters of death
structure – death and new life The typist home at teatime, clears her
king the passing from winter to breakfast, lights
. fertility comes from UNION Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
spring, from darkness to dawn
with the divine life Out of the window perilously spread
 Her drying combinations touched by the formulated in ou subjective
sun's last rays, Christian consciousness
On the divan are piled (at night her bed) r
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays. theological terms, Q  attention is directed
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs but other religious ua to processes in the
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest— traditions also mind
I too awaited the expected guest. rt
present  inward look, interest
He, the young man carbuncular, arrives, et
A small house agent's clerk, with one bold in dreams
central themes: s
stare,  no privileged point
One of the low on whom assurance sits 1. incarnation – God became of view
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire. human
The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
 impressionistic
2. death and rebirth / wound and style: recording
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired, 5. Joseph Conrad and the
Endeavours to engage her in caresses healing impressions, not
Which still are unreproved, if undesired. humanity is so diseased that beginnings of modernist facts
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once; saving is painful, like an operation prose
;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference. The dove descending breaks the No, it is
(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all air 1. Victorian age: impossible;
Enacted on this same divan or bed; With flame of incandescent terror
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall it is
And walked among the lowest of the dead.) Of which the tongues declare  epistemological optimism = impossible
Bestows on final patronising kiss, The one discharge from sin and society and people
to convey
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit... error. are knowable, writers
…...' can grasp reality can
the life-
The Thunder Said: still no rebirth, The only hope, or else despair sensation of
be grasped
but a longing for it, symbolized Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre any given
 narrative method: typically
by thirst —To be redeemed from fire by epoch of
intrusive omniscient godlike
attention directed to great fire. narrator: eminently reliable one's
religious traditions (Hinduism, existence,
Buddhism, Christianity) Who then devised the torment? 2. Modernist agnosticism --that which
Love.  agnosticism and scepticism: makes its
5. Eliot’s late work Love is the unfamiliar Name no absolute certainty: “God truth, its
Behind the hands that wove is dead” meaning--
explicitly Christian, religious The intolerable shirt of flame  to believe in coherence = an its subtle
poems and plays Which human power cannot act of faith »»» no God = no and
most famous theatrical play: Murder remove. coherence
in the Cathedral penetrating
We only live, only suspire  authority and tradition –
essence. It
Consumed by either fire or fire. increasingly undermined
Four Quartets: mystical, is
meditative quest: how to find f impossible.
mind and world:
fulfillment by union with the ro We live, as
 heightened concern
divine m
with individual,
F
we dream-- impo
alone. . . ." sed
by JOSEPH CONRAD
The mind of 3. World as chaos: myth (1857−1924) Jozef Teodor
, Konrad Korzeniowski
man is
effects of first world war: time,
capable of
shatters belief in progress psyc 4. His life
anything-- holo  born in Poland (now part
 departure
because gical of Ukraine)
from
everything patte  father Apollo: a
chronologica
is in it, all l story- rns revolutionary and a man
the past as telling: of letters
esca
well as all  history is not pe  involvement in political
the future. going from conspiracy resulted in an
Joseph anywhere histo exile in Russia
Conrad: (unlike ry  parents die, uncle his
Heart of traditional throu guardian
Darkness stories and gh
plots) myth  Marseilles: 20 years of
It is when we  narration ic sea career, In 1878:
try to ruled by visio service on English ships
grapple with memory and n:  naturalized British subject
another associations sense in 1886
man's  fiction: often of  expedition into Africa:
intimate unresolved timel source for Heart of
need that we (no ess darkness
perceive how marriage, no and  This turned him to
incomprehen death) trans writing
sible,  time in the cend  first novel 1894 –
wavering, mind rather ental altogether 31 novels
and misty than time on order  isolated from principal
are the the clock writers or movements
 memory – great
beings that literature:  friends: old-fashioned
share with us central
freedom writers, no contact with
the sight of structuring
from modernists, unaware of
the stars and device
space and Freud
the warmth time (see
of the sun. but: need for transcendence: ecstatic
vision and order (or at least its also the 5. Heart of Darkness 1899!
(Conrad: motto of
Lord Jim) memory)
imagism!)
Plot: The narrator Marlow (an avaricious, predatory, almost a kind of note at the foot of the last page, would have been a splendid leader of an
Englishman) recounts his psychopatic world. scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady extreme party.' 'What party?' I asked. 'Any
hand, may be regarded as the exposition of a party,' answered the other. 'He was an--an--
adventure into the Congo to a method. It was very simple, and at the end of extremist.' Did I not think so? I assented. Did
group of men aboard a ship „He matures. The 19th that moving appeal to every altruistic I know, he asked, with a sudden flash of
(Nellie) anchored in the Thames century becomes the 20th sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and curiosity
estuary. Marlow takes a foreign century.” F. R. Carl terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene
sky: Narration:
assignment as a ferry-boat 'Exterminate all the brutes!' The curious part
captain, employed by a Belgian (Marlow about Kurtz):
was that he had apparently forgotten all about first person narration, also: a
trading company, employed to The original Kurtz had been educated partly story within a story –
that valuable postscriptum, because, later on,
in England, and--as he was good enough to
transport ivory down the Congo say himself--his sympathies were in the right
when he in a sense came to himself, he there is a first narrator telling
river; and to return the mysterious repeatedly entreated me to take good care of us how Marlow narrated his
place. His mother was half-English, his father
'my pamphlet' (he called it), as it was sure to
Kurtz to civilization. was half-French. All Europe contributed to
have in the future a good influence upon his
story to a group of British
Kurtz: an ivory trader, initially the making of Kurtz; and by-and-by I learned listeners
career. I had full information about all these
that, most appropriately, the International
high colonizing ideals but turning Society for the Sup- pression of Savage
things, and, besides, as it turned out, I was to
savage and amoral during his long have the care of his memory. I've done realization: British
Customs had intrusted him with the making
enough for it to give me the indisputable right imperialism is corrupt and
stay in Africa of a report, for its future guidance. And he
to lay it, if I choose, for an everlast- ing rest
had written it too. I've seen it. I've read it. It
in the dust-bin of progress, amongst all the brutal in practice
interest in inner, spiritual was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence, but
sweepings and, figuratively speaking, all the
too high-strung, I think. Seventeen pages of
realities: close writing he had found time for! But this
dead cats of civilization. But then, you see, I Postcolonial critique:
Conrad and Freud pioneers can't choose. He won't be forgotten. Whatever Chinua Achebe: "An Image
must have been before his--let us say--nerves,
he was, he was not common. He had the
in stressing the irrational went wrong, and caused him to preside at
power to charm or frighten rudimentary souls
of Africa: Racism in
elements in human behaviour certain midnight dances ending with Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'"
into an aggravated witch-dance in his honor;
unspeakable rites, which--as far as I Massachusetts Review. 18.
he could also fill the small souls of the
Marlow’s journey is reluctantly gathered from what I heard at
pilgrims with bitter misgivings:
various times--were offered up to him--do full text at
symbolical/spiritual: …. To this day I am unable to say what was
you understand?--to Mr. Kurtz himself. But it http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/wyrick/d
recognition of an obscure Kurtz's profession, whether he ever had any--
was a beautiful piece of writing. The opening
which was the greatest of his talents. I had ebclass/achcon.htm)
link between himself and the paragraph, however, in the light of later
taken him for a painter who wrote for the
manifestation of evil information, strikes me now as ominous. He
began with the argument that we whites, from
papers, or else for a journalist who could black people / Africa is used as a
darkness: personified by paint --but even the cousin (who took snuff metaphor for the brutal and
the point of development we had arrived at,
during the inter- view) could not tell me what
Kurtz, which every human 'must necessarily appear to them [savages] in
he had been--exactly. He was a universal
bestial in the human personality
being may be forced to meet the nature of supernatural beings--we
genius-- ……………... Ultimately a
approach them with the might as of a deity,' very offensive generalizing
within himself journalist anxious to know something of the
and so on, and so on. 'By the simple exercise
fate of his 'dear colleague' turned up. This blacks for Conrad are muscular
„Kurtz’s savage career is of our will we can exert a power for good
visitor informed me Kurtz's proper sphere savages jumping around in frenzy
practically unbounded,' &c., &c. From that
every man’s wish- point he soared and took me with him. The
ought to have been politics 'on the popular
fulfillment” Frederick R. side.' He had furry straight eyebrows, bristly
peroration was magnificent, though difficult
hair cropped short, an eye-glass on a broad
Carl to remember, you know. It gave me the
ribbon, and, becoming expansive, confessed
notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an
Marlow: a morally sensitive, his opinion that Kurtz really couldn't write a
august Benevolence. It made me tingle with
bit--'but heavens! how that man could talk! 6. Introduction to 20th century
naive Englishman with 19th enthusiasm. This was the unbounded power
He electrified large meetings. He had faith-- British drama
century certainties enters an of eloquence --of words--of burning noble
don't you see?--he had the faith. He could get
words. There were no practical hints to
himself to believe anything--anything. He
interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless
G. B. Shaw, J. M. Synge, W. B. dependant marri e
Yeats, T. S. Eliot, John Osborne on his ed a ph
mum, fello ili
bohemian w- sti
drama in the 19th century: , Fabi ne
two main trends: later an: s
frivolous entertainment, interested Char th
book drama: in lotte e
not meant to be acted politics: Payn re
socialist e- ali
ideas Tow sts
revival of drama at the beginning Fabi nshe :
of 20th century: two directions: an nd w
1. Irish revival (renaissance) Soci ho
high poetic quality ety: working: reviewer se
2. reappearance of the drama midd e
of ideas (G. B. Shaw) le drama criticism: thr
class literary realism! ou
George Bernard Shaw (1856-- orga main source: Ibsen gh
1950) nizat famous pamphlet: all
ion ’The Quintessence of Ibsenism’ thi
Life: estab the s
born in lishe ideali Shaw’s aim in theatre:
Ireland d in sts: destroy illusions, ideals, masks
father: 1884 decei
business to ve drama: a forum for
man, a prom thems considering moral, social,
drunkard ote elves political issues
mother: a the th (Widowers’ Houses: the
professio grad e abominable housing
nal singer, ual m conditions in England;
moved to sprea aj Mrs Warren’s Profession:
London d of ori prostitution)
Shaw in socia ty
Dublin lism w heighten the awareness of the
with by ho audience
father peac do a writer of comedies!
joined his eful n’t his humour
mother at mean ca unmatched by his
the age of s re: contemporaries
twenty th
 Mrs Warren’s Profession life itself is a mysterious, unwomanly Play
impersonal force = life force woman, boy
not performed for 8 years (1894-- objective of this life force = masculinity of
1902), bad reputation greater and greater understanding overemphasized, the
of itself modern West
basic conflict between mother and woma dialectical view
ern
daughter! n: of history: Joan =
questionable financial specia an agent of Worl
foundations of mother’s wealth l role history/life force d’ as
Mrs Warren: a prostitute (operated on – (progressive and in
the contintent, Vienna, Bp, English prima regressive forces) my
morality, more hypocritical) ry othe
helper not a tragedy: in r
tension: Mrs W: uses corruption of the the long run Joan play
and at the same time wants to rise life will be justified s, I
above it? force, have
bearin the revival of Irish drama used
later: returns to the Fabian g
on
position: you you stay within the childr poetry brought back
system and reform it gradually en influenced by Irish nationalism or
from within turns to Irish past for writing two
plays exhibiting material wor
serious moral concern this philosophy: Irish mythology, the ds
art is justified by Man and legends of pre- and early only
affecting the morals of society Superman Christian era that
aim: shock the (parody of one central I
audience, make them parliamentary hero: have
uncomfortable, make democracy, attack Cuchulain, not
them think on Fabian defender of hear
socialism, plot: Ulster,
d
Later phase: flows Don known for
no longer believes world can Giovanni, but the his terrifying amo
be changed socially woman takes the battle frenzy ng
salvation in the personal, initiative) Back to theme: rural life, the
biological sphere Methuselah peasantry cou
language of the peasants ntry
influenced by Henri Bergson Saint Joan peo
(Creative Evolution) long preface In ple
Nietzsche, Hegel, 20th century writi of
Schopenhauer recast of St. Joan ng Irela
’The
 nd, write start with all of them in verse, short one-act w
or a chance that is plays ill
spok not given to b
early phase: longing desire,
en writers in e
search for ideal beauty
a
in places where first play: Countess
d
my the springtime Cathleen
m
own of the local life C
itt
nurs has been o
e
ery forgotten, and u
d
…. the harvest is a nt
to
es
memory only, h
in countries s
and the straw ea
where the of
v
has been turned fe
imagination of e
into brick rs
the people, and n
from J. h
the language =
M. er
they use, is rich e
Synge’s so
and living, it is m
Preface ul
possible for a b
to The to
writer to be rich o
Playboy sa
and copious in di
of the v
his words, and m
e
Western e
at the same time th
World nt
to give the e
of
reality, which is p
[National Literary Society (1892)] se
the root of all o
aim: lf
poetry, in a or
to promote Irish literature, music, -
sa
comprehensive art sa
cr
and natural cr
ili
form. lectures, concerts, lending ifi
gi
libraries ce
In Ireland .. .we o
Abbey Theatre: 1904 a
have a popular us
W. B. Yeats: his n
imagination that ac
manager d
t:
is fiery, and dramatists of the b
b
magnificent, revival: Yeats, Sean O’Casey, J. ut
ea
and tender; so M. Synge, Lady Gregory ut
sh
that those of us y
e
who wish to W. B. Yeats’ dramas
 p no setting, no luck and villagers turn against him
o expensive props, company I’ve he attempts to kill his father a
et dependant on won me in the second time to regain his
in actor and words end of time – popularity
th two fine women
e reception: nationalistic riots in
fighting for the Dublin
dr John Millington Synge
a like of me – till depiction of Irish
m The Playboy of the Western I’m thinking this peasants
a: World: performed at the Abbey night wasn’t I a unsettling:
A Theatre in 1907 foolish fellow subversion of
le tragicomedy (3 acts) set in not to kill my accepted sexual roles
el Michael James Flaherty’s public father in the antithetical to the
= house on the west coast of Ireland years gone by. Abey Theatre’s
bi Language a dynamic force to mission ???
o transform life In act 2 father turns up and
gr destroys the illusion Christy ambivalent reference to the poet-
a insignificant Christy Mahon created figure: Christy presented as a
p appears in the village, claiming he Old Mahon: poet:
hi killed his own father by driving a Running wild, is Pegeen: it’s the
ca spade (’loy’) into his head it? If he seen a poets are your like
l celebration of the villagers – fine, fiery fellows
red petticoat
Cathleen Ní with great rages
Houlihan
Bravery is a coming
treasure in a swinging over when their
spirit of
lonesome place the hill, he’d be temper’s roused
Ireland
personifie and a lad would off to hide in the
kill his father, I ’m also: truly ambiguous and ironic
d by an sticks, and
idea of heros and heroism
old thinking, would you’d see him great talkers are synonymous
woman face a foxy divil shouting out his with bravery and heroism
who with a pitchpike on sheep’s eyes
rouses her the flags of hell. between the fantasy and reality: What matters?
people to little twigs and
the pubkeeper’s daughter Pegeen Words or deeds?
the
falls in love with him the leaves, and use of imagination to
national
his two ears escape from reality
struggle also several village women rising like a villagers: unable
second phase: international, Christy: Well, hare looking out to accept the fact
interest in Japanese drama (Noh it’s a clean bed through a gap. that they have
drama) created the
and soft with it, Girls, indeed!
fantasy and now
and it’s great
 it has become belligerent, dissatisfied working- intellectual famous
reality. class male protagonist environment economist John
traumatic Maynard
expressed in novels: Kingsley Amis – adolescence: Keynes)
1930s: resurgence of poetic Lucky Jim, John Wain: Hurry on
(religious) drama (in England) death of mother Here met
Down; Alan Sillitoe: The Loneliness
T. S. Eliot: Murder in the when she was Leonard Woolf,
of the Long-Distance Runner
Cathedral – 1935, commissioned 13 married: 1912
for the Canterbury festival half sister Stella Hogarth Press:
John Osborne (1929-1994): Look
martyrdom of St. Thomas a two years later: 1917
Back in Anger (1956)
Becket – breakdowns for Lesbian
realistic drama, no novelty in
influence of Greek tragedy, the rest of her relationship
form, but in content
medieval morality plays –
life with Vita-
liturgical The hero,
Jimmy Porter:
minor revival of religious plays Father died Sackville West
although the son of a worker,
followed 1904, favourite 1941: drowned
education: » on the border
of the middle class brother: two herself
upward mobility years later
(1930s, 1940s, 1950s: absurd threatened by the provoked an Her last letter to her husband:
drama, see later lecture) more privileged alarming
Jimmy Porter collapse I feel certain that I am going mad again.
1950S: Angry young men = I feel we can't go through another of
continues to work in also possible those terrible times. And I shan't recover
dominant literary force of the a street-market and sexual abuse by this time. I begin to hear voices, and I
fifties vents his rage on his half brothers can't concentrate. So I am doing what
middle-class wife seems the best thing to do. You have
George and given me the greatest possible happiness.
disaffection with class system, and her middle-class
pedigreed families, elitist Gerald You have been in every way all that
friend. anyone could be. I don't think two people
universities, hypocrisy Cornvall:
could have been happier 'til this terrible
dislike for anything high brow 7. Virginia Woolf: memories of a disease came. I can't fight any longer. I
and phoney modernism, feminism, lighthouse know that I am spoiling your life, that
without me you could work. And you will
impressionism (1882—1941) I know. You see I can't even write this
social background: part of properly. I can't read. What I want to say
after WWII, creation of welfare Bloomsbury is I owe all the happiness of my life to
state, living living standards for Life: you. You have been entirely patient with
father: editor Group with
the poor had increased drastically, me and incredibly good. I want to say
and critic Leslie sister, painter that — everybody knows it. If anybody
but power still in the hands of the Vanessa Bell (E. could have saved me it would have been
elite Stephen, you. Everything has gone from me but the
London M. Forster,
certainty of your goodness. I can't go on
uncertainty about traditional educated at biographer and spoiling your life any longer. I don't think
gender roles home in a essayist Lytton two people could have been happier than
Stratchey, we have been.
highly
 importance to a women as mirrors concept of a female
patriarch who
Theories of maleness and has to conquer, reflecting the figure of literary tradition
femaleness (feminism) who has to rule, man at twice his natural
of feeling that size (hindering the The weight, the
two books of feminist polemic: great numbers pace, the stride
improvement of the
Room of One’s Own, Three of people, half of a man’s mind
the human race situation of women) are too unlike
Guineas indeed, are by her own for her
nature inferior to lift anything
3.
Room of One’s Own to himself. …
But it is obvious
substantial from
Women have him
1. served all these that the values successfully.
One cannot centuries as of women differ
think well, love looking- very often from
well, sleep well the values difference. cultural rather
glassess
if one has not possessing the which have than biological
dined well. magic and been made by need for „the study of the
A woman must delicious power the other sex;
have money and naturally, this is psychology of women by a
of reflecting the
a room of her figure of man at so. Yet it is the woman”
own if she is to twice its natural masculine
write fiction size. …. mirrors values that
are essential to prevail.
imaginary life of all violent and Speaking 4.
crudely, And there is
Shakespeare’s sister: heroic action.
football and the girl behind
… if she begins
emphasis on financial to tell the truth, sport are the counter too
independence and the figure in the ’important’; the – I would as
worship of soon have her
autonomous space looking-glass
fashion, the true history as
shrinks; his
fitness for life is buying of the hundred
2. diminished. clothes ’trivial’. and fiftieth life
Without self- How is he going … This is an of Napoleon or
confidence we to go on giving insignificant seventieth
are as babes in judgement, book because it study of Keats
the cradle. And civilizing deals with the … All these
how can we natives, making feelings of infinitely
generate this laws, writing women in a obscure lives
imponderable books, dressing drawing-room. remain to be
quality which is up and A scene in a recorded
yet so speechifying at battlefield is
invaluable, banquets, more important exploration of the private
most quickly? unless he can than a scene in
a shop … sphere: „women have sat
By thinking that see himself at
other people breakfast and at indoors all these millions
are inferior to dinner at least assumption of women’s of years, the very walls are
oneself. ….. twice the size he „difference” permeated by their
Hence the really is?
enormous creative force”
 Mrs Dalloway uses all its the typical rs.
faculties.
(1925) one day of male How
an average society androgynous mind: associated do
lady: „Mrs modernist desire for with the they
Dalloway said she totality, unity: aggressive exhi
would buy the Tires aspects of bit
flowers herself.” ias Western thes
anticipating postmodern in civilisation: e
views Eliot power, char
’s dominance, acte
5. The colonisation risti
in each of us (first world cs?
two powers Wast
reside, one e war: To the Can
male, one Lan Lighthouse, you
female; and in 1928) iden
the man’s brain d
the man Orla also: with tify
predominates ndo language, sym
over the words and boli
woman, and in (192
the woman’s 8): reason but cal
brain the fanta lacking obje
woman intuition cts
predominates stica
over the man. l and asso
The normal and biog sensitivity ciat
comfortable ques ed
state of being is raph
when the two y tions with
live in harmony for mal
together, stud e
spiritually in her age men are now
cooperating. writing only with the male y: self-
Coleridge side of their brains Iden asse
perhaps meant tify rtio
this when he also political implications:
said that the connection between „pure, som n?
great mind is self-assertive virility” and e Wha
androgynous. It such t
is when this fascism
fusion takes mal kind
place that the reflection in Mrs e of
mind is fully char hum
fertilized and Dalloway (1925):
acte an
 qual Monday or Let us record
Tuesday, the the atoms as
ities accent falls they fall upon in her novels:
are differently from the mind in the narratives are uneventful,
cont of old; the order in which common place, hardly any plot
moment of they fall, let us
rast importance trace the (Mrs Dalloway: how a middle-
ed came not here pattern, aged housewife prepares for
with but there; so however her evening party)
that, if a writer disconnected
mal were a free man and incoherent narrative filtered through, even
e and not a slave, in appearance, dissolved in the characters’
aggr if he could write which each consciousness
what he chose, sight or
essi not what he incident scores intensely lyrical prose:
on must, if he upon the abundant with auditive and
and could base his consciousness. visual impressions
work upon his Let us not take
who own feeling and it for granted
exhi not upon that life exists
bit convention, more fully in Mrs Dalloway 1925
there would be what is
the no plot, no commonly
m? comedy, no thought big Mrs. Dalloway said
tragedy, no love than in what is she would buy the
interest or commonly flowers herself.
Literary impressionism, catastrophe in thought small. For Lucy
poetic style (the essay: the accepted had her
from the work cut
’Modern fiction’) style, and
perhaps not a essay out for her.
single button ’Modern The doors
The mind sewn on as the would be
receives a Fiction’ taken off
Bond Street
myriad tailors would their
impressions— have it. Life is attention to details, nuances, hinges;
trivial, not a series of Rumpelmay
fantastic, processes rather than hard er’s men
gig lamps
evanescent, or symmetrically facts, descriptions were
engraved with arranged; life is coming.
the sharpness of a luminous And then,
steel. From all „materialist” opposed to the thought
halo, a semi-
sides they come, transparent „spiritual writer”: „the Clarissa
an incessant envelope flickerings of that innermost Dalloway,
shower of surrounding us what a
innumerable flame which flashes its morning—
from the
atoms; and as beginning of messages through the brain”, fresh as if
they fall, as consciousness disregard of standard narrative issued to
they shape to the end. children on
themselves into conventions such as coherence, a beach.
the life of probability
What a lark! she had gone out techniqu the
What a plunge! on to the terrace
For so it had —Peter Walsh. e) different
always seemed to He would be back dominat characte
her, when, with a from India one of ed by rs about
little squeak of these days, June
the hinges, which or July, she forgot the each
she could hear which, for his working other
now, she had letters were s of the
burst open the awfully dull; it She
French windows was his sayings mind: would
and plunged at one remembered; memorie not
Bourton into the his eyes, his say of
s any
open air. How pocket-knife, his
fresh, how calm, smile, his time- one in
stiller than this of grumpiness and, span: the
course, the air when millions of world
one day, now
was in the early things had utterly
morning; like the vanished—how but that
flap of a wave; strange it was!— memorie they
the kiss of a a few sayings like were
s this or
wave; chill and this about
sharp and yet (for cabbages. embrace were
a girl of eighteen a whole that....
as she then was) she
life: would
solemn, feeling as
she did, standing narrative technique: free especiall not
there at the open indirect discourse y one say of
window, that Peter,
narrated summer she
something awful
was about to in the at would
happen; looking third Bourton not
at the flowers, at say of
person literary hersel
the trees with the
smoke winding off singular, cubism: f, I am
them and the but several this, I
rooks rising, am
author perspecti that
falling; standing
and looking until and ves in
Peter Walsh said, characte play important themes:
“Musing among r no aging and death
the
vegetables?”— discours „reliable lives of men and women:
was that it?—“I e merges knowled different possibilities and
prefer men to (stream- ge”: perspectives
cauliflowers”—
was that it? He of- only alienation: especially male-
must have said it consciou impressi female
at breakfast one sness ons of
morning when
contrasted say cont sym
with an and rast: boli
idealized Lily Clari ze
female- Bris ssa effic
female coe is in ienc
relationship (mal love y,
which es: with civil
psychologic alwa civil izati
ally ys izati on?
corresponds an on, Whi
to pre- intru refus ch
Odipal sion) ing char
mother- sensitivity: to experience life to to acte
daughter the full, the role of the artist ackn r
relationship, Septimus owle adm
and is Warren dge ires
looked for Smith: a the civil
in the past war veteran, aggr izati
Mrs shell shock, essiv on
Dall psychologic e, the
owa ally mas most
y: unstable, culin ?
Clari commits e How
ssa suicide aspe does
and ct of Sept
Sall parallels the imus
y between worl reac
Seto Clarissa and d t to
n Septimus! ques thes
in tions e
To question: : aspe
the Find Whi cts
Ligh parallels as ch of
thou you are obje the
se: reading the cts worl
Mrs novel! mig d?
Ram ht How
 does she had pilfered. She was never wholly Jesuit boarding school, but had to course of civilisation in Ireland by
admirable. She had wanted success. Lady leave it
he Bexborough and the rest of it. And once she
preventing the Irish people from

ulti had walked on the terrace at Bourton. Jesuit Belvedere College, Dublin having one good look at themselves

mat (join the order) in my nicely polished looking-

University of Dublin, studying glass.”
ely …..
(letter to Grant Richards, 23
modern languages.
help June 1906, SL 89-90)
The clock began striking. The young man had When mother was dying of
Clar killed himself; but she did not pity him; with cancer, he refused to kneel and
issa the clock striking the hour, one, two, three, pray attention on lower middle class
expe she did not pity him, with all this going on. the ruling elite: the Protestant
There! the old lady had put out her light! the minority, Catholics – low-paid
rien whole house was dark now with this going In 1904 he met Nora Barnacle and
ce on, she repeated, and the words came to her, on June the 16th (!): first date jobs
especially women (Ireland =
life Fear no more the heat of the sun. She must From 1904-1920 he and Nora
go back to them. But what an extraordinary lived in Trieste Zürich image as wronged woman)
on a night! She felt somehow very like him—the
from 1920-1941: in Paris and the source of most misery:
deep young man who had killed himself. She felt English domination, the
er glad that he had done it; thrown it away. The Zürich
clock was striking. The leaden circles two children: Giorgio and Lucia Protestants and
level dissolved in the air. He made her feel the the
difficulties with making money;
? beauty; made her feel the fun. But she must Holy
go back. She must assemble. She must find
Joyce teaching English in schools
and also privately Rom
Sally and Peter. And she came in from the
little room. financial difficulties ceased by the an,
last 25 years of his life: Harriet Cath
Shaw (English feminist and olic
(at the party towards the end) publisher) his patron and
[omitted in 2019 spring) Apos
James Joyce (1882-1941) tolic
Then (she had felt it only this morning) there after undergoing surgery for a
was the terror; the overwhelming incapacity, perforated ulcer, he died Chur
one’s parents giving it into one’s hands, this Irish novelist, short story writer ch:
life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with and poet the Irish government denied Nora
permission to repatriate his exerc
serenely; there was in the depths of her heart undisputed influence ising
an awful fear. Even now, quite often if remains
Richard had not been there reading the an
Times, so that she could crouch like a bird
Life: even
mostly outside Ireland: still Dubliners (1914)
and gradually revive, send roaring up that
short stories: about Dublin with more
immeasurable delight, rubbing stick to stick, Dublin provides the setting for all disab
one thing with another, she must have his works clinical dispassion and realism
perished. But that young man had killed influenced by Ibsen ling,
born in middle class family in beca
himself. meanness, poverty, abuse,
Dublin, use
first comfortable, well to do, but paralysis
Somehow it was her disaster—her disgrace. It is not my fault that the odour of
unop
It was her punishment to see sink and father squandered their money pose
ashpits and old weeds and offal
disappear here a man, there a woman, in this Catholic family of strong d
hangs round my stories. I seriously
profound darkness, and she forced to stand nationalist outlook
here in her evening dress. She had schemed; believe that you will retard the
 auth as eternity too of experience into the radiant Molly
ority (Stephen in body of everliving life” (Portrait) Bloom:
Portrait) the
fairly conventional in technique epiphany: a sudden spiritual woman
but also: uncertainties of human I fear more than transformation in the course of and wife
consciousness that the which everyday realities become and
free indirect discourse chemical action radiant and signficiant whore
to individualize a fictional which would be
set up in my
portrait (Maria and the use of the one day = a whole lifetime
word ’nice’) soul by a false Ulysses 1922 different organs = total man
homage to a
fragments of human different arts = sum total of
symbol behind * Set in Dublin, events unfold
experience: ambiguities, which are
human activity
uncertainties over 24 hours, beginning on the each event is related to
massed twenty morning of Thursday 16th June
centuries of typical events in human
The Portrait of the Artist as a 1904. The work has 18 chapters history, literature and myth:
authority and
Young Man (1916) which „correspond” to episodes in orchestration!
veneration
a biographical novel: the story of The Odyssey of Homer.
the personal development of the ultimate value: freedom, It is the epic of two races (Israel-
* Two myths of Western culture
artist liberation; isolated, lonely Ireland) and at the same time the (symbolic, esoteric level and
interior monologue, interest in individual cycle of the human body as well as realistic level):
a little story of a day (life)... It is
psychic reality „the enemy of Bright also a kind of encyclopaedia. My
Odyssey
focus on a single mind: Stephen Young Rebels for more intention is not only to render the The Father and the Son
Dedalus myth sub specie temporis nostri but (Christian)
than a century had been also to allow each adventure (that
other people” (Wayne is, every hour, every organ, every
elevation of art as the supreme Booth) art being interconnected and archetypal story of wondering
value: prototypical tale of the interrelated in the somatic scheme and homecoming
of the whole) to condition and even
modernist artist representative modern moment: to create its own technique. (James In the climactic Circe chapter
relying on the supreme Stephen seeks to „learn in my Joyce, Letters, 21st September Bloom meets the drunken Stephen
1920)
principle of individualism: own life and away from home and in a brothel, they leave together,
friends what the heart is and how * greatest totalizing effort of but Stephen finds himself in a
aim: to find his private it feels” modernist literature: street fight from which Bloom
vision never before the individual = microcosm saves him and takes him home.
known or imagined Theory of art: epiphany Three protagonists = As Bloom gazes on the
absolute, total honesty story of the complete unconscious Stephen, he
And I am not to seek the spiritual in the „man” experiences a vision about his
afraid to make invisible world but in the ordinary Stephen Dedalus: dead son, Rudy.
a mistake, even world „the artist” = Ireland
a great mistake, analogue with the Eucharist: My head is full of pebbles and
Leopold Bloom:
a lifelong rubbish and broken matches and
„everyman” = Israel bits of glass picked up 'most
mistake and
the artist: „a priest of the eternal (also outsider, alien) everywhere. The task I set myself
perhaps as long imagination, transmuting the daily bread technically in writing a book from
 eighteen different points of view ec funeral earlier in the day, and
and in as many styles, all ti first 3 chapters: Stephen Dedalus Bloom wants to help the widow
apparently unknown or
undiscovered by my fellow vi - story of „Telemachus” longing arrange affairs of inheritance.
tradesmen, that and the nature of ty for his father)
the legend chosen would be enough Homeric parallel: Odysseus’s
to upset anyone's mental balance. second 3 chapters: Leopold
What parallel courses did Bloom and adventures with the one-eyed
(Letters, 24 June 1921) Stephen follow returning? Bloom, his wonderings in Dublin;
giant
Starting united both at normal walking pace
the story of Odysseus” deprived
* Literary „cubism” from Beresford place they followed in the of his wife and son, longing for
Story: At the pub Bloom is
Eighteen different order named Lower and Middle Gardiner home
streets and Mountjoy square, west: then, at provoked, insulted and chased out by
perspectives: there are chapter 7 (Aeolus): newspaper- an obnoxious Irish nationalist, the
reduced pace, each bearing left, Gardiner's
different ways of seeing place by an inadvertence as far as the farther office scene: we see both Citizen
chapter 17 corner of Temple street: then, at reduced protagonists
(Ithaca): pace with interruptions of halt, bearing right, study of the
Bloom and Temple street, north, as far as Hardwicke following episodes: development of
place. Approaching, disparate, at relaxed unconsciously chase each other; racial (anti-semitic)
Stephens walking pace they crossed both the circus
heading for sometimes appearing together for prejudice
before George's church diametrically, the
home: chord in any circle being less than the arc a moment
one-eyed = narrow minded
apparently a which it subtends.
chapter 14 (Oxen of the Sun) (the
narrative of ([they were talking during the walk] parody of 9 different prose The memory of the dead, says the citizen
severe taking up his pintglass and glaring at Bloom.
Did Bloom discover common factors of styles): takes place in a hospital -- Ay, ay, says Joe.
objectivity similarity between their respective like and where both Bloom and Stephens -- You don't grasp my point, says Bloom.
in unlike reactions to experience?
et al. go visiting: Bloom is invited What I mean is...
re Both were sensitive to artistic impressions, to their party -- Sinn Fein! says the citizen. Sinn fein
al musical in preference to plastic or pictorial. amhain! The friends we love are by our side
it Both preferred a continental to an insular chapter 15: (Circe), night town and the foes we hate before us.
manner of life, a cisatlantic to a transatlantic scene: their association reaches a
y place of residence. Both indurated by early
a climax (see above) Narrative techniqe: two thoroughly
domestic training and an inherited tenacity of
p heterodox resistance professed their disbelief unharmonious voices
chapter 16—17: joint journey
ar in many orthodox religious, national, social 1) a debt-collector, socially
home
o
and ethical doctrines. Both admitted the low: malevolent, satirical: keeping
alternately stimulating and obtunding chapter 18: Molly Bloom wakes
d equal distance
influence of heterosexual magnetism. up at dawn – stream of
y (beginning of chapter 17, Ithaca) consciousness [366] So we turned into Barney
of Kiernan's and there sure enough
sc * language draws attention to was the citizen up in the corner
ie having a great confab with
itself: not a transparent medium CYCLOPS and its antecedents himself and that bloody mangy
nt style is all: style takes the place of Bloom is going to a pub named mongrel, Garryowen, and he
ifi moral attitude, of any normative Barney Kiernan's to meet a waiting for what the sky would
c view lawyer, Martin Cunningham and drop in the way of drink.
o to discuss the affairs of the There he is, says I, in his
bj gloryhole, with his cruiskeen
Structure: Dignam family. There was a lawn and his load of papers,
 working for the cause. is interrupted by dangled at every movement of his chapter begins and ends with YES
The bloody mongrel let a grouse passages in vastly portentous frame and on these were (a female word according to
out of him would give you the graven with rude yet striking art the
creeps. Be a corporal work of different styles Joyce)
(„interpolations”, tribal images of many Irish heroes and the sun shines for you he said the day we
mercy if someone would take the
heroines of antiquity, Cuchulin, Conn of were lying among the rhododendrons on
life of that bloody dog. I'm told „asides”)
for a fact he ate a good part of hundred battles, Niall of nine hostages, Howth head in the grey tweed suit and
caricatures of Brian of Kincora, the Ardri Malachi, Art
the breeches off a constabulary his straw hat the day I got him to
man in Santry that came round
vastly different MacMurragh, Shane O'Neill, Father propose to me yes first I gave him the bit
one time with a blue paper about styles: the legal, John Murphy, Owen Roe, Patrick of seedcake out of my mouth and it was
a licence. the journalistic, Sarsfield, Red Hugh O'Donnell leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my
the scientific, the God after that long kiss I near lost my
[412]-- But do you know what a biblical etc.
nation means? says John Wyse.
Chapter 18 (Penelope) breath yes he said I was a flower of the
-- Yes, says Bloom.
The figure seated on a large boulder at mountain yes so we are flowers all a
-- What is it? says John Wyse. the foot of a round tower was that of a authorial presence apparently womans body yes that was one true thing
-- A nation? says Bloom. A nation broadshouldered deepchested disappears: we enter into Molly’s he said in his life and the sun shines for
is the same people living in the stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired freely you today yes that was why I liked him
mind which is like a flowing river
same place. freckled shaggybearded wide-mouthed because I saw he understood or felt what
-- By God, then, says Ned, largenosed longheaded deepvoiced (no punctuation marks, no
a woman is and I knew I could always
laughing, if that's so I'm a nation barekneed brawnyhanded hairylegged selection, no comment)
get round him and I gave him all the
for I'm living in the same place ruddyfaced sinewyarmed hero. From
for the past five years. pleasure I could leading him on till he
shoulder to shoulder he measured Molly is lying in bed thinking asked me to say yes and I wouldnt
So of course everyone had a
laugh at Bloom and says he, several ells and his rocklike about her past and present, Bloom answer first only looked out over the sea
trying to muck out of it: mountainous knees were covered, as was and her other lovers and the sky I was thinking of so many
-- Or also living in different likewise the rest of his body wherever things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr
places. visible, with a strong growth of tawny 8 gigantic, incomplete sentences Stanhope and Hester and father and old
-- That covers my case, says Joe. prickly hair in hue and toughness similar (lurid pornographic details as captain Groves and the sailors playing
-- What is your nation if I may to the mountain gorse (Ulex Europeus). all birds fly and I say stoop and washing
ask, says the citizen. well)
The widewinged nostrils, from which up dishes they called it on the pier and
-- Ireland, says Bloom. I was bristles of the same tawny hue projected,
flow = flow of nature
born here. Ireland. flow of urine (water and the sentry in front of the governors house
were of such capaciousness that within with the thing round his white helmet
The citizen said nothing only blood)
cleared the spit out of his gullet their cavernous obscurity the field-lark poor devil half roasted and the Spanish
and, gob, he spat a Red bank might easily have lodged her nest. The girls laughing in their shawls and their
oyster out of him right in the eyes in which a tear and a smile strove Joyce’s presentation of „the tall combs and the auctions in the
corner. ever for the mastery were of the eternal feminine” (8: laid on its morning the Greeks and the jews and the
-- After you with the push, Joe, dimensions of a goodsized cauliflower. A side, the sign of infinity), Arabs and the devil knows whoelse from
says he, taking out his powerful current of warm breath issued Woman = great cycle of nature, a all the ends of Europe and Duke street
handkerchief to swab himself dry. at regular intervals from the profound home to return to and the fowl market all clucking outside
cavity of his mouth while in rhythmic Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys
question: What effect does such a resonance the loud strong hale slipping half asleep and the vague
last sentence: she is planning to
narrative viewpoint possibly have on reverberations of his formidable heart fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade
thundered rumblingly causing the give Bloom one more chance to
readers? on the steps and the big wheels of the
ground, the summit of the lofty tower reestablish full sexual relations
carts of the bulls and the old castle
and the still loftier walls of the cave to with her thousands of years old yes and those
2) other „voice”:
vibrate and tremble. ……. From his handsome Moors all in white and
the first narration
girdle hung a row of seastones which turbans like kings asking you to sit down
in their little bit of a shop and Ronda of on re
with the old windows of the posadas 2 pu s st
glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover rp be or
os co e
to kiss the iron and the wineshops half
e.. m th
open at night and the castanets and the .. e e
night we missed the boat at Algeciras the C se im
watchman going about serene with his ut ns po
lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent of el rt
O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes f es an
like fire and the glorious sunsets and the fr s, ce
figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and o ab of
all the queer little streets and the pink m su m
hi rd yt
and blue and yellow houses and the
s , h
rosegardens and the jessamine and re us an
geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar li el d
as a girl where I was a Flower of the gi es rit
mountain yes when I put the rose in my ou s" ua
hair like the Andalusian girls used or s, ( l
shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed m M to
me under the Moorish wall and I thought et ar ou
well as well him as another and then I ap ti r
hy n ag
asked him with my eyes to ask again yes si Es e,
and then he asked me would Iyes to say ca sli by
yes my mountain flower and first I put l, n) m
my arms around him yes and drew him an . ak
down to me so he could feel my breasts d in
all perfume yes and his heart was going tr “ g
like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. an A m
sc bs an
en ur a
8. Theatre of the Absurd de d w
nt T ar
" al he e
A ro at of
bs ot re th
ur s, ca e
d m n ul
is an be ti
th is se m
at lo en at
w st; as e
hi al an re
ch l at al
is hi te iti
de s m es
vo ac pt of
id ti to hi
s he en emphasises action,
co at t. freedom and decision as
nd re It
iti ho is fundamental to human
on pe fel existence
, s t opposed to the rationalist
by to th tradition and to positivism.
in ac at
sti hi th indifferent, objective,
lli ev er "absurd" universe without
ng e e
in th is
a given meaning
hi is m
m by ys
ag sh tic "The Theatre of the Absurd”:
ai oc al European plays in the late 1940s,
n ki ex 1950s, and 1960s, also: a
th ng pe particular style of theatre
e m ri
lo an en
st ou ce term coined by critic Martin
se t in Esslin,.
ns of co
e an nf Departure from
of ex ro
co ist nt
traditional
s en in theatrical
mi ce g conventions:
c th th
w at e
realistic characters:
on ha li
de s mi * characters appear
r be ts as automatons
an co of speaking in clichés
d m hu * failing memories
pr e m
im tri an fail (in Godot they
ev te, co are not sure who
al m nd Pozzo is when he
an ec iti turns up the second
gu ha on
time)
is ni .”
h. ca (J * they hardly
T l an remember
he an K their past (in
A d ul Godot:
bs co ik
ur m )
fragments
d pl about a warm
T ac philosophical roots: existentialism summer day;
 Birthday P: Life: Irish Protestant well-to-do "You ask me for my What is the purpose of life: To
ideas on Waiting for
Stanley has family (born on a Good Friday, Godot and my ideas on grow old!!!! To pass the time
illogical, 13, Friday) the theatre," he wrote to
Michel Polac on Godot's experience of time: circular,
incoherent Relations with women: complex, publication a year before repetitive
memories) often abortive it was produced. "I have
* recognition Postgraduate studies: in Paris no ideas on the theatre. I represented
know nothing about it. I
scenes, (dissertation on Proust) never go. That's
by the structure: symmetrical
discursive influenced by Joyce reasonable. What is
Christian hope is parodied by the
thought ruled After death of father: settled in rather less so," he added,
"is . . . to write a play, waiting in the play
out Paris, active in French resistance and then to have no
realistic situations: Earlier work: fiercely difficult ideas on that either." Was I sleeping while the others suffered?
Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow when I
* Time, place and 1930: Whoroscope, a verse "I know no more about
wake, or think I do, what shall I say of
identity: ambiguous monologue in the voice of René this play than anyone
who just reads it today? That with Estragon, my friend, at
and fluid (we don’t Descartes attentively," Beckett this place, until the fall of night, I waited
know where Godot 1938: first novel: Murphy wrote. "I don't know for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his
takes place; the what spirit I wrote it in. I carrier, and that he spoke to us?
know no more about the Probably. But in all that what truth will
characters are not After 1940: write about characters than what there be? (ESTRAGON, having struggled
sure about the time, impotence and ignorance, they say, what they do with his boots in vain, is dozing off again.
and what happens to
how many days have essential experience of human life them . . . everything I
VLADIMIR looks at him.) He’ll know
passed etc.) abandon rhetoric and have been able to learn, I nothing. He’ll tell me about the blows he
have shown. It's not a received and I’ll give him a carrot.
* even basic virtuosity (Pause.) Astride of a grave and a difficult
great deal. But it's
causality frequently clean and analytical French, enough for me, quite birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the
breaks down. three novels: enough. I'd go so far as grave-digger puts on the forceps. We
to say that I would have have time to grow old. The air is full of
(Birthday P: We Molly, Malone Dies and The been content with less . .
don’t know what Unnameable (1946-50) our cries. (He listens.) But habit is a
. Estragon, Vladimir,
great deadener. (He looks again at
Goldberg and Pozzo, Lucky, I have
Estragon.) At me too someone is looking,
only been able to know
McCann want from Waiting for Godot: them a little, from far of me too someone is saying, He is
Stanley) French premier: 1953, English: off, out of a need to sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep
* Meaningless plots, 1955 understand them. They on. (Pause.) I can’t go on! (Pause.) What
owe you some have I said?
repetitive or growing artistic „asceticism” explanations, perhaps.
nonsensical dialogue Let them unravel.
Without me. Them and
* dream-like, or even antecedents. Me, we're quits." HAROLD PINTER (1930)
nightmare-like Extension of the symbolist line in
"If by Godot I had born in a
moods. (Estragon: British poetic drama (from Yeats meant God I would lower middle class Jewish family
several dreams; to E) have said God, and
in London
Birthday Party = a Minimalism of his work: derive not Godot." [godillot
nightmare) from Yeats Noh plays = boot]
compared to Beckett his dramatic
French existentialism (Sartre and
world is firmly grounded in
Samuel Beckett: 1906-1989 Camus) and surrealism (André theme: meaninglessness of human
contemporary society
(Nobel prize: 1969) Breton) existence
Pinter’s plays: interested in theme: how a helpless individual, alienated from the centres rebellion against the
the nature of power, of power a one time artist is depressed, of power, authority establishment and the traditional
structures brainwashed and subdued: by class system: „anger”
he offended against „Holy
* dominance, what / whom? (Question: What examples:
Authority”: individual is
control, may the two intruders Osborne: Look back
crushed below the weight
exploitation, symbolize?) in anger: class
of social expectations
victimization antagonism as major
* number of plot: unsociable boarding-house or simply: his crime is his conflict (a play)
his figures: resident (Stanley) is terrorized by being born at all Kingsley Amis:
related to the two sinister men (Goldberg and or: ust an undefined, Lucky Jim: anger
arts (Stanley: McCann) who have come in existential angst (feeling manifest in the
a concert search of him, of terror) relentless exposure
pianist, reduced to blind violence at a of hypocrisy,
victimized birthday party thrown for him by the underlying fear a working-class novel:
by society) his landlady sensitive individual has of more committed and
* the and taken away by them the next the outside world value-centred:
psycholog morning, incapable of speech or Allan Sillitoe The
y of resistance Loneliness of the
power but ’reorientated’ and ’integrated’ 9 British fiction after the Long Distance
in a respectable suit and white War; postmodernism Runner: a sense of
expressed by means of collar „them” and „us”:
pinteresque dialogue: „have”s and „have-
British fiction in the 50s: return
everyday fear hugely pervasive in Western nots”, the powerful
to realism and Englishness
conversation, culture: and the powerless
traditional 19th themes: interest
BUT a „somebody will come at get interest in moral issues
in social relations
darker sense you”: the bogeyman story Christian doctrine
violent reaction against
of a man’s a crime or misdeed in the of human
modernist technical innovations:
insecurity, past comes to haunt the depravity :
„Writing is not a
aggressivene present William
private game to
ss Golding:
be played at a
figure of Stanley: ambivalent, Lord of the
private party.”
Birthday Party 1957 multpile layers of interpretation Flies (1954):
fiction becomes parochial: no
are possible: the fragility
traumatic experiences of
genre: tragicomedy? „comedy of of human
totalitarianism or defeat in war,
menace” the persecuted victim of civilization
continuities undisturbed
conventional structure of modern literature (Kafka: Anthony
conscious derivation from major
Greek tragedy The Trial) Burgess:
novelist of the past borrowings
but: comic stock Clockwork
the individual (typical of and allusions
characters Orange
the 20th century)
(1962): men
do evil
 because the decent rise of postmodern architecture in  questioning of
choose to, treatment the seventies VERSUS high metanarratives: deep
and enjoy Margaret modernist buildings aversion to universal
doing it had had instead of the inhuman, emancipation
Kingsley Amis mathematically precise „high (metanarratives: broad
from him
moral issues: a modernist” buildings interpretative schemas)
was the
matter for debate ornamented tower blocks the political promise of the
and speculation result of a imitation medieval squares Enlightenment has failed
temporary and fishing villages, instead: there has to be a
Kingsley Amis: Lucky Jim victory of renovated factories and plurality of language games
fear over warehouses and rehabilitated  link between power and
Amis: admittedly anti-modern, irritation, landscapes truth/knowledge (Michel
anti-experimental, anti- and pity „pluralistic” and Foucault):
cosmopolitan (The Movement) over „organic” strategies there is no objectivity: no
boredom.” urban development as a neutral reason: reason often
traditionally English social ’collage’ of highly becomes the instrument for
comedy, 18th c. tradition, one possible interpretation: differentiated spaces: power,
Fielding Dixon’s advance to his own „collage city, urban institutions, organisations
university in a country town true self and his true feelings revitalization” exercies control over
James/Jim Dixon, a young comic climax: his language games,
lecturer at the history department but paradoxically: his widespread doubt in and closed systems of knowledge
under Professor Welch boldness is rewarded by questioning of the Enlightenment = „fascism in the head”
exposure of the hypocrisy of winning Christine and a legacy:  concern with „otherness”
academic life, seen through the better job (based on pluralism):
eyes of Dixon  end of modernity = end of all groups have a right to
Dixon: a double life, a double Philosophy of the novel? you scientific positivism (end of speak for themselves
perspective symbolized by his simply need luck in life? Enlightenment certitudes) (colonized people, blacks
„public” face and his „private” „Nice things are nicer than nasty „pure reason”, „objectivity” and gays, women, religious
faces things.” is impossible, knowledge is groups etc.)
„Chinese mandarin human and mediated (see  the collapse of time horizons,
face” comic effects: Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of historical continuity:
„Martian invader mostly linguistic: of Scientific Revolutions, no „centred self” but
face” heroes: imitating various 1964) fragmented self (modernism:
styles  reason (intellectual know- alienation)
huge gap between private and how and its resultant experience = a series of pure
public faces: POSTMODERNISM technology) has failed to and unrelated presents,
in public hypocritical, also deliver the good life preoccupation with
insincere in his love life, 1. „postmodernism” in general: o the belief in progress instantaneity
the ’structure of feeling’ has shattered (Western history plundered
Whatever changed (the 80s) culture no longer  superficiality, loss of depth
passably privileged) (no continuity of values and
 beliefs), images, appearance, EITHER left wing (paradox: es.org.uk/magazine/record.
attachment to surfaces sympathies (V. Woolf, W. „poetry asp?id=6300
H. Auden, C. D. Lewis) makes husband of Sylvia Plath
OR: authoritarianism, nothing
conservativism (Roman happens” problem/plight of modern man is that
10. Poetry before and after Catholicism) YET: the his rational and cognitive powers are
poet should cultivated too exclusively;
the II. World War; Philip Wystan Hugh Auden „persuade us
Larkin and Seamus Heaney How to turn instinctive, natural
[with Stephen Spender, to rejoice” energies creative?
Cecil Day-Lewis and and „In the ANIMALS: manifestation of
Introduction to mid 20th Louis MacNeice] New desert of the a life force, non-human, non-
century literature and art Country Poets) heart / let the rational
interested in history, healing
central event: second world politics fountains Hawk Roosting
war „I start” (’In
I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.
fascism and am Memory of Inaction, no falsifying dream
communism your W. B. Yeats’) Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
social, choic Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.
economic e, after the war in the 40s: a The convenience of the high trees!
and political your movement of new The air's buoyancy and the sun's ray
turmoil Are of advantage to me;
decis romantic poetry And the earth's face upward for my inspection.
ion” main
reaction against high modernism (Spai representative: Dylan My feet are locked upon the rough bark.
It took the whole of Creation
n, Thomas (of Welsh origin) To produce my foot, my each feather:
the 1930s and 40s: artists 1937 interested in Now I hold Creation in my foot
sensitive to the problems of the ): spirituality,
time: says religion, Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly -
I kill where I please because it is all mine.
„hist nature (not in There is no sophistry in my body:
Great Depression ory” politics and My manners are tearing off heads -
(1929) to society) The allotment of death.
the rise of peop the 1950s: Ted Hughes (1930— For the one path of my flight is direct
Fascism le 1998) and Philip Larkin (1928— Through the bones of the living.
the Spanish Civil No arguments assert my right:
belief in the 1985)
War ethical The sun is behind me.
nature of Ted Hughes: neo-Romantic (poet = Nothing has changed since I began.
My eye has permitted no change.
necessity of poetry: to shaman) I am going to keep things like this.
commitment: hold up
Virginia Woolf human friend and translator of
The Leaning values in the János Pilinszky. See his
Tower midst of article on Pilinszky:
inhumanity http://www.poetrymagazin
PHILIP LARKIN (1928—1985) The Movement: a loose grouping going silenc
on e,
of the 50s, based on key I step Brewe
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
But they were fucked up in their turn friendships (Larkin and Amis) inside, d God
They may not mean to, but they do. * concerned with the Englishness letting knows
They fill you with the faults they had the how
of their work door long.
And add some extra, just for you
By fools in old-style hats and coats, * respect for clarity, intelligibility: thud Hatles
Who half the time were soppy-stern hostile to modernist literature, shut. s, I
And half at one another's throats. Anoth take
doubt about Eliot er off
Man * bored by the political churc My
hands preoccupations of the forties, even h: cycle-
on mattin clips
more by the dispair of the forties, g, in
miser
y to not interested in suffering seats, awkw
man. * nine writers: Kingsley Amis, and ard
It stone, revere
Robert Conquest, Donald Davie, And nce,
deepe
ns like John Holloway, Elizabeth little
a Jennings, Philip Larkin, John books;
coasta sprawl
Wain, Thom Gunn, Iris Murdoch ings
l
shelf. of (first
Get flower stanza
out as s, cut )
Church Going (in the volume: For
early
as you The Less Deceived 1955) Sunda * initial personal experience
can, * Movement identity y,
brown broadened into sg. universal: the
And characterized by an oscillation
don't ish need for transcendence and the
have between agnosticism and a now; loss of an organized framework of
any sensitivity to the Christian some
brass connection with it
kids tradition: A
yourse and
* CG: articulates this tension in stuff seriou
lf. s
three steps! Composite tension Up at
the house
Life: graduated at Oxford made up of layers of contrast holy on
(English literature) (modern sporty cyclist VERSUS end; seriou
the s earth
a librarian, writer of novels, tradition; past and present, it is,
small
reviewer of poetry secularism and religious belief, neat In
third volume of poetry (The nature and culture organ; whose
Once I blent
Less Deceived, 1955): the air all
am And a
preeminent poet of his sure tense, our
generation there's musty, comp
nothin unign ulsion
g orable s
 meet, syntax of the sentences in stanza Irish and not British: "Be advised, my
Are Study Questions passport's green / No glass of ours was
recog 1)
nised, 3. How many structural units can 1. How old is the speaker? ever raised / To toast the Queen."
and we divide this poem into? 2. The basis of the poem is a
Only the very stupid or the very deprived
robed
4. What cultural process is comparison: a very common can any longer help knowing that the
as
destini described in stanzas 3-5? What contrast or tension in human life documents of civilization have been
(society). What is it? written in blood and tears, blood and
es. are its steps? What is symbolized tears no less real for being very remote.
And
by the invasion of the church by 3. The poem is structured by two And when this intellectual predisposition
that
much nature? movements. Can you identify co-exists with the actualities of Ulster
them? How does this affect the and Israel and Bosnia and Rwanda and a
never 5. What are some of the host of other wounded spots on the face
can be
ambivalences and ironies of the meaning of the poem? of the earth, the inclination is not only
obsole
te last two stanzas? How does irony 4. How is the speaker’s not to credit human nature with much
ambivalent attitude to modern constructive potential but not to credit
question even the positive anything too positive in the work of art.
statements? emancipation expressed? (from Nobel Lecture, 1995)
(last
5. What can the windows
stanza symbolize? but also: poetry "the ship and the
) anchor" of our spirit within an
High Windows * young lovers and older ocean of violent, divisive world
* irony: each move towards a speaker: modernity, the break politics
When I see a couple of kids
positive statement is cancelled And guess he's fucking her and she's with religion and with tradition
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, Life:
I know this is paradise
described ambivalently
* Movement: not antiChristian: (symbolic directions, down and
born near Castledawson, County Derry
still a sense of their parents’ (orthern Ireland)
Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives-- up, indicate this) grew up on his father's cattle farm..
tradition Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
* ’four letter word’ modernity eldest in a Catholic family of nine
* „all negatives in poetry, once Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long VERSUS the exaltation of the children.
stated, become a special kind slide close! graduating from Queen's University,
of poetic positive” (Barbara * window in French
Belfast,
Everett) To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if secondary school teacher, university
Anyone looked at me, forty years back, symbolism (Baudelaire, lecturer (second place: Queen Univ.
And thought, That'll be the life; Mallarmé): necessity and Belfast)
Study Questions No God any more, or sweating in the dark guest professor at American universities,
absence of the ideal, an ideal
1. Who is the speaker? What do Living in Dublin he divides his time
About hell and that, or having to hide we imprint on the void sky by
we learn about him from the first between America and Ireland
What you think of the priest. He the intensity of our longing popular public readings (pop-music
stanza? And his lot will all go down the long slide
2. Characterize his attitude Like free bloody birds. And immediately fanaticism)
Seamus Heaney 1939-213
towards the church and what it Rather than words comes the thought of high
a researcher of Old English: retranslated
represents as it is expressed in the windows:
Beowulf;
Irish, Nobel Prize in 1995.
2004 EU Enlargement (a poem)
first two stanzas. How does the The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
style express the attitude (note the Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless. Main themes:
 1) exploration of the deep (based on To bodies preserved in nearb and a
personal memories and the Irish stare, few of our
big- the soil of neighbours
heritage)
2) violence and social injustice eyed Denmark and had got ther
Narciss Ireland photograph
3) individualistic and meditative (his us, into s in the
own poetry) some paper,
spring
(because of its peering out
1.) first volumes: Death of a Naturalist, Is chemical composition, across its
Door into the dark beneat peat has a preserving antlers. So I
h all effect, mummifying began to get
personal memories combined with adult corpses and ancient an idea of
images of Irish heritage and the dignity. objects bog as the
I rhyme memory of
landscape of Northern Ireland
To see „I had been the
(’Digging,’ ’Bogland’) myself, landscape,
vaguely
to set wishing to or as a
Digging: explores the poet’s the write a landscape
relationship with his family and national darkne poem about that
heritage ss bogland, remembered
digging up potatoes echoin chiefly everything
(father’s and g. because it is that
grandfather’s work) is (’Personal a landscape happened in
Helicon’) that has and to it. In
paralleled with the fact, if you
digging (’Digging’) strange
poet’s „digging with go round
fishing (’The assuaging
his pen” into the the
Casualty’) effect on
national heritage me, one National
exhumation
drawing on myth and unique with Museum in
rescuing from oblivion Dublin, you
aspects of Irish experience associations
probing of secrecy and will realize
fascination for the darkness and reaching
inwardness that a great
the depths (Door into the Dark) back into
concern with the early proportion
communion with „the mystery”:
subaqueous and childhood. of th most
the dark, cherished
subterranean We used to
violent aspect material
(’Bogland’, hear about
of nature bog-butter, heritage of
’Punishment’)
a „feared, butter kept Ireland was
maternal fresh for a „found in a
darkness the bog: central great bog’ (from
expressed through symbol number of Feeling into
Words)
the starting point years under
peering down wells the peat.
for the exploration Then when I bog = memory of the
Now, to
pry of the past was at landscape
into in several works school the
congruence between bogland – a
roots, skeleton of
Heaney has an elk had repository of the past and the
to
finger returned to the been taken internal world of the poet’s
slime, "bog people", out of a bog
preserving, shaping imagination, 2) violence (e. g. North, 1975) 3) later works (Station Island, Before. The air was thick with a bass
social injustice and violent history chorus.
and, the national consciousness Sweeney Astray) Right down the dam gross bellied frogs
bog = significant Irish myth of his country strong individualistic, were cocked
(equivalent to the frontier and the violence: also a permanent, mythic meditative mood On sods; their loose necks pulsed like
quality, as a constant of human history sails. Some hopped:
West in American consciousness) The slap and plop were obscene threats.
historical background: 1968-69: 'The Death of a Naturalist BY SEAMUS Some sat
’Bogland’ Troubles'. HEANEY Poised like mud grenades, their blunt
heads farting.
We have no prairies All year the flax-dam festered in the heart I sickened, turned, and ran. The great
To slice a big sun at evening-- * sectarian violence in Ireland, slime kings
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Everywhere the eye concedes to addressing specific revenge Flax had rotted there, weighted down by Were gathered there for vengeance and I
Encrouching horizon, killings huge sods. knew
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun. That if I dipped my hand the spawn
Is wooed into the cyclops' eye 'Casualty': about would clutch it.
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Of a tarn.2 Our unfenced country Louis O’Neill, Wove a strong gauze of sound around the
Is bog that keeps crusting fisherman smell. 11. POSTMODERN
Between the sights of the sun. There were dragonflies, spotted
'The Strand at LITERARY THEORY,
butterflies,
They've taken the skeleton Lough Beg': But best of all was the warm thick
POSTMODERN FICTION
Of the Great Irish Elk Heaney’s cousin slobber SALMAN RUSHDIE, KAZUO
Out of the peat3, set it up Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water ISHIGURO
An astounding crate full of air. * the Bog poems: based on the bodies
recovered in the peat of Jutland In the shade of the banks. Here, every
spring postmodern turn: in France and
Butter sunk under 'Punishment'
I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied
More than a hundred years 'The Tollund Man' Specks to range on window sills at home, the United States rather than in
Was recovered salty and white. * religious prohibitions on sex that are On shelves at school, and wait and watch England
The ground itself is kind, black butter the cause of children being killed or until
hidden away The fattening dots burst, into nimble 1. Theory
Melting and opening underfoot, 'Limbo' 'Bye Child' Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would
Missing its last definition tell us how
By millions of years. The daddy frog was called a bullfrog (Ihab Hassan’s table, 1985)
They'll never dig coal here,4 public events, the statistics, intersect
with the personal life of the poet And how he croaked and how the mammy
frog modernism
Only the waterlogged trunks in ’Punishment’: Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Of great firs, soft as pulp. postmodernism
depicts a tribal revenge of Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by
Our pioneers keep striking frogs too metaphysics, transcendence
Inwards and downwards, adultery, but confesses his own
For they were yellow in the sun and irony, immanence
powerlessness in front of brown
Every layer they strip ancient, violent forces. In rain. to impose order
Seems camped on before. no centre, no
The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage. Then one hot day when fields were totality, fragments
The wet centre is bottomless.5 rank
5
Older people were afraid we might fall into the With cowdung in the grass the angry artist: dead serious
pools in the old workings (excavations for mining frogs self-irony
2 or quarrying) so they put it about (and we believed Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through and play
Mountain lake or pool; the mythical cyclops had
them) that there was no bottom in the bog-holes.
only one eye. hedges
3 Little did they – or I – know that I would filch it for
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
elitism
Carbonized vegetable tissue in the ground the last line of a book” (Heaney, Feeling into
4
Because the ground is too wet for it to form. Words)
 worked surfaces, to a collapsed sense of at landsca
democratization of time and space rather than solidly iv pes:
achieved cultural artefact. And these are double
taste all vital aspects of artistic practice in the e (sacred
aesthetic post-modern condition. (From David e -
craftsmanship Harvey: Condition of Postmodernity) n profane
di )
television, internet,
pop culture* 2. Postmodernist fiction (Brian n single (hardscore positivism)
McHale, 1987) gs
creation/totalization/synthesis
se plural
i. „Real, compared to what?” lf (postmodern
- : anarchic
creation/deconstruction/antithesis landscape of
modernism: multiple perspectives c worlds)
(centring on the same reality o
dispersal) ns reality between fact (or history)
genre/boundary postmodern novels: a plurality of u and fiction: blurred
text/intertext worlds (is there a single reality?) m the real is combined with the
„a large number in inexplicable and the fantastic (and
interpretation/reading
of fragmentary g sometimes with the Gothic)
against
possible worlds te postmodernists fictionalize
interpretation/misreading
coexist in an xt history: is history itself a form of
art object/finished work impossible space” , fiction?
(McHale) se
poliphony (Mihail lf Salman Rushdie: Midnight
process/performance/happening Bakhtin) - Children (1981)
er Gabriel García Márquez: Cien
* Television is the first cultural medium detective story: modernism as aňos de soledad (1967)
in the whole of history to present the science fiction: postmodernism
artistic achievements of the past as a
ur Mihail Bulgakov: The Master and
stitched together collage of equi- e Margarita (1966)
important and simultaneously existing if reality is constructed (humanly, (
phenomena, largely divorced from socially constructed): D rhetoric of contrastive banality:
geography and material history and there is any number er
transported to the living rooms and
studios of the West in a more or less
of possible worlds ri Midnight’s Children: historical
uninterrupted flow. It posits a viewer, John d fantasy: integrating the historical
furthermore, who shares the medium’s Fowles: The French Lieutenant’s a) and the fantastic
own perception of history as an endless Woman: , official version of
reserve of equal events. It is hardly th
surprising that the artist’s relation to history VERSUS
history (the peculiar historicism we have re Magic realism: the fantastic (= alternative, secret
already noted) has shifted, that in the era e coined by German art critic Franz history
of mass television there has emerged an al Roh in 1925)
attachment to surfaces rather than roots, te ontolog
to collage rather than in-depth work, to
Indian history linked to the fates
rn ical
super-imposed quoted images rather than of children born at the same time
(midnight, August 15, 1947: the neither English, nor Japanese: an Steven’s motoring trip = symbol in
day of Indian independence) outsider for a trip into his (and the g
national) past D
narrator: Saleem Sinai Novels: ar
the children: microcosms of the studies of character, of human first person narration: li
Indian macrocosm, paralleling or failings combination of reminiscences, n
mirroring public history in their great empathy, subtle depiction flashbacks, straightforward gt
private histories of the inner world of the narrative o
protagonists combined with the impossibility of reconciling n
ii. Literature in English subtle irony professional duties with private h
first person narratives which (emotional) life e
cosmopolitan concept of literature recollect emotional extremes and two irrevocable choices: rejected p
written in English) traumatic events ending on a his housekeeper’s (Miss ar
the dominant role of the West, note of melancholy resignation: Kenton’s) approach ti
esp. orientalism questioned characters facing and accepting uncritical support ci
their past to Lord p
(Colin MacCabe, Darlington’s at
1981): „the Remains of the Day 1989 sentimental e
multiplication of attempt to d
Englishes the first person narration of appease the Nazis in
throughout the Stevens, Lord Darlington’s butler contradictions: both th
world and their proud and ashamed of LD e
attendant social, cultural changes m m
literatures”; disappearance of old, aristocratic a a
„English values: civility, dignity, k ki
literature is dead professional perfection es n
– long live commercialization of the values m g
writing in of the past: „the head servant is u of
English” part of the package” c hi
(new owner, Farraday): „You are h st
examples for literature in English: the real thing aren’t you? That’s of or
Salman Rushdie: Midnight’s what I wanted, isn’t that what I th y
Children have?” e postmodern perspective: tension
Kazuo Ishiguro: Remains of postimperial transformations: the fa between the grand narratives of
the Day leveling of social hierarchy, the ct the war and the minor subjective
loss of imperial identity, th narrative of Stevens
Kazuo Ishiguro (1954) movement from Empire to at (macronarratives and the
globalized web) b micronarrative)
born in Nagasaki, Japan, family y
moved to England in 1960. the inward look: journey into the se (the butler’s) style: again subtle
lives in London, British wife past: rv ambiguity
dignified, aesthetic, civil and
fluent or is it the parody of that?

But I see I am
becoming
preoccupied
with these
memories and
this is perhaps a
little foolish.
This present trip
represents, after
all, a rare
opportunity for
me to savour to
the full the
many
splendours of
the English
contryside, and
I know I shall
greatly regret it
later if I allow
myself to be
unduly diverted.

Ishiguro: to examine the extent to

which such a style „is indeed
dignified and to what an extent it
is a form of cowardice”