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Modernism &
Modernist Literature
 "The term modernism refers to the radical shift in
aesthetic and cultural sensibilities evident in the art and
literature of the post-World War I period. The ordered,
stable and inherently meaningful world view of the
nineteenth century could not, wrote T.S. Eliot, accord
with „the immense panorama of futility and anarchy
which is contemporary history.‟.. rejecting nineteenth-
century optimism, [modernists] presented a profoundly
pessimistic picture of a culture in disarray.”
 Virginia Woolf proclaimed that, “human nature
underwent a fundamental change „on or about
December 1910‟" as a reaction to the transformative
post-Impressionist exhibit curated by critic Robert Fry,
which featured artists such as Gaugin, Cézanne, and
Van Gogh.
 Consider what this statement means—to undergo a
fundamental change in human nature
 Think about your own experience of such a shift in
human nature
 Think broadly and write down specific emotional and
social changes you have experienced in your daily lives
because of these changes
 certain historical, social, and cultural forces prompted the same kind of wide-scale
change in the way individuals thought about their world and contributed to making
people feel less individual and more alienated, fragmented, and at a loss in their daily
lives and worlds:
 the rise of cities (the influx of immigration, continued industrialization) ;

 profound technological changes in transportation, architecture, and engineering;
 a rising population that engendered crowds and chaos in public spaces;
 a growing sense of mass markets often made individuals;
 WWI
Pre-Modern World (e.g., Romantic, Modern World (early 20th
Victorian Periods) century)
Ordered Chaos
Meaningful Futile
Optimistic Pessimistic
Stable Unstable
Faith Loss of Faith
Morality/Values Collapse of Morality/Values
Clear Sense of Identity Confused Sense of Identity and
Place in World
Definition
 Modernism is a literary and cultural international movement which
flourished in the first decades of the 20th century.
 Modernism is not a term to which a single meaning can be

ascribed. It may be applied both to the content and to the form of
a work, or to either in isolation.
 It reflects a sense of cultural crisis which was both exciting and

disquieting, in that it opened up a whole new view of human
possibilities at the same time as putting into question any
previously accepted means of grounding and evaluating new ideas.
 Modernism is marked by experimentation, particularly

manipulation of form, and by the realization that knowledge is
not absolute.
Introduction
 Period: At the end of the 19th and beginning of

the 20th century
 A trend of thought that affirms the power of

human beings to create, improve, and reshape
their environment with the aid of scientific
knowledge, technology and practical
experimentation
Introduction
 A series of reforming cultural movements in

art and architecture, music, literature and the
applied arts emerged in the three decades
before 1914
 Encouraged the re-examination of every aspect
of existence (e.g. commerce / philosophy)
 Goal: finding which was "holding back" progress,
+ replacing it with new, progressive and better
ways of reaching the same end
 New realities of the industrial and mechanized
age: permanent and imminent
 World view: the new = the good, the true and the
beautiful
Introduction
 Rebelled against nineteenth century

academic and historicist traditions
 “Traditional” forms of art, architecture,

literature, religious faith, social organization
and daily life: outdated
Introduction
 Modernism was set in motion, in one sense, through a series of

cultural shocks. The first of these great shocks was the Great War,
which ravaged Europe from 1914 through 1918, known now as
World War One.
 Instead of progress and growth, the Modernist intelligentsia sees

decay and a growing alienation of the individual. The machinery
of modern society is perceived as impersonal, capitalist, and
antagonistic to the artistic impulse. War most certainly had a great
deal of influence on such ways of approaching the world. Two
World Wars in the span of a generation effectively shell-shocked
all of Western civilization.
Introduction
 The stability and quietude of Victorian civilization were

rapidly becoming a thing of the past. The assassination
of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria was essentially the
triggering event of the First World War, a conflict
which swept away all preconceived notions about the
nature of so-called modern warfare.
 In the world of art, generally speaking, Modernism was
the beginning of the distinction between “high” art and
“low” art. The educational reforms of the Victorian
Age had led to a rapid increase in literacy rates, and
therefore a greater demand for literature or all sorts.
Introduction
 The nineteenth century, like the several centuries

before it, was a time of privilege for wealthy Caucasian
males. Women, minorities, and the poor were
marginalized to the point of utter silence and
inconsequence.
 The twentieth century witnessed the beginnings of a new
paradigm between first the sexes, and later between
different cultural groups. Class distinction remains
arguably the most difficult bridge to cross in terms of
forming a truly equitable society.
Introduction
 In American Literature, the group of writers and thinkers

known as the Lost Generation has become
synonymous with Modernism.
 In the wake of the First World War, several American

artists chose to live abroad as they pursued their
creative impulses. These included the intellectual
Gertrude Stein, the novelists Ernest Hemingway and F.
Scott Fitzgerald, and the painter Waldo Pierce, among
others.
Introduction
 The term itself refers to the spiritual and existential hangover left
by four years of unimaginably destructive warfare. The artists of
the Lost Generation struggled to find some meaning in the world in
the wake of chaos.
 As with much of Modernist literature, this was achieved by turning
the mind’s eye inward and attempting to record the workings of
consciousness.
 The Lost Generation, like other “High Modernists,” gave up on the
idea that anything was truly knowable. All truth became relative,
conditional, and in flux. The War demonstrated that no guiding
spirit rules the events of the world, and that absolute destruction was
kept in check by only the tiniest of margins.
Modernism as a movement
Modernism as a movement can be recognized not only

in literature but also in:
 The sciences
 Philosophy
 Psychology
 Anthropology
 Painting
 Music
 Sculpture
 Architecture
General Features
Modernism was built on a sense of lost community and civilization
and embodied a series of contradictions and paradoxes, embraced
multiple features of modern sensibility:
 Revolution and conservatism
 Loss of a sense of tradition:

lamented in an extreme form of reactionary conservatism
celebrated as a means of liberation from the past
 Increasing dominance of technology:

condemned vehemently
embraced as the flagship of progress
Consequences
Productive insecurity originated

 Aesthetics of experimentation
 Fragmentation
 Ambiguity
 Nihilism
 Variety of theories
 Diversity of practices
Influential Thinkers of the Time
 Physicist Einstein on Relativity (1905)

 Physicist Planck on Quantum Theory (1900)
 Philosopher Nietzsche on the Will of Power
 Philosopher Bergson on the Concept of Time
 Psychologist William James on Emotions and Inner Time
 Psychologist Freud on the Unconscious (The
Interpretation of Dreams, 1900)
 Psychologist Jung on Collective Unconscious
 Linguist De Saussure on Language
 Anthropologist Frazer on Primitive Cultures
Thematic features
 Intentional distortion of shapes
 Focus on form rather than meaning
 Breaking down of limitation of space and time
 Breakdown of social norms and cultural values
 Dislocation of meaning and sense from its normal context
 Valorisation of the despairing individual in the face of an unmanageable
future
 Disillusionment
 Rejection of history and the substitution of a mythical past
 Need to reflect the complexity of modern urban life
 Importance of the unconscious mind
 Interest in the primitive and non-western cultures
 Impossibility of an absolute interpretation of reality
 Overwhelming technological changes
 In broad terms, the period was marked by sudden and

unexpected breaks with traditional ways of viewing
and interacting with the world.
 Experimentation and individualism became virtues,
where in the past they were often heartily discouraged.
 Indeed, a central preoccupation of Modernism is with the
inner self and consciousness.
 In contrast to the Romantic world view, the Modernist
cares rather little for Nature, Being, or the
overarching structures of history.
 In its genesis, the Modernist Period in English literature was first

and foremost a visceral reaction against the Victorian culture
and aesthetic, which had prevailed for most of the nineteenth
century.
 Indeed, a break with traditions is one of the fundamental
constants of the Modernist stance.
 Intellectuals and artists at the turn of the twentieth century believed

the previous generation‟s way of doing things was a cultural dead
end. They could foresee that world events were spiralling into
unknown territory.
 In Modernist literature, it was the poets who took fullest

advantage of the new spirit of the times, and stretched the
possibilities of their craft to lengths not previously imagined.
 In general, there was a disdain for most of the literary production of
the last century.
 The exceptions to this disdain were the French Symbolist poets like
Charles Beaudelaire, and the work of Irishman Gerard Manley
Hopkins.
 The French Symbolists were admired for the sophistication of their
imagery. In comparison to much of what was produced in England
and America, the French were ahead of their time. They were
similarly unafraid to delve into subject matter that had usually been
taboo for such a refined art form. Hopkins, for his part, brought a
fresh way to look at rhythm and word usage.
 Leading up to the First World War, Imagist poetry was dominating

the scene, and sweeping previous aesthetic points of view under the
rug. The Imagists, among them Ezra Pound, sought to boil
language down to its absolute essence. They wanted poetry to
concentrate entirely upon “the thing itself” .
 To achieve that effect required minimalist language, a lessening
of structural rules and a kind of directness that Victorian and
Romantic poetry seriously lacked. Dreaminess or Pastoral poetry
were utterly abandoned in favor of this new, cold, some might say
mechanized poetics.
 Imagist poetry was almost always short, unrhymed, and noticeably
sparse in terms of adjectives and adverbs. At some points, the line
between poetry and natural language became blurred.
 This was a sharp departure from the ornamental,

verbose style of the Victorian era. Gone also were the
preoccupations with beauty and nature. Potential
subjects for poetry were now limitless, and poets took full
advantage of this new freedom.
 The novel was by no means immune from the self-
conscious, reflective impulses of the new century.
Modernism introduced a new kind of narration to the
novel, one that would fundamentally change the entire
essence of novel writing.
 The “unreliable” narrator supplanted the omniscient, trustworthy

narrator of preceding centuries, and readers were forced to question
even the most basic assumptions about how the novel should
operate. James Joyce‟s Ulysses is the prime example of a novel
whose events are really the happenings of the mind, the goal of
which is to translate as well as possible the strange pathways of
human consciousness.
 A whole new perspective came into being known as “stream of
consciousness.” Rather than looking out into the world, the great
novelists of the early twentieth century surveyed the inner space of
the human mind. At the same time, the psychoanalytic theories of
Sigmund Freud had come into mainstream acceptance. These two
forces worked together to alter people‟s basic understanding of what
constituted truth and reality.
 Experimentation with genre and form was yet another defining

characteristic of Modernist literature.
 Perhaps the most representative example of this experimental mode
is T. S. Eliot‟s long poem The Waste Land. Literary critics often
single out The Waste Land as the definitive sample of Modernist
literature.
 In it, one is confronted by biblical-sounding verse forms, quasi-
conversational interludes, dense and frequent references which
frustrate even the most well-read readers, and sections that
resemble prose more than poetry. At the same time, Eliot fully
displays all the conventions which one expects in Modernist
literature. There is the occupation with self and inwardness, the
loss of traditional structures to buttress the ego against shocking
realities, and a fluid nature to truth and knowledge
 The cynicism and alienation of the first flowering of Modernist
literature could not persist.
 By mid-century, indeed by the Second World War, there was already
a strong reaction against the pretentions of the Moderns.
 Artists of this newer generation pursued a more democratic,
pluralistic mode for poetry and the novel.
 There was optimism for the first time in a long time.
Commercialism, publicity, and the popular audience were finally
embraced, not shunned. Alienation became boring.
 True, the influence of Modernist literature continues to be quite
astonishing. The Modern poet-critics changed the way people
think about artists and creative pursuits.
 The Modern novelists changed the way many people perceive truth
and reality. These changes are indeed profound, and cannot easily
be replaced by new schemas.
Major Modernist Writers
 Bishop, Elizabeth (1911-1979)
 Conrad, Joseph (1857-1924)
 Doolittle, Hilda (1886-1961)
 Eliot, Thomas Stearns (1888-1965)
 Faulkner, William (1897-1962)
 Fitzgerald, F. Scott (1896-1940)
 Hemingway, Ernest (1899-1961)
 Hughes, Langston (1902-1967)
 James, Henry (1843-1916)
 Lawrence, D. H. (1885-1930)
 Lowell, Amy (1874-1925)
 Pound, Ezra (1885-1972)
 Shaw, George Bernard (1856-1950)
 Stevens, Wallace (1879-1955)
 Williams, Tennessee (1882-1941)
 Woolf, Virginia (1882-1941)
 Yeats, William Butler (1865-1939)
Stylistic Features of
 Marked pessimism: a clear rejection of the
optimism apparent in Victorian literature
 Common motif in Modernist fiction: an
alienated individual (a dysfunctional
individual) trying in vain to make sense of a
predominantly urban and fragmented society
 Absence of a central, heroic figure
 Collapsing narrative and narrator into a
collection of disjointed fragments and
overlapping voices
Stylistic Features of
 Concern for larger factors such as social or
historical change demonstrated in "stream of
consciousness" writing
 Examples:
 Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway
 James Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man,Ulysses
 A reaction to the emergence of city life as a
central force in society
Formal Characteristics of
 Open Form
 Discontinuous narrative
 Juxtaposition
 Two unlike things are put next to one another
 A quality of being unexpected
 To compare/contrast the two, to show similarities or differences
 Classical allusions
 A figure of speech
 Making a reference to or representation of, a place, event, literary

work, myth, or work of art,
 Directly or by implication
 Left to the reader or hearer to make the connection

 Borrowings from other cultures and
languages
 Unconventional use of metaphor
 Fragmentation
 Multiple narrative points of view (parallax)

 Free Verse
 Vers libre
 Styles of poetry that are not written using strict meter or
rhyme
 Still recognizable as 'poetry' by virtue of complex patterns
of one sort or another that readers will peive to be part of a
coherent whole
 Intertextuality
 Coined by poststructuralist Julia Kristeva in 1966
 Shaping texts' meanings by other texts
 Author‟s borrowing and transformation of a prior text
 Reader‟s referencing of one text in reading another
 Metanarrative
 Sometimes master- or grand narrative
 A global or totalizing cultural narrative schema
 Ordering and explaining knowledge and experience
 The prefix “meta” = "beyond" [about]
 A narrative = a story
 A story about a story
 Encompassing and explaining other 'little stories' within
totalizing schemas
Thematic Characteristics of
 Breakdown of social norms and cultural
sureties
 Dislocation of meaning and sense from its
normal context
 Valorization of the despairing individual in the
face of an unmanageable future
 Rejection of history and the substitution of a
mythical past, borrowed without chronology
 Product of the metropolis, of cities and urbanscapes
 Overwhelming technological changes of the 20th
Century
 Disillusionment
 A feeling arising from the discovery
 Something is not what it was anticipated to be
 More severe and traumatic than common disappointment
 Especially when a belief central to one's identity is shown
to be false
 Stream of consciousness
 A literary technique
 Portraying an individual's point of view
 By giving the written equivalent of the character's thought processes:
 Either in a loose internal interior monologue
 Or in connection to his or her sensory reactions to external
ocurrences
 A special form of interior monologue
 Characterized by:
 Associative (and at times dissociative) leaps in syntax and
punctuation
 Making the prose difficult to follow
 Tracing a character's fragmentary thoughts and sensory feelings
 Distinguished from dramatic monologue:
 The speaker is addressing an audience or a third person
 Used chiefly in poetry or drama
 Write a typed, one-page letter in the voice of
an individual living during the late 1800s to
early 1900s. The letter can be written to
imaginary individuals from future generations.
The letter should address the individual‟s
response to the social, cultural, technological,
or historical change
Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)
A great American-born
English poet, literary
critic and Nobel-prize
winner
Biographical Introduction
 T.S. Eliot, American-British poet and
critic, was born from a middle-class
family in St. Louis in 1888.
 During his studies at Harvard in
America, the Sorbonne in Paris, and
Oxford in England, Eliot mastered
French, Italian, English literature, as
well as Sanskrit.
 In 1914 Eliot accepted a job in London as a bank
clerk establishing his residence in London. Soon
the erudite young man joined the literary circle of
Pound and Yeats and started to write poetry.
 In 1917 his first poem was published and caused a
great deal of comment on both side of the
Atlantic. (Prufrock and Other Observations)
 After the bank clerk, Eliot worked as an assistant
editor of the Egoist (1917–19)
 In 1922 - founded The Criterion an influential
right-wing literary journal, The Waste Land appeared
in the first issue
 In those London years he formed his mutually
admiring and fruitful relationship with Ezra Pound
 His first marriage in 1915 was troubled and ended
with their separation in 1933. His subsequent
marriage in 1957 was far more successful.
 In 1925 he was employed by the publishing house
of Faber and Faber, eventually becoming one of its
directors, a position which he held until his death.
 In 1927 he became a British subject (naturalised
in the United Kingdom or the British Empire)
remaining in England where his entire life was
devoted to literature and was received into the
Church of England. He declared that he was
‗Anglo- Catholic in religion, royalist in politics and
classicist in literature.‘
 Eliot renounced his citizenship to the
United States and said: "My mind may be
American but my heart is British."
"It wouldn't be what it is, and I imagine it
wouldn't be so good ... if I'd been born in
England, and it wouldn't be what it is if I'd
stayed in America. It's a combination of
things. But in its sources, in its emotional
springs, it comes from America."
"[M]y poetry has obviously more in common with
my distinguished contemporaries in America
than with anything written in my generation in
England"
 He wrote several plays, but his best
work is a group of four long poems
entitled Four Quartets, written
between 1935 and 1941, which led to
his receipt of the Nobel Prize in
1948 and made him one of the most
distinguished literary figures of the
20th century.
 1948 awarded the British Order of

Merit and the Nobel Prize
 His poetic output is not very large, but its
influence on the development of 20th
century poetry has been substantial.
 He established his style and demonstrated
his departure from traditional form and
metaphor in his first important poem The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. It is also an
example of the important new
experiments and technical innovations
in the early 20th century.
 He frequently made use of
symbolism, which gave his poetry
the subtlety of suggestiveness and
overtones
 He brought poetic language and

rhythm closer to that of conversations
by the use of colloquial
expressions and even slangs
His aesthetic views:
A poem should be an organic thing

in itself, a made object. Once it is
finished, the poet will no longer have
control of it. It should be judged,
analyzed by itself without the
interference of the poet’s personal
influence and intentional elements
and other elements.
His aesthetic views
 Modern life is chaotic, futile,

fragmentary, so poetry should reflect
this fragmentary nature of life and this
kind nature of life should be projected,
not analyzed.
His aesthetic views
objective correlative:
 a set of objects, a situation, a chain

of events, formula in which the poet
expresses his emotion and in which
the fusion of intellect, feeling, and
experience should be achieved.
Tradition and Individual Talent
 The poet should draw upon tradition:
use the past to serve the present
and future (the past, present, future
interrelate), borrow from authors
remote in time, alien in language,
diverse in interest, use the past to
underscore what is missing from the
present.
Eliot‘s Techniques
 Use of disconnected images/symbols
 Use of literary allusions/references
 Use of highly expressive meter and
rhythm of free verses
 Use of metaphysical whimsical
images/whims
 Use of flexible tone
His Major Works
 The Waste Land (1920)
 The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
(1910-1911)
 The Hollow Men (1925)
 Four Quartets (1936-1942, 1943)
 Tradition and Individual Talent
 Of Metaphysical Poets （1921）
Brief Introduction to The Waste Land
 It was composed during a period of personal difficulty
for Eliot—his marriage was failing, and both he and
Vivienne were suffering from nervous disorders. The
poem is often read as a representation of the
disillusionment of the post-war generation. That year
Eliot lived in Lausanne, Switzerland to take a
treatment and to convalesce from a break-down.
 his most important work, a long, complicated
poem that reveals disillusionment and
pessimism with contemporary society and is
remarkable for its originality in form and
content.
 On November 15, 1922, he wrote to Richard Aldington,
saying, "As for The Waste Land, that is a thing of the
past so far as I am concerned and I am now feeling
toward a new form and style."
 The poem is known for its obscure nature—its

slippage between satire and prophecy; its abrupt
changes of speaker, location, and time.Despite this, it
has become a touchstone of modern literature, a
poetic counterpart to a novel published in the same
year, James Joyce‘s Ulysses.
 Among its best-known phrases are "April is the
cruellest month", "I will show you fear in a handful of
dust";
The Waste Land
Section Ⅰ: The Burial of the Dead
Section Ⅱ: A Game of Chess
Section Ⅲ: The Fire Sermon
Section Ⅳ: Death by Water
Section Ⅴ: What the Thunder Said
The Burial of the Dead
 It is made up of four vignettes, each
seemingly from the perspective of a
different speaker.
 The first is an autobiographical snippet
from the childhood of an aristocratic
woman.
 The second is a prophetic, apocalyptic
invitation to journey into a desert waste.
 The third describes an imaginative reading.
 The fourth is the most surreal in which the
speaker asks a ghostly figure about the
fate of a corpse planted in his garden.
Form of Burial of the Dead
This section can be seen as a modified dramatic
monologue. The four speakers in this section are
frantic in their need to speak, to find an audience, but
they find themselves surrounded by dead people and
thwarted by outside circumstances, like wars.
Because the sections are so short and the situations so
confusing, the effect is not one of an overwhelming
impression of a single character; instead, the reader is
left with the feeling of being trapped in a crowd,
unable to find a familiar face.
Commentary
The poet lives in a culture that has decayed and

withered but will not expire, and he is forced to
live with reminders of its former glory. The plot
of the poem revolves two influential
contemporary cultural/ anthropological texts,
Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance and Sir
James Frazier’s The Golden Bough. Both of
these works focus on the persistence of ancient
fertility rituals in modern thought and religion;
of particular interest to both authors is the
story of the Fisher King.
Commentary (continued)
Eliot provides copious footnotes

that is an excellent source for
tracking down the origins of a
reference. Many of the
references are from the Bible.
Memory in the first episode creates a
confrontation of the past with the present, a
juxtaposition that points out just how badly
things have decayed. The second contains a
troubled religious proposition. The speaker
describes a true wasteland of “stony rubbish”.
The third explores Eliot’s fascination with
transformation. The final allows Eliot finally
to establish the true wasteland of the poem,
the modern city.
A Game of chess
Summary
This section focuses on two opposing scenes,
one of high society and one of the lower
classes. The first half of the section portrays
a wealthy, highly groomed woman
surrounded by exquisite furnishings. The
second part shifts to a London barroom,
where two women discuss a third woman.
AForm
Game of chess
The first part is largely in unrhymed iambic
pentameter lines, or blank verse. As the section
proceeds, the lines become increasingly irregular
in length and meter, giving the feeling of
disintegration, of things falling apart. The second
part is a dialogue interrupted by the barman’s
refrain, which constitutes a loose series of phrases
connected by “I said (s)” and “she said (s).”
Commentary
The two women of this section of the poem
represent the two sides of modern
sexuality: while one side of this sexuality is
a dry, barren interchange inseparable
from neurosis and self- destruction, the
other side of this sexuality is a rampant
fecundity associated with a lack of culture
and rapid aging. Neither woman’s form of
sexuality is regenerative.
The Fire Sermon
Summary
This title is taken from a sermon given
by Buddha in which he encourages his
followers to give up earthly passion
(symbolized by fire) and seek freedom
from earthly things.
The Fire Sermon
Form
This section is notable for its inclusion of
popular poetic forms, particularly musical
pieces, including Spenser’s wedding song
(which becomes the song of the Thames-
daughters), a soldier’s ballad, a nightingale’s
chirps, a song from Oliver Goldsmith’s The
Vicar of Wakefield, and a mandolin tune
(which has no words but is echoed in “ a clatter
and a chatter from within”).
Commentary
The opening two stanzas of this section
describe the ultimate “Waste Land” as Eliot
sees it. The wasteland is cold, dry and
barren, covered in garbage. Unlike the
desert, which at least burns with heat, this
place is static, save for a few scurrying rats.
Even the river, normally a symbol of
renewal, has been reduced to a “ dull canal”.
The ugliness stands in implicit contrast to
the “Sweet Thames” of Spenser’s time.
The most significant image in these
lines is the rat. This section ends
with only the single word “burning”,
isolated on the page, reveals the
futility of all of man’s struggles.
Death by water
Summary
The shortest section of the poem describes
a man, Phlebas the Phoenician, who has
died, apparently by drowning. In death he
has forgotten his worldly cares as the
creatures of the sea have picked his body
apart. The narrator asks his reader to
consider Phlebas and recall his or her own
mortality.
Death by water
Form
It is one of the most formally organized
sections of the poem. The alliteration and
the deliberately archaic language (“O
you”, “a fortnight dead”) also contribute
to the serious, didactic feel of this section.
Commentary
The major point of this short section is

to rebut ideas of renewal and
regeneration.
What the Thunder said
Summary
This section is dramatic in both its imagery
and its events. Eliot draws on the traditional
interpretation of “what the thunder says”, as
taken from the Upanishads (Hindu fables).
According to these fables, the thunder “gives”,
“sympathizes”, and “controls” through its
“speech”. Eliot launches into a meditation on
each of these aspects of the thunder’s power.
What the Thunder said
Form
The final section moves away from more typical
poetic forms to experiment with structures
normally associated with religion and philosophy.
Both formally and thematically , this part follows
a pattern of obsession and resignation. Its
patterning reflects the speaker’s offer at the end
to “fit you”, to transform experience into poetry.
Commentary
The last words of the poem are in a non-
Western language that invoke an
alternative set of paradigms to those of
the Western world and offer a glimpse
into a culture and a value system new to
us and offer some hope for an alternative
to our own dead world.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
(131 lines)
 This poem, the earliest of Eliot’s major works, was

completed in 1910 or 1911 but not published until
1915. It is an examination of the tortured psyche
of the prototypical modern man--overeducated,
eloquent, neurotic, and emotionally stilted.
 Prufrock, the poem’s speaker, seems to be

addressing a potential lover, with whom he would
like to “force the moment to its crisis” by somehow
consummating their relationship. But Prufrock
knows too much of life to “dare” an approach to
the woman.
Lead-in Questions
 In your mind, what should a piece of love
song be like?
 What is the narrative point of view in this
poem? What is the function?
 What kind of a person is Prufrock? Is he an
individual or general symbol?
 Notice the irony, allusion, and stream of
consciousness in the poem
Prufrock—a general symbol
 The poem follows the conscious experience
of a man, Prufrock (relayed in the ―stream of
consciousness‖ form characteristic of the
Modernists), lamenting his physical and
intellectual inertia, the lost opportunities in
his life and lack of spiritual progress, with the
recurrent theme of carnal love unattained.
Stream of Consciousness
 Stream-of-consciousness writing is usually
regarded as a special form of interior monologue
and is characterized by associative leaps in
syntax and punctuation that can make the prose
difficult to follow, tracing a character's fragmentary
thoughts and sensory feelings. Stream of
consciousness and interior monologue are
distinguished from dramatic monologue, where
the speaker is addressing an audience or a third
person, and is used chiefly in poetry or drama.
 In stream of consciousness, the speaker‘s
thought processes are more often depicted
as overheard in the mind (or addressed to
oneself) and is primarily a fictional device.
The term was first introduced to the field of
literary studies from that of psychology by
philosopher and psychologist William
James, brother of writer Henry James.
Latin Quotes
If I believed that my
answer were to a person
who should ever return to
the world, this flame
would stand without
further movement; but
since never one returns
alive from this deep, if I
hear true, I answer you
without fear of infamy. Dante’s The Inferno, Canto
XXVII, 61-66
Explanation of the Title
 T. S. Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) originally
entitled this poem "Prufrock Among the
Women." He changed the title to "The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" before publishing
the poem in Poetry magazine in 1915.
 The words "Love Song" seem apt, for one of
the definitions of love song is narrative
poem. And, of course, "The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock" is a narrative, presenting a
moment in the life of the title character. It
is also a poem. In addition, the work has
characteristics of most love songs, such as
repetition (or refrain), rhyme, and rhythm. It
also focuses on the womanly love that eludes
Prufrock.
Type of Work:
Dramatic Monologue
 A modernistic poem in the form of a dramatic
monologue.
 A dramatic monologue presents a moment in
which a narrator/speaker discusses a topic and, in
so doing, reveals his personal feelings to a
listener. Only the narrator, talks—hence the term
monologue, meaning "single (mono) discourse
(logue)." During his discourse, the speaker
intentionally and unintentionally reveals
information about himself. The main focus of a
dramatic monologue is this personal information,
not the speaker's topic. Therefore, a dramatic
monologue is a type of character study.
The Speaker/Narrator
 The poem centers on a balding, insecure
middle-aged man. He expresses his
thoughts about the dull, uneventful,
mediocre life he leads as a result of his
feelings of inadequacy and his fear of
making decisions. Unable to seize
opportunities or take risks (especially
with women), he lives in a world that is
the same today as it was yesterday and
will be the same tomorrow as it is today.
He does try to make progress, but his
timidity and fear of failure inhibit him
from taking action.
Setting
 The action takes place in the
evening in a bleak section of a
smoky city. This city is probably St.
Louis, where Eliot (1888-1965) grew
up. But it could also be London, to
which Eliot moved in 1914. However,
Eliot probably intended the setting to
be any city anywhere.
Characters
 J. Alfred Prufrock: The speaker/narrator, a timid, overcautious
middle-aged man. He escorts his silent listener through streets in
a shabby part of a city, past cheap hotels and restaurants, to a
social gathering where women he would like to meet are conversing.
However, he is hesitant to take part in the activity for fear of
making a fool of himself.
 The Listener: An unidentified companion of Prufrock. The

listener could also be Prufrock's inner self, one that prods him but
fails to move him to action.
 The Women: Women at a social gathering. Prufrock would like to

meet one of them but worries that she will look down on him.
 The Lonely Men in Shirtsleeves: Leaning out of their windows,

they smoke pipes. They are like Prufrock in that they look upon a
scene but do not become part of it. The smoke from their pipes
helps form the haze over the city, the haze that serves as a
metaphor for a timid cat—which is Prufrock.
Themes
 Loneliness and Alienation: Prufrock is a
pathetic man whose anxieties and obsessions
have isolated him.
 Indecision: Prufrock resists making decisions
for fear that their outcomes will turn out
wrong.
 Inadequacy: Prufrock continually worries that
he will make a fool of himself and that people
will ridicule him for his clothes, his bald spot,
and his overall physical appearance.
 Pessimism: Prufrock sees only the negative
side of his own life and the lives of others.
Interpretation of this Poem
 The speaker invites the listener to walk
 Let us go then, you and I, with him into the streets on an evening
When the evening is spread out that resembles a patient, anesthetized
against the sky with ether (physicians used ether to
Like a patient etherised upon a render patients unconscious before an
table; operation), lying on the table of a
Let us go, through certain half- hospital operating room. The imagery
deserted streets, suggests that the evening is lifeless and
The muttering retreats 5 listless. The speaker and the listener
Of restless nights in one-night will walk through lonely streets—the
cheap hotels business day has ended—past cheap
And sawdust restaurants with hotels and restaurants with sawdust on
oyster-shells: the floors. (Sawdust was used to
Streets that follow like a tedious absorb spilled beverages and food,
argument making it easy to sweep up at the end
Of insidious intent of the day.) The shabby establishments
To lead you to an overwhelming will remind the speaker of his own
question … 10 shortcomings, their images remaining
Oh, do not ask, ―What is it?‖ in his mind as he walks on. They will
Let us go and make our visit. then prod the listener to ask the
speaker a question about the speaker's
life—perhaps why he visits these seedy
haunts, which are symbols of his life,
and why he has not acted to better
himself or to take a wife.
 In the room the  At a social gathering
women come and in a room, women
go discuss the great
Talking of Renaissance artist
Michelangelo. Michelangelo.
Prufrock may
wonder how they
could possibly be
interested in him
when they are
discussing someone
as illustrious as
Michelango.
 The yellow fog that rubs its
back upon the window-  Smoky haze spreads across the
panes, 15 city. The haze is like a quiet, timid
The yellow smoke that rubs its cat padding to and fro, rubbing its
muzzle on the window-panes head on objects, licking its tongue,
Licked its tongue into the and curling up to sleep after
corners of the evening, allowing soot to fall upon it. The
Lingered upon the pools that speaker resembles the cat as he
stand in drains, looks into windows or into "the
Let fall upon its back the soot room," trying to decide whether
that falls from chimneys, to enter and become part of the
Slipped by the terrace, made a activity. Eventually, he curls up in
sudden leap, 20 the safety and security of his own
And seeing that it was a soft soft arms—alone, separate. What
October night, this stanza means is that Prufrock
Curled once about the house, feels inferior and is unable to act
and fell asleep. decisively. He consigns himself to
corners, as a timid person might
at a dance; stands idly by doing
nothing, as does a stagnant pool;
and becomes the brunt of ridicule
or condescension (the soot that
falls on him).
 There's no hurry, though,
 And indeed there will be time the speaker tells himself.
For the yellow smoke that slides
along the street, There will be time to
Rubbing its back upon the decide and then to act—
window-panes; 25 time to put on the right
There will be time, there will be face and demeanor to meet
time
To prepare a face to meet the people. There will be time
faces that you meet; to kill and time to act; in
There will be time to murder and fact, there will be time to
create, do many things. There will
And time for all the works and
days of hands even be time to think
That lift and drop a question on about doing things—time
your plate; 30 to dream and then revise
Time for you and time for me, those dreams—before
And time yet for a hundred
indecisions, sitting down with a woman
And for a hundred visions and to take toast and tea.
revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and
tea.
 In the room the  The women are
women come and still coming and
go going, still talking
Talking of of Michelangelo,
Michelangelo. suggesting that
life is repetitive
and dull.
 Prufrock says there will
 And indeed there will be time
To wonder, ―Do I dare?‖ and, ―Do I
be time to wonder
dare?‖ whether he dares to
Time to turn back and descend the
stair,
approach a woman. He
With a bald spot in the middle of my feels like turning back.
hair— 40 After all, he has a bald
[They will say: ―How his hair is
growing thin!‖] spot, thinning hair, and
My morning coat, my collar mounting thin arms and legs.
firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but
Moreover, he has doubts
asserted by a simple pin— about the acceptability of
[They will say: ―But how his arms and
legs are thin!‖]
his clothing. What will
Do I dare 45 people think of him?
Disturb the universe? Does he dare to
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a approach a woman? He
minute will reverse. will think about it and
make a decision, then
reverse the decision.
 For I have known them  Prufrock realizes that the
all already, known them people here are the
all:— same as the people he
Have known the has met many times
evenings, mornings, before—the same,
afternoons, 50 uninteresting people in
I have measured out my the same uninteresting
life with coffee spoons; world. They all even
I know the voices dying sound the same. So why
with a dying fall should he do anything?
Beneath the music from
a farther room.
So how should I
presume?
 And I have known the  He has seen their gazes
eyes already, known before, many times—
them all— 55 gazes that form an
The eyes that fix you in a opinion of him, treating
formulated phrase, him like a butterfly or
And when I am another insect pinned
formulated, sprawling on into place in a display.
a pin, How will he be able to
When I am pinned and explain himself to them—
wriggling on the wall, the ordinariness, the
Then how should I begin mediocrity, of his life?
To spit out all the butt-
ends of my days and
ways? 60
And how should I
presume?
 And I have known the  Yes, he has known
arms already, known women like these before,
them all— wearing jewelry but
Arms that are braceleted really bare, lacking
and white and bare substance. Why is he
[But in the lamplight, thinking about them?
downed with light brown Perhaps it is the smell of
hair!] a woman's perfume.
It is perfume from a
dress 65
That makes me so
digress?
Arms that lie along a
table, or wrap about a
shawl.
And should I then
presume?
And how should I begin?
 Shall I say, I have  Will he tell a woman
gone at dusk that he came
through narrow through narrow
streets 70 streets, where lonely
And watched the men (like Prufrock)
smoke that rises lean out of windows
from the pipes watching life go by
Of lonely men in but not taking part
shirt-sleeves, in it? He should have
leaning out of been nothing more
windows? than crab claws in
I should have been a the depths of the
pair of ragged claws silent ocean.
Scuttling across the
floors of silent seas.
 And the afternoon, the evening,  The time passes peacefully. It
sleeps so peacefully! 75 is as if the afternoon/evening
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers, is sleeping or simply wasting
Stretched on the floor, here beside time, stretched out on the
you and me. floor. Should the speaker sit
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment down with someone and have
to its crisis? 80 dessert—should he take a
But though I have wept and fasted, chance, make an
wept and prayed, acquaintance, live? Oh, he has
Though I have seen my head brought
in upon a platter, suffered; he has even
I am no prophet—and here’s no great imagined his head being
matter; brought in on a platter, like
I have seen the moment of my
greatness flicker, the head of John the Baptist.
And I have seen the eternal Footman Of course, unlike John, he is
hold my coat, and snicker, 85 no prophet. He has seen his
And in short, I was afraid. opportunities pass and even
seen death up close, holding
his coat, snickering. He has
been afraid.
 And would it have been worth it,
 Would it have been
after all, worth it for the
After the cups, the marmalade,
the tea,
speaker while
Among the porcelain, among drinking tea to try to
some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth
make a connection
while, 90 with one of the
To have bitten off the matter with
a smile,
women? Would it
To have squeezed the universe have been worth it
into a ball
To roll it toward some
to arise from his
overwhelming question, lifeless life and dare
To say: ―I am Lazarus, come from
the dead,
to engage in
Come back to tell you all, I shall conversation with a
tell you all‖— 95
If one, settling a pillow by her
woman, only to have
head, her criticize him or
Should say: ―That is not what I
meant at all.
reject him.
That is not it, at all.‖
 And would it have been worth it,  Would it have been worth it,
after all, considering all the times he
Would it have been worth would be with the woman at
while, 100 sunset or with her in a
After the sunsets and the
dooryards and the sprinkled dooryard? Would it have been
streets, worth it after all the mornings
After the novels, after the teacups, or evenings when workmen
after the skirts that trail along the sprinkled the streets (see
floor— sprinkled streets, below),
And this, and so much more?— after all the novels he would
It is impossible to say just what I discuss with her over tea,
mean! after all the times he heard
But as if a magic lantern threw
the nerves in patterns on a the drag of her skirt along the
screen: 105 floor, after so many other
Would it have been worth while occasions? Would it have been
If one, settling a pillow or worth it if, after plumping a
throwing off a shawl, pillow or throwing off her
And turning toward the window, shawl, she turned casually
should say: toward a window and told him
―That is not it at all, that he was mistaken about
That is not what I meant, at all.‖
her intentions toward him?
 No! I am not Prince Hamlet,  Prufrock and Hamlet
nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one (the protagonist of
that will do Shakespeare's
To swell a progress, start a Hamlet, Prince of
scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, Denmark) are both
an easy tool, indecisive. But
Deferential, glad to be of Prufrock lacks the
use, 115
Politic, cautious, and majesty and
meticulous; charisma of Hamlet.
Full of high sentence, but a Therefore, he fancies
bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost himself as Polonius,
ridiculous— the busybody lord
Almost, at times, the Fool. chamberlain in
Shakespeare's play.
 I grow old … I grow old … 120
 The speaker realizes
I shall wear the bottoms of my that time is passing
trousers rolled.
16 and that he is
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare
to eat a peach?
growing old.
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and However, like other
walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, men going through a
each to each.
17 middle-age crisis, he
I do not think that they will sing to
me. 125
considers changing
18 his hairstyle and
I have seen them riding seaward on
the waves clothes. Like
Combing the white hair of the waves
blown back
Odysseus in the
When the wind blows the water white Odyssey, he has
and black.
19 heard the song of
We have lingered in the chambers of
the sea the sirens. However,
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed
red and brown 130
they are not singing
Till human voices wake us, and we to him.
drown.
Questions
 In the first line, who is ―you‖ and ―I‖?
 The evening sky is compared to be a patient
etherised on a table? What is the similarity
between these two things?
 What effect do the iamges take? (evening sky,
half-deserted streets, restless nights, cheap
hotels, sawdust, oyster-shells, streets)
 What is the overwhelming question?
Suggested answers
 ―you‖ is the assumed listener, but he is absent,
actually, it is just the speaker‘s inner self. It
emphasizes his fear and loneliness.
 lack of vigor, consciousness. ―evenging‖ has
set the major tone for the whole poem. (slow,
melanchony)
 Economic depression, moral corruption,
spiritual waste land.
 To express his wooing heart, to consummate
their love affair.
Line 13-14 (disharmony)
 In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
What is the disharmony?
 Michelangelo, was an Italian
Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect,
poet, and engineer. (the climax of
elegant art)
 Modern women live a highly-

materialized life, vulgar, empty in
spiritual equipment, this takes ironic
effect.
Picture of modern life
 yellow fog, yellow smoke, the soot,

the lazy cat
 Verbs: rub, licked, lingered, slipped,
curled
Stanza 4
 How many times ―there will be time‖ repeated? What
is the function? (An allusion to Ecclesiastes )
1 To everything there is a season, and a time to every
purpose under the heaven;2 A time to be born, and a
time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up
that which is planted.3 A time to kill, and a time to
heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;4
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn,
and a time to dance;5 A time to cast away stones,
and a time to gather stones together; a time to
embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;6 A
time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a
time to cast away;7 A time to rend, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;8 A time
to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time
of peace.
Answers
 To strenthen the rhythm.
To give himself courage
to face the coming party.
But the feeling of fear is
also increased by saying
so.
 He disliked the party. ―to
prepare a face to meet
the faces you meet.‖
 Murder: to kill the timid
self; create; to create a
new self (by wearing a
mask)
Stanza 6
 From stanza 4 and 6, Prufrock‘s leading
character is vividly reflected, please find
out those words to illustrate.
 What are the reasons for his pretending
face?
 Notice ―Do I dare?‖, ―Do I dare disturb
the universe?‖
Stanza 7-9 (how should I presume)
For I have known them all already, known them all–
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
Appreciating the following lines
 I know the voice dying with a dying fall (allusion)
beneath the music from a farther room.
so how should I presume?
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how I should begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
and how should I presume?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
and should I then presume?
and how should I begin?
Narrative digression stanza 10
 Stanza 10 reminds readers of the image in
stanza 1
 Lonely people in paupers and dirty streets
 The speaker is also lonely, but his loneliness is
caused by abandoning himself rather than by
old age, poverty or disease.
 Here, he compares himself to a pair of ragged
claws.
Stanza 11-12
 In imagination, he was tendered by
long fingers.
 Should I have the strength to force
the moment to its crisis?
 In short, I am afraid.
Stanza 13
 Would it have been worth while, to
have…, to have…, to roll…, to say…
 the universe→into a ball →towards
some overwhelming questions
such a question is not only a personal
concern for Prufrock, it aquires
general(universal) symbol.
Stanza 13 and 14
 Would it have been worth while…
 ―That is not what I meant at all, that
is not it , at all.‖
The speaker wanted to propose such an
overwhelming question, but the wooed
lady cannot understand him.
Stanza 15
 The analogy of Prince Hamlet. What are the
similarities and dissimilarities.
 Similarities: both are indecisive, feel

puzzled by the overwhelming question.
(Ophelia refused Hamlet‘s proposal)
 Dissimlarities: living in different social
backgrounds. (chaotic and turbulent VS
disillusioned and empty)
Till human voice wake us, and we
drown
 How do you understand the above line?
this is the tragedy of modern people.
They would rather indulge themselves in
fantasy than come back to reality. Once
they identify themselves in the modern
society, they will collapse spiritually.
(a tragedy of a generation, a tragedy of
human civilization)
Characterization of Prufrock
Lack of courage, vigour and energy
Sensitive, neurotic, indecisive, suffered from spiritual

paralysis
"Prufrock," deals with spiritually exhausted people

who exist in the impersonal modern city.
 Prufrock is a representative character who cannot
reconcile his thoughts and understanding with his
feelings and will. The poem displays several levels
of irony, the most important of which grows out of
the vain, weak man's insights into his sterile life
and his lack of will to change that life. The poem is
replete with images of enervation and paralysis,
such as the evening described as "etherized,"
immobile. Prufrock understands that he and his
associates lack authenticity.
Social Significance of Prufrock
 Prufrock voices the existing situation of all the
modern people.
 It is an examination of the tortured psyche of the

prototypical modern man--overeducated, eloquent,
neurotic, and emotionally stilted.
 "For many readers in the 1920s, Prufrock seemed

to epitomize the frustration and impotence of the
modern individual. He seemed to represent
thwarted desires and modern disillusionment”
Allusion
 In "Time for all the works and days of hands" (29) the
phrase 'works and days' is the title of a long poem - a
description of agricultural life and a call to toil - by the
early Greek poet Hesiod.
 "I know the voices dying with a dying fall" (52)
echoes Orsino's first lines in Shakespeare's Twelfth
Night.
 The prophet of "Though I have seen my head (grown
slightly bald) brought in upon a platter / I am no
prophet - and here's no great matter" (81-2) is John
the Baptist, whose head was delivered to Salome by
Herod as a reward for her dancing (Matthew14:1-11,
and Oscar Wilde's play Salome).
 "To have squeezed the universe into a ball" (92)
echoes the closing lines of Marvell's 'To His Coy
Mistress'.
 "'I am Lazarus, come from the dead'" (94) may be
either the beggar Lazarus (of Luke 16) who was not
permitted to return from the dead to warn the
brothers of a rich man about Hell or the Lazarus (of
John 11) whom Christ raised from the dead, or both.
 "Full of high sentence" (117) echoes Chaucer's
description of the Clerk of Oxford in the General
Prologue to The Canterbury Tales.[26]
 "There will be time to murder and create" is a biblical
allusion to Ecclesiastes 3.
W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)
• Poet, dramatist, mystic, essayist, critic.

• Widely considered to be one of the greatest
English-language poets of the 20th century.
• Founded the Irish Literary Theatre.
• Received the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1923.
Overview of Yeats
• Important member of the Abbey theater
group, Gaelic Revival, and Celtic Twilight.
• Pretty political at one point in his life but later
rejects most political causes to follow a more
aesthetic and philosophical path.
• Poems touch on desire for Irish Identity, Irish
Mythology, Culture, Irish Politics, and a
healthy distrust of man-made systems.
A Family of Artists
• William Butler Yeats was born on June 13,
1865 in Dublin.
• His father was a lawyer of sorts who turned
into a Pre-Raphaelite painter.
• In 1867 the family followed him to London
and settled in Bedford Park.
• In 1881 (Yeats = 16) they returned to Dublin,
where Yeats studied at the Metropolitan
School of Art.
Father, Son, and Brother
A portriat of W.B. Yeats A painting by Jack B Yeats

(painted by his father) (W.B. Yeats’s brother)
Identity Crisis – or -- Contrasts and Balance
• While Yeats was born in Ireland’s East, some

of his early days and later family jaunts were
spent in Sligo (Which he sees as his home).
• While he is part of the Protestant
Ascendancy, he and his family support the
Irish Nationalist movements.
Sligo
Dublin
London
Coole Park
Changing Interests
• As a student at the Metropolitan School of
Art, Yeats was uninspired. While there he met
the poet, dramatist, and painter George
Russell (1867-1935). Russell was interested in
mysticism, and his search inspired Yeats to
explore reincarnation, the supernatural, and
Oriental mysticism.
A Writer is Born
• Yeats made his literary debut in 1885, when
his first poems were published in The Dublin
University Review.
• In 1887 the family returned to Bedford Park
(London), and Yeats devoted himself to
writing the poetry that would fill his first few
volumes.
Maud Gonne
• Yeats met the love of his life, Maud Gonne, in
1889. She was an actress who was financially
independent and she was also an Irish
revolutionary who became a major figure in
Yeats’s life and work.
• Yeats wrote poetry for her, asked her to marry
him multiple times, and many biographers
claim he worshipped her.
• When she married another in 1903, Yeats
wrote “No Second Troy.”
A Different Agenda
• Maud Gonne influenced Yeats to join the
revolutionary organization the Irish
Republican Brotherhood.
• By 1896 Yeats began work reforming the Irish
Literary Society, and then the National
Literary Society in Dublin, which aimed to
promote the New Irish Library.
Lady Gregory And the Abbey Theater
• In 1897, Yeats met Lady Gregory. Yeats,
Gregory, Synge, and others founded the Irish
Literary Theatre.
Lady Gregory
The Old Abbey Theater J.M. Synge

Later Life
• In early 1917 Yeats bought
Thoor Ballyle, an abandoned
Norman stone tower near
Coole Park.
• After restoring
it, the tower became his
summer home and a central
symbol in his later poetry.
• In 1917 he married Georgie
Hyde-Lees.
Getting Personal
and Writing Much
• Yeats’s later work is more personal and his
subjects include his children and the
experience of growing old. Many suggest his
greatest poetry is written late in his life.
Yeats is buried in Sligo
Sailing to Byzantium
‘Now I am trying to write about the state of

my soul, for it is right for an old man to
make his soul, and some of my thoughts
upon that subject are here...’
WB Yeats
Can I go there?
• Sadly no... Byzantium was an ancient Greek city on the site
that later became Constantinople (modern Istanbul).
• It was founded by Greek colonists from Megara in 657 BC.
The city was rebuilt and re-inaugurated as the new capital
of the Roman Empire by Emperor Constantine I in 330 AD
and subsequently renamed Constantinople.
• The city remained the capital of the Byzantine
Empire until 1453, when it was conquered and became the
capital of the Ottoman Empire.
• Since the establishment of modern Turkey in 1923, the
Turkish name of the city, Istanbul, has replaced the name
Constantinople in the West.
• Yeats saw the Byzantine Empire, along with the
Renaissance, as one of the high points of civilisation
Symbolism of Byzantium
• An ideal state of mind beyond life
• Represents the perfect aesthetic
• The perfection of art allows the artist to
transcend daily life, the ego, nature, death,
relationships, desire
• Art is not personal here; it is art for art’s sake
The Byzantine artists...
• All artists are impersonal.
• They work without consciousness of
individual design
• They are absorbed in their subject matter/ the
creation of art itself
• Their aim is to represent the visions of the
whole people NOT the individual
Note on form
• Ottava Rima – loose iambic pentameter stanzas
with an asymmetric rhyme pattern
• A sestet and a couplet: ABABABCC
• Renaissance form that Yeats discovered in Italy
with Lady G in 1907
• Associated with aristocratic poise, ceremony and
custom; Yeats often uses in reflective poems (e.g.
‘Among School Children’
• Provides a sense of balance and shape and
possibly, reflection (link to structure in ‘Wild
Swans at Coole...)
Sailing to Byzantium (1927)
I
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
II
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
III
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
IV
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
Interpretations
• An allegory of the process by which fantasies are
made into art
• About the artfulness of art
• A rejection of the personal in art
• A metaphysical poem as much as a symbolic
poem
• Reflects Yeats’ commitment to the craft of
poetry, above all else
• Or as Yeats suggested, is it ‘over and above
utility...something that wrings the heart’?
• “Sailing to Byzantium,” first published in 1928 as part
of Yeats’ collection, The Tower, contains only four
stanzas and yet is considered to be one of the most
effective expressions of Yeats’ artistic craft.
• To escape the agony of old age, Yeats decides to
leave the country of the young and travel to
Byzantium, where the sages in the city’s famous gold
mosaics (completed mainly during the sixth and
seventh centuries) could become the “singing-
masters” of his soul.
• In 1931, Yeats wrote that he chose to “symbolize the
search for the spiritual life by a journey to that city”
because “Byzantium was the centre of European
civilization and the source of its spiritual
philosophy.”
• The poem is noteworthy for its evocative imagery
and interwoven phrases as the poet immerses in life
and at the same time strives for permanence.
• Byzantium was the capital in 5th, 6th C of the Roman
Empire (recently ‘Istanbul’) but here it is an
imaginary land.
Theme:
• Yeats thinks each human soul must be
revived through constant transmigration and
that it gradually comes to an immortal place.
• Each soul must be purified before his
rebirth. This poem describes the situation of
transmigration
Analysis
• The source of several major themes in “Sailing to
Byzantium” can be found in Yeats’ 1925 work, A
Vision (1925), in which he develops his cyclical
theory of life.
• In “Sailing to Byzantium,” Yeats used the concept of
the spiraling gyre to suggest that opposite
concepts—such as youth and age, body and soul,
nature and art, transient and eternal—are in fact
mutually dependent upon each other.
• Yoked together by the gyre and the poem itself, the
mutually interpenetrating opposites—thesis and
antithesis—resolve in such a way as to produce a
synthesis that contains a larger truth (Hegel’s theory
of dialectic).
• “Sailing to Byzantium” has at least two symbolic
readings, both mutually interdependent upon the
other. The poem is both about the journey taken by
the speaker's soul around the time of death and the
process by which, through his art, the artist
transcends his own mortality.
• Byzantium represents what Yeats, in A Vision, calls
“Unity of Being,” in which “religious, aesthetic and
practical life were one” and art represented “the
vision of a whole people.”
• An important theme is the superiority of the art
over the natural. The artificial is seen as perfect and
unchanging while the natural world is prone to
ugliness and decay.
Dylan Thomas
Dylan Marlais Thomas

27 October 1914
Born
Swansea, Wales, UK
9 November 1953 (aged 39)
Died
New York, USA
Occupation Poet
Modernism
Literary movement
Romanticism
Spouse(s) Caitlin Macnamara (1937-1953)
Llewelyn Edouard Thomas (1939-
2000)
Children Aeronwy Bryn Thomas (b. 1943)
Colm Garan Hart Thomas (b.
1949)
Early life
• Dylan Thomas was born in the Uplands area
of Swansea, South Wales, on 27 October
1914.
• His father, David John Thomas, was an
English master who taught English literature
at the local grammar school.
• His mother, Florence Hannah Thomas (née
Williams), was a seamstress born in Swansea.
• Dylan had a sister, Nancy, eight years older
than him.
Early life
• His childhood was spent largely in Swansea,
with regular summer trips to visit his
maternal aunt’s Carmarthenshire dairy farm.
These rural sojourns and the contrast with
the town life of Swansea provided inspiration
for much of his work, notably many short
stories, radio essays and the poem Fern Hill.
Thomas was known to be a sickly child who
shied away from school and preferred
reading on his own
Education
• Thomas's formal education began at Mrs. Hole's
'Dame School', a private school, which was situated a
few streets away on Mirador Crescent.
• In October 1925, Thomas attended the single-sex
Swansea Grammar School, in the Mount Pleasant
district of the city.
• Thomas's first poem was published in the school's
magazine, of which he later became an editor. He left
school at 16 to become a reporter for the local
newspaper, the South Wales Daily Post only to leave
the job under pressure 18 months later in 1932. He
then joined an amateur dramatic group in Mumbles,
but still continued to work as a freelance journalist
for a few more years.
Career
• Thomas wrote half of his
poems and many short stories
while living at his Cwmdonkin
home, “And death shall have
no dominion” is one of his best
known works written at this
address.
• His highly acclaimed first
poetry volume, 18 Poems, was
published on 18 December
1934, the same year he moved
to London.
Career
• The publication of Deaths and Entrances in
1946 was a major turning point in his career.
• Thomas was well known for being a versatile
and dynamic speaker, best known for his
poetry readings.
• His powerful voice would captivate American
audiences during his speaking tours of the
early 1950s. He made over 200 broadcasts for
the BBC.
Marriage and children
• In the spring of 1936,
Dylan Thomas met
Caitlin MacNamara, a
dancer. They met in the
Wheatsheaf public
house, in the Fitzrovia
area of London’s West
End. A drunken Thomas
proposed marriage on
the spot, and the two
began a courtship.
Addiction • Thomas liked to boast about
his addiction, saying;
“An alcoholic is someone you
don't like, who drinks as much
as you do.”
• Thomas "liked the taste of
whisky," and he did quite his
fair share of drinking, although
the amount he is supposed to
have drunk may have been an
exaggeration.
Style
• Thomas’s verbal style played against strict
verse forms, such as the villanelle ("Do Not
Go Gentle into That Good Night").
• His images were carefully ordered in a
patterned sequence, and his major theme
was the unity of all life, the continuing
process of life and death and new life that
linked the generations.
• Thomas saw biology as a magical
transformation producing unity out of
diversity, and in his poetry he sought a poetic
ritual to celebrate this unity.
• He saw men and women locked in cycles of
growth, love, procreation, new growth,
death, and new life again. Therefore, each
image engenders its opposite.
• Thomas derived his closely woven,
sometimes self-contradictory images from
the Bible, Welsh folklore and preaching, and
Freud.
Poetry
• Thomas's poetry is famous for its musicality,
most notable in poems such as Fern Hill, In
the White Giant's Thigh, In Country Sleep and
Ballad of the Long-legged Bait. Do not go
gentle into that good night, possibly his most
popular poem, is unrepresentative of his
usual poetic style.
• Thomas once confided that the poems which
had most influenced him were Mother Goose
rhymes which his parents taught him when
he was a child. He did not understand all of
their contents, but he loved their sounds, and
the acoustic qualities of the English language
became his focus in his work later.
• He claimed that the meanings of a poem
were of "very secondary nature" to him.
Bibliography
• Poetry
• 18 Poems (1934)
• The Map of Love (1939)
• Twenty-Five Poems (1936)
• New Poems (1943)
• Deaths and Entrances (1946)
• Twenty-Six Poems (1950)
• In Country Sleep (1952)
• Collected Poems, 1934-1952 (1952)
Death
• Dylan Thomas died in New York on 9
November 1953. The first rumours were of a
brain haemorrhage, followed by reports that
he had been mugged. Soon came the stories
about alcohol, that he had drunk himself to
death. Later, there were speculations about
drugs and diabetes.
Impact on other cultural figures
• Musician Bob Dylan once said the work of Dylan
Thomas influenced the change of his name from
Zimmerman to Dylan
• Welsh musician John Cale has been highly
influenced by the work of Dylan Thomas, even
setting several of his poems (There Was a
Saviour, On a Wedding Anniversary, Lie Still,
Sleep Becalmed and Do Not Go Gentle Into That
Good Night) to orchestral music on his 1989
album Words for the Dying, as well as a musical
setting of A Child's Christmas in Wales on his
album Paris 1919.
• American author Shirley
Jackson met Thomas once
briefly in her family home and
wrote several short stories
dedicated to and loosely based
around Thomas.
• American band Brave Saint
Saturn quoted a portion of the
poem "And death shall have no
dominion" in the song "Here is
the News" from the album Anti-
Meridian.
DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD
NIGHT
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT
• Do not go gentle into that good night, a

villanelle composed in 1952, is considered to
be among the finest works by Dylan Thomas .
Originally published in the journal Botteghe
Oscure in 1951, it also appeared as part of the
collection "In Country Sleep."
• Written for his dying father, it is one of
Thomas's most-quoted works.
Subject
• Dylan Thomas’ father had been a robust,

militant man most of his life, and when in his
eighties, he became blind and weak, his son
was disturbed seeing his father become “soft”
or “gentle.” In this poem, Thomas is rousing
his father to continue being the fierce man he
had previously been.
• Thomas watched his father, formerly in the
Army, grow weak and frail with old age. Thus,
the speaker in his poem tries to convince his
father to fight against imminent death.
• The speaker addresses his father using wise
men, good men, wild men, or grave men as
examples to illustrate the same message:
that no matter how they have lived their lives
or what they feel at the end they should die
fighting. He implies that one should not die
without fighting for one's life, or after life.
• Stanza 1: The first line is a command, “Do not
go gentle into that good night.”
Don’t give up easily.
• The second line” Old age should burn and rave
at close of day” offers the speaker’s belief that
even when old and infirm, the man should
stay energetic and complain if necessary as
long as he does not give in to death easily.
• Then line three again is a command, “Rage,
rage against the dying of the light”:
Fight, complain, rail against the oncoming of
death.
Stanza 2
Though wise men at their • Even though wise men
end know dark is right, know that they cannot
Because their words had keep death away
forked no lightning they forever and especially if
Do not go gentle into that they have not
good night. accomplished their
goals in life, they don’t
fork: v. branch out, split, accept death easily;
separate, divide; make they “Do not go gentle .
into the shape of a fork . . .”
Stanza 3
Good men, the last wave by,
crying how bright • Good men exclaim what might
Their frail deeds might have
danced in a green bay, have been, their “frail deed”
Rage, rage against the dying of might have shone like the sun
the light.
reflecting off the waters of a
frail: adj. fragile; flimsy; weak,
slight, thin; “green bay,” and they, therefore,
bay: n. small arm of the sea
where the shore curves “Rage, rage” against the
inward
oncoming of death.
Stanza 4
• Wild men whose antics
Wild men who caught and seemed to shine as
sang the sun in flight, brightly as the sun and
And learn, too late, they who thought they were
grieve it on its way, so optimistic, but later
realized they spent
Do not go gentle into that much of their life in
good night. grief, still they “Do not
go gentle . . . .”
Stanza 5
Grave men, near death, • Grave men whose eyes
who see with blinding are fading fast can still
sight flash life’s happiness, as
Blind eyes could blaze like they “Rage, rage . .
meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the
dying of the light.
gay: adj. happy, cheerful;
Stanza 6
And you, my father, there • The speaker addresses
on the sad height, his father. “And so my
Curse, bless, me now with father you are nearing
your fierce tears, I pray. death—yell at me,
Do not go gentle into that scream at me, cry out;
good night. to see you do that
would be a blessing for
Rage, rage against the me and I beg you to
dying of the light. show me that militant
man you once were: Do
not go gentle . . . . ”
Other explanations…
• Another explication is that the speaker admits that death is unavoidable,
but encourages all men to fight death. This is not for their own sake, but
to give closure and hope to the kin that they will leave behind. To
support this, he gives examples of wise men, good men, wild men, and
grave men to his father, who was dying at the time this poem was
written. There is little textual evidence for this interpretation, however,
except the words "curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray." Also,
it has been historically stated that Thomas never showed this poem to his
father; if so, it would seem that Thomas composed it more for his own
benefit than his father's.

Literary devices:
• The form on the poem is a villanelle, with a rime
scheme alternating “night” and “day.”
• “Good night” is a metaphor.
• “Dying of the light” is a metaphor.
• “Old age should burn and rave” in line 2 is a
combination of rhetoric and personification.

Literary devices:
• “Burn” in that same line is used metaphorically, as is
“dark” in line 4.
• In line 5 “their words had forked no lightning” is

metaphorical.
• Line 8 “Their frail deeds might have danced in a

green bay” employs personification and metaphor.
Literary devices:
• Line 10 “Wild men who sang the sun in flight” is
exaggeration and metaphor.
• Line 11 “they grieved it on its way” is also exaggeration

and metaphor.
• Line 14 “Blind eyes could blaze like meteors” is a simile.
• Line 17 “Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I

pray” is a paradox.
THE FORCE THAT THROUGH THE
GREEN FUSE DRIVES THE FLOWER
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
The force that drives the water through the rocks

Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.
The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.
The lips of time leech to the fountain head;

Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.
And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb

How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.
THE FORCE THAT THROUGH THE GREEN
FUSE DRIVES THE FLOWER
• ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the
flower’ is a poem by Dylan Thomas written in the
1930s. It is a most beautiful poem full of wistfulness
and sorrow with a sense of helplessness.
• In the poem Thomas handles all of the literary

elements with dexterity with possible interpretations.
But the general theme, the cycle of life, is evident
through his skillful use of imagery, symbolism, and
connotation.
Theme
• The main theme of this poem is the
connection between nature and life. Thomas
speaks of a mysterious and unstoppable force
that controls both mankind and nature,
forever linking them together, as his ‘youth is
bent by the same wintry fever’ as the ‘crooked
rose’, and he believes that the lives of mankind
and nature are not separable.
Theme
• Thomas talks about a power, “the force”, which
pushes the flower up through the earth and the
water through the rocks; makes the water swirl
in a circle and sends the sailboat moving
through the water; and moves the quicksand
downward taking everything with it that got
caught in its spin.
• There is a theme of regeneration in all stanzas.

Analysis of the Poem
Stanza 1 • The “green fuse” represents
the stem of the flower, but
The force that through the
green fuse drives the through connotation “fuse” is
flower thought of as something
Drives my green age; that explosive, contrary to a
blasts the roots of trees gentle flower.
Is my destroyer. • The word “green” implies
And I am dumb to tell the youth and growth as he
crooked rose describes his age. In the
My youth is bent by the second and third lines, the
same wintry fever. (1-5) force that produced life in
the flower and himself is
fuse : n. projectiles for weaponry
blast: v. to explode described as the same force
crooked: adj. evil, corrupt that destroys life.
wintry: adj. cold, snowy
Stanza 1
• The fourth line shatters the
The force that through the beautiful image of a rose, a
green fuse drives the symbol of healthiness and
flower strength, when it is
Drives my green age; that described as crooked,
blasts the roots of trees inviting negative
Is my destroyer. connotations. Just as the
And I am dumb to tell the rose is delicate, he is also
weakened and the seasons of
crooked rose
his life change from
My youth is bent by the springtime liveliness to
same wintry fever. (1-5) “wintry fever.” The image of a
frail old man comes to mind.
Stanza 2
• The “force” here extends the
The force that drives the flow of the stream as it drives
water through the rocks it along, similar to the first
Drives my red blood; that stanza in which the force
dries the mouthing extended the growth of the
streams flower.
Turns mine to wax. • “Red blood” is similar to
And I am dumb to mouth “green age” from the first
unto my veins stanza – they both represent
How at the mountain life and vivacity. In lines
spring the same mouth seven and eight “the force”
sucks. (6-10) becomes destructive again as
in the first stanza.
mouthing: adj. speaking
Stanza 2
• The force that pushed life
The force that drives the along becomes the force that
water through the rocks takes away life as it “dries”
Drives my red blood; that the stream and turns the
dries the mouthing speaker’s blood to “wax,”
which represents the
streams
speaker’s stiff corpse after
Turns mine to wax. embalming.
And I am dumb to mouth
• As in the first stanza he is
unto my veins unable to communicate his
How at the mountain feelings. An attempt to
spring the same mouth explain the situation to his
sucks. (6-10) body would be futile, since it
is already lifeless.
Stanza 3 • The “hand” agitates the
normally calm waters of the
The hand that whirls the pool and the generally
water in the pool motionless quicksand, and it
Stirs the quicksand; that is so powerful that it also
ropes the blowing wind controls the wind.
Hauls my shroud sail. • The third line of this stanza is
And I am dumb to tell the a double entendre. The
hanging man speaker can be referring to a
How of my clay is made ship where the “shroud” is
the hangman’s lime. (11- one of the ropes that support
15) a ship’s mast; in this case the
whirl: v. to spin around “hand’s” power is
clay: n. workable earth material demonstrated as it controls
lime: n. binding material the ship’s course.
Stanza 3 • The “shroud” would be the
sheet used to wrap a dead
The hand that whirls the body for burial.
water in the pool • In the fourth and fifth lines
Stirs the quicksand; that the speaker find it senseless
ropes the blowing wind to communicate his feelings
Hauls my shroud sail. with the “hanging man” since
And I am dumb to tell the they both share the same
hanging man fate. The speaker’s body, his
“clay,” will be in the
How of my clay is made hangman’s cavity, which is
the hangman’s lime. (11- filled with “lime” to prevent
15) the smell of rotting corpses.
Stanza 4
• The denotation of
The lips of time leech to “fountainhead” is an original
the fountain head; source, where life begins,
Love drips and gathers, time leeches the fountain
but the fallen blood head just as age exhausts
Shall calm her sores. life.
And I am dumb to tell a • The next line leans towards
weather’s wind the reoccurring theme of
How time has ticked a death where “fallen blood”
heaven round the stars. represents a dead person.
(16-20) • The speaker brings another
leech: v. to remove the soluble life into being through
constituents from by subjecting to reproduction in line one and
the action of percolating water or
in lines two and three.
other liquid
Stanza 4
The lips of time leech to
the fountain head; • Time is referred to as “her”
Love drips and gathers, and the burden on society is
represented by “sores.” He is
but the fallen blood
incapable of explaining to the
Shall calm her sores. wind how time works
And I am dumb to tell a because the wind already
weather’s wind knows the nature of time.
How time has ticked a The “weather’s wind” has
heaven round the stars. been to the heavens and the
(16-20) stars and has seen all
possible weathers.
tick: v. to click
Other explanations…
• He describes this force as linking life and death

in an eternal cycle; ‘of my clay is made the
hangman’s lime’. Thomas suggests late in the
poem the name of the force that he is talking
about: ‘(the lips of) time’, emphasising his
point that this force is powerful and central to
all.
Literary devices:
• Structurally the poem follows a certain rhythm:
Each stanza beginning with the word ‘the’, and
the first two stanzas beginning with the same
words altogether: ‘The force that drives’, which
reflects the regularity of this cycle and its
continuance.
• The poet doesn’t use rhymes, but sometimes
uses words that sound similar such as the
ending:
‘tomb’ and ‘worm’, to give a sense of comfort and
regularity when read out.
Literary devices:
• The organisations of ideas in the first three
stanzas are very similar:
The first part concerns (in the first two stanzas)
comparing mankind with nature in terms of life
and creation, and after the semi-colon is the
mention of destruction. Then comes a short line
showing how the force will cause the death of the
poet. The last two lines show how the poet is
unable to articulate the wonders of the power.
Literary devices:
• Word order is sometimes emphatic:
‘The force’ starting a line makes it clear that that
is the major theme of the poem, and the second
line of many of the stanzas begin with a verb that
emphasises power.
Often a verb is used to start the line, such as
‘drives’ and ‘stirs’, to reinforce the importance of
the actions the themed force performs.
Literary devices:
• The use of imagery and contrast in language:
Thomas uses many colours in terms of imagery, which
adds depth and meaning to the poem, as colours can
symbolise numerous things. ‘green’ stresses life and
youth, and also the fact that the same word is used to
describe the age of a human and the life of a flower.
The use of ‘red blood’ also adds to this, as red is a very
healthy and lively colour. His imagery is often
extremely interesting and original. The ‘shroud sail’
reminds the reader of perhaps a Viking funeral, which
draws many connections with the sea and the wind.
Virginia Woolf
Brief History
• Adeline Virginia Woolf (born Stephen; 25 January
1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English novelist,
essayist, epistler, publisher, feminist, and writer of short
stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist
literary figures of the twentieth century.
• During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant
figure in London literary society and a member of the
Bloomsbury Group.
• Her most famous works include the novels Mrs
Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando
(1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's
Own (1929), with its famous dictum, "A woman must
have money and a room of her own if she is to write
fiction."
Early life
• Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia
Stephen in London in 1882.
• Her mother, a famous beauty, Julia Prinsep
Stephen (born Jackson) (1846–1895), was born
in India to Dr. John and Maria Pattle Jackson
and later moved to England with her mother,
where she served as a model for Pre-
Raphaelite painters such as Edward Burne-
Jones.
• Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a notable
author, critic and mountaineer.
Early life
• The young Virginia was educated by her

parents in their literate and well-connected
household at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington.
Her parents had each been married previously
and been widowed, and, consequently, the
household contained the children of three
marriages. Julia had three children from her first
husband, Herbert Duckworth: George, Stella,
and Gerald Duckworth.
Early life
• The young Virginia was educated by her

parents in their literate and well-connected
household at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington
• Her parents had each been married previously

and been widowed, and, consequently, the
household contained the children of three
marriages. Julia had three children from her first
husband, Herbert Duckworth: George, Stella,
and Gerald Duckworth.
Early life
• Leslie had one daughter from his first wife,

Minny Thackeray: Laura Makepeace
Stephen, who was declared mentally
disabled and lived with the family until she
was institutionalised in 1891.
• Leslie and Julia had four children
together: Vanessa Stephen (1879), Thoby
Stephen (1880), Virginia (1882), and
Adrian Stephen (1883).
Early Life
• Sir Leslie Stephen‘s eminence as an editor,
critic, and biographer, and his connection to
William Thackeray (he was the widower of
Thackeray‘s youngest daughter), meant that his
children were raised in an environment filled
with the influences of Victorian literary society.
• Henry James, George Henry Lewes, Julia
Margaret Cameron (an aunt of Julia Stephen),
and James Russell Lowell, who was made
Virginia‘s honorary godfather, were among the
visitors to the house.
Early Life
• Julia Stephen was equally well connected.
Descended from an attendant of Marie
Antoinette, she came from a family of renowned
beauties who left their mark on Victorian society
as models for Pre-Raphaelite artists and early
photographers.
• Supplementing these influences was the
immense library at the Stephens‘ house, from
which Virginia and Vanessa (unlike their
brothers, who were formally educated) were
taught the classics and English literature.
Early Life
• According to Woolf's memoirs, her most vivid
childhood memories, however, were not of
London but of St. Ives in Cornwall, where the
family spent every summer until 1895.
• The Stephens' summer home, Talland House,
looked out over Porthminster Bay, and is still
standing today, though somewhat altered.
• Memories of these family holidays and
impressions of the landscape, especially the
Godrevy Lighthouse, informed the fiction Woolf
wrote in later years, most notably To the
Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf
Her father Leslie Stephen

was an eminent Victorian
man of letters.
She grew up in a literary
and intellectual
atmosphere with free
access to her father‘s library
Leslie Stephen with Virginia Woolf.
Childhood experiences of death and sexual abuse led to depression
the death of her mother her stepbrothers

when she was 13
The Prose and the Passion

Early Life
• The sudden death of her mother in 1895, when Virginia
was 13, and that of her half-sister Stella two years later,
led to the first of Virginia's several nervous breakdowns
• The death of her father in 1904 provoked her most
alarming collapse and she was briefly institutionalized.
• Her breakdowns and subsequent recurring depressive

periods, modern scholars (including her nephew and
biographer, Quentin Bell) have suggested, were also
influenced by the sexual abuse she and Vanessa were
subjected to by their half-brothers George and Gerald
Duckworth (which Woolf recalls in her autobiographical
essays A Sketch of the Past and 22 Hyde Park Gate).
Early Life
• Throughout her life, Woolf was plagued by

periodic mood swings and associated
illnesses. Though this instability often
affected her social life, her literary
productivity continued with few breaks
until her suicide.
Virginia Woolf
The Bloomsbury Group  In 1904

she moved to Bloomsbury and became a
member of the Bloomsbury Group. This
meant the rejection of traditional morality
and artistic convention.
Experimentation  best known as one

The Bloomsbury Group of the great experimental novelists during
the modernist period.
Bloomsbury
• After the death of their father and Virginia's second
nervous breakdown, Vanessa and Adrian sold 22 Hyde
Park Gate and bought a house at 46 Gordon Square in
Bloomsbury.
• Following studies at King's College, Cambridge and

King's College London, Woolf came to know Lytton
Strachey, Clive Bell, Rupert Brooke, Saxon Sydney-
Turner, Duncan Grant, and Leonard Woolf.
• Virginia Stephen married writer Leonard Woolf
in 1912. Despite his low material status - Woolf
referring to Leonard during their engagement as
a "penniless Jew" - the couple shared a close
bond. Indeed, in 1937, Woolf wrote in her diary:
"―Love-making — after 25 years can‘t bear to be
separate ... you see it is enormous pleasure
being wanted: a wife. And our marriage so
complete.‖"
• The two also collaborated professionally, in
1917 founding the Hogarth Press, which
subsequently published Virginia's novels along
with works by T.S. Eliot, Laurens van der Post,
and others.
• The ethos of the Bloomsbury group discouraged

sexual exclusivity, and in 1922, Virginia met the
writer and gardener Vita Sackville-West, wife of
Harold Nicolson. After a tentative start, they
began a sexual relationship that lasted through
most of the 1920s.
• In 1928, Woolf presented Sackville-West with
Orlando, a fantastical biography in which the
eponymous hero's life spans three centuries and
both genders. It has been called by Nigel
Nicolson, Vita Sackville-West‘s son, "the longest
and most charming love letter in literature.―
• After their affair ended, the two women remained
friends until Woolf's death in 1941. Virginia
Woolf also remained close to her surviving
siblings, Adrian and Vanessa; Thoby had died of
an illness at the age of 26
Suicide
• After completing the manuscript of her last

(posthumously published) novel, Between the
Acts, Woolf fell victim to a depression similar to
that which she had earlier experienced.
• The onset of World War II, the destruction of her

London home during the Blitz, and the cool
reception given to her biography of her late
friend Roger Fry all worsened her condition until
she was unable to work.
• On 28 March 1941, Woolf committed
suicide. She put on her overcoat, filled its
pockets with stones, then walked into the
River Ouse near her home and drowned
herself.
• Woolf's skeletonised body was not found
until 18 April. Her husband buried her
cremated remains under a tree in the
garden of their house in Rodmell, Sussex.
• In her last note to her husband she wrote:
“I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel
we can't go through another of those terrible
times. And I can‘t recover this time. I begin to
hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am
doing what seems the best thing to do. You
have given me the greatest possible happiness.
You have been in every way all that anyone
could be. I don‘t think two people could have
been happier ‗til this terrible disease came. I
can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling
your life, that without me you could work.
• And you will I know. You see I can't even write
this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I
owe all the happiness of my life to you. You
have been entirely patient with me and
incredibly good. I want to say that — everybody
knows it. If anybody could have saved me it
would have been you. Everything has gone from
me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go
on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two
people could have been happier than we have
been. V.
Literature Background
• Modernism as an artistic and cultural

movement is generally music and
literature emerging in the decades before
1914 as artists rebelled against late 19th
century artistic traditions.
Virginia Woolf
Evolution of her style in her main novels
• The Voyage Out (1915)

Traditional
• Night and Day (1917) narratives
• Jacob’s room (1922) Narrative experimentation with the

novel
• Mrs Dalloway (1925)
A more completely developed
“stream-of-consciousness
• To the Lighthouse (1927) technique”

Virginia Woolf
A feminist writer  the themes of androgyny, women and writing
Describes Clarissa Dalloway and

• Mrs Dalloway (1925) Sally Seton’s relationship as young
women
• Orlando (1928) Deals with androgyny
Shows Woolf’s concern with the

• A Room of One’s Own (1929) questions of women’s subjugation
and the relationship between women
and writing

Virginia Woolf
• Main aim  to give voice to the complex

inner world of feeling and memory.
• The human personality  a continuous

shift of impressions and emotions.
• Narrator  disappearance of the

omniscient narrator.
• Point of view  shifted inside the

characters‘ minds through flashbacks,
associations of ideas, momentary
Vanessa Bell, Mrs St John Hutchinson, 1915,
impressions presented as a continuous flux. Tate Gallery, London

Virginia Woolf
Woolf vs Joyce
Woolf’s stream of Joyce’s stream of
consciousness consciousness
never lets her characters’ characters show their

thoughts flow without control, thoughts directly through
maintains logical and interior monologue,
grammatical organisation sometimes in an incoherent
and syntactically
unorthodox way

Virginia Woolf
Woolf vs Joyce
Moments of being Epiphanies
Rare moments of insight The sudden spiritual

during the characters’ daily manifestation caused by a
life when they can see trivial gesture, an external
reality behind appearances object  the character is
led to a self-realization
about himself/herself

Quote
• "Have you any notion how many books

are written about women in the course
of one year? Have you any notion how
many are written by men? Are you
aware that you are, perhaps, the most
discussed animal in the universe?"
----Virginia A Woolf
To the
Lighthouse
Major Characters
Mrs. Ramsay Mr. Ramsay Lily Briscoe
James Ramsay
stream-of-consciousness novel
This novel is an extraordinarily poignant evocation of a lost

happiness that lives on in the memory. For years now, the
Ramsays have spent every summer in their holiday home in
Scotland, and they expect these summers will go on forever. In
this, her most autobiographical novel, Virginia Woolf captures the
intensity of childhood longing and delight, and the shifting
complexity of adult relationships. From an acute awareness of
transience, she creates an enduring work of art.
To the Lighthouse (plot summary)
• can be divided into three
sections:
• ―The Window,‖
• ―Time Passes,‖
• ―The Lighthouse‖
Each section is fragmented

into stream-of-
consciousness
contributions from various
narrators.
Characters…
Mrs. Ramsay -
Mr. Ramsay’s wife.
A beautiful and loving woman, Mrs. Ramsay is a
wonderful hostess who takes pride in making
memorable experiences for the guests at the
family’s summer home on the Isle of Skye.
Affirming traditional gender roles
wholeheartedly, she lavishes particular attention
on her male guests, who she believes have
delicate egos and need constant support and
sympathy.
32
Mr. Ramsay -
• Mrs. Ramsay’s husband, and a prominent

metaphysical philosopher.
• Mr. Ramsay loves his family but often acts
like something of a tyrant.
• He tends to be selfish and harsh due to his
persistent personal and professional anxieties.
33
Lily Briscoe -
• A young, single painter who befriends the

Ramsays on the Isle of Skye.
• Like Mr. Ramsay, Lily is plagued by fears that
her work lacks worth.
• She begins a portrait of Mrs. Ramsay at the
beginning of the novel but has trouble
finishing it.
• The opinions of men like Charles Tansley,
who insists that women cannot paint or write,
threaten to undermine her confidence. 34
James Ramsay -
• The Ramsays’ youngest son.

• James loves his mother deeply and feels a
murderous antipathy toward his father, with
whom he must compete for Mrs. Ramsay’s
love and affection.
• By this time, he has grown into a willful and
moody young man who has much in common
with his father, whom he detests.
35
 Paul Rayley - A young friend of the Ramsays who visits them on
the Isle of Skye.
 Paul is a kind, impressionable young man who follows Mrs.
Ramsay’s wishes in marrying Minta Doyle.
 Minta Doyle - A flighty young woman who visits the Ramsays on

the Isle of Skye.
 Minta marries Paul Rayley at Mrs. Ramsay’s wishes.
 Charles Tansley - A young philosopher and pupil of Mr. Ramsay

who stays with the Ramsays on the Isle of Skye.
 Tansley is a prickly and unpleasant man who harbors deep
insecurities regarding his humble background.
36
 William Bankes - A botanist and old friend of the
Ramsays who stays on the Isle of Skye. Bankes is a kind and
mellow man whom Mrs. Ramsay hopes will marry Lily
Briscoe. Although he never marries her, Bankes and Lily
remain close friends.
 Augustus Carmichael - An opium-using poet who visits
the Ramsays on the Isle of Skye. Carmichael languishes in
literary obscurity until his verse becomes popular during the
war.
 Andrew Ramsay - The oldest of the Ramsays’ sons.
Andrew is a competent, independent young man, and he looks
forward to a career as a mathematician.
37
Jasper Ramsay - One of the Ramsays’ sons. Jasper,
to his mother’s chagrin, enjoys shooting birds.
Roger Ramsay - One of the Ramsays’ sons. Roger is
wild and adventurous, like his sister Nancy.
Prue Ramsay - The oldest Ramsay girl, a beautiful
young woman. Mrs. Ramsay delights in contemplating
Prue’s marriage, which she believes will be blissful.
Rose Ramsay - One of the Ramsays’ daughters. Rose
has a talent for making things beautiful. She arranges the
fruit for her mother’s dinner party and picks out her
mother’s jewelry.
38
Nancy Ramsay - One of the Ramsays’ daughters.
Nancy accompanies Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle on
their trip to the beach. Like her brother Roger, she is a
wild adventurer.
Cam Ramsay - One of the Ramsays’ daughters. As a
young girl, Cam is mischievous. She sails with James and
Mr. Ramsay to the lighthouse in the novel’s final section.
Mrs. McNab - An elderly woman who takes care of
the Ramsays’ house on the Isle of Skye, restoring it after
ten years of abandonment during and after World War I.
Macalister - The fisherman who accompanies the
Ramsays to the lighthouse.
39
Characters…
Mrs. Ramsay -
Mr. Ramsay’s wife.
A beautiful and loving woman, Mrs. Ramsay is a
wonderful hostess who takes pride in making
memorable experiences for the guests at the
family’s summer home on the Isle of Skye.
Affirming traditional gender roles
wholeheartedly, she lavishes particular attention
on her male guests, who she believes have
delicate egos and need constant support and
sympathy.
40
Mr. Ramsay -
• Mrs. Ramsay’s husband, and a prominent

metaphysical philosopher.
• Mr. Ramsay loves his family but often acts
like something of a tyrant.
• He tends to be selfish and harsh due to his
persistent personal and professional anxieties.
41
Lily Briscoe -
• A young, single painter who befriends the

Ramsays on the Isle of Skye.
• Like Mr. Ramsay, Lily is plagued by fears that
her work lacks worth.
• She begins a portrait of Mrs. Ramsay at the
beginning of the novel but has trouble
finishing it.
• The opinions of men like Charles Tansley,
who insists that women cannot paint or write,
threaten to undermine her confidence. 42
James Ramsay -
• The Ramsays’ youngest son.

• James loves his mother deeply and feels a
murderous antipathy toward his father, with
whom he must compete for Mrs. Ramsay’s
love and affection.
• By this time, he has grown into a willful and
moody young man who has much in common
with his father, whom he detests.
43
 Paul Rayley - A young friend of the Ramsays who visits them on
the Isle of Skye.
 Paul is a kind, impressionable young man who follows Mrs.
Ramsay’s wishes in marrying Minta Doyle.
 Minta Doyle - A flighty young woman who visits the Ramsays on

the Isle of Skye.
 Minta marries Paul Rayley at Mrs. Ramsay’s wishes.
 Charles Tansley - A young philosopher and pupil of Mr. Ramsay

who stays with the Ramsays on the Isle of Skye.
 Tansley is a prickly and unpleasant man who harbors deep
insecurities regarding his humble background.
44
 William Bankes - A botanist and old friend of the
Ramsays who stays on the Isle of Skye. Bankes is a kind and
mellow man whom Mrs. Ramsay hopes will marry Lily
Briscoe. Although he never marries her, Bankes and Lily
remain close friends.
 Augustus Carmichael - An opium-using poet who visits
the Ramsays on the Isle of Skye. Carmichael languishes in
literary obscurity until his verse becomes popular during the
war.
 Andrew Ramsay - The oldest of the Ramsays’ sons.
Andrew is a competent, independent young man, and he looks
forward to a career as a mathematician.
45
Jasper Ramsay - One of the Ramsays’ sons. Jasper,
to his mother’s chagrin, enjoys shooting birds.
Roger Ramsay - One of the Ramsays’ sons. Roger is
wild and adventurous, like his sister Nancy.
Prue Ramsay - The oldest Ramsay girl, a beautiful
young woman. Mrs. Ramsay delights in contemplating
Prue’s marriage, which she believes will be blissful.
Rose Ramsay - One of the Ramsays’ daughters. Rose
has a talent for making things beautiful. She arranges the
fruit for her mother’s dinner party and picks out her
mother’s jewelry.
46
47
THEMES
Theme of Time
• Time is measured as it is experienced by

certain people, which infuses select
moments with incredible importance and
duration.
• In other parts of the novel, ten years is
covered in about a dozen pages. Time is
therefore both elongated and
compressed.
48
The Transience of Life and Work
Mr. Ramsay reflects that even the most enduring
of reputations, such as Shakespeare’s, are
doomed to eventual oblivion.
This realization accounts for the bitter aspect of
his character. Frustrated by the inevitable demise
of his own body of work and envious of the few
geniuses who will outlast him, he plots to found a
school of philosophy that argues that the world is
designed for the average, unadorned man, for the
“liftman in the Tube” rather than for the rare
immortal writer.
49
• Mrs. Ramsay is as keenly aware as her
husband of the passage of time and of
mortality. She recoils, for instance, at the
notion of James growing into an adult,
registers the world’s many dangers, and
knows that no one, not even her husband, can
protect her from them.
• Such crafted moments, she reflects, offer the
only hope of something that endures.
50
Art as a Means of Preservation
• Mr. Ramsay devotes himself to his

progression through the course of human
thought, while Mrs. Ramsay cultivates
memorable experiences from social
interactions.
• After all, Mr. Ramsay fails to obtain the
philosophical understanding he so
desperately desires, and Mrs. -Ramsay’s life,
though filled with moments that have the
shine and resilience of rubies, ends. 51
As Lily begins her portrait of Mrs. Ramsay at the
beginning of the novel, Woolf notes the scope of
the project: Lily means to order and connect
elements that have no necessary relation in the
world—“hedges and houses and mothers and
children.”
Art is, perhaps, the only hope of surety in a
world destined and determined to change: for,
while mourning Mrs. Ramsay’s death and
painting on the lawn, Lily reflects that “nothing
stays, all changes; but not words, not paint.”
52
The Subjective Nature of Reality
• Toward the end of the novel, Lily reflects that

in order to see Mrs. Ramsay clearly—to
understand her character completely—she
would need at least fifty pairs of eyes; only
then would she be privy to every possible
angle and nuance.
53
• She is committed to creating a sense of the
world that not only depends upon the private
perceptions of her characters but is also
nothing more than the accumulation of those
perceptions.
54
The Restorative Effects of
Beauty
• At the beginning of the novel, both Mr.
Ramsay and Lily Briscoe are drawn out of
moments of irritation by an image of extreme
beauty.
• Beauty retains this soothing effect throughout
the novel: something as trifling as a large but
very beautiful arrangement of fruit can, for a
moment, assuage the discomfort of the guests
at Mrs. Ramsay’s dinner party.
55
• Lily later complicates the notion of beauty as
restorative by suggesting that beauty has the
unfortunate consequence of simplifying the
truth.
• Her impression of Mrs. Ramsay, she believes,
is compromised by a determination to view
her as beautiful and to smooth over her
complexities and faults.
56
Theme of Memory and the Past
• Because time is such a distorted thing in To

the Lighthouse, memory and the past are a
vital part of the characters’ present.
• When a single moment is given the tenth
degree, every significant aspect of the moment
is interrogated.
57
Theme of Love
• Love takes several different forms in the text:

lasting love that is still flawed, love that casts
a glow on everyone else, love that doesn’t last,
friendly love, familial love, admiring love,
love as an intellectual topic, etc., but the main
point is that love is not the sort of all-
consuming force you see in Anna Karenina.
• Love in To the Lighthouse is pretty tame and
usually turns out to be love for Mrs. Ramsay.
58
Theme of Gender
• Well, it’s a Woolf novel. Gender figures in all

the chauvinistic remarks that the men make,
and the protective tone towards men that Mrs.
Ramsay takes.
• Also, Mrs. Ramsay is held up as an ideal of
womanhood. Lily Briscoe deviates from this
ideal because she is not interested in marriage
or comforting and sympathizing with every
male character in the novel.
59
Theme of Marriage
• Mrs. Ramsay really wants everyone to get

married – particularly women. She herself
is in a marriage that at least one character
holds up as an ideal. Interestingly enough,
her marriage to Mr. Ramsay is actually the
only real marriage we see in the novel.
• We do, however, "hear about" (via Lily‘s
memory) how the Rayley marriage, which
Mrs. Ramsay had encouraged so much,
worked out – it was unsuccessful. 60
Theme of Manipulation
• Mrs. Ramsay can get people to marry

because she has excellent powers of
manipulation. She can make any man feel
like the strongest, most manly man ever.
• Aside from manipulation, Mrs. Ramsay is
very well attuned to people‘s desires and
needs, which comes in handy because
her husband can be rather demanding
when it comes to ego stroking.
61
Theme of Admiration
• Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are both well-

admired in their respective fields. Mr.
Ramsay tends to be followed around by
young philosophy students who admire
his work, and although Mrs. Ramsay
shuns admiration, most people admire her
beauty and grace.
62
Theme of Identity
• Mrs. Ramsay, in particular, is very conscious of

her identity, constantly interrogating herself and
her character.
• She adopts a very subordinate position when in
her interactions with other people, which means
that her own true self is frequently stifled.
• But – good news – when there are no people
around to pander to, her own private self has
room to explore. Lily also contemplates her
identity often.
63
Theme of Victory
• The main point, however, is that victory occurs

beneath the surface in To the Lighthouse and
often in social interactions. Mrs. Ramsay scores
a victory by not saying "I love you," yet Mr.
Ramsay has never asked her to say it.
• On the surface they have a perfectly civilized
conversation. Victory and defeat occur in the
nuances of interaction, not in the overt way that,
say, a world war encompasses victory and
defeat.
64
Theme of Friendship
• Friendship plays a secondary role to love

in the novel, but for Lily Briscoe, friendship
is the most she has ever truly wanted from
a man.
• The other friendship we see
(retrospectively) is between Mr. Ramsay
and Mr. Bankes. It failed.
65
Theme of Laws and Order
• .
• This is a double-edged sword because
she frequently sacrifices truth in order to
preserve harmony. She adheres to a
certain ideal of the world in which
everyone is united and everything is at
peace.
66
Motifs
The Differing Behaviors of Men and Women

As Lily Briscoe suffers through Charles Tansley’s
boorish opinions about women and art, she reflects
that human relations are worst between men and
women.
The dynamic between the sexes is best understood
by considering the behavior of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay.
Their constant conflict has less to do with divergent
philosophies—indeed, they both acknowledge and
are motivated by the same fear of mortality—than
with the way they process that fear.
67
• Men, Mrs. Ramsay reflects in the opening
pages of the novel, bow to it.
• Lily Briscoe, who as a -single woman
represents a social order more radial and
lenient than Mrs. Ramsay’s, resists this duty
but ultimately caves in to it.
68
Brackets
In “Time Passes,” brackets surround the few sentences

recounting the deaths of Prue and Andrew Ramsay,
while in “The Lighthouse,” brackets surround the
sentences comprising Chapter VI.
But in Chapter VI of “The Lighthouse,” the purpose of
the brackets changes from indicating violence and
death to violence and potential survival.
Whereas in “Time Passes,” the brackets surround
Prue’s death in childbirth and Andrew’s perishing in
war, in “The Lighthouse” they surround the
“mutilated” but “alive still” body of a fish.
69
Symbols -The Lighthouse
Lying across the bay and meaning something

different and intimately personal to each
character, the lighthouse is at once inaccessible,
illuminating, and infinitely interpretable.
As the destination from which the novel takes its
title, the lighthouse suggests that the
destinations that seem surest are most
unobtainable. Just as Mr. Ramsay is certain of his
wife’s love for him and aims to hear her speak
words to that end in “The Window,” Mrs.
Ramsay finds these words impossible to say.
70
 These failed attempts to arrive at some sort of solid ground, like
Lily’s first try at painting Mrs. Ramsay or Mrs. Ramsay’s attempt to
see Paul and Minta married, result only in more attempts, further
excursions rather than rest.
 The lighthouse stands as a potent symbol of this lack of
attainability.
 James arrives only to realize that it is not at all the mist-shrouded
destination of his childhood. Instead, he is made to reconcile two
competing and contradictory images of the tower—how it appeared
to him when he was a boy and how it appears to him now that he is
a man.
 He decides that both of these images contribute to the essence of the
lighthouse—that nothing is ever only one thing—a sentiment that
echoes the novel’s determination to arrive at truth through varied
and contradictory vantage points.
71
Lily’s Painting
Lily’s painting represents a struggle against gender
convention, represented by Charles Tansley’s statement
that women can’t paint or write.
Lily’s desire to express Mrs. Ramsay’s essence as a
wife and mother in the painting mimics the impulse
among modern women to know and understand
intimately the gendered experiences of the women who
came before them.
Lily’s composition attempts to discover and
comprehend Mrs. Ramsay’s beauty just as Woolf’s
construction of Mrs. Ramsay’s character reflects her
attempts to access and portray her own mother.
72
 The painting also represents dedication to a feminine
artistic vision, expressed through Lily’s anxiety over
showing it to William Bankes.
 In deciding that completing the painting regardless of what
happens to it is the most important thing, Lily makes the
choice to establish her own artistic voice.
 In the end, she decides that her vision depends on balance
and synthesis: how to bring together disparate things in
harmony.
 In this respect, her project mirrors Woolf’s writing, which
synthesizes the perceptions of her many characters to come
to a balanced and truthful portrait of the world.
73
The Ramsays’ House
 The Ramsays’ house is a stage where Woolf and her characters
explain their beliefs and observations. During her dinner party, Mrs.
Ramsay sees her house display her own inner notions of shabbiness
and her inability to preserve beauty.
 In the “Time Passes” section, the ravages of war and destruction
and the passage of time are reflected in the condition of the house
rather than in the emotional development or observable aging of the
characters.
 The house stands in for the collective consciousness of those who
stay in it. At times the characters long to escape it, while at other times
it serves as refuge.
 From the dinner party to the journey to the lighthouse, Woolf shows
the house from every angle, and its structure and contents mirror the
interior of the characters who inhabit it.
74
The Sea
References to the sea appear throughout the novel.

Broadly, the ever-changing, ever-moving waves parallel
the constant forward movement of time and the changes
it brings.
Woolf describes the sea lovingly and beautifully, but
her most evocative depictions of it point to its violence.
As a force that brings destruction, has the power to
decimate islands, and, as Mr. Ramsay reflects, “eats away
the ground we stand on,” the sea is a powerful reminder
of the impermanence and delicacy of human life and
accomplishments.
75
The Boar’s Skull
After her dinner party, Mrs. Ramsay retires

upstairs to find the children wide-awake,
bothered by the boar’s skull that hangs on the
nursery wall.
The presence of the skull acts as a disturbing
reminder that death is always at hand, even (or
perhaps especially) during life’s most blissful
moments.
76
The Fruit Basket
Rose arranges a fruit basket for her mother’s

dinner party that serves to draw the partygoers out
of their private suffering and unite them.
Although Augustus Carmichael and Mrs. Ramsay
appreciate the arrangement differently—he rips a
bloom from it; she refuses to disturb it—the pair is
brought harmoniously, if briefly, together.
The basket testifies both to the “frozen” quality
of beauty that Lily describes and to beauty’s
seductive and soothing quality.
77
– Part I: The Window
• The novel is set in the Ramsays' summer home
in the Hebrides, on the Isle of Skye.
• The section begins with Mrs Ramsay assuring
James that they should be able to visit the
lighthouse on the next day.
• This prediction is denied by Mr Ramsay, who
voices his certainty that the weather will not be
clear, an opinion that forces a certain tension
between Mr and Mrs Ramsay, and also between
Mr Ramsay and James.
• This particular incident is referred to on various
occasions throughout the chapter, especially in
the context of Mr and Mrs Ramsay's relationship.
• The Ramsays have been joined at the house by
a number of friends and colleagues, one of
them being Lily Briscoe who begins the novel as
a young, uncertain painter attempting a
portrayal of Mrs. Ramsay and her son James.
• Briscoe finds herself plagued by doubts

throughout the novel, doubts largely fed by the
statements of Charles Tansley, another guest,
claiming that women can neither paint nor write.
Tansley himself is an admirer of Mr Ramsay
and his philosophical treatises.
• The section closes with a large dinner
party. Mr Ramsay nearly snaps at
Augustus Carmichael, a visiting poet,
when the latter asks for a second serving
of soup.
• Mrs Ramsay, who is striving for the
perfect dinner party is herself out of sorts
when Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle, two
acquaintances whom she has brought
together in engagement, arrive late to
dinner, as Minta lost her grandmother‘s
brooch on the beach.
• Part II: Time Passes
• The second section is employed by the author
to give a sense of time passing.
• Woolf explained the purpose of this section,
writing that it was 'an interesting experiment
[that gave] the sense of ten years passing.'.
• This section's role in linking the two dominant
parts of the story was also expressed in Woolf's
notes for the novel, where above a drawing of
an "H" shape she wrote 'two blocks joined by a
corridor.'
• During this period Britain begins and
finishes fighting World War I.
• In addition, the reader is informed as to
the fates of a number of characters
introduced in the first part of the novel:
Mrs Ramsay passes away, Prue dies in
childbirth, and Andrew is killed in the war.
• Mr Ramsay is left alone without his wife to
praise and comfort him during his bouts of
mortal fear and his anguish over doubts
regarding his self worth.
• Part III: The Lighthouse
• In the final section, ―The Lighthouse,‖
some of the remaining Ramsays return to
their summer home ten years after the
events of Part I, as Mr Ramsay finally
plans on taking the long-delayed trip to
the lighthouse with his son James and
daughter Cam(illa).
• The trip almost doesn‘t happen, as the
children hadn't been ready, but they
eventually take off.
• On the way there, the children give their
father the silent treatment for forcing them
to come along.
• James keeps the sailing boat steady, and
rather than receiving the harsh words he
has come to expect from his father, he
hears praise, providing a rare moment of
empathy between father and son; Cam's
attitude towards her father has changed
as well.
• They are being accompanied by the sailor
Macalister and his son, who catches fish
during the trip. The son cuts a piece of
flesh from a fish he has caught to use for
bait, throwing the injured fish back into the
sea.
• While they set sail for the lighthouse, Lily
attempts to complete her long-unfinished
painting. She reconsiders Mrs Ramsay‘s
memory, grateful for her help in pushing Lily to
continue with her art, yet at the same time
struggling to free herself from the tacit control
Mrs Ramsay had over other aspects of her life.
• Upon finishing the painting and seeing that it

satisfies her, she realizes that the execution of
her vision is more important to her than the idea
of leaving some sort of legacy in her work – a
lesson Mr Ramsay has yet to learn.
87
Critical Questions…
• What are some of the main symbols in To the
Lighthouse, and what do they signify? How
does Woolf’s use of symbolism advance her
thematic goals?
88
• If To the Lighthouse is a novel about the
search for meaning in life, how do the
characters conduct their search? Are they
successful in finding an answer?
89
James Joyce (1882–1941)
James Joyce
 He was an Irish novelist.

 He revolutionized the methods of depicting
characters and developing a plot in modern
fiction.
James Joyce --Ireland
• In the 20th c., Joyce

was deeply influenced
by Ireland and wrote
all his works about it
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce
• Born in 1882 in Dublin, the oldest of ten
children
• His family was quite well off at first. But after
the father’s death, the Joyce family fell into
worse and worse poverty.
• Was educated at two Jesuit colleges
• Clongowes Wood College in Kildare
• Belvedere College in Dublin
• In 1898 he entered college - studied modern
languages at University College, Dublin
• 1900 - Ibsen's New Drama (essay)
• 1901 - The Day of the Rabblement (essay)
• In 1902 he received a degree
he began writing poems and his
mother, Mary Jane Joyce, died
• After graduating he lived in poverty in Paris
• writing poetry.
• In1904 - began literary career.
- eloped with Nora Barnacle, a young
woman from Galway city who was working as a
chambermaid.
- began A Portrait
• 1905 - first son, Giorgio

- moved to Trieste
• 1907 - daughter, Lucia

• - first book, the poems of Chamber Music
• 1911 - gave lectures on Shakespeare in Trieste

1914 - Dubliners is published
1915 - WWI, moved to Zurich.
1916 - A Portrait
- Exiles published in US
1918 - The serialization of Ulysses
in The Little Review
1920 - moved to Paris
Joyce, Zurich, 1915
Between
LIFE Pola
1904 and
1920 Joyce
and his wife
moved to
various
cities in
Europe:
Zurich, Trieste
Trieste,
Rome, Pola.
Rome
Zurich
•From 1915-1920 Joyce, his wife Nora
and their two children, Georgio and
Lucia, lived in Zurich while Joyce
worked on the first twelve episodes of
Ulysses.
•After World War I ended, they lived in

Paris for the next 20 years. Once World
War II began they were forced to exile
themselves to Zurich.
•Joyce died in 1941 in Zurich following

surgery on an ulcer.
•James Joyce was one of the most

important influences on the
development of the 20th-century novel.
Edmund Wilson called him “the great
poet of a new phase of human
consciousness.”
James Joyce’s Works
· Chamber Music
· Dubliners
· Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
· Ulysses
James Joyce
Major Themes
• Paralysis
• Isolation
• Poverty
• Longing for Escape
• Religion
• Epiphany
The most important features of Joyce’s works
• The setting of most of his works  Ireland,

especially Dublin.
• He rebelled against the Catholic Church.
• All the facts  explored from different points of

view simultaneously.
The most important features of Joyce’s works
• Greater importance given to the inner world of the

characters.
• Time  perceived as subjective.
• His task  to render life objectively.
Isolation and detachment of the artist from society

How he loved his country and how he is loved by his people
Ireland
• Most of his works were related
with Ireland and especially Dublin
• Revealed the real world and

especially the spiritual world of the
people
• Most of the stories and characters came from his
own experiences
• He influenced many later writers like Samuel

Becket ‗s Waiting for Godot
Modernism
• With the publication of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,

James Joyce became recognized as one of the most
important modernists shaping the future of literature.
• Modernism is a style of writing that writers and other artists

used with trends such as symbolism, expressionism, imagism,
and surrealism.
• Modernist writers rejected 19th century realism, and remained

disengaged from mainstream thought and values, and to
present their readers with complex new forms.
Formal characteristics
• Open form
Poets who write in open forms usually insist on the
form growing out of the writing process, i.e. the
poems follow what the words and phrase suggest
during the composition process, rather than being
fitted into any pre-existing plan. Some do employ
vestiges of traditional devices but most regard them
as a hindrance to sincerity or creativity.
•Intertextuality
the shaping of texts' meanings by other texts. It can
refer to an author’s borrowing and transformation of a
prior text or to a reader’s referencing of one text in
reading another.
•Classical Allusions
a stylistic device or trope, in which one refers covertly
or indirectly to an object or circumstance that has
occurred or existed in an external context
Allusion differs from the similar term intertextuality in
that it is an intentional effort.
Thematic characteristics
 Breakdown of social norms and cultural sureties
 Dislocation of meaning and sense from its normal
context
 Valorization of the despairing individual in the face
of an unmanageable future
 Disillusionment
 Rejection of history and substitution of a mythical
past, borrowed without chronology
 Product of the metropolis of cities and urbanscapes
 Stream of consciousness
Canonical Modernist Authors
• T.S. Eliot
• W.B. Yeats
• James Joyce
• Virginia Woolf
• Ernest Hemingway
• Franz Kafka
• Gertrude Stein
• F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Ezra Pound
Important Elements of Joyce’s style
• When reading Portrait you are taken into the conscious and
unconscious thoughts that run endlessly through a character’s
mind, and these may include memories of the past suddenly
interrupted by fantasies about the future fused with some
elements of the present.
• Stream of Consciousness: the intermingled flow of a
character’s thoughts, feelings and perceptions. In Portrait the
stream of consciousness was presented through interior
monologue: Stephen’s inner thoughts to the reader with no
interpretation by the narrator.
• Epiphany: This term originated in the Christian religion to define
a moment when God is clearly revealed. Joyce used it to
denote secular revelation in day-to-day life. There are many
epiphanies the novel, sudden revelations which change
Stephen’s life.
• Motif: an idea, image, or element which is found in
many literary works.
• Leitmotif: is a motif which occurs repeatedly within a
single work. Joyce uses a number of recurring motifs
in connection with various situations: eyes and the
fear of blindness; water (in all its forms); roses; cows;
the colors white, red, yellow and green; birds; flight;
cold and warmth.
• In Portrait Joyce’s style changes with Stephen’s
age. When your reading you will recognize
Stephen’s progression of age through Joyce’s
sentence structure and Stephen’s thoughts.
The evolution of Joyce’s style
Realism
Disciplined prose Dubliners
Different points of view
Free-direct speech
Third-person narration
Minimal dialogue
Language and prose used A Portrait of
the Artist as a
to portray the Young Man
protagonist’s state of
mind
Free-direct speech
Interior monologue with

two levels of narration
Ulysses
Extreme interior
monologue
A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man
What is a portrait?
• A distortion?
• A work of fiction?
• A representation of
truth?
• A version of ourselves
we show the world?
This is one of the central questions
the reader explores in reading
James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man.
Seldom has a novel depended more on

the relationship between author and
protagonist, truth and invention,
objective existence and subjective
interpretation.
Some tenets of Modernism:
1. Radical disruption of linear flow of
narrative.
2. Experimentation with unity of plot,
characterization, and POV.
3. Ironic or ambiguous juxtapositions to call
into question moral certainty.
4. Exploration of character/authorial
subconscious (including latent sexuality).
5. Also, ambiguity. Well, there’s a lot of it.
The first page of Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man (Can you find all the tenets?)
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down
along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens
little boy named baby tuckoo
His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a
hairy face.
He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived:
she sold lemon platt.
O, the wild rose blossoms
On the little green place.
He sang that song. That was his song.
O, the green wothe botheth.
When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold. His mother put on the
oilsheet. That had the queer smell.
His mother had a nicer smell than his father. She played on the piano the sailor's
hornpipe for him to dance. He danced:
Tralala lala,
Tralala tralaladdy,
Tralala lala,
Tralala lala.
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man: a semi-autobiographical novel,
first serialized in the literary periodical
The Egoist from 1914 to 1915, and
then published in book form in 1916.
• It is divided into five chapters dealing

with the spiritual evolution of Stephen
Dedalus, a fictional alter-ego of Joyce,
from childhood to maturity.
A contemporary edition of A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man.
“When the soul of a man  The importance of the
is born in this country, indefinite article “A” 
there are nets flung at it the novel is only one of the
to hold it back from possible interpretations of a
flight. You talk to me of subject.
nationality, language,
religion. I shall try to fly  The setting in place 
by those nets.” Dublin
(From chapter 5)
 Like Stephen
“When the soul of a man 1. Joyce was the son of a religious

mother and a financially inept father.
is born in this country,
there are nets flung at it 2. Joyce was the eldest of ten children
to hold it back from and received his education at Jesuit
flight. You talk to me of schools.
nationality, language, 3. Joyce had early experiences with

religion. I shall try to fly prostitutes during his teenage years
by those nets.” and struggled with questions of faith.
(From chapter 5)
4. Joyce left Ireland to pursue the
life of a poet and writer.
Point of View
• Portrait is written in third-person omniscient. Although Joyce is

telling us Stephen’s story, we often feel “inside Stephen’s
head.”
• The narrative  not continuous but fragmented, with gaps in the

chronology.
• For the most part, we see only what Stephen sees and we
know only what he knows.
• We are just far enough outside of Stephen that we are free to

pass judgment on him and wonder what he will do next.
Narrative Technique
• Every narrative detail  filtered through Stephen's

consciousness.
• Use of the experimental stream-of-consciousness technique 

to let the reader see, hear and feel what Stephen is experiencing as
the action unfolds.
• Different languages and styles  linked to each phase of

Dedalus’s evolution.
Many of Joyce’s religious views were shaped by his
Jesuit education at Clongowes Wood, Belvedere,
and University Colleges
• He evolved from rote obedience to

existential listlessness to banal
corruption to strict adherence and
finally outright rejection.
• "I will not serve that in which I no
longer believe, whether it calls itself
my home, my fatherland, or my
church: and I will try to express
myself in some mode of life or art as
freely as I can and as wholly as I
can, using for my defense the only
arms I allow myself to use -- silence,
exile, and cunning."
In addition to Irish politics and religion,
Joyce’s own family relationships had an
important role in his writings
The eldest of ten children, James’ relationship with his family infused
Portrait with some of its most painful pathos. His father, John Joyce,
married well and held a job for some time before being released and
sliding into alcoholism and compounding debt. The Joyces moved
frequently, each time into greater squalor.
James’ relationship with his mother was similarly strained later in life over
his rejection of Catholicism and refusal to make confession or kneel while
the rest of the family prayed.
Society‘s views on sexuality.
• Joyce’s relationship with his
wife, Nora Barnacle, was
complex and reflected his
own messy views on women.
They were sexually open with
one another and passionate,
but also quarreled frequently.
Nora worked to support
Joyce’s artistic ambitions, but
often found herself neglected
and annoyed by his drinking
and neurotic behavior.
Joyce‘s creation—Stephen Dedalus–
reflects a number of Joyce‘s own
personal features
• Ambivalence about his Irish heritage
• A complex and often suffocating
relationship with Catholicism
• Frustration with his genealogy and the
failures of his family
• A simultaneous reverence and disdain for
the divine/sexual natures of women.
• A struggle to define himself and his art
independent of his experiences
Structure
• A portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is made up of important
episodes in Stephen’s life.
– Chapter One: Stephen’s childhood; first hints of
disillusionment with his country, church, and family.
– Chapter Two: Stephen’s adolescence; sexual awakening;
further disillusionment, especially with his father.
– Chapter Three: Stephen is 16. His remorse over his sexual
activities leads him to try to re-connect with the church.
– Chapter Four: The now-pious Stephen, in his late teens,
realizes he is living in an inauthentic way and sees his calling
not as a priest of the church but as “a priest of the
imagination.”
– Chapter Five: As a young university student, Stephen
develops his artistic theories and realizes he must leave
Ireland, which is stifling him.
Reading Portrait is an act of
subtle inspection
• Stephen Dedalus
is James Joyce.
Except he isn’t…
•The novel is told
from Stephen’s
perspective.
Except it isn’t…
•The narrator is
subjective and
unreliable. Except
when he isn’t…
Rule #1: You will only see the
world as Stephen is capable of
seeing it.
The novel is almost wholly
written in the 3rd person, but it is
filtered through the cognitive
apparatus of Stephen Dedalus.
Thus, the details you are given
are Stephen’s details, the
vocabulary is Stephen’s, the
tone and sense of unity are
Stephen’s. When Stephen is
focused and descriptive, so is
the narration; when he is
distracted
What and for:
to annotate obscure,
Shiftsso
in isperception.
the How does the
prose. reflect Stephen’s stage of development? And for
narration
what purpose?
Rule #2: This is a Kunstleroman–
a novel of artistic development.
All action of the novel is
centered around how
Stephen develops.
Stephen first exists in
accordance with his world,
then in defiance of it, and
finally as an expression of
his own inborn volition. And
he’s a writer– his
relationship
What to annotate for: Stephen’s artisticwith language
evolution. How do
we know he’s an artist? isAnd
shifts meaningfully..
what role does language
play in his life?
Kunstlerroman
• Growth process, at its roots a quest story, has been
described as a search for meaning within society.
• To spur the hero, some form of loss or discontent
must jar him to set off from home.
• Process of maturity is long and difficult, gradual,
consisting of repeated clashes between
protagonist’s needs and desires and the views and
judgments of an unbending social order.
• Eventually, the spirit & values of the social order
become manifest in the protagonist, who is then
accommodated into society. The novel ends with
an assessment by the protagonist of himself and his
new place in that society.
Rule #3: Time and place are
fluid.
Don’t expect clear markers
of where and when you are
in the novel. Joyce plays
with the narrative to 1)
Evoke the nature of memory
and experience; 2)
Stylistically reflect Stephen’s
cognitive development;
and 3) Provide the principle
moments of Stephen’s
development.
What to annotate for: Why are you getting this scene?
Every detail is meaningful, either to Stephen’s
development or Joyce’s commentary on its impact.
Rule #4: Stephen is and is not James
Joyce.
This is undeniably an
autobiographical novel, but
it’s not a perfect recreation.
The purpose of this blurring
of the lines is to create art
out of the life.
What to annotate for: Um… not much. Don’t get bogged

down with Joyce’s life. But do think about how life can
be turned into art. Remember “Grecian Urn?”
Rule #5: Allusions matter!
Portrait bursts with meaningful
references to places, people,
and stories Joyce connects to
Stephen’s development. The
name “Stephen Dedalus”
evokes Saint Stephen and the
Greek inventor Daedelus.
Charles Parnell, Kitty O’Shea,
Dublin, and other Irish details
are all included for a reason!
What to annotate for: Political, geographical, religious,
ornithological (dealing with birds) and mythological
allusions. What do they have to do with Stephen’s
development?
Background Information
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man contains

many references and allusions to historical events,
places, mythology, other works and philosophies of
literature, and rituals and tenets of the Catholic
church.
• Irish History
• Irish Catholicism
• The Daedalus Myth
Irish History
• Problems between Britain and Ireland began in about 607,
when the English crown confiscated land in Ireland – the
home of Gaelic Catholics- and sponsored British Protestant
settlement there.
• Rebellions by Irish Catholics led to further losses of property,
power, and rights.
• Irish Catholics suffered from an economic depression. Several
Irish peasants where forced to tenant-farm small plots of lands
making just enough to be able to feed their families.
• Several million Irish starved to death due to the potato blight
which devastated the potato crops in the 1840’s.
• Between 1841-1851 many Irish who could afford to emigrate,
went to United States and Canada.
• In the late 1870’s an agricultural depression occurred between
the nationalists Charles Stewart Parnell and Michael Davitt,
who headed the Land League and campaigned successfully
for agricultural reform.
• Parnell led the movement for Home Rule – self-government by
an independent Irish parliament. With Catholic leverage in
British parliament, Parnell was able to force Britain to accept
Home Rule for Ireland. Before the bill was actually passed,
however, Parnell’s enemies exposed an adulterous affair
Parnell was involved in with Kitty O’Shea, a married woman.
(she is referred several times in the book) The Catholic church
denounced Parnell, and Parnell’s own supporters deserted
him. Parnell died of pneumonia shortly thereafter.
• Davitt joined the Fenian movement in 1865 and was

imprisoned three times by the English for his revolutionary
activities. He was especially Influenced by the theories of
Henry George. Davitt broke with Parnell over the question of
land nationalization, but remained an important Irish leader
and was instrumental in bringing the Parnell and anti-Parnell
factions together in the united Irish League (1898).
Irish Catholicism
• Like the majority of Irish, James Joyce was raised in the Roman
Catholic Church. Like Stephen in A portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man, Joyce eventually rejected the church. The novel is interlaced
with references to Catholicism, and in order to understand Stephen’s
torment and guilt, it is helpful to know some of the basic tenets of the
religion he finally abandoned.
– Jesuit: Jesuit priests- members of the order of the Society of Jesus-

enjoyed considerable prestige within the church and in Irish
society because of their reputation for rigid standards in religious,
intellectual, and philosophical areas. Stephen’s father wants him
to be schooled by “the best,” so Stephen attends Jesuit schools.
– Mortal Sin: a serious, willful transgression against the law of God.
This sinning can only be forgiven if the sinner is remorseful and
promises to repent and not repeat the sin. A person that doesn’t
confess his sin is deprived of God’s grace and the consequences
are Hell. Father Arnell gives a frightening description of the
tortures of Hell in Chapter Three.
• The Holy Trinity: The principles of the Roman Catholic faith are
based on the belief in the existence of the Holy Trinity as one –
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God is the creator of the universe,
and will judge human beings for their sins, with the power to
deny them entrance to Heaven.
• Eucharist (or Communion): Communion is given to Roman
Catholics following confession of sins as a sign of God’s grace.
• Easter Duty: Confession and Communion, required at least
once a year, at Easter, the celebration of Christ’s resurrection.
• Sacrilege: an action or thought that degrades the scared.
Stephen discusses sacrilege with Cranly in the last chapter.
• Seven Deadly Sins: Stephen feels at one point that he is guilty
of all of these sins, and even one of them is considered fatal to
spiritual progress: Pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony,
envy, and sloth.
• Heresy: Freethinkers were condemned as heretics because
their belief varies from that of the church. Stephen becomes a
freethinker by the end of the novel.
• Purgatory
The Daedalus Myth
• Daedalus is the hero of the Greek
myth. According to the myth,
Daedalus was a craftsman and
inventor who made a hollow wooden
cow so that Queen Pasiphae could
fulfill her desire to couple with a bull. To
contain the half-bull, half-human
monster, Daedalus built the Minotaur‘s
Labyrinth on Crete. When Daedalus
later displeased King Minos, the king
confined both Daedalus and his son,
Icarus, to the labyrinth. Daedalus
made wings out of wax and feathers,
and he and Icarus flew away. Icarus
flew too close to the sun, however,
and his wax wings melted. He plunged
into the sea and drowned, and
Daedalus escaped safely to Sicily.
– In addition to sharing his name with the mythical hero,
Stephen shares the feelings of being trapped in a maze of
his own making. He must fly over the obstacles of church,
family, and country to escape over the sea to Europe in
order to feel truly free.
– Just as the mythical Daedalus was renowned for three
cunning achievements – the cow, the labyrinth, and the
wings - Stephen tells Cranly he plans to use “silence, exile,
and cunning” to defend the free expression of his art. Like
Daedalus, he will be a craftsman and inventor, but his
materials will be words and imagination.
– The Greek “daidolos” is often translated as “cunningly
wrought.” In the last line of the novel, the April 27 diary
entry, Stephen writes “Old father, old artificer, stand me
now and ever in good stead.” Artifice is a synonym for
cunning, and Stephen seems to see Daedalus as his
spiritual father and muse.
Read the poem and annotate
Icaro Volero sopra fiumi, laghi, mari e monti; Oltre le nubi tra cieli

infiniti. Senza confini e catene alle mani, Volero oggi e domani.
Volero dove il sole riscalda ogni cuore, dove la luna e le stelle vegliano
notti senza dolore.
Volero nella luce di un Dio infinito, dove la fede ha un solo colore e la
gente non muore.
Con le ali dell’amore, io posso volare.
Read the poem and Annotate
Icarus I will fly over rivers, lakes, oceans &

mountains; Beyond the clouds of the infinite
sky. With no barriers or chains on my wrists*; I will
fly today and tomorrow.
I will fly where the sun warms every heart,  where
the moon and the stars watch over the night so it
passes painlessly.
I will fly in the light of an infinite God Where faith
has just one colour and people never die.
With the wings of love, I can fly.
“Once upon a time...”
(Chapter 1)
• Stephen’s first song:

The wild rose blossoms / On
the little Green Place 
red = Irish patriotism.
green = the Irish countryside.
• His third song:

Pull out his eyes / Apologise
 is a sort of epiphany  it
foreshadows his future Clongowes Wood College
struggle against authority.

ULYSSES (1922)
• Published in Paris
• Parallels between the novel and Homer’s
poem Odyssey, with structural
correspondences between the
characters
Leopold Bloom Odysseus
Molly Bloom Penelope
Stephen Dedalus Telemachus
and their experiences.
ULYSSES (1922)
• The story developes on a
single day, 16 June 1904,
the date when James
Joyce and Nora Barnacle
first stepped out together,
an event which would be
commemorated by
providing the date for the
action of Ulysses.
ULYSSES (1922)
• Divided into three parts subdivided
into eighteen episodes:
• Part I 3 episodes Stephen
• Part II 12 episodes Leopold
• Part III 3 episodes Molly
• Every episode of Ulysses has a theme,
technique, and correspondence
between its characters and those of
the Odyssey.
ULYSSES (1922)
I . Stephen Dedalus
• Joycean alter ego (main character in Joyce’s
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916).
• His Christian name is that of the first Christian
martyr. He is a young man with intellectual
ambitions and considers himself a martyr to
art.
• His surname is that of the legendary builder of
the first maze. Stephen wants to convert the
Irish to the cult of beauty inherited from the
Greeks.
ULYSSES (1922)
II. Leopold Bloom
The Ulysses of the title, he is a
middle-aged man who
wanders around Dublin as
Ulysses wandered around the
Mediterranean, encountering
adventures which roughly
parallel those of the Homeric
hero.
ULYSSES (1922)
III. Molly
Leopold’s wife, she stays at
home waiting for the
wanderers (Leopold and
Stephen) like Penelope on
Ithaca, though not so
faithful. Actually she has an
affair while her husband is
out.
ULYSSES (1922)
Parallel with the Odyssey
Chapter 1 Telemachus
• On Ithaca, Telemachus is forced to

share the house with his mother’s
suitors. He is discontented and seeks for
his father.
• In Dublin, Stephen is forced to share

the house with some companions who
mock him. He is evicted and wanders
in search of a «Father».
ULYSSES (1922)
Parallel with the Odyssey
Chapter 6 Hades
• Leopold attends a friend’s

funeral and meditates on death.
• Ulysses visits the Underworld and
speaks with the souls of the
dead
ULYSSES (1922)
The Mythical Method
• Leopold Bloom is a modern Ulysses,
an archetypal who can stand for
humanity.
• The circumstances have changed
but the human quest continues
unchanged.
• The narration develops around a
parallel between a mythical,
legendary and heroic age and an
unexcitingly human, mediocre,
ULYSSES (1922) Molly’s monologue
• This chapter (XVIII) begins and ends with the
affirmative Yes. The yesses represent Molly's
ongoing optimism to life in general,
punctuating the choices she has made and
the memories she has revisited during the
entire soliloquy. The yesses also represent
Joyce's belief that women are a positive life
force, The key here is to be found in Molly's
ultimate decision to serve Bloom breakfast in
bed the following day.
• It is possible to see the ironic comparison
between Molly Bloom and Penelope, who
uses her knowledge of the construction of
Ulysses’s bed to confirm the identity of her
long-absent husband.
ULYSSES (1922)
Episode One: ―Telemachus‖
Episode Two: ―Nestor‖
Episode Three: ―Proteus‖
Episode Four: ―Calypso‖
Episode Five: ―The Lotus Eaters‖
Episode Six: ―Hades‖
Episode Seven: ―Aeolus‖
Episode Eight: ―Lestrygonians‖
Episode Nine: ―Scylla and Charybdis‖
Episode Ten: ―The Wandering Rocks‖
Episode Eleven: ―Sirens‖
Episode Twelve: ―Cyclops‖
Episode Thirteen: ―Nausicaa‖
Episode Fourteen: ―Oxen of the Sun‖
Episode Fifteen: ―Circe‖
Episode Sixteen: ―Eumaeus‖
Episode Seventeen: ―Ithaca‖
Episode Eighteen: ―Penelope‖
John Fowles
Quick Facts
• Birthday: March 31, 1926
• Nationality: British
• Died At Age: 79
• Sun Sign: Aries
• Also Known As: John Robert Fowles
• Born in: Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, England
• Famous as: Writer & Teacher
• Family: Spouse/Ex-: Elizabeth Christy
• Father: Robert John Fowles
• Mother: Gladys May Richards Fowles
• Siblings: Jack
• Died on: November 5, 2005
• Place of death: Lyme Regis
• John Fowles initially started out as a teacher and was unaware that his life
would change with the publication of his first novel, ‘The Collector’, which
went on to become one of his best-known works in his long and fruitful
career.
• Some of his other prominent works include ‘The Aristos’, ‘The Ebony
Tower’, ‘Daniel Martin’, ‘The Magus’ and ‘A Maggot’ to name a select few.
• This prominent author and novelist gained immense fame during his
lifetime but towards the end of his life, he could barely walk, with a verbal
disorder and a bemused gaze.
• A master of literature, Fowles reiterated on the themes of philosophy,
postmodernism, social life, personal relationships and feminism.
• His importance can be gauged by the fact that ‘The Times’ newspaper
named him as one of the ’50 greatest British writers since 1945’.
• In addition to his novels, short stories, poems, theoretical writings and
screenplays, Fowles also translated several plays from French for the
National Theater.
• He is also accredited with writing several reference books on preservation
and ecology, local history and the appreciation of nature.
Childhood & Early Life
• John Robert Fowles was born in Leigh-on-Sea,
located 40 miles from London, to Gladys May
Richards and Robert John Fowles. When he
was only 6-years-old, his mother passed away.
• He was close to his cousin, Peggy Fowles, who
was 18 years old at the time of his birth and
was more like his nursemaid. He studied at
Alleyn Court Preparatory School and then at
Bedford School, which he joined in 1939.
• During his time in school, he was academically
and athletically proficient and graduated from the
institute in 1944. After school, he enrolled in a
Naval Short Course at Edinburgh University, which
he completed the next year. He was about to get
a commission in the Royal Marines, but was
instead assigned to Okehampton Camp for two
years.
• In 1947, he completed his military service and
entered New College, Oxford, where he pursued
French and German and later, focused only on
French for his BA.
• During his time in Oxford, he was greatly inspired
by the works of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul
Sartre, famous existentialists.
Career
• After he graduated from Oxford, he spent the next year at
the University of Poitiers.
• In 1951, he was employed as an English teacher at the
Anargyrios and Korgialenios School of Spetses, which was
set on the Peloponnesian island of Spetsai. During his time
on the island, he began writing the draft for ‘The Magus’.
• Although he was already working on ‘The Magus’, he began
outlining what would go on to become one of his best
works, ‘The Collector’. The book was finally published in
1963. The success of the novel was so huge that he realized
in order to pursue a literary career; he would have to quit
teaching.
• He wrote a second book, ‘The Aristos: A Self
Portrait in Ideas’, in 1964, which contained
numerous metaphysical dictums. The following
year, ‘The Collector’ was made into a film and
Fowles left London to settle in a secluded farm
house in Dorset.
• After he completed his draft for ‘The Magus’, it
was published in 1966. Two years later, it was
made into a film.
• In 1969, he authored and published ‘The French
Lieutenant’s Woman’. His next work titled ‘The
Ebony Tower’ came out four years later. The book
made him even more successful than before and
it was also adapted for television.
• Following the success of ‘The Ebony Tower’, he authored
‘Shipwreck’ in 1974. Three years down the line, he would author
and publish a typical English novel titled, ‘Daniel Martin’.
• From 1978 to 1982, he went on to write a number of books,
averaging one book a year. The books that were published include,
‘Islands’, ‘The Tree’, ‘The Enigma of Stonehenge’, ‘A Short History of
Lyme Regis’ and Mantissa. Many of them were reviewed as average
by the critics and were not as successful as his previous novels.
• He then went on to author, ‘A Maggot’, in 1985, which is included in
the list of his major works. At the time of its publication, it was
classified as a postmodern novel and received rave reviews for its
unique narrative style. The same year, he also co-authored, ‘Land’
with Fay Godwin.
• During this period, he also worked briefly as the
overseer of the Lyme Regis Museum, retiring from his
post in 1988. From then on, he became involved in
politics and his output began to decline.
• He authored ‘Lyme Regis Camera’ in 1990 and eight
years later, wrote ‘Wormholes- Essays and Occasional
Writings’, which were his only works of the 90s.
• Towards the end of his life, he wrote ‘The Journals –
Volume 1’ in 2003. Three years later, he produced last
work ‘The Journals – Volume 2’.
Major Works
• ‘The Collector’, was published in 1963 and became a huge hit with
the readers as soon as it was published. The novel was adapted for
film, which released two years after the release of the book and it
was also adapted for theatre. The novel went on to become such a
huge hit, that a song called ‘The Collector’ was inspired by it. Apart
from movies and theatre, the basic plot of ‘The Collector’ has been
used for television as well. The thematic rudiments of the novel
have also been used for books and comics.
• ‘A Maggot’, written in 1985, is regarded as his magnum opus. Set
against the backdrop of ancient timeframe and went on to become
best-seller as soon as it was published. The narrative style became
popular with the readers and is widely regarded as one of the
greatest classics of his time. It became an instant best-seller.
Awards & Achievements
• He won the Silver Pen Award in 1969.
• In 1970, he was awarded the W.H. Smith
Literary Award.
• He was conferred the Christopher Award, in
1981.
• He was made an honorary fellow of New
College, Oxford, in 1997.
Personal Life & Legacy
• He fell in love with Elizabeth Christy, who was
already married at the time. After her
marriage with her husband ended, she
married Fowles on April 2, 1954. He became
step-father for Christy’s daughter, Anna.
• He later married another woman, Sarah
Smith, in 1998.
• He passed away after a prolonged illness at his
home in Lyme Regis.
The Theatre of Absurd and
Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)
Samuel Beckett
The Theatre of the Absurd and Samuel Beckett
1. The Theatre of the Absurd and Samuel Beckett
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
NEW MEANING OF EXISTENCE FRENCH EXISTENTIALISM SAMUEL BECKETT
Only Connect ... New Directions

2. Historical background
• The aftermath of World War II

increased by the Cold War.
• The atrocities of the Nazi

concentration camps.
The nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, 1945
• The Allies’ atomic bomb.
• Disillusionment coming from the

realization that Britain had been
reduced to a second-class power.
The infamous entrance to Auschwitz.

3. New meaning of existence

• Awareness of man’s propensity to
evil and conscience of the
destructive power of scientific
knowledge.
A sense of anguish,
helplessness and
• The lack of moral assurance and the
decline of religious faith. rootlessness
developed especially
• The disillusionment with both the among the young
liberal and social theories about
economic and social progress.
• Mistrust in the power of reason.

4. French existentialism
• Existentialism saw man
trapped in a hostile world.
• Human life was meaningless

and this created a sense of
confusion, despair and
emptiness.
• The universe was not Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
rational and defied any

explanation.
4. French existentialism
• The main exponent of this
philosophical current was the
French Jean Paul Sartre.
• Existentialists presented the

absurdity of human condition
by means of a lucid
language and logical
reasoning. Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

5. The Theatre of the Absurd: main features
• Absence of a real story or plot.
• No action since all actions are insignificant.
• Vagueness about time, place and the characters.
• The value of language is reduced; in fact, what happens on the

stage transcends, and often contradicts, the words spoken by
the characters.
• Extensive use of pauses, silences, miming and farcical

situations which reflect a sense of anguish.
• Incoherent babbling makes up the dialogue.

6. The Theatre of the Absurd: main themes
• The sense of man’s alienation.
• The cruelty of human life.
• The absence or the futility of objectives.
• The meaninglessness of man’s struggle.

7. Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)

Main works
• Waiting for Godot (written in French in

1952 and translated into English in 1954)
• Endgame (1958)
• Krapp’s Last Tape (1959)
• Happy Days (1961)
• Breath (1970)
Samuel Beckett

8. Waiting for Godot
• No Setting: a desolate country

road and a bare tree.
• Time: evening.
• Characters: two tramps,

Vladimir and Estragon, bored by
a day of nothingness; Pozzo and
Lucky.
Poster for a staging of Waiting for Godot.

8. Waiting for Godot
• Theme: the static situation of

waiting.
• Plot: the two tramps are waiting

for a mysterious Godot who
never turns up.
Poster for a staging of Waiting for Godot.

9. Waiting for Godot: characters
• Vladimir and Estragon are

complementary.
• Lucky and Pozzo are linked

by a relationship of master and
servant.
• Vladimir and Lucky represent

the intellect. Waiting for Godot, London, Peter Hall Co.

9. Waiting for Godot: characters
• Estragon and Pozzo stand for

the body.
• The two couples are mutually

dependent.
• The character the two tramps

are waiting for is Godot 
Biblical allusions in this name. Waiting for Godot, London, Peter Hall Co.

10. Waiting for Godot: structure

• The play has a circular structure
 it ends almost exactly as it
begins.
• The two acts are symmetrically

built  the stage is divided into
two halves by a tree, the human
races into two, Vladimir and
Estragon.
Waiting for Godot, London, Peter Hall Co.
• It is pervaded by a grotesque
humour.
• Its tone is tragic and desperate.

11. Waiting for Godot: themes

• Human impotence in the face of life’s meaninglessness.
• A static world where nothing happens.
• Absence of a traditional time  there is no past, present and

future, just a repetitive present.
• Disintegration of language  absurd exchanges, broken and

fragmented dialogues.
• The lack of communication  use of para-verbal language:

mime, silences, pauses and gags.

12. Beckett vs. Osborne

Beckett Osborne
Plot Obscure, non True-to-life,
consequential consequential
Setting Symbolic, bare Realistic, related to
working class
Theme Meaninglessness of Social critic against
human experience middle-class values
Stage Directions Repetitive, frequent Detailed, informative,

clear
Language Everyday, meaningless Everyday, simple, clear

Godot:
• Waiting for Godot (En Attendant Godot) was
written in 1949 and published in English in
1954.
• It brought Beckett international fame and
established him as one of the leading names
of the theater of the absurd.
• Beckett more or less admitted in a New York
Post interview by Jerry Tallmer that the
dialogue was based on converstaions between
Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil and himself in
Godot:
• Two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, who call
each other Gogo and Didi, meet near a bare
tree on a country road.
• They wait for the promised arrival of Godot,
whose name could refer to “God” or also the
French name for Charlie Chaplin, “Charlot”.
• To fill the boredom they try to recall their
past, tell jokes, eat and speculate about
Godot.
• Pozzo, a bourgeois tyrant, and Lucky, his
Godot:
• Godot sends world that he will not come that
day but will surely come the next.
• In Act II Vladimir and Estragon still wait, and
Godot sends a promising message.
• The two men try to hang themsleves and then
declare their intention of leaving, but they
have no energy to move.
• In Beckett’s philosophical show, there is no
meaning without being.
• The very existence of Vladimir and Estragon is
in doubt.
Godot:
VLADIMIR: We have to come back tomorrow.
ESTRAGON: What for?
VLADIMIR: To wait for Godot.
ESTRAGON: Ah! (Silence.) He didn’t come?
VLADIMIR: No.
• Beckett demonstrates that when put in
extreme situations, these characters tell us
the most about us (the audience) and our own
lives.
Historical background
• The aftermath of World War II

increased by the Cold War.
• The atrocities of the Nazi

concentration camps.
The nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, 1945
• The Allies’ atomic bomb.
• Disillusionment coming from the

realization that Britain had been
reduced to a second-class power.
The infamous entrance to Auschwitz.

New meaning of existence

• Awareness of man’s propensity to evil
and conscience of the destructive power
of scientific knowledge.
A sense of anguish,
• The lack of moral assurance and the
helplessness and
decline of religious faith.
rootlessness
• The disillusionment with both the liberal developed especially
and social theories about economic and among the young
social progress.
• Mistrust in the power of reason.

French existentialism
• Existentialism saw man trapped in a
hostile world.
• Human life was meaningless and this

created a sense of confusion, despair
and emptiness.
• The universe was not rational and

defied any explanation = ABSURD
• The main exponent of this Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
philosophical current was the French

Jean Paul Sartre.
POST-WAR DRAMA: GENERAL INTRODUCTION
• During the 1950’s= REVIVAL of DRAMA in Britain
showing  REJECTION of TRADITIONAL

VALUES
• TWO MAIN TRENDS in new post-war drama:
ANGER and ABSURD

“ANGRY YOUNG MEN”
EDUCATED middle class or working class playwrights (left-
wing ideas)
Also called the KITCHEN-SINK DRAMA (squalid setting)
• Formally NOT innovative plays  REALISTIC PLAYS
• but INNOVATIVE CONTENT STRONG CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS
• Frustration of the younger generation who rejected their parents’

middle class values and wanted to expose their unfair situation
• Direct/real language of the working class
• Attacks against the establishment (the ruling classes and their

values)
main exponent = John Osborne – Look back in Anger (1956)
The theatre of the Absurd
Influence of Camus and Sartre (existentialism)

pessimistic view of man’s existence=
no purpose at all in man’s life, totally absurd
=
After 2 world wars, in a world with no religion, with no
belief  Man is lost
?
A BIG existential question
WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF HUMAN EXISTENCE?
NO MEANING AT ALL
A tragic situation
Beckett’s plays want to represent just this

The absurdity and Irrationality of Human
Existence
To represent this …
…he could not follow a realistic form of drama
INNOVATIVE FORM
Main THEMES of Beckett’s plays
(influenced by existentialism)
• The sense of man’s alienation.
• The cruelty of human life.
• The absence or the futility of objectives.
• The meaninglessness of man’s struggle

The theatre of the Absurd
• Term applied to a group of dramatists:
Rumanian Ionesco, Russian Adamov (Beckett
met them in Paris) Beckett (the most
representative)
• but not a “school” (each worked on his

own)
• First written in French and performed in Paris  En
Attendant Godot (1953) (written in a foreign language to maintain the
language as simple and detached as possible)
• Then translated (by Beckett himself) into English (1954)

and performed in London  Waiting
for Godot (1955)
General situation of B’s plays
All of his characters ARE TRAPPED by a situation from which

they can not escape (buried in earth, in dustbins)
Main features: plot
TRADITIONAL DRAMA WAITING FOR GODOT
• There is a story
developing in time • NO STORY, NO PLOT (static work)
nothing happens
• Portrait of society
through realistic • The characters interact to fill up
characters who move their time, pauses and silences are
in a definite period of as important as words
time • They quarrel, they put on or off
boots (estragon) or hat (vladimir)
• the audience can • they speak but not to
identify themeselves communicate something – they
with the characters just fill up the time to avoid silence
• Emphasis on INNER REALITY (A

DRAMA OF THE MIND)
Main features: time
• TRADITIONAL • WAITING FOR GODOT
DRAMA • No development in time
• Events narrated in a • No past, no future = the characters

chronological way, do not remember their past or
there is a figure out their future
development, a • one day similar to the following
climax, a conclusion
• Not a beginning not an end (sort
of nightmare)
• First act almost identical to the

second
Main features: setting
• TRADITIONAL DRAMA • WAITING FOR GODOT
= Realistic setting
and scenery • A country road, a bare
tree (everywhere)
Symbolical setting
(expressionism= the
representation of the
mind and its existential
desolation and despair)
Main features:CHARACTERS
• Two tramps ESTRAGON (gogo) and VLADIMIR (didi)
• Other two tramps POZZO (the boss) and LUCKY (the slave)
• The boy announcing the arrival of GODOT (that never comes)
Who is godot?
It may recall the idea of God (In French= Little God)
Go + . (dot) (they want to go but they do not move)
N.B.: Beckett never said it was God
This is what the characters do:

just WAITING FOR GODOT (main theme)
Godot = something/someone that could relieve man from an
unbearable situation
But…… GODOT NEVER COMES

Main features: characters
TRADITIONAL • WAITING FOR GODOT
DRAMA • Tramps - No defined personality or social class –
(symbolical of an existential situation)
COMPLEMENTARY
• Realistic (two different aspects of the same personality = body (gogo)
characters and mind (didi)
they need each other
• with their Vladimir (didi  dìt dìt – he speaks)  more intellectual, he plays with
personalities his hat
Estragon (gogo  go,go – problems with his boots) – he has to do with

• Belonging to a corporal activities (he is angry, sleepy, he always complains he is
beaten by someone during the night,)
specific social +
class Pozzo (the oppressor/ the power of the body)
Lucky (the slave / the power of the mind, he can speak-when
he has his hat on)
COMPLEMENTARY, too = Linked to each other by a rope, kept by Pozzo

(but the in the second act the role is the opposite – Pozzo is blind
and needs Lucky who has become dumb)
GODOT The “saviour” or the “saving event” that never comes

Main features: language
TRADITIONAL WAITING FOR GODOT
DRAMA • Incoherent babbling, puns, gags (language
loses its meaning too)
• Realistic,
• Many PAUSES, MIMING, SILENCES
• Characters
speak to
communicate • What happens on the stage is often
contradicted by the words spoken by the
protagonists
Vladimir “Well, Shall we go?

Estragon “ Yes, let’s go”
[they do not move]
Main features: Style
• It is pervaded by a grotesque humour (irony

about everything because everything is equally meaningless)
• It may be considered a Tragi-comedy

• Tragedy= they would like to commit suicide to put an end to
their absurd, desperate situation
• Comedy= There is no tragic end, they fail, they cannot escape
their existential situation
• Its tone is tragic and desperate.

Life (1906 -1989)
• IRISH - Born in Dublin (Anglo-Irish parents)
• Graduated in Modern Languages (French, Italian)
at Trinity College, Dublin
• 1928 Paris (lecturer at Ecole Normale)
• Influenced by EXISTENTIALISM (Camus, Sartre)
• Met Ionesco and Adamov in Paris
• Back to Ireland: Teacher at Trinity College Dublin
• 1931 (25 years old)  vagabond years across Europe 
finally Paris (1936)
…life
• World War II  fought in the Resistance
Movement
• 1945 definetely in Paris (met Joyce)
• Wrote in French and English, indifferently
• En Attendant Godot = Instant success
• He wrote other plays (Endgame, Happy
days), critical essays, radio plays.
• 1969 NOBEL PRIZE for LITERATURE
t205 “We’ll come back tomorrow” (from about minute 6 of the video )
FILM (English)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDjgThErfIM
THEATRE (English)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7_g52JrshE
t206 “Waiting” (from about minute 1:35 of the video)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YELhHkDvwZM&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL
Miscellaneous scenes from Waiting for Godot
THEATRE (Italian)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBfJaHDDZI8&feature=related
HAPPY DAYS http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4f9wM-6OLl8&feature=related

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Modernism &

 the rise of cities (the influx of immigration, continued industrialization) ;

 Modernism is not a term to which a single meaning can be

 It reflects a sense of cultural crisis which was both exciting and

 Modernism is marked by experimentation, particularly

 Period: At the end of the 19th and beginning of

 A trend of thought that affirms the power of

 A series of reforming cultural movements in

 Rebelled against nineteenth century

 “Traditional” forms of art, architecture,

 Modernism was set in motion, in one sense, through a series of

 Instead of progress and growth, the Modernist intelligentsia sees

 The stability and quietude of Victorian civilization were

 The nineteenth century, like the several centuries

 In American Literature, the group of writers and thinkers

 In the wake of the First World War, several American

Modernism as a movement can be recognized not only

 Revolution and conservatism

 Loss of a sense of tradition:

 Increasing dominance of technology:

Productive insecurity originated

 Physicist Einstein on Relativity (1905)

 In broad terms, the period was marked by sudden and

 In its genesis, the Modernist Period in English literature was first

 Intellectuals and artists at the turn of the twentieth century believed

 In Modernist literature, it was the poets who took fullest

 Leading up to the First World War, Imagist poetry was dominating

 This was a sharp departure from the ornamental,

 The “unreliable” narrator supplanted the omniscient, trustworthy

 Experimentation with genre and form was yet another defining

 A quality of being unexpected

 To compare/contrast the two, to show similarities or differences

 Making a reference to or representation of, a place, event, literary

 Left to the reader or hearer to make the connection

 Unconventional use of metaphor

 Multiple narrative points of view (parallax)

 1948 awarded the British Order of

 He brought poetic language and

A poem should be an organic thing

 Modern life is chaotic, futile,

 a set of objects, a situation, a chain

 The poem is known for its obscure nature—its

The poet lives in a culture that has decayed and

Eliot provides copious footnotes

The major point of this short section is

 This poem, the earliest of Eliot’s major works, was

 Prufrock, the poem’s speaker, seems to be

 The Listener: An unidentified companion of Prufrock. The

 The Women: Women at a social gathering. Prufrock would like to

 The Lonely Men in Shirtsleeves: Leaning out of their windows,

 Modern women live a highly-

 yellow fog, yellow smoke, the soot,

 Similarities: both are indecisive, feel

Lack of courage, vigour and energy

Sensitive, neurotic, indecisive, suffered from spiritual

"Prufrock," deals with spiritually exhausted people

 It is an examination of the tortured psyche of the

 "For many readers in the 1920s, Prufrock seemed

• Poet, dramatist, mystic, essayist, critic.