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1. Introduction to 20th century British literature mind and world: trend from the objective to the subjective:
„everything is in the mind”,
only certainty: individual soul
examination topics and required reading at the back!!!!!
inward look: interest in unreality and dream, in psychology
modernism (first 2-3 decades of the 20th century) (Freud)
rejection of 19th century optimism in general
Modernism in the ARTS in general
in art: experimentalism, rejection of traditional forms
Impressionism (Manet)
Economic, social, intellectual changes: cubism, surrealism (Picasso, Gustave Klimt, Matisse)
the Victorian age: stabilizing era
expressionism: (Kandinsky)
„positivism” (materialism, rationalism) in philosophy, „realism” in
literature Arnold Schoenberg’s atonal music
epistemological certainty the modernist artist: elitist, alienated from society
Christian norms held up: God, Immortality, Duty
the „Second Industrial Revolution (1865-1900): art = salvation, a substitute of faith
industrial, economic and technological developments
escape from history
Mass production, mechanization of manufacture, employment for
increasing numbers
POETRY:
Long Depression (1873-1896)
* Rejection of prevalent Victorian values (also Romanticism)
Second World War
* social changes: widening gap between rich and poor, alienation, break-up L’Art pour L’art: / Aesthetic Movement at the turn of the century (Walter Pater,
of traditional ties, individualism, the loneliness of the crowds Oscar Wilde)
Art should be independent of all claptrap —should stand alone [...] and
* intellectual changes: appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with
. belief in progress, shattered emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism and the
rationalism questioned (Nietzsche, Kierkegaard) like (James McNeill Whistler1834-1903)
previous optimism questioned (Schopenhauer was labelled
"pessimistic") divorce between art and nature (Baudelaire)
Decadence (George Moore: Ode to a Dead Body)
evolution by undermined religious certainty (Darwin: On the Impressionism
Origin of Species: 1859)
Karl Marx: contradictions within the "capitalist" system.. Symbolism: (W. B. Yeats, French symbolists)
scepticism: no absolute certainty (Einstein’s theory of relativity, To name a thing is to do away with three quarters of your meaning
1916), questioning coherence and meaning (Nietzsche) (Mallarmé)
experience of time and space radically altered
Imagism: (Ezra Pound): An image is that which presents an emotional and
CHANGE is emphasized: Henri Bergson: existence = duration, to
intellectual complex in an instant of time (Ezra Pound)
exist = to change
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2. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) poems expressing his loss of religious faith:
The Impercipient
1. Life:
THAT from this bright believing band
Born in Dorset, love of country, architect, two unhappy marriages An outcast I should be,
14 novels (critical of Victorian society) That faiths by which my comrades stand
began to publish poetry in 1898 ((918 poems altogether) Seem fantasies to me,
And mirage-mists their Shining Land,
Is a drear destiny.
2. Age, background:
Why thus my soul should be consigned
awareness of modern problems: To infelicity,
Why always I must feel as blind
To sights my brethren see,
collapse of values, starting point: Darwin Why joys they've found I cannot find,
rise of agnosticism: (Thomas Henry) Huxley – Abides a mystery.
agnosticism = everything outside scientific reach is
Since heart of mine knows not that ease
unknowable (theology, God) Which they know; since it be
morality: has no basis That He who breathes All's Well to these
value of individual cannot be stated Breathes no All's Well to me,
My lack might move their sympathies
And Christian charity!

3. His philosophy and poetic style I am like a gazer who should mark
An inland company
a religious man deprived of belief Standing upfingered, with, "Hark! hark!
first he believes in the notion of progress: „evolutionary meliorism” The glorious distant sea!"
And feel, "Alas, 'tis but yon dark
after the World War: consciousness is an accident, universe: a machine And wind-swept pine to me!"
the only reality = change:
Yet I would bear my shortcomings
Then we looked closelier at Time, With meet tranquillity,
And saw his ghostly arms revolving But for the charge that blessed things
To sweep off woeful things with prime, I'd liefer have unbe.
Things sinister with things sublime
O, doth a bird deprived of wings
Alike dissolving (from ’Going and Staying’) Go earth-bound wilfully!
....
modern: questioning age-old conventions of poetry: Enough. As yet disquiet clings
About us. Rest shall we.
„anti-religous” poems, „anti-love” poems
intensely personal
A Drizzling Easter Morning’
expressionism: sacrifices beauty for the expressive function
And he is risen? Well, be it so. . . .
And still the pensive lands complain,
And dead men wait as long ago,
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As if, much doubting, they would know
What they are ransomed from, before expressionism: consonant clusters, alliterations, high-brow, latinized words
They pass again their sheltering door. express alienation and threat
bitter irony (see questions)
I stand amid them in the rain,
While blusters vex the yew and vane;
And on the road the weary wain
God for Hardy = „Immanent Will”
Plods forward, laden heavily; See parallel with his famous novel: Tess of the D’Urbervilles:
And toilers with their aches are fain „The President of the Immortals finished his sport with Tess.”
For endless rest—though risen is he.
Neutral Tones (1867)
deliberately breaks the conventions of Easter poems, ironical
speaker feels excluded from the joy of Easter We stood by a pont that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
„if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.”
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;
- They had fallen from an ash and were gray.
Hap (1866)1
Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles of years ago;
If but some vengeful god would call to me And some words played between us to and fro
From up the sky, and laugh: ’Thou suffering thing, On which lost the more by our love.
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting!’ The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strenght to die;
Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited; Like an ominous bird a-wing.
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I
Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed. And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,
But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain, And a pond edged with grayish leaves
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
- Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain, *famous poem about the loss of love
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. …
*traditional devices of a love poem reversed
Thes purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain. *hopelessness, expressed by gray, faded colours
* framed structure
Questions: * a personal experience becomes a symbol of universal truth

What kind of a „god” does the speaker desire for himself and why? (first two 1. Establish the dominant meter of the poem by indicating stressed and unstressed
stanzas) Why would he be „half-eased” by a vengeful, cruel god? syllables (do this at least for the first stanza).
2. How do we know that this text is a reversal of a love poem? How are the traditional
What is the real nature of the universe (the real nature of „god/s”) as described devices of a love poem reversed?
in the third stanza? (Why the capital letters?) 3. Characterize the relationship of this couple. What are some of the poetic figures
expressing that? What is the main source of the figures?
1
The text of these poems are reproduced in my seminar course kit as well.
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4. Characterize the structure of the poem. It helps to compare thoroughly the first and
last stanzas. What makes the last stanza special and different from all the rest? Think
about images and motifs that appear in both. What changes can you observe? (Look at
the tenses of the verbs for example.)

The Convergence of the Twain

I
biblical idea: a cosmic wedding/marriage/union at the end of time (the Lamb
[Christ] and his Bride [the church]; history has a purpose, an outcome
this hope is bitterly parodied: the cosmic consummation consists of the encounter
between ship and iceberg

Study Questions
Structurally, the poem can be divided into two parts. Can you identify them? (A
grammatical change, among other things, indicates the shift.)
What is described in the first section? What is described in the second section? What
does “she” refer to? (There is a clue later.)
Can you identify the historical event behind the poem?
The poem contains a narrative but it does not follow the chronological order. Can you
reconstruct the proper chronology/timing?
A contrast is set up in the first stanza which then dominates the poem. Point out the
contrasting images in stanzas 1 to 5.
Can you find the synonym of the expression “human vanity”?
What philosophical/theological idea is parodied in the second section? In other words:
a historical event is described, but extremely ironically. In what does the irony lie?
Find the phrase which has the same referent as “Immanent Will.”
Explain the title.
The irony is strenghtened by the use of a metaphor to describe the “august event.”
Consider the expressions. “prepared a mate”; “consummation.” Which area of life do
these images come from?
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It is indeed only those things which seem useless or very feeble that have any power
and all those htings that seem useful or strong (armies, architecture, reason) would
have been a little different if some mind long ago had not given itself to some emotion
3. William Butler Yeats (1865—1939) and shaped sounds or colours or forms or all of these, into a musical relation, that
Important role in the revival of Irish literature their emotion might live in other minds.
central theme: Ireland, her history, folklore and contemporary public life
* belief in a mythic unity of being (Romantics!)
Yeats and Endre Ady: similarities * importance of form:
* national identity: crucial „your words are as subtle, as complex, as full of mysterious life as the
*symbolism body of a …. woman”
* the great cataclisms of their time, esp.first world war: woman (dancer): embodiment of poetry/art
„things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” (The Second Coming)
„Minden egész eltörött” (Kocsiút az éjszakában) 3. Early poetry:
 Romantic:sweet melody, daydreaming
1. Life  Celtic twilight: vague atmosphere, dream,
triangle of three cities: Dublin-London-Sligo  landscape: vaporous, gray; half lights
Sligo: Celtic tradition The Lake Isle of Innisfree
London: cosmopolitan experience
Dublin: a Romantic, nationalistic shelter I will arise and go now,
And go to Innisfree,
important personalities in his life: And a small cabin build there,
Maud Gonne: frustrated love: unquenchable source for poetry Of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there,
Lady Augusta Gregory: friend A hive for the honey bee,
a writer, dramatist, has a collection of Irish folk-tales And live alone in the bee-loud glade

And I shall have some peace there,

2. symbolism:
For peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning
through the use of symbols poetry helps you discover an unseen, spiritual world To where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer,
The Symbolism of Poetry (important esssay) And noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings
a symbol =
a complex of metaphors/images, evoking/conjuring up some emotion I will arise and go now,
emotion: NOT a feeling, it is a power that moves For always night and day
I hear lake water lapping
a Romantic notion of art: With low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway
poets (and painters and musicians) are continually making and unmaking the
Or on the pavements gray,
world I hear it in the deep heart's core (from The Rose, 1893)
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on the one hand: eulogistic, ordinary people are transformed by their
written in London: sacrifice, on the other hand: an unnecessary tragedy?
wish to escape (influence of Romanticism and “Celtic twilight”)
directness of style and simplicity
but also subtle poetic devices (rhythm, sound symbolism) “The Second Coming”
complex symbolism:
nine: magic number, of birth, new life TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
honey: reference to Canaan; glade to Greek mythology The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
How do alliterations, metrical irregularities and other devices express Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
the direction of the poem towards a sense of calmness and peace? Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
4. Change in Yeats’ poetry: turbulent first decades of the 20 th century The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Abbey Theatre 1904
Yeats: manager, involved, more realism Surely some revelation is at hand;
style: „talk”, much more vulgar, ugly and harsh Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
later: symbolism returns transformed (intensive and shocking) The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
second decade of the century: turbulent Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
(Major Robert Gregory, husband shot in the war) A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
intensification of the independence movement A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
Easter Rising 1916 (“the Irish ’56”) That twenty centuries of stony sleep
revolution and civil war, declaration of the Irish Free State in 1921 Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
leaders = poets, teachers, dreamers, executed And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
’Easter 1916’
written after 1919
(last lines):
I write it out in a verse— the gyre: two whirling cones interpenetrating
MacDonagh and MacBride complementary opposites (like yin-yang)
And Connolly and Pearse narrowing VERSUS spreading movement
Now and in time to be, subjectivity VERSUS objectivity
Wherever green is worn, inward VERSUS outward movement
Are changed, changed utterly: both in history and in the individual
A terrible beauty is born.  general disintegration
 the rhyming falls apart, dissonances
elegiac feeling  iambic rhythm but full of irregular caesuras
antithetical: a debate with himself:
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 falcon –falconer: man disconnected from God And fastened to a dying animal
 ceremony of innocence: baptism It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
 beast to be born in Bethlehem = Christ’s birth: reversed!
IV
Once out of nature I shall never take
5. The aging Yeats My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
’Sailing to Byzantium’, ’Byzantium’, ’Among Schoolchildren’ Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
(In The Tower, 1928) To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
How to escape from the body? How to overcome the confines of matter)? To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Growing preoccupation for the aging Yeats Of what is past, or passing, or to come

Two different solutions: Study Questions

Sailing to Byzantium: a complete rejection of nature, body and matter 1. Establish the dominant meter of the poem by indicating stressed and
Byzanthium and Among Schoolchildren: synthesis between the spiritual and unstressed syllables (do this at least for the first stanza).
the physical/material 2. Contrasting stanzas 1-2 with 3-4. How would you describe the governing
tension or contrast of this poem. Find references to the first part of the poem in
“Sailing to Byzantium” the last two stanzas.
I 3. What kind of quest does the poet undertake in this poem? What does the
That is no country for old men. The young voyage symbolize?
In one another's arms, birds in the trees 4. Contrast the last two lines of stanza 1 with the previous lines. What exactly is
--Those dying generations--at their song, described in the first 6 lines? What are some of the poetic devices used?
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, 5. What is the dominant metaphor of stanza 2?
Fish, flesh, or fowl commend all summer long 6. What do you think fire can be a symbol for (stanza 3)?
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. 7. What kind of utterance is stanza 3?
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
8. What exactly does he want to become (in stanza 4) in ordet to defeat
Monuments of unaging intellect.
II mortality?
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless “Byzantium” and “Among Schoolchildren”:
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing great synthesis is achieved
For every tatter in its mortal dress, vision of unity: artist becomes one with the creative process, thus overcoming
Nor is there singing school but studying human limitations
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come (last stanza of Among Schoolchildren)
To the holy city of Byzantium. Labour is blossoming or dancing where
III The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
O sages standing in God's holy fire Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
As in the gold mosaic of a wall, Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre, O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
And be the singing-masters of my soul. Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
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O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
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(Murder in the Cathedral: written for Edinburgh church
festival, 1935)
4. T. S. Eliot (1888--1965)
 Nobel prize: 1948, died at the age of 77
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table 3. Critical ideas:
(’The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’)
1. What makes it “modernist”? a) the impersonality of poetry and the „objective correlative”
 ordinary language, conversational style * against the Romantic cult of personality and subjectivism:
 surprise, incongruance: a cold, medical image intruding (Wordsworth: poetry = spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”)
 sarcastic, urban irony
 juxtapose and fuse the opposite or the discordant the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will
 precise image grasping a mood be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more
perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are
its material.
2. Life:
 born in USA, St. Louis, Unitarian family it is not the ’greatness’, the intensity of the emotions, the components,
 Harvard: philosophy + doctoral studies but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak,
under which the fusion takes place, that counts.
 Paris - Sorbonne
 left the USA in 1914: settled in England (’Tradition and Individual Talent’, 1919)
 in London: Vivien Haywood, first wife – disastrous marriage
 second late marriage with secretary Valerie Fletcher b) The importance of the literary tradition
originality: not to be valued, poets are part of a living literary tradition
 Wasteland: 1922: recovering from a nervous breakdown
Ezra Pound’s editorial advice
 in London: book reviews, schoolteacher, worked for a bank (for several 4. The Wasteland (1922)
years)
Five chapters: I. The Burial of the Dead, II. A Game of Chess, III. The Fire
 editor of a newly founded quarterly: The Criterion (publishing Proust,
Sermon, IV. Death by Water, V. The Thunder Said
Gide, Thomas Mann) 1922-1939
The Waste Land: in first issue of Criterion
wasteland = modern world
 director of Faber and Faber:
futility, barrenness-infertility (physical and spiritual), alienation
aiding many young poets, writers (Pound, Auden, Joyce) principally expressed through the alienation of the sexes:
 in 1927: joined the Church of England: conversion to Christianity, My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me
important outcome of a long spiritual quest 'Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak
 declared himself “classical in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo- 'What are you thinking of? What thinking? What,
Catholic in religion.” 'I never know what you are thinking. Think.'
from A Game of Chess
 turn to theatre: rejects earlier elitism
structured by a spiritual quest for renewal or rebirth)
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a descent to the zero point (the lowest point) alienated, apathetic modern people: spiritual journey resisted
no rebirth in the Waste Land
first to the earth (The Burial of the Dead) Waste Landers are not aware of this dimension of life
descent under water = zero point not aware of sacred subtext
reached in The Fire Sermon and Death by Water
beginning of an ascent: What the Thunder Said O the moon shone bright on Mrs Porter
And on her daughter
structure borrowed from ancient and Christian mythology: They wash their feet in soda water
unless one first spiritually dies one cannot experience spiritual
rebirth and fulfillment prostitutes washing themselves after the visit – subtext: ancient spring rite
first: the worst has to be faced (about oneself and the world)
(From the Fire Sermon)
At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
cycle of nature provides the structure – death and new life Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
the passing from winter to spring, from darkness to dawn Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
many religions and rituals involve a sacrificial death Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
a) Greek, Phoenician, Egyptian dying god mythology: Attis, Adonis, Osiris Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
three-day ritual: a god associated with vegetation is usually put to death on The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
the first day, is buried, disappears and his absence is mourned on the Out of the window perilously spread
second, and risen on the third Her drying combinations touched by the sun's last rays,
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
b) the quest for the Holy Grail (cup with Christ’s blood) (Gawain, Perceval, Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.
Galahad) I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest—
old and ailing king = Fisher king = Adam (fallen man) I too awaited the expected guest.
(it can be dead king, wounded king, sick king or extremely old) He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
aim of quest: to restore the king and the land by finding the Grail A small house agent's clerk, with one bold stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
the hero who comes, the knight, the saviour – (= Orpheus and Christ) The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
hero and sick king in one (Christ = „Ecce homo” = Adam) The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
a mediator - so he is also a fisher Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
ancient symbol of the fish/fisher – who fishes humanity out of the chaotic Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence;
waters of death His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.
fertility comes from UNION with the divine life (And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
symbols: Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
union by eating (sacramental food symbolism) And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
union by sex/love (sexual symbolism) Bestows on final patronising kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit...
…...'
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The Thunder Said: still no rebirth, but a longing for it, symbolized by thirst
attention directed to great religious traditions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity)

5. Eliot’s late work

explicitly Christian, religious poems and plays

most famous theatrical play: Murder in the Cathedral

Four Quartets: mystical, meditative quest: how to find fulfillment by

union with the divine
formulated in Christian theological terms, but other religious
traditions also present

central themes:
1. incarnation – God became human
2. death and rebirth / wound and healing
humanity is so diseased that saving is painful, like an operation

The dove descending breaks the air

With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.

Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.
from Four Quartets
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5. Joseph Conrad and the beginnings of modernist prose effects of first world war: shatters belief in progress
 departure from chronological story-telling:
 history is not going anywhere (unlike traditional stories
1. Victorian age: and plots)
 narration ruled by memory and associations
 epistemological optimism =  fiction: often unresolved (no marriage, no death)
society and people are knowable, writers can grasp reality can be  time in the mind rather than time on the clock
grasped  memory – central structuring device
 narrative method: typically intrusive omniscient godlike narrator:
eminently reliable but: need for transcendence: ecstatic vision and order (or at least its memory)
imposed by myth, time, psychological patterns
2. Modernist agnosticism
 agnosticism and scepticism: no absolute certainty: “God is dead” escape from history through mythic vision: sense
 to believe in coherence = an act of faith »»» no God = no coherence of timeless and transcendental order
 authority and tradition – increasingly undermined great literature: freedom from
space and time (see also the motto
mind and world: of imagism!)
 heightened concern with individual, subjective consciousness
 attention is directed to processes in the mind
 inward look, interest in dreams
JOSEPH CONRAD (1857−1924) Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski
 no privileged point of view
 impressionistic style: recording impressions, not facts 4. His life
 born in Poland (now part of Ukraine)
No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation
 father Apollo: a revolutionary and a man of letters
of any given epoch of one's existence, --that which makes its  involvement in political conspiracy resulted in an exile in Russia
truth, its meaning--its subtle and penetrating essence. It is  parents die, uncle his guardian
impossible. We live, as we dream--alone. . . ."
 Marseilles: 20 years of sea career, In 1878: service on English ships
The mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is  naturalized British subject in 1886
in it, all the past as well as all the future.
 expedition into Africa: source for Heart of darkness
Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness
 This turned him to writing
It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate  first novel 1894 – altogether 31 novels
need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering,  isolated from principal writers or movements
and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the  friends: old-fashioned writers, no contact with modernists, unaware of
stars and the warmth of the sun. (Conrad: Lord Jim) Freud

3. World as chaos: 5. Heart of Darkness 1899!

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Plot: The narrator Marlow (an Englishman) recounts his adventure into the exposition of a method. It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic
Congo to a group of men aboard a ship (Nellie) anchored in the Thames sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky:
'Exterminate all the brutes!' The curious part was that he had apparently forgotten all about that
estuary. Marlow takes a foreign assignment as a ferry-boat captain, employed valuable postscriptum, because, later on, when he in a sense came to himself, he repeatedly entreated
by a Belgian trading company, employed to transport ivory down the Congo me to take good care of 'my pamphlet' (he called it), as it was sure to have in the future a good
river; and to return the mysterious Kurtz to civilization. influence upon his career. I had full information about all these things, and, besides, as it turned out, I
Kurtz: an ivory trader, initially high colonizing ideals but turning savage and was to have the care of his memory. I've done enough for it to give me the indisputable right to lay it,
if I choose, for an everlast- ing rest in the dust-bin of progress, amongst all the sweepings and,
amoral during his long stay in Africa figuratively speaking, all the dead cats of civilization. But then, you see, I can't choose. He won't be
forgotten. Whatever he was, he was not common. He had the power to charm or frighten rudimentary
interest in inner, spiritual realities: souls into an aggravated witch-dance in his honor; he could also fill the small souls of the pilgrims
Conrad and Freud pioneers in stressing the irrational elements in human with bitter misgivings:
behaviour …. To this day I am unable to say what was Kurtz's profession, whether he ever had any--which was
the greatest of his talents. I had taken him for a painter who wrote for the papers, or else for a
Marlow’s journey is symbolical/spiritual: recognition of an obscure link journalist who could paint --but even the cousin (who took snuff during the inter- view) could not tell
between himself and the manifestation of evil me what he had been--exactly. He was a universal genius-- ……………... Ultimately a journalist
anxious to know something of the fate of his 'dear colleague' turned up. This visitor informed me
darkness: personified by Kurtz, which every human being may be forced to Kurtz's proper sphere ought to have been politics 'on the popular side.' He had furry straight
eyebrows, bristly hair cropped short, an eye-glass on a broad ribbon, and, becoming expansive,
meet within himself
confessed his opinion that Kurtz really couldn't write a bit--'but heavens! how that man could talk! He
„Kurtz’s savage career is every man’s wish-fulfillment” Frederick R. Carl electrified large meetings. He had faith-- don't you see?--he had the faith. He could get himself to
believe anything--anything. He would have been a splendid leader of an extreme party.' 'What party?'
Marlow: a morally sensitive, naive Englishman with 19th century I asked. 'Any party,' answered the other. 'He was an--an--extremist.' Did I not think so? I assented.
certainties enters an avaricious, predatory, almost psychopatic world. Did I know, he asked, with a sudden flash of curiosity

„He matures. The 19th century becomes the 20th century.” F. R. Carl Narration:
first person narration, also: a story within a story –
(Marlow about Kurtz): there is a first narrator telling us how Marlow narrated his story to a group
The original Kurtz had been educated partly in England, and--as he was good enough to say himself-- of British listeners
his sympathies were in the right place. His mother was half-English, his father was half-French. All
Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz; and by-and-by I learned that, most appropriately, the
International Society for the Sup- pression of Savage Customs had intrusted him with the making of a realization: British imperialism is corrupt and brutal in practice
report, for its future guidance. And he had written it too. I've seen it. I've read it. It was eloquent,
vibrating with eloquence, but too high-strung, I think. Seventeen pages of close writing he had found Postcolonial critique:
time for! But this must have been before his--let us say--nerves, went wrong, and caused him to Chinua Achebe: "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's 'Heart of
preside at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites, which--as far as I reluctantly
Darkness'" Massachusetts Review. 18.
gathered from what I heard at various times--were offered up to him--do you understand?--to Mr.
Kurtz himself. But it was a beautiful piece of writing. The opening paragraph, however, in the light of full text at http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/wyrick/debclass/achcon.htm)
later information, strikes me now as ominous. He began with the argument that we whites, from the
point of development we had arrived at, 'must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of black people / Africa is used as a metaphor for the brutal and bestial in the
supernatural beings--we approach them with the might as of a deity,' and so on, and so on. 'By the human personality
simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,' &c., &c. From that
point he soared and took me with him. The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember,
you know. It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me very offensive generalizing
tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbounded power of eloquence --of words--of burning noble blacks for Conrad are muscular savages jumping around in frenzy
words. There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at
the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the
 14
6. Introduction to 20th century British drama drama: a forum for considering moral, social, political issues
G. B. Shaw, J. M. Synge, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, John Osborne (Widowers’ Houses: the abominable housing conditions in England;
Mrs Warren’s Profession: prostitution)

drama in the 19th century: heighten the awareness of the audience

two main trends: frivolous entertainment, a writer of comedies! his humour unmatched by his
book drama: not meant to be acted contemporaries

revival of drama at the beginning of 20th century: two directions: Mrs Warren’s Profession
1. Irish revival (renaissance) high poetic quality
2. reappearance of the drama of ideas (G. B. Shaw) not performed for 8 years (1894--1902), bad reputation

George Bernard Shaw (1856--1950) basic conflict between mother and daughter!
questionable financial foundations of mother’s wealth
Life: Mrs Warren: a prostitute (operated on the contintent, Vienna, Bp, English morality,
born in Ireland father: businessman, a drunkard more hypocritical)
mother: a professional singer, moved to London
Shaw in Dublin with father tension: Mrs W: uses corruption and at the same time wants to rise above it?
joined his mother at the age of twenty
dependant on his mum, bohemian, later: returns to the Fabian position: you you stay within the system and reform
later interested in politics: socialist ideas it gradually from within
Fabian Society: middle class organization
established in 1884 to promote the gradual spread serious moral concern
of socialism by peaceful means art is justified by affecting the morals of society
aim: shock the audience, make them uncomfortable, make them
married a fellow-Fabian: Charlotte Payne- think
Townshend
Later phase:
working: reviewer no longer believes world can be changed socially
salvation in the personal, biological sphere
drama criticism: literary realism!
main source: Ibsen influenced by Henri Bergson (Creative Evolution) Nietzsche, Hegel,
famous pamphlet: ’The Quintessence of Ibsenism’ Schopenhauer
the idealists: deceive themselves life itself is a mysterious, impersonal force = life force
the majority who don’t care: the philistines objective of this life force = greater and greater understanding of itself
the realists: who see through all this woman: special role – primary helper
Shaw’s aim in theatre: destroy illusions, ideals, masks of the life force, bearing children

plays exhibiting this philosophy: Man and Superman (parody of

parliamentary democracy, attack on Fabian socialism, plot:
 15
flows Don Giovanni, but the woman takes the initiative) Back aim: to promote Irish literature, music, art
to Methuselah lectures, concerts, lending libraries
Abbey Theatre: 1904
Saint Joan W. B. Yeats: his manager
long preface dramatists of the revival: Yeats, Sean O’Casey, J. M. Synge, Lady
20th century recast of St. Joan Gregory
unwomanly woman, masculinity overemphasized, modern
dialectical view of history: Joan = an agent of history/life force W. B. Yeats’ dramas
(progressive and regressive forces) all of them in verse, short one-act plays
early phase: longing desire, search for ideal beauty
not a tragedy: in the long run Joan will be justified
first play: Countess Cathleen
Countess offers her soul to save the poor
the revival of Irish drama
sacriligious act: but she will be admitted to
heaven
poetry brought back
= embodiment of self-sacrifice and beauty
influenced by Irish nationalism
poet in the drama: Aleel = biographical
turns to Irish past for writing material
Cathleen Ní Houlihan
Irish mythology, the legends of pre- and early Christian era
spirit of Ireland personified by an old woman who
one central hero: Cuchulain, defender of Ulster, known for
rouses her people to the national struggle
his terrifying battle frenzy
theme: rural life, peasantry second phase: international, interest in Japanese drama (Noh drama)
language of the peasants no setting, no expensive props, dependant on actor and words

In writing ’The Playboy of the Western World’ as in my

other plays, I have used on or two words only that I John Millington Synge
have not heard among the country people of Ireland, or
spoken in my own nursery …. The Playboy of the Western World: performed at the Abbey Theatre in 1907
in countries where the imagination of the people, and the language tragicomedy (3 acts) set in Michael James Flaherty’s public house on the west
they use, is rich and living, it is possible for a writer to be rich and coast of Ireland
copious in his words, and at the same time to give the reality, which is Language a dynamic force to transform life
the root of all poetry, in a comprehensive and natural form.
In Ireland .. .we have a popular imagination that is fiery, and insignificant Christy Mahon appears in the village, claiming he killed his own
magnificent, and tender; so that those of us who wish to write start father by driving a spade (’loy’) into his head
with a chance that is not given to writers in places where the celebration of the villagers
springtime of the local life has been forgotten, and the harvest is a
Bravery is a treasure in a lonesome place and a lad would kill his father,
memory only, and the straw has been turned into brick
I ’m thinking, would face a foxy divil with a pitchpike on the flags of hell.
from J. M. Synge’s Preface to The Playboy of the Western
World the pubkeeper’s daughter Pegeen falls in love with him

[National Literary Society (1892)] also several village women

 16
Christy: Well, it’s a clean bed and soft with it, and it’s great luck and
company I’ve won me in the end of time – two fine women fighting for 1950S: Angry young men = dominant literary force of the fifties
the like of me – till I’m thinking this night wasn’t I a foolish fellow not
to kill my father in the years gone by. disaffection with class system, pedigreed families, elitist universities, hypocrisy
In act 2 father turns up and destroys the illusion Christy created dislike for anything high brow and phoney
Old Mahon: Running wild, is it? If he seen a red petticoat coming
social background:
swinging over the hill, he’d be off to hide in the sticks, and you’d see
him shouting out his sheep’s eyes between the little twigs and the after WWII, creation of welfare state, living living standards for the poor had
leaves, and his two ears rising like a hare looking out through a gap. increased drastically, but power still in the hands of the elite
Girls, indeed!
uncertainty about traditional gender roles
villagers turn against him
he attempts to kill his father a second time to regain his popularity belligerent, dissatisfied working-class male protagonist
reception: nationalistic riots in Dublin expressed in novels: Kingsley Amis – Lucky Jim, John Wain: Hurry on Down;
depiction of Irish peasants Alan Sillitoe: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner
unsettling: subversion of accepted sexual roles
antithetical to the Abey Theatre’s mission ??? John Osborne (1929-1994): Look Back in Anger (1956)
realistic drama, no novelty in form, but in content
ambivalent reference to the poet-figure: Christy presented as a poet:
Pegeen: it’s the poets are your like – fine, fiery fellows with great rages The hero,
Jimmy Porter:
when their temper’s roused although the son of a worker,
education: » on the border of the middle class
also: truly ambiguous and ironic idea of heros and heroism upward mobility threatened by the more privileged
great talkers are synonymous with bravery and heroism Jimmy Porter continues to work in a street-market and vents his
rage on his middle-class wife and her middle-class friend.
fantasy and reality: What matters? Words or deeds?
use of imagination to escape from reality
villagers: unable to accept the fact that they have created the
fantasy and now it has become reality.

1930s: resurgence of poetic (religious) drama (in England)

T. S. Eliot: Murder in the Cathedral – 1935, commissioned for the Canterbury
festival
martyrdom of St. Thomas a Becket –
influence of Greek tragedy, medieval morality plays – liturgical
minor revival of religious plays followed

(1930s, 1940s, 1950s: absurd drama, see later lecture)

 17
7. Virginia Woolf: modernism, feminism, impressionism (1882—
1941) imaginary life of Shakespeare’s sister: emphasis on financial independence and
autonomous space
Life:
father: editor and critic Leslie Stephen, London 2.
Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we
educated at home in a highly intellectual environment generate this imponderable quality which is yet so invaluable, most
traumatic adolescence: death of mother when she was 13 quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. …..
half sister Stella two years later: breakdowns for the rest of her life Hence the enormous importance to a patriarch who has to conquer,
Father died 1904, favourite brother: two years later provoked an who has to rule, of feeling that great numbers of people, half the human
alarming collapse race indeed, are by nature inferior to himself. … Women have served
also possible sexual abuse by half brothers George and Gerald all these centuries as looking-glassess possessing the magic and
Cornvall: memories of a lighthouse delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
…. mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action. … if she
begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his
part of Bloomsbury Group with sister, painter Vanessa Bell (E. M.
fitness for life is diminished. How is he going to go on giving
Forster, biographer and essayist Lytton Stratchey, famous economist judgement, civilizing natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up
John Maynard Keynes) and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast
Here met Leonard Woolf, married: 1912 and at dinner at least twice the size he really is?
Hogarth Press: 1917
Lesbian relationship with Vita-Sackville West women as mirrors reflecting the figure of man at twice his natural size (hindering
1941: drowned herself the improvement of the situation of women)

Her last letter to her husband: 3.

But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the
I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible values which have been made by the other sex; naturally, this is so. Yet
times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and
doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You sport are ’important’; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes
have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been ’trivial’. … This is an insignificant book because it deals with the
happier 'til this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene in a battlefield is more
that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I important than a scene in a shop …
can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely
patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that — everybody knows it. If anybody could assumption of women’s „difference”
have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your concept of a female literary tradition
goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been
happier than we have been.
The weight, the pace, the stride of a man’s mind are too unlike her own
for her to lift anything substantial from him successfully.

Theories of maleness and femaleness (feminism) difference. cultural rather than biological
two books of feminist polemic: Room of One’s Own, Three Guineas need for „the study of the psychology of women by a woman”

Room of One’s Own

1. 4.
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well if one has not dined well. And there is the girl behind the counter too – I would as soon have her
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write true history as the hundred and fiftieth life of Napoleon or seventieth
fiction study of Keats … All these infinitely obscure lives remain to be
recorded
 18
his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no
exploration of the private sphere: „women have sat indoors all these millions of comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted
years, the very walls are permeated by their creative force” style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street
tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically
Mrs Dalloway (1925) one day of an average society lady: „Mrs Dalloway
arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope
said she would buy the flowers herself.” surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.
anticipating postmodern views
Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which
5. they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent
in each of us two powers reside, one male, one female; and in the man’s in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the
brain the man predominates over the woman, and in the woman’s brain consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully
the woman predominates over the man. The normal and comfortable in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought
state of being is when the two live in harmony together, spiritually small.
cooperating. Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that the great from the essay ’Modern Fiction’
mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is
fully fertilized and uses all its faculties. attention to details, nuances, processes rather than hard facts, descriptions
androgynous mind: modernist desire for totality, unity: „materialist” opposed to the „spiritual writer”: „the flickerings of that innermost flame
Tiresias in Eliot’s The Waste Land which flashes its messages through the brain”,
Orlando (1928): fantastical biography disregard of standard narrative conventions such as coherence, probability
in her age men are now writing only with the male side of their brains in her novels:
also political implications: connection between „pure, self-assertive virility” and narratives are uneventful, common place, hardly any plot (Mrs Dalloway: how a
fascism middle-aged housewife prepares for her evening party)
narrative filtered through, even dissolved in the characters’ consciousness
reflection in Mrs Dalloway (1925): intensely lyrical prose: abundant with auditive and visual impressions
the typical male associated with the aggressive aspects of
Western civilisation: power, dominance, colonisation (first world
war: To the Lighthouse, 1928) Mrs Dalloway 1925
also: with language, words and reason but lacking intuition and
sensitivity Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
questions for study: Identify some such male For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken
characters. How do they exhibit these characteristics? off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then,
Can you identify symbolical objects associated with thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if issued to
male self-assertion? What kind of human qualities are children on a beach.
contrasted with male aggression and who exhibit them? What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when,
with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had
burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air.
Literary impressionism, poetic style (the essay: ’Modern fiction’)
How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early
morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and
The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did,
or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to
incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off
themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh
differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but said, “Musing among the vegetables?”—was that it?—“I prefer men to
there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could cauliflowers”—was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one
write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon morning when she had gone out on to the terrace—Peter Walsh. He
 19
would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot
which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one
remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and,
when millions of things had utterly vanished—how strange it was!—a few (at the party towards the end)
sayings like this about cabbages.
Then (she had felt it only this morning) there was the terror; the overwhelming incapacity, one’s
parents giving it into one’s hands, this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there
narrative technique: free indirect discourse was in the depths of her heart an awful fear. Even now, quite often if Richard had not been there
reading the Times, so that she could crouch like a bird and gradually revive, send roaring up that
narrated in the third person singular, but author and character
immeasurable delight, rubbing stick to stick, one thing with another, she must have perished. But that
discourse merges (stream-of-consciousness technique) young man had killed himself.
dominated by the workings of the mind: memories
time-span: one day, but memories embrace a whole life: Somehow it was her disaster—her disgrace. It was her punishment to see sink and disappear here a
man, there a woman, in this profound darkness, and she forced to stand here in her evening dress.
especially one summer at Bourton
She had schemed; she had pilfered. She was never wholly admirable. She had wanted success. Lady
literary cubism: several perspectives in play Bexborough and the rest of it. And once she had walked on the terrace at Bourton.
no „reliable knowledge”: only impressions of the different
characters about each other …..
The clock began striking. The young man had killed himself; but she did not pity him; with the clock
She would not say of any one in the world now that they were
striking the hour, one, two, three, she did not pity him, with all this going on. There! the old lady had
this or were that.... she would not say of Peter, she would not
put out her light! the whole house was dark now with this going on, she repeated, and the words
say of herself, I am this, I am that
came to her, Fear no more the heat of the sun. She must go back to them. But what an extraordinary
night! She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he
important themes: had done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. He made
aging and death her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun. But she must go back. She must assemble. She must find
lives of men and women: different possibilities and perspectives Sally and Peter. And she came in from the little room.
alienation: especially male-female
contrasted with an idealized female-female relationship which
psychologically corresponds to pre-Odipal mother-daughter
relationship, and is looked for in the past
Mrs Dalloway: Clarissa and Sally Seton
in To the Lighthouse: Mrs Ramsay and Lily Briscoe
(males: always an intrusion)
sensitivity: to experience life to the full, the role of the artist
Septimus Warren Smith: a war veteran, shell shock,
psychologically unstable, commits suicide
parallels between Clarissa and Septimus!
question: Find parallels as you are reading the novel!
contrast: Clarissa is in love with civilization, refusing to
acknowledge the aggressive, masculine aspect of the
world
questions: Which objects might symbolize efficiency,
civilization? Which character admires civilization the
most? How does Septimus react to these aspects of the
world? How does he ultimately help Clarissa
experience life on a deeper level?
 20
James Joyce (1882-1941) the Holy Roman, Catholic and Apostolic Church:
exercising an even more disabling, because
Irish novelist, short story writer and poet unopposed authority
undisputed influence
fairly conventional in technique
Life: but also: uncertainties of human consciousness
mostly outside Ireland: still Dublin provides the setting for all his works free indirect discourse
born in middle class family in Dublin, to individualize a fictional portrait (Maria and the use of the word ’nice’)
first comfortable, well to do, but father squandered their money fragments of human experience: ambiguities, uncertainties
Catholic family of strong nationalist outlook
Jesuit boarding school, but had to leave it The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
Jesuit Belvedere College, Dublin (join the order) a biographical novel: the story of the personal development of the artist
University of Dublin, studying modern languages. interior monologue, interest in psychic reality
When mother was dying of cancer, he refused to kneel and pray focus on a single mind: Stephen Dedalus

In 1904 he met Nora Barnacle and on June the 16th (!): first date elevation of art as the supreme value: prototypical tale of the modernist artist
From 1904-1920 he and Nora lived in Trieste Zürich relying on the supreme principle of individualism:
from 1920-1941: in Paris and Zürich
two children: Giorgio and Lucia aim: to find his private vision never before known or imagined
difficulties with making money; Joyce teaching English in schools and also absolute, total honesty
privately And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong
financial difficulties ceased by the last 25 years of his life: Harriet Shaw mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too (Stephen in Portrait)
(English feminist and publisher) his patron
I fear more than that the chemical action which would be set up in my
after undergoing surgery for a perforated ulcer, he died soul by a false homage to a symbol behind which are massed twenty
the Irish government denied Nora permission to repatriate his remains centuries of authority and veneration

Dubliners (1914) ultimate value: freedom, liberation; isolated, lonely individual

short stories: about Dublin with clinical dispassion and realism „the enemy of Bright Young Rebels for more than a century had been
influenced by Ibsen other people” (Wayne Booth)
meanness, poverty, abuse, paralysis
It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories. I
representative modern moment: Stephen seeks to „learn in my own life and
seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish away from home and friends what the heart is and how it feels”
people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass.”
(letter to Grant Richards, 23 June 1906, SL 89-90) Theory of art: epiphany

attention on lower middle class to seek the spiritual in the invisible world but in the ordinary world
the ruling elite: the Protestant minority, Catholics – low-paid jobs analogue with the Eucharist:
especially women (Ireland = image as wronged woman)
the source of most misery: English domination, the Protestants and the artist: „a priest of the eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread
 21
of experience into the radiant body of everliving life” (Portrait) points of view and in as many styles, all apparently unknown or undiscovered by my fellow
tradesmen, that and the nature of the legend chosen would be enough to upset anyone's
epiphany: a sudden spiritual transformation in the course of which everyday mental balance.
(Letters, 24 June 1921)
realities become radiant and signficiant
* Literary „cubism”
Eighteen different perspectives: there are different ways of seeing
Ulysses 1922 chapter 17 (Ithaca): Bloom and Stephens heading for
home: apparently a narrative of severe objectivity
* Set in Dublin, events unfold over 24 hours, beginning on the morning of in reality a parody of scientific objectivity
Thursday 16th June 1904. The work has 18 chapters which „correspond” to
episodes in The Odyssey of Homer. What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning?
Starting united both at normal walking pace from Beresford place they followed in the order named
It is the epic of two races (Israel-Ireland) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well Lower and Middle Gardiner streets and Mountjoy square, west: then, at reduced pace, each bearing
as a little story of a day (life)... It is also a kind of encyclopaedia. My intention is not only to left, Gardiner's place by an inadvertence as far as the farther corner of Temple street: then, at
render the myth sub specie temporis nostri but also to allow each adventure (that is, every hour, reduced pace with interruptions of halt, bearing right, Temple street, north, as far as Hardwicke
every organ, every art being interconnected and interrelated in the somatic scheme of the whole) place. Approaching, disparate, at relaxed walking pace they crossed both the circus before George's
to condition and even to create its own technique. (James Joyce, Letters, 21st September 1920) church diametrically, the chord in any circle being less than the arc which it subtends.

* greatest totalizing effort of modernist literature: ([they were talking during the walk]
the individual = microcosm Did Bloom discover common factors of similarity between their respective like and unlike reactions
Three protagonists = story of the complete „man” to experience?
Stephen Dedalus: „the artist” = Ireland Both were sensitive to artistic impressions, musical in preference to plastic or pictorial. Both
Leopold Bloom: „everyman” = Israel (also outsider, alien) preferred a continental to an insular manner of life, a cisatlantic to a transatlantic place of
residence. Both indurated by early domestic training and an inherited tenacity of heterodox
Molly Bloom: the woman and wife and whore resistance professed their disbelief in many orthodox religious, national, social and ethical doctrines.
Both admitted the alternately stimulating and obtunding influence of heterosexual magnetism.
one day = a whole lifetime (beginning of chapter 17, Ithaca)
different organs = total man
different arts = sum total of human activity * language draws attention to itself: not a transparent medium
each event is related to typical events in human history, literature and style is all: style takes the place of moral attitude, of any normative view
myth: orchestration!
Structure:
* Two myths of Western culture (symbolic, esoteric level and realistic level):
Odyssey first 3 chapters: Stephen Dedalus - story of „Telemachus” longing for his
The Father and the Son (Christian) father)

archetypal story of wondering and homecoming second 3 chapters: Leopold Bloom, his wonderings in Dublin; the story of
In the climactic Circe chapter Bloom meets the drunken Stephen in a brothel, Odysseus” deprived of his wife and son, longing for home
they leave together, but Stephen finds himself in a street fight from which chapter 7 (Aeolus): newspaper-office scene: we see both protagonists
Bloom saves him and takes him home. As Bloom gazes on the unconscious
Stephen, he experiences a vision about his dead son, Rudy. following episodes: unconsciously chase each other; sometimes appearing
together for a moment
My head is full of pebbles and rubbish and broken matches and bits of glass picked up
'most everywhere. The task I set myself technically in writing a book from eighteen different
 22
chapter 14 (Oxen of the Sun) (the parody of 9 different prose styles): takes with a blue paper about a licence.
place in a hospital where both Bloom and Stephens et al. go visiting: Bloom is
[412]-- But do you know what a nation means? says John Wyse.
invited to their party
-- Yes, says Bloom.
chapter 15: (Circe), night town scene: their association reaches a climax (see -- What is it? says John Wyse.
-- A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same place.
above) -- By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if that's so I'm a nation for I'm living in the same
chapter 16—17: joint journey home place for the past five years.
So of course everyone had a laugh at Bloom and says he, trying to muck out of it:
chapter 18: Molly Bloom wakes up at dawn – stream of consciousness -- Or also living in different places.
-- That covers my case, says Joe.
-- What is your nation if I may ask, says the citizen.
CYCLOPS and its antecedents -- Ireland, says Bloom. I was born here. Ireland.
Bloom is going to a pub named Barney Kiernan's to meet a lawyer, Martin The citizen said nothing only cleared the spit out of his gullet and, gob, he spat a Red
bank oyster out of him right in the corner.
Cunningham and to discuss the affairs of the Dignam family. There was a -- After you with the push, Joe, says he, taking out his handkerchief to swab himself dry.
funeral earlier in the day, and Bloom wants to help the widow arrange affairs of
inheritance. question: What effect does such a narrative viewpoint possibly have on readers?

Homeric parallel: Odysseus’s adventures with the one-eyed giant 2) other „voice”: the first narration is interrupted by passages in
vastly different styles („interpolations”, „asides”)
Story: At the pub Bloom is provoked, insulted and chased out by an obnoxious caricatures of vastly different styles: the legal, the journalistic,
Irish nationalist, the Citizen the scientific, the biblical etc.
study of the development of racial (anti-semitic) prejudice The figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round tower was that of a
broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired freely freckled
one-eyed = narrow minded shaggybearded wide-mouthed largenosed longheaded deepvoiced barekneed
brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced sinewyarmed hero. From shoulder to shoulder he
The memory of the dead, says the citizen taking up his pintglass and glaring at Bloom.
measured several ells and his rocklike mountainous knees were covered, as was likewise
-- Ay, ay, says Joe.
-- You don't grasp my point, says Bloom. What I mean is...
the rest of his body wherever visible, with a strong growth of tawny prickly hair in hue and
-- Sinn Fein! says the citizen. Sinn fein amhain! The friends we love are by our side and the foes we toughness similar to the mountain gorse (Ulex Europeus). The widewinged nostrils, from
hate before us. which bristles of the same tawny hue projected, were of such capaciousness that within
their cavernous obscurity the field-lark might easily have lodged her nest. The eyes in
Narrative techniqe: two thoroughly unharmonious voices which a tear and a smile strove ever for the mastery were of the dimensions of a goodsized
1) a debt-collector, socially low: malevolent, satirical: keeping equal cauliflower. A powerful current of warm breath issued at regular intervals from the
profound cavity of his mouth while in rhythmic resonance the loud strong hale
distance
reverberations of his formidable heart thundered rumblingly causing the ground, the
[366] So we turned into Barney Kiernan's and there sure enough was the citizen up in the summit of the lofty tower and the still loftier walls of the cave to vibrate and tremble. …….
corner having a great confab with himself and that bloody mangy mongrel, Garryowen, From his girdle hung a row of seastones which dangled at every movement of his
and he waiting for what the sky would drop in the way of drink. portentous frame and on these were graven with rude yet striking art the tribal images of
There he is, says I, in his gloryhole, with his cruiskeen lawn and his load of papers, many Irish heroes and heroines of antiquity, Cuchulin, Conn of hundred battles, Niall of
working for the cause. nine hostages, Brian of Kincora, the Ardri Malachi, Art MacMurragh, Shane O'Neill,
The bloody mongrel let a grouse out of him would give you the creeps. Be a corporal Father John Murphy, Owen Roe, Patrick Sarsfield, Red Hugh O'Donnell
work of mercy if someone would take the life of that bloody dog. I'm told for a fact he ate
a good part of the breeches off a constabulary man in Santry that came round one time
Chapter 18 (Penelope)
 23
figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue
authorial presence apparently disappears: we enter into Molly’s mind which is and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and
like a flowing river (no punctuation marks, no selection, no comment) Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my
hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under
the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my
Molly is lying in bed thinking about her past and present, Bloom and her other
eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would Iyes to say yes my mountain flower and
lovers first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts
all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
8 gigantic, incomplete sentences (lurid pornographic details as well)
flow = flow of nature
flow of urine (water and blood)

Joyce’s presentation of „the eternal feminine” (8: laid on its side, the sign of
infinity),
Woman = great cycle of nature, a home to return to

last sentence: she is planning to give Bloom one more chance to reestablish full
sexual relations with her

chapter begins and ends with YES (a female word according to Joyce)
the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth
head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I
gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years
ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the
mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in
his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he
understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave
him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt
answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he
didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and
the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the
pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet
poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs
and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows
whoelse from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking
outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in
the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and
the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and
turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old
windows of the posadas 2 glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the
wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at
Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown
torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the
 24
8. Theatre of the Absurd time, how many days have passed etc.)
* even basic causality frequently breaks down. (Birthday P: We
"Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose.... Cut off from don’t know what Goldberg and McCann want from Stanley)
his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, * Meaningless plots, repetitive or nonsensical dialogue
man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, * dream-like, or even nightmare-like moods. (Estragon: several
useless" (Martin Esslin).
dreams; Birthday Party = a nightmare)
“Absurd Theatre can be seen as an attempt to restore the
importance of myth and ritual to our age, by making man Samuel Beckett: 1906-1989 (Nobel prize: 1969)
aware of the ultimate realities of his condition, by
instilling in him again the lost sense of cosmic wonder
and primeval anguish. The Absurd Theatre hopes to Life: Irish Protestant well-to-do family (born on a Good Friday, 13, Friday)
achieve this by shocking man out of an existence that has Relations with women: complex, often abortive
become trite, mechanical and complacent. It is felt that Postgraduate studies: in Paris (dissertation on Proust)
there is mystical experience in confronting the limits of influenced by Joyce
human condition.” (Jan Kulik)
After death of father: settled in Paris, active in French resistance
Earlier work: fiercely difficult
philosophical roots: existentialism
1930: Whoroscope, a verse monologue in the voice of René Descartes
emphasises action, freedom and decision as fundamental to human
1938: first novel: Murphy
existence
opposed to the rationalist tradition and to positivism.
After 1940: write about impotence and ignorance, essential experience of
indifferent, objective, "absurd" universe without a given meaning human life
abandon rhetoric and virtuosity
clean and analytical French, three novels:
"The Theatre of the Absurd”: European plays in the late 1940s, 1950s, and
Molly, Malone Dies and The Unnameable (1946-50)
1960s, also: a particular style of theatre
Waiting for Godot:
term coined by critic Martin Esslin,.
French premier: 1953, English: 1955
growing artistic „asceticism”
Departure from traditional theatrical conventions:
antecedents.
realistic characters:
Extension of the symbolist line in British poetic drama (from Yeats to E)
* characters appear as automatons speaking in clichés
Minimalism of his work: derive from Yeats Noh plays
* failing memories fail (in Godot they are not sure who Pozzo is
French existentialism (Sartre and Camus) and surrealism (André Breton)
when he turns up the second time)
* they hardly remember their past (in Godot: fragments "You ask me for my ideas on Waiting for Godot and my ideas on the theatre,"
about a warm summer day; Birthday P: Stanley has he wrote to Michel Polac on Godot's publication a year before it was
illogical, incoherent memories) produced. "I have no ideas on the theatre. I know nothing about it. I never go.
* recognition scenes, discursive thought ruled out That's reasonable. What is rather less so," he added, "is . . . to write a play,
and then to have no ideas on that either."
realistic situations:
* Time, place and identity: ambiguous and fluid (we don’t know "I know no more about this play than anyone who just reads it attentively,"
Beckett wrote. "I don't know what spirit I wrote it in. I know no more about
where Godot takes place; the characters are not sure about the the characters than what they say, what they do and what happens to them . . .
 25
everything I have been able to learn, I have shown. It's not a great deal. But
it's enough for me, quite enough. I'd go so far as to say that I would have been Birthday Party 1957
content with less . . . Estragon, Vladimir, Pozzo, Lucky, I have only been able
to know them a little, from far off, out of a need to understand them. They
owe you some explanations, perhaps. Let them unravel. Without me. Them genre: tragicomedy? „comedy of menace”
and Me, we're quits." conventional structure of Greek tragedy
"If by Godot I had meant God I would have said God, and not Godot." but: comic stock characters
[godillot = boot]
theme: how a helpless individual, a one time artist is depressed, brainwashed
theme: meaninglessness of human existence and subdued: by what / whom? (Question: What may the two intruders
What is the purpose of life: To grow old!!!! To pass the time symbolize?)
experience of time: circular, repetitive plot: unsociable boarding-house resident (Stanley) is terrorized by two sinister
represented by the structure: symmetrical men (Goldberg and McCann) who have come in search of him,
reduced to blind violence at a birthday party thrown for him by his landlady
Christian hope is parodied by the waiting in the play and taken away by them the next morning, incapable of speech or resistance
Was I sleeping while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow when I wake, or think I but ’reorientated’ and ’integrated’ in a respectable suit and white collar
do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon, my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I
waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably. But in
all that what truth will there be? (ESTRAGON, having struggled with his boots in vain, is dozing
fear hugely pervasive in Western culture:
off again. VLADIMIR looks at him.) He’ll know nothing. He’ll tell me about the blows he „somebody will come at get you”: the bogeyman story
received and I’ll give him a carrot. (Pause.) Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the a crime or misdeed in the past comes to haunt the present
hole, lingeringly, the grave-digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full
of our cries. (He listens.) But habit is a great deadener. (He looks again at Estragon.) At me too figure of Stanley: ambivalent, multpile layers of interpretation are possible:
someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep
on. (Pause.) I can’t go on! (Pause.) What have I said?
the persecuted victim of modern literature (Kafka: The Trial)
the individual (typical of the 20th century) alienated from the centres of
HAROLD PINTER (1930) power, authority
born in a lower middle class Jewish family in London
he offended against „Holy Authority”: individual is crushed below the
compared to Beckett his dramatic world is firmly grounded in contemporary weight of social expectations
society or simply: his crime is his being born at all

Pinter’s plays: interested in the nature of power, of power structures or: ust an undefined, existential angst (feeling of terror)
* dominance, control, exploitation, victimization the underlying fear a sensitive individual has of the outside world
* number of his figures: related to the arts (Stanley: a
concert pianist, victimized by society)
* the psychology of power

expressed by means of pinteresque dialogue:

everyday conversation, BUT a darker sense of a man’s
insecurity, aggressiveness
 26
9 British fiction after the War; postmodernism „Chinese mandarin face”
„Martian invader face”
British fiction in the 50s: return to realism and Englishness
traditional 19th themes: interest in social relations huge gap between private and public faces:
violent reaction against modernist technical innovations: in public hypocritical, also insincere in his love life,
„Writing is not a private game to be played at a private party.”
fiction becomes parochial: no traumatic experiences of totalitarianism or defeat Whatever passably decent treatment Margaret had had from
in war, continuities undisturbed him was the result of a temporary victory of fear over irritation,
and pity over boredom.”
conscious derivation from major novelist of the past borrowings and allusions
rebellion against the establishment and the traditional class system: „anger”
one possible interpretation:
examples:
Dixon’s advance to his own true self and his true feelings
Osborne: Look back in anger: class antagonism as major conflict
comic climax: his
(a play)
but paradoxically: his boldness is rewarded by winning Christine and a
Kingsley Amis: Lucky Jim: anger manifest in the relentless
better job
exposure of hypocrisy,
working-class novel: more committed and value-centred:
Philosophy of the novel? you simply need luck in life?
Allan Sillitoe The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner: a
„Nice things are nicer than nasty things.”
sense of „them” and „us”: „have”s and „have-nots”, the powerful
and the powerless
comic effects:
interest in moral issues
mostly linguistic:
Christian doctrine of human depravity :
heroes: imitating various styles
William Golding: Lord of the Flies (1954): the fragility of
human civilization
POSTMODERNISM
Anthony Burgess: Clockwork Orange (1962): men do evil
because the choose to, and enjoy doing it
1. „postmodernism” in general: the ’structure of feeling’ has changed (the
Kingsley Amis moral issues: a matter for debate and
80s)
speculation
rise of postmodern architecture in the seventies VERSUS high modernist
Kingsley Amis: Lucky Jim
buildings
instead of the inhuman, mathematically precise „high modernist” buildings
Amis: admittedly anti-modern, anti-experimental, anti-cosmopolitan (The
ornamented tower blocks
Movement)
imitation medieval squares and fishing villages,
renovated factories and warehouses and rehabilitated landscapes
traditionally English social comedy, 18th c. tradition, Fielding
„pluralistic” and „organic” strategies
university in a country town
urban development as a ’collage’ of highly differentiated spaces:
James/Jim Dixon, a young lecturer at the history department under Professor
„collage city, urban revitalization”
Welch
exposure of the hypocrisy of academic life, seen through the eyes of Dixon
widespread doubt in and questioning of the Enlightenment legacy:
Dixon: a double life, a double perspective symbolized by his „public” face and
his „private” faces
 27
 end of modernity = end of scientific positivism (end of Enlightenment
certitudes)
„pure reason”, „objectivity” is impossible, knowledge is human and
mediated (see Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,
1964)
 reason (intellectual know-how and its resultant technology) has failed to
deliver the good life
o the belief in progress shattered (Western culture no longer
privileged)
 questioning of metanarratives: deep aversion to universal emancipation
(metanarratives: broad interpretative schemas)
the political promise of the Enlightenment has failed
instead: there has to be a plurality of language games
 link between power and truth/knowledge (Michel Foucault):
there is no objectivity: no neutral reason: reason often becomes the
instrument for power,
institutions, organisations exercies control over language games,
closed systems of knowledge = „fascism in the head”
 concern with „otherness” (based on pluralism):
all groups have a right to speak for themselves (colonized people, blacks
and gays, women, religious groups etc.)
 the collapse of time horizons, of historical continuity:
no „centred self” but fragmented self (modernism: alienation)
experience = a series of pure and unrelated presents, preoccupation with
instantaneity
history plundered
 superficiality, loss of depth (no continuity of values and beliefs), images,
appearance, attachment to surfaces
 28
10. Poetry before and after the II. World War; Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes: neo-Romantic (poet = shaman)
Seamus Heaney
friend and translator of János Pilinszky. See his article on Pilinszky:
http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=6300
Introduction to mid 20th century literature and art husband of Sylvia Plath

central event: second world war problem/plight of modern man is that his rational and cognitive powers are
fascism and communism cultivated too exclusively;
social, economic and political turmoil How to turn instinctive, natural energies creative?
ANIMALS: manifestation of a life force, non-human, non-rational
reaction against high modernism
Hawk Roosting
the 1930s and 40s: artists sensitive to the problems of the time:
I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.
Inaction, no falsifying dream
Great Depression (1929) Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
the rise of Fascism Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.
the Spanish Civil War
The convenience of the high trees!
The air's buoyancy and the sun's ray
necessity of commitment: Are of advantage to me;
Virginia Woolf The Leaning Tower And the earth's face upward for my inspection.

My feet are locked upon the rough bark.

EITHER left wing sympathies (V. Woolf, W. H. Auden, C. D. Lewis)
It took the whole of Creation
OR: authoritarianism, conservativism (Roman Catholicism) To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot
Wystan Hugh Auden [with Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis and
Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly -
Louis MacNeice] New Country Poets)
I kill where I please because it is all mine.
interested in history, politics There is no sophistry in my body:
„I am your choice, your decision” (Spain, 1937): My manners are tearing off heads -
says „history” to people
The allotment of death.
belief in the ethical nature of poetry: to hold up human
For the one path of my flight is direct
values in the midst of inhumanity (paradox: „poetry makes Through the bones of the living.
nothing happens” YET: the poet should „persuade us to No arguments assert my right:
rejoice” and „In the desert of the heart / let the healing
The sun is behind me.
fountains start” (’In Memory of W. B. Yeats’)
Nothing has changed since I began.
My eye has permitted no change.
after the war in the 40s: a movement of new romantic poetry I am going to keep things like this.
main representative: Dylan Thomas (of Welsh origin)
interested in spirituality, religion, nature (not in politics PHILIP LARKIN (1928—1985)
and society)
the 1950s: Ted Hughes (1930—1998) and Philip Larkin (1928—1985) They fuck you up, your mum and dad. But they were fucked up in their turn
They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had
 29
And add some extra, just for you By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another's throats. * irony: each move towards a positive statement is cancelled
Man hands on misery to man. * Movement: not antiChristian: still a sense of their parents’ tradition
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
* „all negatives in poetry, once stated, become a special kind of poetic positive”
And don't have any kids yourself. (Barbara Everett)

Life: graduated at Oxford (English literature) Study Questions

a librarian, writer of novels, reviewer of poetry 1. Who is the speaker? What do we learn about him from the first stanza?
third volume of poetry (The Less Deceived, 1955): the preeminent poet of his 2. Characterize his attitude towards the church and what it represents as it is expressed in
generation the first two stanzas. How does the style express the attitude (note the syntax of the
sentences in stanza 1)
The Movement: a loose grouping of the 50s, based on key friendships (Larkin and Amis) 3. How many structural units can we divide this poem into?
* concerned with the Englishness of their work 4. What cultural process is described in stanzas 3-5? What are its steps? What is
* respect for clarity, intelligibility: hostile to modernist literature, doubt about Eliot symbolized by the invasion of the church by nature?
* bored by the political preoccupations of the forties, even more by the dispair of the 5. What are some of the ambivalences and ironies of the last two stanzas? How does irony
forties, not interested in suffering question even the positive statements?
* nine writers: Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, Donald Davie, John Holloway, Elizabeth
Jennings, Philip Larkin, John Wain, Thom Gunn, Iris Murdoch

High Windows
Church Going (in the volume: The Less Deceived 1955) When I see a couple of kids
* Movement identity characterized by an oscillation between agnosticism and a sensitivity And guess he's fucking her and she's
to the Christian tradition: Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise
* CG: articulates this tension in three steps! Composite tension made up of layers of
contrast (modern sporty cyclist VERSUS tradition; past and present, secularism and Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives--
religious belief, nature and culture Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Once I am sure there's nothing going on Like an outdated combine harvester,
I step inside, letting the door thud shut. And everyone young going down the long slide
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ; And thought, That'll be the life;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence, No God any more, or sweating in the dark
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence, About hell and that, or having to hide
(first stanza) What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
* initial personal experience broadened into sg. universal: the need for transcendence and Like free bloody birds. And immediately
the loss of an organized framework of connection with it
A serious house on serious earth it is, Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet, The sun-comprehending glass,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies. And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
And that much never can be obsolete Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
(last stanza)
 30
Study Questions
1. How old is the speaker? Main themes:
2. The basis of the poem is a comparison: a very common contrast or tension in human life 1) exploration of the deep (based on personal memories and the Irish heritage)
(society). What is it? 2) violence and social injustice
3. The poem is structured by two movements. Can you identify them? How does this affect 3) individualistic and meditative (his own poetry)
the meaning of the poem?
4. How is the speaker’s ambivalent attitude to modern emancipation expressed? 1.) first volumes: Death of a Naturalist, Door into the dark
5. What can the windows symbolize?
personal memories combined with images of Irish heritage and the landscape of Northern
* young lovers and older speaker: modernity, the break with religion and with tradition Ireland (’Digging,’ ’Bogland’)
described ambivalently (symbolic directions, down and up, indicate this)
* ’four letter word’ modernity VERSUS the exaltation of the close! Digging: explores the poet’s relationship with his family and national heritage
* window in French symbolism (Baudelaire, Mallarmé): necessity and absence of the digging up potatoes (father’s and grandfather’s work) is paralleled with
ideal, an ideal we imprint on the void sky by the intensity of our longing the poet’s „digging with his pen” into the national heritage
drawing on myth and unique aspects of Irish experience
fascination for the darkness and the depths (Door into the Dark)
Seamus Heaney 1939-213
communion with „the mystery”:
the dark, violent aspect of nature
Irish, Nobel Prize in 1995.
a „feared, maternal darkness
expressed through
Irish and not British: "Be advised, my passport's green / No glass of ours was ever raised /
To toast the Queen."
peering down wells
Only the very stupid or the very deprived can any longer help knowing that the documents of Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
civilization have been written in blood and tears, blood and tears no less real for being very To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
remote. And when this intellectual predisposition co-exists with the actualities of Ulster and Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
Israel and Bosnia and Rwanda and a host of other wounded spots on the face of the earth, the To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
inclination is not only not to credit human nature with much constructive potential but not to (’Personal Helicon’)
credit anything too positive in the work of art. (from Nobel Lecture, 1995) digging (’Digging’)
fishing (’The Casualty’)
but also: poetry "the ship and the anchor" of our spirit within an ocean of violent, divisive exhumation
world politics rescuing from oblivion
probing of secrecy and inwardness
Life: concern with the subaqueous and subterranean (’Bogland’, ’Punishment’)
born near Castledawson, County Derry (orthern Ireland)
grew up on his father's cattle farm.. the bog: central symbol
eldest in a Catholic family of nine children. the starting point for the exploration of the past
graduating from Queen's University, Belfast, in several works Heaney has returned to the "bog people", bodies
secondary school teacher, university lecturer (second place: Queen Univ. Belfast) preserved in the soil of Denmark and Ireland
guest professor at American universities,
Living in Dublin he divides his time between America and Ireland (because of its chemical composition, peat has a preserving effect,
popular public readings (pop-music fanaticism) mummifying corpses and ancient objects
a researcher of Old English: retranslated Beowulf; „I had been vaguely wishing to write a poem about bogland, chiefly
2004 EU Enlargement (a poem) because it is a landscape that has strange assuaging effect on me,
 31
one with associations reaching back into early childhood. We used
to hear about bog-butter, butter kept fresh for a great number of Only the waterlogged trunks
years under the peat. Then when I was at school the skeleton of an Of great firs, soft as pulp.
elk had been taken out of a bog nearb and a few of our neighbours Our pioneers keep striking
had got ther photographs in the paper, peering out across its Inwards and downwards,
antlers. So I began to get an idea of bog as the memory of the
landscape, or as a landscape that remembered everything that Every layer they strip
happened in and to it. In fact, if you go round the National Museum Seems camped on before.
in Dublin, you will realize that a great proportion of th most The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.
cherished material heritage of Ireland was „found in a bog’ (from The wet centre is bottomless.5
Feeling into Words)
2) violence (e. g. North, 1975)
bog = memory of the landscape social injustice and violent history of his country
congruence between bogland – a repository of the past and the internal world of the poet’s violence: also a permanent, mythic quality, as a constant of human history
preserving, shaping imagination, and, the national consciousness
bog = significant Irish myth (equivalent to the frontier and the West in American historical background: 1968-69: 'The Troubles'.
consciousness)
* sectarian violence in Ireland, addressing specific revenge killings
’Bogland’ 'Casualty': about Louis O’Neill, fisherman
'The Strand at Lough Beg': Heaney’s cousin
We have no prairies
* the Bog poems: based on the bodies recovered in the peat of Jutland
To slice a big sun at evening--
Everywhere the eye concedes to
'Punishment'
Encrouching horizon, 'The Tollund Man'
* religious prohibitions on sex that are the cause of children being killed or hidden away
Is wooed into the cyclops' eye 'Limbo' 'Bye Child'
Of a tarn.2 Our unfenced country
Is bog that keeps crusting public events, the statistics, intersect with the personal life of the poet
Between the sights of the sun.
in ’Punishment’:
They've taken the skeleton depicts a tribal revenge of adultery, but confesses his own powerlessness in front of
Of the Great Irish Elk ancient, violent forces.
Out of the peat3, set it up
An astounding crate full of air. 3) later works (Station Island, Sweeney Astray)
strong individualistic, meditative mood
Butter sunk under
More than a hundred years
Was recovered salty and white. Death of a Naturalist BY SEAMUS HEANEY
The ground itself is kind, black butter
All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Melting and opening underfoot, Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Missing its last definition Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
By millions of years. Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
They'll never dig coal here,4 Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
2
Mountain lake or pool; the mythical cyclops had only one eye. 5
3
Older people were afraid we might fall into the pools in the old workings (excavations for mining or quarrying)
Carbonized vegetable tissue in the ground so they put it about (and we believed them) that there was no bottom in the bog-holes. Little did they – or I –
4
Because the ground is too wet for it to form. know that I would filch it for the last line of a book” (Heaney, Feeling into Words)
 32
There were dragonflies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring
I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied
Specks to range on window sills at home,
On shelves at school, and wait and watch until
The fattening dots burst, into nimble
Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how
The daddy frog was called a bullfrog
And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too
For they were yellow in the sun and brown
In rain.

Then one hot day when fields were rank

With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.
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11. POSTMODERN LITERARY THEORY, POSTMODERN FICTION „a large number of fragmentary possible worlds coexist in an
SALMAN RUSHDIE, KAZUO ISHIGURO impossible space” (McHale)
poliphony (Mihail Bakhtin)
postmodern turn: in France and the United States rather than in England
detective story: modernism
1. Theory science fiction: postmodernism

(Ihab Hassan’s table, 1985) if reality is constructed (humanly, socially constructed):

there is any number of possible worlds
modernism postmodernism John Fowles: The French Lieutenant’s Woman:
metaphysics, transcendence irony, immanence three alternative endings
self-consuming text, self-erasure (Derrida),
to impose order no centre, no totality, fragments
artist: dead serious self-irony and play Magic realism: the fantastic (= coined by German art critic Franz Roh in
elitism democratization of taste 1925)
aesthetic craftsmanship television, internet, pop culture* ontological landscapes: double (sacred-profane)
single (hardscore positivism)
creation/totalization/synthesis creation/deconstruction/antithesis plural (postmodern: anarchic landscape of worlds)
(centring dispersal)
reality between fact (or history) and fiction: blurred
genre/boundary text/intertext the real is combined with the inexplicable and the fantastic (and sometimes
interpretation/reading against interpretation/misreading with the Gothic)
art object/finished work process/performance/happening postmodernists fictionalize history: is history itself a form of fiction?

* Television is the first cultural medium in the whole of history to present the artistic Salman Rushdie: Midnight Children (1981)
achievements of the past as a stitched together collage of equi-important and simultaneously Gabriel García Márquez: Cien aňos de soledad (1967)
existing phenomena, largely divorced from geography and material history and transported to the Mihail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita (1966)
living rooms and studios of the West in a more or less uninterrupted flow. It posits a viewer,
furthermore, who shares the medium’s own perception of history as an endless reserve of equal
events. It is hardly surprising that the artist’s relation to history (the peculiar historicism we have rhetoric of contrastive banality:
already noted) has shifted, that in the era of mass television there has emerged an attachment to
surfaces rather than roots, to collage rather than in-depth work, to super-imposed quoted images Midnight’s Children: historical fantasy: integrating the historical and the
rather than worked surfaces, to a collapsed sense of time and space rather than solidly achieved fantastic
cultural artefact. And these are all vital aspects of artistic practice in the post-modern condition.
(From David Harvey: Condition of Postmodernity)
official version of history VERSUS alternative, secret history

2. Postmodernist fiction (Brian McHale, 1987) Indian history linked to the fates of children born at the same time (midnight,
August 15, 1947: the day of Indian independence)
i. „Real, compared to what?”
narrator: Saleem Sinai
modernism: multiple perspectives on the same reality the children: microcosms of the Indian macrocosm, paralleling or mirroring
postmodern novels: a plurality of worlds (is there a single reality?) public history in their private histories
 34
ii. Literature in English
the inward look: journey into the past:
cosmopolitan concept of literature written in English) Steven’s motoring trip = symbol for a trip into his (and the national) past
the dominant role of the West, esp. orientalism questioned
first person narration: combination of reminiscences, flashbacks,
(Colin MacCabe, 1981): „the multiplication of Englishes straightforward narrative
throughout the world and their attendant literatures”; the impossibility of reconciling professional duties with private (emotional)
„English literature is dead – long live writing in English” life
two irrevocable choices: rejected his housekeeper’s (Miss Kenton’s) approach
examples for literature in English: uncritical support to Lord Darlington’s sentimental attempt to
Salman Rushdie: Midnight’s Children appease the Nazis
Kazuo Ishiguro: Remains of the Day contradictions: both proud and ashamed of LD
makes much of the fact that by serving
Kazuo Ishiguro (1954) Darlington he participated in the making of
history
born in Nagasaki, Japan, family moved to England in 1960. postmodern perspective: tension between the grand narratives of the war and
lives in London, British wife the minor subjective narrative of Stevens (macronarratives and the
neither English, nor Japanese: an outsider micronarrative)

Novels: (the butler’s) style: again subtle ambiguity

studies of character, of human failings dignified, aesthetic, civil and fluent or is it the parody of that?
great empathy, subtle depiction of the inner world of the protagonists
combined with subtle irony But I see I am becoming preoccupied with these memories and this is
first person narratives which recollect emotional extremes and traumatic events perhaps a little foolish. This present trip represents, after all, a rare
ending on a note of melancholy resignation: characters facing and accepting opportunity for me to savour to the full the many splendours of the
their past English contryside, and I know I shall greatly regret it later if I allow
myself to be unduly diverted.
Remains of the Day 1989
Ishiguro: to examine the extent to which such a style „is indeed dignified and
to what an extent it is a form of cowardice”
the first person narration of Stevens, Lord Darlington’s butler

social, cultural changes

disappearance of old, aristocratic values: civility, dignity, professional
perfection
commercialization of the values of the past: „the head servant is part of the
package”
(new owner, Farraday): „You are the real thing aren’t you? That’s what I
wanted, isn’t that what I have?”
postimperial transformations: the leveling of social hierarchy, the loss of
imperial identity, movement from Empire to globalized web)