English Literature OBIETTIVI E RISULTATI DI APPRENDIMENTO ATTESI Sullo sfondo dei principali eventi storici del Novecento lo studente dovrà saper riconoscere i principali lineamenti delle estetiche modernista e postmodernista nel campo delle arti in generale e nel campo narrativo in particolare ID: 935717
Download Presentation The PPT/PDF document "Modernist and postmodernist fiction in X..." is the property of its rightful owner. Permission is granted to download and print the materials on this web site for personal, non-commercial use only, and to display it on your personal computer provided you do not modify the materials and that you retain all copyright notices contained in the materials. By downloading content from our website, you accept the terms of this agreement.
Slide1
Modernist and postmodernist fiction in XX Century English Literature
OBIETTIVI E RISULTATI DI APPRENDIMENTO ATTESI
Sullo sfondo dei principali eventi storici del Novecento, lo studente dovrà saper riconoscere i principali lineamenti delle estetiche modernista e postmodernista nel campo delle arti in generale e nel campo narrativo in particolare. Particolare attenzione verrà dedicata al passaggio da una dominante epistemologica (modernista) a una dominante ontologica (post-modernista). Dopo aver dimostrato di saper riconoscere le linee di continuità e le fratture tra le due estetiche oggetto del programma, lo studente dovrà dimostrare di saper analizzare le opere, prese in esame durante il corso, dei seguenti autori: E. M. Forster, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf,
Ian
McEwan
, Ali Smith,
Kazuo
Ishiguro
.
Slide2PREREQUISITI
Lo studente deve aver conoscenza della storia della letteratura inglese con approfondimenti del periodo
early
modern
(5-600), all’interno del quale risulta indispensabile la conoscenza del Teatro Elisabettiano e dell’opera di Shakespeare. Deve altresì conoscere la storia del canone letterario del XVIII e del XIX secolo, e padroneggiare le distinzioni di genere letterario con particolare riferimento al genere del
novel
nelle sue varie articolazioni, e della
short story
.
Slide3PROPEDEUTICITÀLo studente deve aver superato gli esami della Lingua e della Letteratura inglese del I e del II anno
Slide4Bibliography
Opere
E.M. Forster,
Other Kingdom
(in
Collected Short Stories
), any edition
Joseph Conrad
, Heart of Darkness
, any edition
V. Woolf,
To the Lighthouse
, any edition
Ian McEwan,
Atonement,
any edition
Ali Smith,
The Accidental
, any edition
Kazuo Ishiguro,
Never Let me Go
, any edition
(
facoltativo
)
Testi
critici
Peter Childs,
Modernism
, London, Routledge, 2016 (III edition)
Christophe Den
Tandt
,
Postmodernism in Anglo-American Fiction
(online publication, pp.1-50)
Brian McHale “What Was
Postmodermism
?” In
The
Cambridge University Introduction to Postmodernism, Cambridge Press, 2015
(
facoltativo
)
Rossella Ciocca, “
Cinematic narration and the mélange of genres in
The Accidental
by Ali Smith”, in
Forms of Migration. Migration of Forms
, C. Corti, M.
Trulli
, V.
Cavone
(Eds.), pp. 367-374, Bari,
Progedit
, 2009
Sebastian
Groes
(ed.),
Ian McEwan Contemporary Critical Perspectives
, London, Continuum, 2009 (Chapters 5, 6)
Slide5Contents
. Crisis of representation and the artistic vanguards of early 1900
2. Stylistic features of literary modernism
3. Forster and myth as meta-language
4 Conrad and symbolism
5. Woolf and the stream of consciousness
6. After the II world war: from realism to the death of the novel
7. Experimentalism is back: postmodernism
8. Ian McEwan, the concept of metafiction
9. Ali Smith, the use of pastiche
10. Kazuo Ishiguro, alternative
ontologies
in literature
(facoltativo)
Slide6A FEW KEYWORDS
MODERNITY
Modernity may be defined as the broad philosophical, cultural and historical formation that began with Renaissance humanism (Leonardo da Vinci, Erasmus, Thomas More). It gave rise to the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution—Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Isaac Newton —, laid the foundation of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and led up to the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution. In brief, one could summarize modernity as the belief that the human subject may control its environment (nature) by rational and scientific means, and may also take its political destiny into its own hands, typically by adhering to a project of rational, humanistic progress.
MODERNISM/MODERNISMS
(aesthetical declination of modernity: crisis or celebration of modernity?)
POSTMODERNISM
(post as
after
or as Versus?)
Slide7Modernism: a few categories
CRISIS (dal
greco
separare
,
discernere
)
epistemological
INDUSTRIALISATION
URBANISATION
SECULARISATION
WAR
IMPERIALISM
MITH and SYMBOL
Slide8Modernism: REACTION TO MODERNITY
Apocalyptic reaction (Eliot, Yeats, Pound, Lawrence)
Disintegration (close-knit rural community)
Fragmentation, anonymity (urban society),
ephemerality
, insecurity, division of labour, alienation, mass-culture, displacement, mechanisation, nature’s enslavement, neurosis
Slide9Modernism: THE TRADITION OF THE NEW
Celebratory
reaction
(
futurism
,
vorticism
, bohémien
cosmopolitanism
, avant-garde)
‘il faut être absolument moderne’ (Rimbaud)
‘make it new’ (Ezra Pound)
‘blast and
bombardiering
’ (Wyndham Lewis)
renewal of social and political customs
Suffragism
, the new woman, socialism, democracy, social justice, openness, sexual frankness, new understanding of time and space, speed, mobility, communication, travel, dynamism, new languages, experimentalism
Slide10DATES
genre-bound
definition
includes authors associated with innovation (Donne, Blake, Sterne, Coleridge)
time-bound definition
:
wide: 1880s-1945; 1890s-1930s
focused: pre-war years pars
destruens
(
Blast
)
Post-
war
years
reconstruction (
rappel à l’ordre
)
Slide11DATES
1910
“In or about December, 1910, human character changed. …All human relations have shifted – those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature.” (Woolf, post-impressionism exhibition organised by Roger Fry)
1922
annus
mirabilis: T. S. Eliot,
The Waste Land
, J. Joyce,
Ulysses
, K. Mansfield, T
he Garden Party
, V. Woolf,
Jacob’s Room
1939
terminus ad
quem
Finnegans
Wake
(post-mod.)
1960s
the term modernism widely used as a description of a recognizable literary phase that was over.
Slide12DATES: POLITICS AND SOCIETY
1882
married women’s property act
1888
Local government act – London county council
1889
London dock strike
1893
formation of Independent Labour party
1897
National Union women’s suffrage societies
1900
Labour Party
1902
Education act for secondary education
1903
E. Pankhurst founds the Women’s Social and Political Union
1905
Sinn Fein, Irish Nationalist party
1908
Old age pensions introduced
1911
National Health Insurance act
1912
Militant agitation for women’s suffrage
1913
Suffragette demonstrations in London
1916
Easter rising in Dublin (poem by W. B. Yates)
Slide13DATES: POLITICS AND SOCIETY
1917
Russian revolution
1918
Vote for women aged thirty
1919
first woman elected in Parliament
1920
Oxford admits women to degree
1922
Irish Republic (except Ulster)
1924
First Labour Government
1926
General strike
1927
General strikes declared illegal
1928
Women’s right to vote as full as men’s
1929
New York’s stock exchange collapsed
1932
Hunger march of unemployed to London
1936
Edward VIII abdicates
1944
Secondary Education compulsory for all
Slide14DATES: SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
1893
Four-wheel car of Karl Benz
1895
Marconi’s telegraphy
Roentgen’s X rays
1898
Curies discover radium and plutonium
1900
Planck’s theory of quantum
1903
Wrights brothers first flight
1905
Einstein’s theory of relativity
1911
Amundsen reaches South Pole
1913
Bohr discovers atom’s structure
1918
Rutherford separates atom
1919
First flight on the Atlantic
1922
Founding of British Broadcasting Company
1928
First talkie (sound) film
1929
Fleming’s penicillin
1935
Fermi fixes atom
1945
Nuclear Bombs on Japanese Towns
Slide15ROOTS, ANTECEDENTS, FORERUNNERS
UNDERSTANDING OF REALITY
MARX
NIETZSCHE Masters of ‘suspect’
FREUD founders of hermeneutics
SAUSSURE
Modernity as the age of the ‘world picture’
(Heidegger)
Slide16Karl Marx (1818-83)
ideological character of truth and common
sense(objectivity) ‘false consciousness’
Economy world view ideology
Slide17F. Nietzsche (1844-1900)
End of metaphysics, death of God
(aforisma 125
La Gaia Scienza
)
Slide18The Birth of Tragedy
(1872) Life like art is a ‘
purposiveness
without purpose’, lived for its intrinsic value and not for some transcendental end. To experience life in a pre-dualistic dimension of mutual belonging between subject and object, man and nature, in a Dionysian sensual fashion (aesthetics= pertaining the senses) over an Apollonian post-Socratic attitude which demanded control by reason over the body, the matter, the instincts.
“it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that the existence of the world is justified” “It is a dream. I will dream on”
Slide19Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is (Become what you are Vs Know Yourself)
Thus spoke Zarathustra
(the over-man, a new creative creature capable of living artistically transcending religion, morality, social conventions and habits)
Beyond Good and Evil
: “We moderns, we half- barbarians. We are in the midst of our bliss only when we are most in danger.”
Slide20S. Freud (1856-1939)
Unconscious dimension
Consciousness as sublimation and repression
Pleasure principle and reality principle
Civilization as product of postponement and repression
(displacement of morality: human behaviour, society and even history are not to be judged but interpreted)
Slide211856 born in Freiberg in Jewish family1860 family moves to Vienna
1873 studies Medicine
1876 enters Institute of Physiology directed by von
Brucke
1881 degrees in Medicine
1882 meets Joseph Breuer, begins to work in hospital as assistant to T.
Meynert
, specializes in nervous disturbs
1885 scholarship to attend Charcot lessons in Paris
1886 back in Vienna works as specialist in nervous disturbs
1895 publishes
Studi
sull’isteria
with Breuer in which the method of free associations is applied
1896 death of father
1897 begins
aoutoanalysis
1899 publishes
L’interpretazione
dei
sogni
1901
Psicopatologia
della
vita
quotidiana
1902 meetings every
wednesdays
of Psychological Society to become in 1908 Psychoanalytical Society
1905
Tre saggi sulla teoria sessuale
,
Il motto di spirito e la sua relazione con l’inconscio
Slide221906 knows
Carl Gustav
Jung
1908
Caso clinico del piccolo Hans
1909
L’uomo
dei
topi
, goes with Jung and
Ferenczi
to America where he gives the
Cinque
conferenze
sulla
psicoanalisi
, receives
laurea
honoris
causa
in psychology
1910 International Psychoanalytical Society in
Norimberga
1913
Totem e
tabù
, breaks with Jung
1920
Al di là del principio del piacere
1921
Psicologia delle masse e analisi dell’io
1922
L’Io e l’
Es
1925
Inibizione, sintomo e angoscia
1926
meets Einstein in
Berlin
1929
Il disagio della civiltà
1934 first
draft
of
L’uomo Mosè e la religione monoteistica
1936 Nazi seize warehouse of publishing house, T. Mann writes speech for Freud’s 80
th
birthday, proclaimed member of Royal Society
1938 Vienna occupied by Nazi, Freud leaves for London
1939 dies
Slide23Ferdinand de Saussure 1857-1913
Course in General Linguistics
(1916 from students’ notes) ‘language as a system of differences with no positive signs’, relationship between word in its graphic or spoken form (signifier) and the thing it represents (signified) is arbitrary and conventional.
Constructed-
ness
of meaning: language does not describe the world but constructs it. Language is not a window on reality but a net superimposed on it through which we ‘see’ the world. Language is the access to reality with its ‘already given’ ideological, historical, conventional implications. Reality is ‘pre-read’ by language.
Slide24Ludvig Wittgenstein Tractatus Logico-philosophicus
(1921): “The limits of my language are the limits of my world”
In Jacques Derrida’s (1930-2004) terms: the subject is inscribed in language, he is a function of language.
Slide25LITERARY FORERUNNERS
Baudelaire, Rimbaud,
Mallarmé
, Verlaine, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Decadence, Symbolist Movement
Exploration of new forms of subjectivity:
ennui
as a combination of apathy and boredom which rendering the subject inactive also makes him hypersensitive and thirsty of new and strong sensations.
Slide26Ivory tower and flaneursAloofness of the artist “The only refuge left to us was the poet’s ivory tower, which we climbed, ever higher, to isolate ourselves from the mob.” (Gerard de Nerval)
the artist as
flaneur
, strolling observer who watches the world but is not ‘seen’, keeps his extraneousness
Slide27Writing as a form of art
Rejection of romantic ideal of art as product of natural inspiration replaced by torturing pursuit of technical skill and craftsmanship “Last week I spent 5 days writing one page”(Flaubert)
Slide28SPACE and TIME
“the keynote of Modernism is liberation, an ironic distrust of all absolutes, including those of temporal or spatial form.” (Bradbury and McFarlane)
“We should ask for no absolutes … Once and for ever, let us have done with the ugly imperialism of any absolute. There is no absolute good, there is nothing absolutely right. All things flow and change, and even change is not absolute.” (D. H. Lawrence)
Slide29Greenich Creation of world standard time at the International Prime Meridian Conference of 1884. Convened in Washington, D.C., at the behest of a group of American
meterologists
and engineers, the goal of the Prime Meridian Conference was to establish the meridian of longitude passing through Greenwich as the spatial and temporal zero point for global cartography and civil time measurement.
Slide30Einstein: Relativity theory (1905)
no physical law is entirely reliable, the observer’s position will always affect the result, making it relative and contingent.
Measured rates, dimensions, and masses depend upon the speed or acceleration of the observers with respect to the object they are observing or upon the presence of mass nearby. Time and space are neither uniform nor homogeneous because their measurement depends upon the physical context of the observer.
Slide31H. Bergson, Essai sur le données immédiates de la conscience (1889)
reality subjectively experienced as different from the linear, regular beats of mechanical time which measures all events by the same gradations; psychological time measured by
duration:
varying speed at which the mind apprehends the length of experiences according to their intensities for each individual.
Slide32MODERNIST TIME/SPACEThe homogeneous, objective, empirical standard against which our internal time and space can be tested are gone, and with their disappearance
the way in
which we think about the world has altered.
Slide33Modernist treatment of time flashback, anticipations, repetitions, jumps, dislocations of time-sequence, reversibility of personal time; stream of consciousness as non-linear, multiple and discontinuous technique to render the interrupted elliptical repetitive flow of subjective thought; development of spatialized rather than chronological structures
Slide34Modernist treatment of time
Proust: “Reality takes shape in the memory alone”
Pound‘s
image
as an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time
Joyce’s
epiphanies
: “revelation of the
whatness
of the thing”, when “the soul of the commonest object … seems to us radiant” (
Stephen Hero
, I version of
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
)
Slide35Woolf’s moments of being, compression of time/space which produces insights and sudden revelations.“it was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to … and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure … which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores. Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened. It was over – the moment.” (Woolf,
Mrs Dalloway
)
Slide36Joyce: In Ulysses superimposition of spatial axis upon time sequence interpolating ex abrupto previous narrative sections to give the idea of simultaneity
“The action takes place in time, but the meaning is created spatially; or, as Thomas Mann said, ‘musically’.” (
Levenson
)
Rhythm and pattern, musical structure for Forster
Slide37Time as stasis and suspension, non-events
Modernism uses our normal temporal expectations, and then frustrates or complicates them (Kermode)
Checov
,
The Three Sisters
(moving to Moscow)
Kafka,
The Trial
(imputation)
Musil
,
The Man Without Qualities
(aspiration to perfection, excess of possibilities leading to paralysis)
Beckett,
Waiting for
Godot
(the coming of
Godot
)
Slide38LANGUAGE
Linguistic Turn. Conventional character of language. Separation between words and things. The access to the world is not guaranteed
Language as social, not natural nor divine, phenomenon
“its simple relationship to the world, of naming and describing, no longer appeared to apply transparently, as ambiguity, irony, misunderstanding and the ineffable seemed commonplace… words, as Alice found in Wonderland, could mean so many things that they were difficult to control, they had become unstuck from referents” (Childs)
Slide39Crisis of Language Crisis in communication
“I was a bad civil servant” … “I was lying when I said that I was a bad civil servant” (Dostoevsky,
Memorie
dal
Sottosuolo
)
“That is not what I meant at all” (Eliot,
Prufrock
)
“Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream—making a vain attempt (Conrad,
H. o. D.
)
Slide40“We think we understand each other, but we never really understand.” (Pirandello, Sei Personaggi
…
)
“You had to recognise that words had lost their value in the Nineteenth century, particularly towards the end, they had lost much of their variety, and I felt that I could not go on, that I had to recapture the value of the individual word, find out what it meant and act within it.” (Gertrude Stein)
Slide41Form over Content
“There was so much to doubt: the foundations of religion and ethics, the integrity of governments and selves… But if the fate of the west seemed uncertain and shadowy, the struggles with the metrical scheme of lyric poetry or the pictorial space of a cubist painting could seem bracingly crisp. Shining luminously from so much of the work is the happiness of concentrated purpose and the pride of the cultural labourer believing fully in the artistic task at hand” (
Levenson
)
Slide42The modern novel
“It was altering in length, appearance, price, and in social, moral and commercial purpose. It was multiplying, dividing its audience, reaching into new kinds of expression, undertaking daring new kinds of exploration, demanding new kinds of attention, claiming new freedoms of methods and subjects: new rights to social and sexual frankness, new complexities of discourse and form.” (M. Bradbury)
Slide43‘The Modern Novel’ in The Common Reader by V. Woolf
Admitting the vagueness which afflicts all criticism of novels, let us hazard the opinion that for us at this moment the form of fiction most in vogue more often misses than secures the thing we seek. Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide … The writer seems constrained to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love interest, and an air of probability …
Slide44But sometimes, more and more as time goes by, we suspect a momentary doubt, a spasm of rebellion, as the pages fill themselves in the customary way. Is life like this? Must novels be like this?
Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being ‘like this’. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted sense
Slide45… Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and un-circumscribed spirit?”
Slide46Monologo interioreDa Edouard
Dujardin
,
Il monologo interiore,
1927
“ il monologo interiore, come ogni monologo, è un discorso del personaggio messo in scena e ha lo scopo di introdurci direttamente nella sua vita interiore, senza che l’autore intervenga con spiegazioni e commenti; e, come ogni monologo, è un discorso senza ascoltatore e un discorso non pronunciato.
Dal monologo tradizionale, tuttavia, si differenzia per i seguenti motivi: quanto al contenuto, è espressione del pensiero più intimo, più vicino all’inconscio;
quanto allo spirito, è un discorso anteriore a ogni organizzazione logica, che riproduce questo pensiero allo stato nascente e così come si manifesta;
quanto alla forma, si realizza in frasi dirette, ridotte al minimo sintattico;
Il monologo interiore è il discorso senza ascoltatore e non pronunciato col quale un personaggio esprime il suo pensiero più intimo, più vicino all’inconscio, anteriore ad ogni organizzazione logica, cioè allo stato nascente, attraverso frasi dirette ridotte al minimo sintattico, in modo da dare l’impressione del suo primo manifestarsi”.
Slide47Flusso di coscienza vs monologo interioreChatman distingue Flusso di coscienza e monologo interiore:
“Flusso di coscienza [è] l’ordinamento casuale di pensieri e impressioni […] Esso dispone gli elementi semantici secondo il principio della libera associazione”.
“Il monologo interiore è segnalato dalla sintassi: attribuisce il verbo al presente e il riferimento pronominale in prima persona al personaggio che pensa (se la sintassi è ellittica questi elementi sono impliciti)
” S.
Chatman
,
Storia e discorso
, cit., p. 202
Slide48Edward Morgan Forster
1879 LONDON; 1970 COVENTRY
1897 KING’S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE
(lifelong connection)
1946 Honorary fellowship
1901 I VISIT TO ITALY
(visits to Greece, India, Egypt)
Slide49Works
1905
Where Angels fear to tread (film)
1907
The Longest Journey
1908
A room with a view (film)
novels
1910
Howard’s End (film)
1914
Maurice
(published ’71, film)
1924
A Passage to India (film)
1911
The Celestial Omnibus
1928
The Eternal Moment
short stories
1972
The Life to come
1927
Aspects of the Novel
essay
Slide50FORSTER’S AESTHETICS
ART
as
Self-contained
harmony
“Speranza, venata d’apprensione, che l’ordine offerto dalla letteratura stabilisca l’armonia del mondo.”
(F.
Marenco
)
GENRE Social/moral comedy; ‘Condition of England’ comedy: “
Howards End
asks the question: ‘Who shall inherit England?’”(Lionel Trilling); “England becomes a character and its health is a central subject.”
(R.
Schwarz
)
STYLE ‘Voce sommessa di un
antiprofeta
’ (
political
moderation
;
expressive
moderation
)
Slide51Characteristics of his writing
POETRY within REALISM
SYMBOLISM within REALISM
RHYTHM AND PATTERN like music
UNDERSTATEMENT broken by MELODRAMA
Ambiguity, evasiveness, humour, irony, sudden emphasis, clear plot, complex manner
THE CHOICE OF SILENCE “Gli eventi hanno spuntato gli arnesi del mio mestiere di narratore” “
…I
would
write
atomically
if
I
could
.”
Slide52FORSTER’S WORLD VIEW
ETHICS: Liberal, humanistic, tolerant, agnostic, Vs imperialism, authoritarianism. ‘Arnoldian’ commitment: Culture/Anarchy
POLITICS Democratic elitism, class-consciousness
IDEALS Democracy, rationality without repression of instincts, spontaneity, intellectual honesty, curiosity for otherness, openness to other cultures, moral integrity, artistic beauty, faithfulness and trust in personal relationships.
Slide53Forster’s world viewFEARS Chaos, nothingness, void, automatism, mechanization, greed, ideological violence.
(“Panic and Emptiness!”
Howards End
)
HE CONDEMNS Undeveloped English heart, middleclass respectability (public schools, established church), prudence, snobbery, prejudice, efficiency, materialism, dogmatism, self-betrayal
Slide54POLARITIES
“Only connect” (the prose and the passion)
HEAD HEART
CULTURE NATURE
PROSE POETRY
MATERIAL IDEAL
COMMERCE ART
ACTION CONTEMPLATION
Slide55Dialectical polarities in the works
English Italian
English Indian
Town Country
Middleclass Working class
Capitalist Intellectual
Production Human relationships
Mentalism
Physicality
Prejudice Emotion
Slide56Dialectical polarities in the works
Rationality Superstition
Common sense Independence of thought
Muddle* Mystery
*“Panic and emptiness”
“telegrams and anger”
Slide57MYTH AND SYMBOL: theoriesOne theory claims that myths are distorted accounts of real historical events. According to this theory, storytellers repeatedly elaborated upon historical accounts until the figures in those accounts gained the status of gods.
According to another theory, myths began as allegories for natural phenomena. Apollo represents fire, Poseidon represents water, and so on.
Slide58Some thinkers believe that myths resulted from the personification of inanimate objects and forces.
According to the myth-ritual theory, the existence of myth is tied to ritual. In its most extreme form, this theory claims that myths arose to explain rituals.
Slide59Myth’s functions
One of the foremost functions of myth is to establish models for behavior. The figures described in myth are sacred and are therefore worthy models for human beings. Thus, myths often function to uphold current social structures and institutions: they justify these customs by claiming that they were established by sacred beings.
Myths can also be entertaining (narrations)
Slide60History of myth’s study
Interest in polytheistic mythology revived in the Renaissance with early works on mythography appearing in the 16th century, such as the
Theologia
mitologica
(1532).
The most important scholars of mythology have been:
Vico
, Schelling, Schiller, Frazer, Jung, Freud,
Lévy-Bruhl
, Lévi-Strauss, N. Frye
. The first scholarly theories of myth appeared during the second half of the 19th century. In general, these 19th-century theories framed myth as a failed or obsolete mode of thought, often by interpreting myth as the primitive counterpart of modern science.
Slide61Junghian theory
Swiss psychologist Carl Jung (1873-1961) and his followers tried to understand the psychology behind world myths. Jung argued that all humans share certain innate unconscious psychological forces, which he called archetypes. Jung believed that the similarities between the myths from different cultures reveals the existence of these universal archetypes.
Slide62Structuralist theory
Like Jung and Campbell, Claude Lévi-Strauss believed that myths reflect patterns in the mind. However, he saw those patterns more as fixed mental structures — specifically, pairs of oppositions (for example raw vs cooked, nature vs culture) — than as unconscious feelings or urges.
Slide63Myth’s fields of application
Philosophy
: Nietzsche, Dionysian spirit, the
Overman
etc.
Anthropology
, J. Frazer,
The Golden Bough
; L. Levy-
Bruhl
,
How Natives Think
, J. Weston,
From Ritual to Romance
Art
: Primitivism (
Gaugin
, Fauvism, Picasso) in sculpture and painting (primitive art was available in Europe after the ‘scramble for Africa’)
Music
I.
Stravinsky
(
obsessive
,
archaic
sounds
)
Slide64Psychoanalysis: Freud, Oedipus complex from Greek myth, Totem and Tabu
,
Civilization and its Discontent
(civilization was tragically but necessarily built on repression and sublimation of instincts)
Jungian Analysis
: Myth performs the function of enabling humans to perceive elemental truths. ex. Gods disguising themselves as animals in myths represent animal instincts in human nature.
Novel
: Conrad, Forster, and Lawrence believed that instinctual realm became destructive when repressed (Stevenson: pre-modernist)
Slide65Ordering function
Myth as
metalanguage
: ordering framework of chaotic futility of contemporary reality (post-war rappel à
l’ordre
) *** Childs, 204-5
Mythic method: exclusion of chronological progression in favour of spatial parallelism between the contemporary and the antique/archaic/traditional/primitive
Slide66Modernist use of myth
Pater
(the return of heathen gods)
Eliot
(holy Grail)
Yeats
(Celtic folklore, symbolist aesthetics, mysticism, exotericism)
Joyce
(Homeric epics; Theosophy)
Forster
(Greek mythologies, symbols as pattern)
Lawrence
(English folklore, Greek, Etruscan, Mexican mythologies, the Bible)
Conrad
(symbolic structure, enigmatic atmosphere)
Slide67Vitalistic function
Myth as
lived
world view: nostalgia of Being in the age of the relativistic World Picture
Holistic nature of primitive cultures before the splitting of consciousness and world into the separate entities of subjective and objective: “Primitive man was believed to have had, like the pre-Socratic Greeks, a psychological continuity with his world… and likewise archaic myth … seemed to be inhabited without the category of disbelief” (
Levenson
)
Slide68The Celestial Omnibus and Other Stories
Other Kingdom
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/34089/34089-h/34089-h.htm
Slide69Other Kingdom (Apollo and Daphne myth as
narrated
by Ovidio)
Slide70Apollo and DaphneApollo was a great warrior and said to Eros who was playing with bow and arrows: "What have you to do with warlike weapons, saucy boy? Leave them for hands worthy of them. Be content with your torch, child, and kindle up your flames, but presume not to meddle with my weapons"
The angry Eros took two arrows, one of gold and one of lead. The gold one was supposed to incite love, while the lead one was supposed to incite hatred. With the leaden shaft, Eros shot the nymph Daphne and with the golden one, he shot Apollo through the heart. Apollo was seized with love for the maiden, and she in turn abhorred him. In fact, she spurned her many potential lovers, preferring instead woodland sports and exploring the woods. Her father,
Peneus
, demanded that she get married so that she may give him grandchildren. However, she begged her father to let her remain unmarried, like Apollo's sister, Artemis.
Slide71Apollo continually followed her, begging her to stay, but the nymph continued her flight. Seeing that Apollo was bound to catch her, she called upon her father, "Help me! Open the earth to enclose me, or change my form, which has brought me into this danger!"
Suddenly, her skin turned into bark, her hair became leaves, and her arms were transformed into branches. She stopped running as her feet became rooted to the ground. Apollo embraced the branches, but even the branches shrank away from him. Since Apollo could no longer take her as his wife, he vowed to tend her as his tree, and promised that her leaves would decorate the heads of leaders as crowns, and that her leaves were also to be depicted on weapons. Apollo also used his powers of eternal youth and immortality to render her ever green. Since then, the leaves of the laurel tree have never known decay.
Slide72Symbolism is a late-nineteenth-century literary movement A broad term that occasionally extends to early twentieth-century modernists like T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound, Symbolism is traditionally dated from circa 1870 to 1900. The movement became more international in the 1890s with the emergence of European Symbolism such as Russian Symbolism, German Symbolism etc.Symbolism can lend itself to confusion because of its name. Far from being restricted to symbols per se, Symbolism attempted instead to raise language (in the broader sense, including the fine arts) to expression as opposed to explicit communication of ideas. Common language implies a ‘communication’ with ready-made or ‘presupposed’ meanings, whereas Symbolist language brings out the full potential of language as a form of recuperation of the uniqueness hidden by ordinary language.
Symbolism
Slide73SYMBOLISM
Symbolism is an extension of the aesthetics of ‘art for art’s sake’ (
Théophile
Gautier, later Oscar Wilde), which
favoured
beauty over utility, and in which language is its own purpose and self-sufficient, without external reference except that which the reader/viewer brings. It is thus concerned with allowing language to speak for itself. In this latter sense, the movement also reacted to the utilitarianism that characterized the nineteenth century. The Symbolist focus on the technical and artificial nature of artistic production anticipates T.S. Eliot’s notions of influence, tradition, and ‘objective correlative’, insofar as his theory of poetic production reacts to Romanticism’s ‘inspiration’ in
favour
of depersonalization and technical mastery.
Slide74Joseph ConradPolish-British
writer
born
Józef
Teodor
Konrad
Korzeniowski
(1857 -- 1924)
Slide75Life and workJoseph Conrad was the only child of Apollo Korzeniowski
– a writer, translator, political activist, and would-be revolutionary – and his wife
Ewa
Bobrowska
. He joined the British merchant marine in 1878, and was granted British citizenship in 1886. Though he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, he was a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature. He wrote stories and novels, many with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of an impassive, inscrutable universe.
Slide76Style and content
Though his works still contain elements of 19th-century realism, Conrad is considered an early modernist. He scorned sentimentality; his manner of portraying emotion in his books was full of restraint,
scepticism
and irony. In the long run his very personal narrative style and anti-heroic characters proved highly influential. His short stories and novels reflect aspects of European imperialism and colonialism conjugated with the exploration of the human psyche.
Slide77SEA ExperienceIn 1874 Conrad left Poland to start a merchant-marine career. After nearly four years in France and on French ships, he joined the British merchant marine which he served and for the next fifteen years. He worked on a variety of ships as crew member (steward, apprentice, able-bodied seaman) and then as third, second and first mate, until eventually achieving captain's rank. Conrad's three-year association with a Belgian trading company included service as captain of a steamer on the Congo River, an episode that would inspire his novella,
Heart of Darkness
.
Slide78Becoming a writer
In 1894, aged 36, Conrad reluctantly gave up the sea, partly because of poor health, partly due to unavailability of ships, and partly because he had become fascinated with writing and decided on a literary career. Financial success long eluded him, who often asked magazine and book publishers for advances, and acquaintances for loans. Eventually a government grant of £100 per annum, awarded in 1910, somewhat relieved his financial worries. Though his talent was recognized by the English intellectual elite, popular success eluded him until 1913 publication of
Chance,
ironically, one of his weaker novels.
Slide79WORKSAlmayer's
Folly
: A Story of an
Eastern
River
, 1895
An
Outcast
of the
Islands
, 1896
The Nigger of the "
Narcissus
": A Tale of the Sea
, 1897
Tales
of
Unrest
, 1898 (short stories)
Lord
Jim
, 1900
The
Inheritors
: An
Extravagant
Story
, with Ford
Madox
Ford, 1901
Youth, a Narrative and
Two
Other Stories, 1902 (Youth: A Narrative, 1898+
Heart of Darkness, 1899 +The End of the Tether, 1902)
Slide80WORKSTyphoon, 1902
Preface
to the Nigger of the "
Narcissus
"
, 1902,
retitled
as
On the Art of
Writing
Typhons
and
Other
Stories,
1903,
Romance: A
Novel
, with Ford
Madox
Ford, 1903
Nostromo: A Tale of the
Seaboard
, 1904
The
Mirror
of the Sea:
Memories
and
Impressions
1906
Slide81Conrad’s writinga blend of realism and symbolism Vs naturalism
“What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men’s existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documented history?” (Conrad,
A personal Record
)
“All art … appeals primarily to the senses, and the artistic aim when expressing itself in written words must also make its appeal through the senses, if its high desire is to reach the secret spring of responsive emotions.” (Preface
Nigger
)
Slide82Aims of Conrad’s art
To transcend appearances
To look for glimpses of truth
Relativistic, subjective, passing, yet simple, elementary, old nature of truth
Truth recognizable by means of emotional resonance
Solidarity, fidelity as values able to redeem life from doubt, nothingness, evil as void, meaninglessness
Art as weapon Vs chaotic evil
Slide83Narrative technique
Sacrality
, 28, 58
Indirection
Plurality of perspectives
Circumscribed viewpoint
Subjectivity
Irony
Symbolism
Indeterminacy, 32, 57
Slide84Indeterminacythe lack of focus, which is one of the main sources of fascination in the text provides a stylistic equivalent to Conrad’s
rejection
of the
concept
of
f
ixity
that
will
later
on
become
basic
in the
ideological
construction of Otherness. Nothing is straightforward in Heart of Darkness; the physical journey upriver is made up of interruptions, returns, losses and recoveries as well as the symbolic journey. Marlow is running away from something rather than toward something else. The natives are not hiding from the colonizers, but deliberately taking refuge in their mystery even when dying. Marlow only draws near to them through a number of sidelong movements, never direct, and never explicit. (N. Vallorani)
Slide85“the secret casket of his genius contains a vapour rather than a jewel” (E. M. Forster) p.30
Slide86“Qui lo sfondo ha l’ossessività di un’atmosfera quotidiana, e così intensa e inamovibile è la presenza di questo ‘altrove’, di questa memoria, che ci pare in sostanza di muoverci nella cerchia incantata di un simbolo, di un mito.” (C. Pavese)
Slide87In particular he sought to trace the weakening of character through environment. Action is of secondary importance, despite the violence of many crucial episodes: those critics are mistaken who hold that his psychology is merely one ingredient of his atmosphere. Rather the sensitive subtleties of atmosphere are part of the psychology. … He conveyed the spell of Eastern islands … but all this was only the setting for the tragedy of man. The loneliness of an alien environment is often the symbol of the soul’s loneliness.” (R. D.
Altick
)
Slide88HEART OF DARKNESSI READING: “The progress of civilization”
indignant, ironical voice Vs hypocrisy, stupidity, violence of imperialism
pp. 40-1, 42-5, 54-5
Slide89II READING: Voyages in the heart of darkness
Dreamlike atmosphere, fear and fascination, suspension.
In the wilderness 39, 61, 100-1
Backward through time 56, 68
In the unconscious 37-8, 69
Slide90Kurtz’s Voyage without return, burial in the wildernessPredator/prey of the wilderness
God/monster
pp. 84-5, 86-7, 97, 111
Slide91Marlowe’s voyagefollowing the traces of Kurtz along the snake-river, 33On the edge of the abyss, saved by work and other values
59,66-7, 69-70, 87-8, 108, 112
Slide92Conrad’s ideas“Those who read me know my conviction that the world … rests on a very few simple ideas; so simple that they must be as old as the hills. It rests notably, among others, on the idea of fidelity.” (Preface
Nigger
)
Slide93Conrad’s ideas“If one be deserving and fortunate, one may perchance attain to such clearness of sincerity that at last the presented vision of regret or pity, of terror or mirth, shall awaken in the hearts of the beholders that feeling of unavoidable solidarity; of the solidarity in mysterious origin, in toil, in joy, in hope, in uncertain fate, which binds men to each other and all mankind to the visible world.” (Preface
Nigger
)
Slide94CONRAD’S Ideas“
If
one
looks
at
life in
its
true
aspect
the
everything
loses
much
of
its
unpleasant
importance
and the
atmosphere
becomes
cleared
of what are only
unimportant mists that drift past in
imposing shapes. When once the truth is grasped
that
one’s
personality
is
only a ridiculous and aimless masquerade of something hopelessly unknown the attainment of serenity is not very far off. Then there
remains
nothing
but
the
surrender
to
one’s
impulses
, the fidelity to
passing
emotions
which
is
perhaps
a
nearer
approach
to
truth
than
any
other
philosophy
of life.”(
Letter
to
Garnett
)
Slide95III reading: Through a forest of symbols
White/Black Light/darkness
Ambiguity, indeterminacy, ambivalence in places
London/estuary (Darkness, light) 27, 121
West, England (darkness) 29, 30-1
Rome (Light, civilization)
Map of Africa(fascinating void)
Conquered
Africa (
darkness
)
Bruxelles
(white, death) 35
Jungle (darkness, mysterious power, antiquity)
Forest under moonlight (enlightened darkness)
Slide96Ambiguity, indeterminacy, ambivalence in objectsKnitted wool (black, death), 35
Wool on negro’s neck (white, death) 44-5
Ivory (white, death)
Kurtz’s ivory visage (white, death)
Kurts’s
picture: flame against black background (light/darkness)
Kurtz’s eloquence (untrustworthy luminous river flowing from heart of darkness)
Intended’s room (darkness), 117
Intended’s face (white, faith and love)
III
reading
:
through
a
forest
of
symbols
Slide97VIGINIA WOOLF (1882 – 1941)
7th child in a blended family of eight. Her mother, Julia P. Jackson, celebrated as a Pre-Raphaelite artist's model, had three children from her first marriage; her father, Leslie Stephen, a notable man of letters, had one previous daughter; their marriage produced another four children.
Slide98Life and death(s)
Woolf's childhood came to an abrupt end in 1895 with the death of her mother and her first mental breakdown, followed two years later by the death of her stepsister and surrogate mother, Stella Duckworth. Her father’s death in 1905 was major turning point in her life and the cause of another breakdown. In 1912, Woolf married Leonard Woolf. The couple rented second homes in Sussex and moved there permanently in 1940. Throughout her life, Woolf was troubled by bouts of depression. Her illness is considered to have been bipolar disorder. Eventually in 1941 she committed suicide by putting rocks in her pockets and drowning herself in a river, at the age of 59.
Slide99Education and fame
While the boys in the family were educated at university, Virginia and her sisters, including the modernist painter Vanessa Bell, were home-schooled in English classics. From 1897–1901, Virginia and her sisters attended the Ladies' Department of King's College London, where she studied classics and history and came into contact with early reformers of women's higher education and the women's rights movement. She began writing professionally in 1900, encouraged by her father. In 1917 with her husband Leonard Woolf she founded the Hogarth Press, which published much of her work and the work of other eminent modernists such as T.S. Eliot. Subsequently Woolf became one of the central subjects of the 1970s movement of feminist criticism, and her works have since garnered much attention and widespread commentary for "inspiring feminism“.
Slide100BLOOMSBURY’s Group
Following her father’s death, the family moved from Kensington to the more bohemian Bloomsbury, where they adopted a free-spirited lifestyle; it was there that, in conjunction with their brothers' intellectual friends, they formed the Bloomsbury Group the set of associated writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists. The circle, which largely came from the
Cambridge Apostles
(Adrian and
Thoby
were at Trinity, and their sisters, Vanessa and Virginia often visited) included writers such as Lytton Strachey and critics such as Clive Bell. Later it would include John Maynard Keynes (1907), Duncan Grant (1908), E. M. Forster (1910), Roger Fry (1910), Leonard Woolf (1911) and David Garnett (1914).
Slide101The Dreadnought hoax (irreverence and pacifism)
Several members of the group attained notoriety in 1910 with the
Dreadnought
hoax which Virginia participated disguised as a male Abyssinian royal. It was a joke during which the group paid an ‘official’ visit to the battleship HMS
Dreadnought
to ridicule the Royal Navy and the army. All the while, they pretended to speak in a foreign language (gibberish interspersed by Latin and Greek.
Slide102The Voyage Out
was published in 1915 at the age of 33. This novel was originally titled
Melymbrosia
, but Woolf repeatedly changed the draft. The novel is set on a ship bound for South America, and a group of young Edwardians onboard and their various mismatched yearnings and misunderstandings.
Mrs
Dalloway
(1925)
centres
on the efforts of Clarissa Dalloway, a middle-aged society woman, to
organise
a party, even as her life is paralleled with that of
Septimus
Warren Smith, a working-class veteran who has returned from the First World War shell shocked and suffering from a post-traumatic stress disorder.
To the Lighthouse
(1927)
centres
on the Ramsay family's anticipation of and reflection upon a visit to a lighthouse and the connected familial tensions.
Works
Slide103WorksOrlando: A Biography
(1928) is a parodic biography of a young nobleman who lives for three centuries without ageing much past thirty (but who does abruptly turn into a woman), the book is in part a portrait of Woolf's lover and friend Vita Sackville-West.
The Waves
(1931) presents a group of six friends whose reflections, which are closer to recitatives than to interior monologues proper, create a wave-like atmosphere that is more akin to a prose poem than to a plot-
centred
novel.
Flush: A Biography
(1933) is a part-fiction, part-biography of the cocker spaniel owned by Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The book is written from the dog's point of view.
Slide104WorksBetween the Acts
(1941), sums up and magnifies Woolf's chief preoccupations: the transformation of life through art, sexual ambivalence, and meditation on the themes of flux of time and life, presented simultaneously as corrosion and rejuvenation—all set in a highly imaginative and symbolic narrative encompassing almost all of English history.
She is also known for her essays, including
A Room of One's Own
(1929), in which she wrote the much-quoted dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
Her works are widely read all over the world and have been translated into more than 50 languages.
Slide105Stream of consciousness
Narrative technique in nondramatic fiction intended to render the flow of
myriad
impressions—visual, auditory, physical, associative, and subliminal—that impinge on the
consciousness
of an individual and form part of his awareness along with the trend of his rational thoughts. The term was first used by the psychologist
William James
in
The Principles of Psychology
(1890). As the psychological novel developed in the 20th century, some writers attempted to capture the total flow of their characters’ consciousness, rather than limit themselves to rational thoughts. To represent the full richness, speed, and subtlety of the mind at work, the writer incorporates snatches of incoherent thought, ungrammatical constructions, and free association of ideas, images, and words at the pre-speech level.
Slide106TO THE LIGHTHOUSE: setting
In the summer home the family used in St Ives, Cornwall, Woolf first saw the
Godrevy
Lighthouse, which was to become iconic in her novel
To the Lighthouse
(1927). In the novel the setting is the Isle of Skye in Scotland and
centres
on the Ramsay family and their visits there between 1910 and 1920.
Slide107TO THE LIGHTHOUSE: structure
The story is set on two days ten years apart and distributed in three chapters:
The Window, Time Passes, The Lighthouse
Following and extending the tradition of modernist novelists like Marcel Proust and James Joyce, the plot is secondary to its philosophical introspection. Cited as a key example of the literary technique of
multiple focalization
, the novel includes little dialogue and almost no action; most of it is written as thoughts and observations.
Slide108To the Lighthouse: themes
The novel centers upon adult relationships and childhood emotions. Among many other themes, main reflections are about loss, the nature of art, and the problem of perception.
One of the primary tropes of the novel is the struggle in the creative process that beset painter Lily Briscoe while she struggles to paint in the midst of the family drama.
The novel is also a meditation upon the lives of a nation's inhabitants in the midst of war.
It also explores the passage of time, and how women are forced by society to allow men to take emotional strength from them.
Slide109Section one:The Windowplot
The story begins with
Mrs
Ramsay assuring her son 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. One of the guests, Lily Briscoe, is an uncertain painter attempting a portrait of Mrs. Ramsay and James who finds herself plagued by doubts largely fed by the claims of Charles
Tansley
, another guest, who asserts that women can neither paint nor write. The section closes with a large dinner party with all the family and their guests.
Slide110Section II: Time Passes
Ten years pass, during which the First World War begins and ends.
Mrs
Ramsay dies, as do two of her children – Prue dies from complications of childbirth, and Andrew is killed in the war.
Mr
Ramsay is left adrift without his wife to praise and comfort him during his bouts of fear and anguish regarding the longevity of his philosophical work. This section is told from an omniscient point of view and occasionally from Mrs.
McNab's
point of view. Mrs.
McNab
worked in the Ramsay's house since the beginning, and thus provides a clear view of how things have changed in the time the summer house has been unoccupied.
Slide111Section III: The Lighthouse
Some of the remaining
Ramsays
and other guests return to their summer home ten years after the events of Part I.
Mr
Ramsay finally plans on taking the long-delayed trip to the lighthouse with daughter Camilla and son James. The trip almost does not happen, as the children are not ready, but they eventually set off. As they travel, the children are silent in protest at their father for forcing them to come along.
Slide112Section III
While they set sail for the lighthouse, Lily attempts to finally complete the painting she has held in her mind since the start of the novel. She reconsiders her memory of
Mrs
and
Mr
Ramsay, balancing the multitude of impressions from ten years ago in an effort to reach towards an objective truth about
Mrs
Ramsay and life itself. Upon finishing the painting (just as the sailing party reaches the lighthouse) 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.
Slide113metafiction
… Woolf’s novel provides an impressionistic account of the experiences of family members and friends. One of the novel's characters, Lily Briscoe, is a painter who seeks to complete a canvas. As such, Lily Briscoe is Woolf’s self-projection into the text. Lily's efforts are initially unsuccessful, yet by the end of the text, she achieves an artistic vision—an epiphany. The last stroke of her brush corresponds to the very end of the text. The ending is therefore metafictional: it draws readers‘ attention to the closing of the text. Yet this device is motivated by the necessity to express a higher order of things. The novel’s ability to perform this act of representation is not questioned or subverted, as it would be in a postmodernist metafictional text. Instead, we witness an aesthetic victory. The metafictional dimension therefore remains more discreet than it would be in a self-subversive metafictional text.
(Den
Tandt
)
Slide114To the Lighthouse
writing, painting
Woolf’s
novel
-
Briscoe’s
picture
Refusal
of
realistic
representation
:
How do the Edwardian novelists create convincing characters? They describe houses, villas, roads…
I asked them—they are my elders and betters—How shall I begin to describe this woman
’
s character? And they said:
‘
…
Describe
——
’
But I cried:
‘
Stop! Stop!
’
And I regret to say that I threw that ugly, that clumsy, that incongruous tool out of the window, for I knew that if I began describing … that vision to which I cling though I know no way of imparting it to you, would have been dulled and tarnished and vanished for ever. That is what I mean by saying that the Edwardian tools are the wrong ones for us to use. (
“
Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown
”
published as 'Character in Fiction' in the July 1924 issue of
The Criterion
, a journal edited by T S Eliot
).
Slide115Clive Bell, art critic and Vanessa’s husband“Thou shalt create form” (Clive Bell)“Lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions. These relations and combinations of lines and colours, these aesthetically moving forms, I call
‘
Significant Form
’
; and
‘
Significant form
’
is the one quality common to all works of visual art.
”
(Clive Bell)
Bloomsbury’s
formalism
Slide116Bloomsbury’s
formalism
“
[The Post-Impressionists] do not seek to imitate form, but to create form; not to imitate life, but to find an equivalent for life. By that I mean that they wish to make images which by the clearness of the logical structure, and by their closely-knit unity of texture, shall appeal to our disinterested and contemplative imagination…
”
( Roger Fry, painter, art historian, art critic, organizer of the 1910 post-impressionism exhibition, here his self-portrait)
Slide117Roger Fry’s influence on Woolf Woolf to Fry: “
You have I think kept me on the right path, so far as writing goes, more than anyone.
”
“Literature was suffering from a plethora of old clothes. Cézanne and Picasso had shown the way; writers should fling
representation
to the winds and follow suit”(Woolf,
Roger Fry
, 1940)
.
Slide118Post-impressionism and writing
Fry
“
The artist may find the material for his pictures in the most unexpected quarters
”
.
Woolf
“
The proper stuff of fiction does not exist. Everything is the proper stuff of fiction,
every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss
”
.
Slide119Post-impressionism and writing
Bell
“
The form in which the artist expresses his emotion bears no memorial of any external form that may have provoked it. We cannot know exactly what the artist feels. We only know what he creates
”
.
Woolf
“
The people we admire most as writers have something elusive, enigmatic, impersonal about them. In ransacking their drawers we shall find out little about them. All has been distilled into their books
”
.
Slide120Lily Briscoe, THE ARTIST= Virginia + VanessaSynthesis
of Virginia and Vanessa.
From Virginia:
biografical
details
,
problems
of the woman
as
artist
.
From Vanessa:
painting’s
problems
:
“
It was a question… how to connect this mass on the right hand with that on the left
”
(
To the Lighthouse
,
pt
I,
ch
9).
Slide121To fix the vision
Woolf
“
But if I had done that I should have escaped the appalling effort of saying what I meant. And to have got at what I meant I should have had to go back and back; to experiment with one thing and another; to try this sentence and that, referring each word to my vision
”
(Mr Bennett…),
Briscoe
“
She must try to get hold of something that evaded her… Get that and start afresh; get that and start afresh; she said desperately, pitching herself firmly again before her easel
”
(
To the Lighthouse
,
pt
III,
ch.
11)
Slide122Lily Briscoe, and Post-impressionism
“
She could have done it differently, of course: the colour could have been thinned and faded; the shapes etherealized… but then she did not see it like that. She saw the colour burning out on a framework of steel
”
(
To the Lighthouse
,
pt
I,
ch.
9).
“
…Colours, which in nature have almost always a certain vagueness and elusiveness, become so definite and clear to him [the painter], owing to their now necessary relation to other colours, that if he chooses to paint his vision he can state them positively and definitely
”
(Fry).
“
The
jacmanna
was bright violet; the wall staring white. She would not have considered it honest to tamper with the bright violet and the staring white, since she saw them like that…
”
(
To the L,
pt
I,
ch
4)
Slide123Lily Briscoe’s painting
“
What did she wish to indicate by
the triangular purple shape
,
“
just there
”
? [Mr Banks] asked.
It was Mrs. Ramsay reading to James, she said. She knew his objection — that no one could tell it for a human shape. But she had made no attempt at
likeness,
she said. For what reason had she introduced them then? he asked. Why indeed? … Mother and child then — objects of universal veneration, and in this case the mother was famous for her beauty — might be reduced, he pondered, to a purple shadow without irreverence.
But the picture was not of them, she said. Or, not in his sense. There were other senses too in which one might reverence them. By a shadow here and a light there, for instance. A mother and child might be reduced to a shadow without irreverence. A
light
here required a
shadow
there.
It was a question, she remembered, how to connect this
mass
on the right hand with that on the left. She might do it by bringing the line of the branch across so; or break the vacancy in the foreground by an
object (James perhaps) so
. But the danger was that by doing that the
unity
of the whole might be broken.
”
(
To the L,
pt
I,
ch
9)
Slide124V. Bell, Studland Beach (1914)
Slide125Representing Mrs
Ramsay
“
To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a
wedge-shaped core of darkness
, something invisible to others…This core of darkness could go anywhere, for no one saw it
”
(
To the L,
pt
I,
ch
11).
Slide126Revelation part III chapters 3 and 13
Slide127To the Lighthouse and Lily’s
picture
Woolf sees her novel like
“
two blocks joined by a corridor
”
.
Lily’s
picture
is
made of
two
masses
reunited
by a
central
line.
Both
the book and the
novel
do
not
aspire
to
similarity
or
realism
in reproduction («to create form; not to imitate life” Roger Frye) .Both the book and the
picture
are
means
to
mourn
, to
grieve
, to deal with the
loss
of Mrs Ramsay (Freud, “Mourning and melancholy”, 1917)
Slide128Virginia’s mourning
“
I used to think of father and mother daily; but writing
The Lighthouse
laid them in my mind. And now he comes back sometimes, but differently. I believe this to be true – that I was obsessed by them both, unhealthily; and writing of them was a
necessary act
”
. (
Diary
)
“
Lily squeezed her tubes again …It was strange how clearly she saw her [Mrs Ramsey], stepping with her usual quickness across fields, … among whose flowers, hyacinth or lilies, she vanished ... For days after she had heard of her death she had seen her thus… a shade across the fields.
The sight, the phrase, had its power to console
”
(
To the
Lighthouse
,
pt
III,
ch
7).
Slide129When was the postmodern?(Guggenheim
museum
, Bilbao)
The prefix "post", does not necessarily imply a new era. Rather, it could also indicate a reaction against modernism. Although many postmodern works have developed out of modernism, modernism is characterised by an epistemological dominant while postmodernism works are primarily concerned with questions of ontology
(
Brian McHale).
The label only acquired its present-day meaning in the 1960s and ’70s when some US critics and social theorists detected a shift in cultural sensibility away from modernism. Unlike modernism, the new avant-gardes were either pessimistic about the capacity of art to break with aesthetic norms or, in a more optimistic light, they considered that art need not exhaust itself in gestures of radical innovation: art could also be playful. While modernism had so far been regarded as the primary twentieth-century paradigm for artistic radicalism and excellence, the culture of the 1960s—American Pop Art; psychedelic culture; 1970s architecture—seemed to require a new descriptive model
.
Slide130When did it end?
After approximately fifty years of postmodern culture, one may wonder whether the movement has reached a state of exhaustion. Indeed major cultural periods—neo-classicism, romanticism—have seldom lasted more than five decades. The possible closure of postmodernism may be diagnosed based on the fact that, except for the rise of Internet technology, cultural innovations in the 1990s and 2000s have not enjoyed the aura of novelty of previous developments in the 1960s, ’70s or ’80s. One may therefore wonder whether cultural historians of the future will not set the end point for postmodernism in the early years of the twenty-first century. The 9/11 attacks on Manhattan and the Pentagon in 2001 or the death of Jacques Derrida (2004) might conceivably serve as final landmarks of the period. However, if postmodernism is ending, it is at this point still difficult To determine which Movement is likely to supersede it. No cultural current seems so far to have gained the prominence postmodernism acquired in the late 1970s.
Slide131Modernism/Postmodernism
Postmodernism encompasses theories of art, literature, culture, architecture. In its simplest terms, postmodernism consists of the period following high modernism and includes the many theories that date from that time, e.g., structuralism, semiotics, post-structuralism, deconstruction, and so forth.
The 1960s were the moment of the first flowering of postmodernist art. In painting, Pop Art became the first postmodernist avant-garde to enjoy wide-ranging success with painters such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Postmodernist architecture developed in the 1970s with artists and theoreticians such as Robert
Venturi
, anticipating the contribution of later artists such as Norman Foster and Frank O.
Gehry
. Musician John Cage and choreographer
Merce
Cunningham contributed to the development of postmodernist music and ballet.
Slide132Postmodern architecture
Slide133Technoculture, hyperreality, society of entertainment
Postmodernism is understood as a cultural period determined by a new stage of industrialism, called late capitalism or
postindustrialism
. The American neo-Marxist theoretician
Fredric Jameson called postmodernism the "cultural logic of late capitalism". "Late capitalism" implies that society has moved past the industrial age and into the information age.
The works of
Lyotard
, and
Baudrillard
, particularly, emphasized the role played in postmodern societies by new technologies of information—TV and computer culture.
Jean
Baudrillard
claimed postmodernity was defined by a shift into
hyperreality
. in which simulations have replaced the real. In postmodernity people are inundated with information, technology has become a central focus in many lives, and our understanding of the real is mediated by simulations of the real.
Postmodernity was redefined as being what French theoretician Guy
Debord
had called la
société
du spectacle.
A culture composed "of disparate fragmentary experiences and images that constantly bombard the individual in music, video, television, advertising and other forms of electronic media”(
Baudrillard
).
Slide134pop artPop art
is an art movement that emerged in the United Kingdom and the United States during the mid- to late-1950s. The movement presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular and mass culture, such as advertising, comic books and mundane mass-produced cultural objects. One of its aims is to use images of
popular
(as opposed to elitist) culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any culture, most often through the use of irony. It is also associated with the artists' use of mechanical means of reproduction or rendering techniques. In pop art, material is sometimes visually removed from its known context, isolated, or combined with unrelated material. Pop art often takes imagery that is currently in use in advertising. Product labeling and logos figure prominently in the imagery chosen by pop artists, like in the
Campbell's Soup Cans
, by Andy Warhol.
Slide135PhilosophyBy the late 1970s, French theoreticians—Jean-François
Lyotard
and Jean
Baudrillard
, particularly—became aware of the new American reflections on postmodernity. They made the link between American postmodernist theory and a pre-existing corpus of French theory of discourse called poststructuralism, whose chief proponents are
Baudrillard
and
Lyotard
themselves, as well as Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, Jacques
Lacan
, Louis Althusser, Gilles
Deleuze
, and Michel Foucault. The latter were philosophers, psychoanalysts, historians, and critics who, since the late 1960s, had developed Theories of Language and Culture under the influence of classic structuralism. They contributed to the postmodern constellation innovative theories on the workings of sign systems—theories often characterized by a distinct note of European pessimism, contrasting with the sometimes utopian accents of 1960s American postmodern avant-gardes
Slide136PoststructuralismPoststructuralism assumes, on the one hand, that we have no access to a world outside of language and, on the other hand, that linguistic systems are always unstable—in a state of conflict or flux. It follows from this that we have no perception of absolute moral or philosophical principles. Indeed, any philosophical or political argument claiming to have an absolute, totalizing value—religion, nationalism, but also values of the left like humanism or Marxism—finds itself deligitimised by the very fact that it must be expressed within a linguistic medium: the latter, because it is inherently unstable, does not provide an adequate support for a discourse of absolute truth. In other words, from a poststructuralist point-of-view, there is no grounding, no anchorage for absolute values in language—that is, no stable ground of Meaning anywhere, since language is all we have.
Slide137Lyotard (grands récits)
Totality, and stability, and order,
Lyotard
argues, are maintained in modern societies through the means of "grand narratives" or "master narratives," which are stories a culture tells itself about its practices and beliefs. A "grand narrative" in American culture might be the story that democracy is the most enlightened (rational) form of government, and that democracy can and will lead to universal human happiness. Every belief system or ideology has its grand narratives, according to
Lyotard
; for Marxism, for instance, the "grand narrative" is the idea that capitalism will collapse in on itself and a utopian socialist world will evolve.
Lyotard
argues that all aspects of modern societies, including science as the primary form of knowledge, depend on these grand narratives. Postmodernism then is the critique of grand narratives, the awareness that such narratives serve to mask the contradictions and instabilities that are inherent in any social organization or practice. Postmodernism, in rejecting grand narratives, favors "mini-narratives," stories that explain small practices, local events, rather than large-scale universal or global concepts. Postmodern "mini-narratives" are always situational, provisional, contingent, and temporary, making no claim to universality, truth, reason, or stability.
Slide138Jean Baudrillard (simulacra)
Another way of saying this, according to Jean
Baudrillard
, is that in postmodern society there are no originals, only copies--or what he calls "simulacra." You might think, for example, about painting or sculpture, where there is an original work (by Van Gogh, for instance), and there might also be thousands of copies, but the original is the one with the highest value (particularly monetary value). Contrast that with
cds
or music recordings, where there is no "original," as in painting--no recording that is hung on a wall, or kept in a vault; rather, there are only copies, by the millions, that are all the same, and all sold for (approximately) the same amount of money. Another version of
Baudrillard's
"simulacrum" would be the concept of virtual reality, a reality created by simulation, for which there is no original. This is particularly evident in computer games/simulations--think of Sim City, Sim Ant, etc.
Slide139Derrida (deconstruction)
In this pessimistic perspective, the very duty of philosophers consists in fostering the work of deligitimisation: they must point out that discourses developed in the name of philosophical absolutes are riddled with contradictions. Derrida calls this skeptical method of analysis
deconstruction
. The work of deconstruction consists in exposing the ineluctable contradictions present in any text because of the very nature of language itself.
Slide140Libertarianism-anarchismIt would, however, be mistaken to argue that all poststructuralist and postmodernist theoreticians view the advent of postmodernity in a pessimistic light. A few authors—Julia Kristeva, Gilles
Deleuze
, Felix
Guattari
, Judith Butler, Donna
Haraway
respond enthusiastically to the vision of a world deprived of absolute landmarks and subjected to the unstable Flux of experience.
Lyotard
too sometimes celebrates the heterogeneity of the postmodern world ("the infinity of heterogeneous finalities"). Thus, the politics of postmodernism resembles a new variety of libertarianism, even anarchism. Because of its libertarian dimension, postmodernism constitutes an important inspiration for feminist and postcolonial theories.
Slide141Cultural Theory and Criticism
By the mid-1980s, the field of postmodernism was enriched by cultural critics who appropriated postmodernist and poststructuralist Theory as a vehicle of Political empowerment. This led to important developments in feminist criticism and to considerable academic interest for the culture of minorities. We now subsume these critical currents under the terms Multiculturalism and
postcolonialism
. The development of Multiculturalist criticism implied a willingness to re-examine the literary canon—the set of texts that is regarded as valuable enough to be taught in the education system or supported by official institutions. The multicultural approach to literature is based on the idea, borrowed for instance from Michel Foucault, that literature is not a neutral discourse but a vehicle of ideology and power: it can reinforce relationships of domination or lead to political liberation. Multiculturalist criticism is closely associated with the postmodern interest for postcolonial literature—fiction from formerly colonized or emergent nations and for the works of minority writers.
Slide142Postmodernist artPostmodernism was indeed initially regarded as the common trait of many post-WWII avant-gardes. The term was used in this meaning in the 1960s and ’70s by
Ihab
Hassan and Leslie Fiedler in their reflections about contemporary developments in American culture. Hassan and Fiedler thought that the new avant-gardes displayed characteristics that differentiated it from previous experimental art, indeed from high modernism—the movement of artistic innovation that had dominated the first half of the twentieth century.
Slide143In Ihab Hassan's formulation postmodernism differs from modernism in several ways:
Modernism
Post-Modernism
Purpose
Play
Design
Chance
Hierarchy
Anarchy
Hypotactic
Paratactic
Totalization
Deconstruction
Presence
Absence
Root/Depth
Rhizome/Surface
Synthesis
Antithesis
Urbanism
Anarchy and fragmentation
Elitism
Anti-authoritarianism
Slide144LiteratureComparisons with modernist literature
Both modern and postmodern literatures represent a break from 19th century realism. In character development, both modern and postmodern literature explore subjectivism, turning from external reality to examine inner states of consciousness, in many cases drawing on modernist examples in the "stream of consciousness" styles of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, or explorative poems like
The Waste Land
by T. S. Eliot. In addition, both modern and postmodern literature explore fragmentariness in narrative- and character-construction.
The Waste Land
is often cited as a means of distinguishing modern and postmodern literature. The poem is fragmentary and employs pastiche like much postmodern literature, but the speaker in
The Waste Land
says, "these fragments I have shored against my ruins". Modernist literature sees fragmentation and extreme subjectivity as an existential crisis, or Freudian internal conflict, a problem that must be solved, and the artist is often cited as the one to solve it. Postmodernists, however, often demonstrate that this chaos is insurmountable; the artist is impotent, and the only recourse against "ruin" is to play within the chaos. Playfulness is present in many modernist works (Joyce's
Finnegans
Wake
or Virginia Woolf's
Orlando
, for example) and they may seem very similar to postmodern works, but with postmodernism playfulness becomes central and the actual achievement of order and meaning becomes unlikely.
Slide145Irony, playfulness, black humor Linda Hutcheon claimed postmodern fiction could be characterized by the ironic quote marks, that much of it can be taken as tongue-in-cheek. This irony, along with black humour and the general concept of "play" (related to Derrida's concept or the ideas advocated by Roland Barthes in
The Pleasure of the Text
) are among the most recognizable aspects of postmodernism. Though the idea of employing these in literature did not start with the postmodernists (the modernists were often playful and ironic), they became central features in many postmodern works. In fact, several novelists later to be labelled postmodern were first collectively labelled black humourists. It's common for postmodernists to treat serious subjects in a playful and humorous way.
Slide146IntertextualitySince postmodernism represents a decentered concept of the universe in which individual works are not isolated creations, much of the focus in the study of postmodern literature is on intertextuality: the relationship between one text (a novel for example) and another or one text within the interwoven fabric of literary history. Critics point to this as an indication of postmodernism’s lack of originality and reliance on clichés. Intertextuality in postmodern literature can be a reference or parallel to another literary work, an extended discussion of a work, or the adoption of a style. In postmodern literature this commonly manifests as references to fairy tales –or in references to popular genres such as sci-fi and detective fiction.
Slide147PasticheRelated to postmodern intertextuality, pastiche means to combine, or "paste" together, multiple elements. In Postmodernist literature this can be an homage to or a parody of past styles. It can be seen as a representation of the chaotic, pluralistic, or information-drenched aspects of postmodern society. It can be a combination of multiple genres to create a unique narrative or to comment on situations in postmodernity
Slide148MetafictionMetafiction is essentially writing about writing or "foregrounding the apparatus", as it's typical of deconstructionist approaches,
making the artificiality of art or the
fictionality
of fiction apparent to the reader and generally disregards the necessity for "
willful
suspension of disbelief".
(see Ian McEwan,
Atonement
)
Slide149FabulationFabulation is a term sometimes used interchangeably with metafiction and relates to pastiche and Magic Realism. It is a rejection of realism which embraces the notion that literature is a created work and not bound by notions of mimesis and verisimilitude. Thus,
fabulation
challenges some traditional notions of literature—the traditional structure of a novel or role of the narrator, for example—and integrates other traditional notions of storytelling, including fantastical elements, such as magic and myth, or elements from popular genres such as science fiction.
Slide150Historiographic metafiction Linda Hutcheon coined the term "historiographic metafiction" to refer to works that fictionalize actual historical events or figures; notable examples include
The General in His Labyrinth
by Gabriel
García
Márquez
(about
Simón
Bolívar),
Flaubert's Parrot
by Julian Barnes (about Gustave Flaubert), John
Fowles
deals similarly with the Victorian Period in
The French Lieutenant's Woman
.
Slide151Ian Russell McEwan
born in 1948, is an English novelist and screenwriter. In 2008,
The Times
featured him on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945" and
The Daily Telegraph
ranked him number 19 in its list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture. His father was a working-class Scotsman who had worked his way up through the army to the rank of major.
McEwan spent much of his childhood in east Asia, Germany, and North Africa, where his father was posted. His family returned to England when he was 12. He studied at the University of Sussex, where he received a degree in English literature in 1970; and the University of East Anglia, where he undertook a master's degree in literature (with the option to submit creative writing instead of a critical dissertation).
Slide152NOVELSNovelsThe Cement Garden
(1978)
The Comfort of Strangers
(1981)
The Child in Time
(1987)
The Innocent
(1990)
Black Dogs
(1992)
Enduring Love
(1997)
Amsterdam
(1998)
Atonement
(2001)
Saturday
(2005)
On Chesil Beach
(2007)
Solar
(2010)
Sweet Tooth
(2012)
The Children Act
(2014)
Nutshell
(2016)
Machines Like Me
(2019)
Slide153Short storiesFirst Love, Last Rites (1975) (Collection of short stories)In Between the Sheets
(1978) (Collection of short stories)
The Short Stories
(1995) (Collection of short stories)
My Purple Scented Novel
(2016 in
The New Yorker
2018 as a booklet commemorating McEwan's 70th birthday)
The Cockroach
(2019) (novella)
Slide154Screenplays Film Adaptations
The Ploughman's Lunch
(1983)
Soursweet
(1988)
The Good Son
(1993)
Last Day of Summer
(1984)
The Cement Garden
(1993)
The Comfort of Strangers
(1990)
The Innocent
(1993)
First Love, Last Rites
(1997)
Solid Geometry
(2002)
Enduring Love
(2004)
Atonement
(2007)
On Chesil Beach
(2017)
The Children Act
(2017)
The Child in Time
(2017)
Sweet Tooth
(in development)
Slide155Prizes and careerMcEwan has been nominated for the Man Booker Prize six times to date, winning the prize for
Amsterdam
in 1998. His other nominations were for
The Comfort of Strangers
(1981, shortlisted),
Black Dogs
(1992, shortlisted),
Atonement
(2001, shortlisted),
Saturday
(2005, longlisted), and
On Chesil Beach
(2007, shortlisted). McEwan also received nominations for the Man Booker International Prize in 2005 and 2007. He has been awarded dozens of minor prizes, fellowships and honors. In his early career, between 1975-1987 he was
nicknamed
'Ian Macabre‘ for the dark and unsettling quality of his writing, with
The Child in Time
, McEwan began to move towards the style that would see him reach a wider readership and gain significant critical acclaim. He has taken public position against Islamist fundamentalism, in support of Roberto Saviano, and against Brexit.
Slide156Atonement, novel 2001; movie 2007
Slide157Briony Tallis is a literary, self-important 13-year-old who lives in an English country estate in 1935. Her cousins, 15-year-old Lola Quincey and 9-year-old twins Jackson and
Pierrot
Quincey, are coming to stay with the
Tallises
because their parents are embroiled in a divorce. Meanwhile,
Briony’s
older sister Cecilia holds unresolved romantic feelings for Robbie Turner, the
Tallises
’ gardener (Robbie’s romantic feelings for Cecilia, meanwhile, are passionately resolved). Thanks to the
Tallises
’ funding, Robbie studies with Cecilia at Cambridge and plans to become a doctor. From a window of the estate,
Briony
witnesses the two of them accidentally break a family heirloom vase in front of a fountain. When Cecilia removes her clothes in front of Robbie to retrieve the shards from the fountain,
Briony
starts to think Robbie is a threat to her sister. Later, Robbie gives
Briony
a letter of apology to give to Cecilia, but accidentally hands her a vulgar draft instead.
Briony
reads the letter and becomes convinced Robbie is a menace. When Robbie realizes his error, he goes to Cecilia to apologize. This apology turns to passionate lovemaking in the family library.
Briony
enters the room and interrupts, further cementing her resentment and suspicion of Robbie.
The Story
Slide158The family gathers for a dinner to commemorate the visit of Leon, the oldest Tallis child. He has brought a friend, Paul Marshall, with him. Paul is the heir to a chocolate fortune. The twins leave the dinner table, and leave a letter behind explaining they have run away from the house because they miss their parents. The guests assemble search parties to look for the boys on the grounds.
Briony
, searching alone, finds Lola being raped in a remote part of the estate. The assailant runs away before
Briony
can identify him, but as she consoles Lola she convinces both Lola and herself that she saw Robbie commit the crime.
Briony
leads Lola back to the house and delivers her story to all the adults present. Policemen arrive and
Briony
testifies that she saw Robbie commit the crime. After many hours, Robbie returns to the house with the twins; he had been searching for them alone all night. When he gets back, he is taken into police custody.
Part Two resumes after Robbie has served three and a half years in prison for Lola’s assault. During that time, he has been in constant correspondence with Cecilia, even though she has not been allowed to visit him in person. She has cut ties with her family and started a career as a nurse. Cecilia’s latest letter informs Robbie that
Briony
has contacted her in the hopes of retracting the false testimony she made
years earlier.
The outbreak of World War II allows Robbie to end his sentence by enlisting in the army. He goes to fight in France. When Part Two begins, he must walk to the coast with his comrades Corporal Nettle and Corporal Mace in order to evacuate with the British forces. During this walk, the men behold disturbing carnage. Despite having a painful shrapnel wound, Robbie makes it to the coast and is evacuated.
Slide159Part Three focuses on Briony, who has foregone college to work as a nurse during the war. Work is demanding, and she is intimidated by her overseer, Nurse Drummond. An influx of injured men from the French evacuation arrives to the hospital, and the harrowing experience of treating them causes Briony
to mature. In her rare free time,
Briony
writes stories, which she submits to magazines unsuccessfully.
A letter from her father informs
Briony
that Paul and Lola are to be married. She attends their wedding and, afterwards, pays a visit to Cecilia. Unexpectedly, Robbie is present as well. The atmosphere is tense, but
Briony
agrees to take the steps necessary to alert her family and the relevant legal authorities of her change in testimony. Cecilia and Robbie see
Briony
off, and
Briony
understands that after she finishes the tasks she agreed to, she must begin an in-depth process of “atonement.”
The book’s epilogue reveals that this atonement process was to write the preceding novel itself.
Briony
, now 77, narrates in the first person. She has just been diagnosed with irreversible dementia. She describes going to a library to donate her correspondence with Corporal Nettle—used to write this book—and afterwards attends a birthday party thrown by her surviving relatives, including
Pierrot
and Leon. While
Briony
longs to publish her memoir, she cannot do so while Paul and Lola remain alive. They are now well-connected socialites and will doubtless sue her for libel.
Briony
admits that her novelization has changed some details—for example, Robbie and Cecilia both actually perished in the war, but her fiction allowed them to live—but she reflects that even though achieving atonement will be impossible for her, her attempt to do so is indispensable.
Slide160MetafictionUnreliability and uncertainty are at the centre of Atonement and request the reader to re-read the novel in light of its surprise ending, as the unreliable narrator Briony Tallis only at the end reveals the novel as being her adult attempt to atone for a childhood mistake.
Sebastian
Groes
(ed.),
Ian McEwan Contemporary Critical Perspectives
, London, Continuum, 2009 (Chapters 5, 6)
Slide161Ali Smith
Ali Smith
is a Scottish author, playwright, academic and journalist, born in 1962. She was a lecturer at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow until she retired after contracting chronic fatigue syndrome, to concentrate on writing books. Her works include collections of short stories, novels, plays and non fiction.
Slide162works
Non-fiction
Artful
(2012), shortlisted for the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize (2013).
Shire
(2013), with images by Sarah Wood: short stories and autobiographical writing. Full Circle Editions.
Plays
Stalemate
(1986), unpublished, produced at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe
The Dance
(1988), unpublished, produced at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe
Trace of Arc
(1989), produced at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival
Amazons
(1990), Cambridge Footlights
Comic
(1990), unpublished, produced at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe
The Seer
(2001)
Just
(2005)
Slide163Short Stories: Free Love and Other Stories (1995), awarded the Saltire First Book of the Year award and Scottish Arts Council Book Award.
Other Stories and Other Stories
(1999)
The Whole Story and Other Stories
(2003)
The First Person and Other Stories
(2008)
Public Library and Other Stories
(2015)
works
Slide164Novels:Like (1997)Hotel World (2001), awarded the Encore Award. Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker Prize
The Accidental
(2005), shortlisted for the 2005 Man Booker Prize, the Orange Prize for Fiction, and won the 2005 Whitbread Novel of the Year award.
Girl Meets Boy
(2007), winner of
Diva
magazine readers’ choice Book of the Year, Sundial Scottish Arts Council Novel of the Year.
[15]
There But For The
(2011), cited by the Guardian book review as one of the best novels of the year.
How to Be Both
(2014), shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize, winner of the 2015 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, and the Folio Prize, winner of the 2014 Goldsmiths Prize and of the Novel Award in the 2014 Costa Book Awards.
Autumn
(2016), shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize.
Winter
(2017)
Spring
(2019)
Summer
(2020)
Slide165The Accidental
The Accidental
(2005) follows a middle-class English family who are visited by an uninvited guest, Amber, while they are on holiday in a small village in Norfolk. Amber's arrival has a profound effect on all the family members. Eventually she is cast out the house by the mother, Eve. But the consequences of her appearance continue even after the family has returned home to London.
Slide166Plot and structure
The novel consists of three parts: "The Beginning," "Middle" and "The End." Each part contains four separate narrations, one focusing on each member of the Smart family: Eve, the mother, Michael, her husband, Astrid (12) and Magnus (17), two children of Eve’s from a previous marriage (to Adam
Berenski
). Opening and closing the novel, and between each part, we have four sections of first-person narration from ‘Alhambra’ – who we can assume is Amber, the Smarts' uninvited house-guest.
The novel opens with Alhambra telling us of her conception in ‘the town’s only cinema’. We then come to “The Beginning”, which consists of a third-person narration focused first on Astrid, then Magnus, then Michael, then finally Eve. Through each character we obtain a different view of how Amber came into their lives, and who they believed her to be, when she arrived unannounced and uninvited at their Norfolk holiday home, claiming her car had broken down.
The second first-person narration we have from Alhambra is altogether different from the first – here we are not offered her history, but rather a history of 20th century cinema. “The Middle” deals, again, with each of the family members’ experiences of Amber: “The Middle” ends with Eve throwing Amber out of their holiday home.
The third first-person narration from Alhambra follows, which is much the same as the second. We then have “The End”, which takes us to the Smart home once they return from holiday. The house has been emptied of all possessions – we must assume, as the family do, by Amber – leaving nothing but the answering machine, which contains messages forcing Magnus, Michael and Eve to face up to their past. The book then finishes with a short section from Alhambra, reinforcing her connection to the cinema.
Slide167style
This can be considered is a postmodern novel teeming with many of the artifices of postmodernist aesthetics. Playfulness, irony, pastiche, intertextuality. It raises questions about the nature of representation, and it is notable for its intergeneric and intermedial dialogue.
See R. Ciocca
, “
Cinematic narration and the mélange of genres in
The Accidental
by Ali Smith”, in
Forms of Migration. Migration of Forms
, C.
Corti
, M.
Trulli
, V.
Cavone
(Eds.), pp. 367-374, Bari,
Progedit
, 2009