English Literature - PowerPoint Presentation

English Literature in the second half of the twentieth century

„…the impotence of capitalist government in the face of Fascism combined with economic dislocation to turn the majority of young intellectuals (and not only intellectuals) in the 1930s to the political left. The 1930s were the so-called red decade, because only the left seemed to offer any solution in various forms of socialism, communism, and left liberalism.” Norton Anthology, 1831

„The outbreak of World War II in September 1939—following shortly on Hitler’s pact with the Soviet Union, which so shocked and disillusioned many of the young left-wing writers that they subsequently moved politically to the center—marked the sudden end of the red decade.” Norton Anthology, 1831

„One could not have a better example of the moral and emotional shallowness of our time, than the fact that we are now all more or less pro Stalin. This disgusting murderer is temporarily on our side, and so the purges, etc., are suddenly forgotten.” –George Orwell, 3 July 1941

„Where World War I was a great engine of modernism, endorsing the chaos of shattered belief, the fragility of language and of the human subject, the Spanish Civil War and then World War II confirmed the English novel in its return to registering the social scene and the historical event.” Norton Anthology, 1840

Pablo Picasso Guernica

„…the younger writers…were less technically inventive than the first-generation modernists…” Norton Anthology, 1831

„In winning a war, Great Britain lost an empire.” Norton Anthology, 1832

„Postwar decolonization coincided with and encouraged the efflorescence of post-colonial writing that would bring about the most dramatic geographic shift in literature in English since its inception.” Norton Anthology, 1832

„…migrants and refugees from these and other nations continued to arrive, transforming Britain into an increasingly multiracial society and infusing energy into British arts and literature.” Norton Anthology, 1832

„The friction between color-blind and ethnically specific notions of Englishness prompted a large-scale and ongoing rethinking of national identity in Britain.” Norton Anthology, 1832

„And even within the greatest modernist fiction the worldly and the material, political and moral questions never dried up…so it was not odd for…left-leaning contemporaries…such as…George Orwell, to engage with the human condition in ways that Dickens or Balzac…would have recognized as not all that distant from their own spirit.” Norton Anthology, 1840

Eric Arthur Blair 1903-1950 (George Orwell)

Dystopia vs. Utopia (Thomas More and Eutopia 1516) no place or a good place? Dystopia—John Stuart Mill with regard to government’s Irish land policy in 1868, cacotopia , Jeremy Bentham in 1818 (Burgess suggested this was a better description for 1984 because it sounds worse)

Other dystopian novels:Evegeny Zamyatin „We” 1924Aldous Huxley „ Brave New World” 1932 Arthur Koestler „ Darkness at noon ” 1940

“Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects.” Orwell, Why I Write

The Olivier Award-nominated play will open in New York in June.The team behind the production said: "There is no piece of literature or art more relevant today than Orwell's seminal work, and the producers are excited to be bringing it to Broadway.„ BBC, 3 February 2017http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-38854721