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UNITS 5 & 6: ROMANTICISM AND REALISM
Time: 1800s Place: Europe Literary significance:
- Romantics: Broke away with the restrained styles and ideas favoured by the leaders of the 18th^ century Enlighment. Exalted important values: love for nature and simple life, individual daring, innovation and the free expression of feelings. (Still important)
- Realists: Rebelled against Romanticism in the 19th Believed that Romanticism emotionalism was no longer an effective tool to describe or reform the industrial society. Had realistic values like the emphasis on factual observation of ordinary people’s life. (Still important)
A Revolt against Reason?
18 th^ c. was the Age of Reason, the Romantic era is thought of as a result against reason. Romantics did not reject reason; they elevate emotion and imagination to a new status. Thinkers of the Romantic era: Arthur Shopenhauer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Soren Kierkegaard and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Shock Waves of Revolution
Europe, 1775: News of revolts in American colonies arousing fears and hopes.
European monarchs and aristocrats were scared by the American Revolution,
the middle class and peasantry were inspired by American’s struggle for liberty.
1789 French Revolution.
European and American artist and intellectual visited France to see the new
regime.
Thomas Paine (powerful American propagandist) and Simon Bolivar
(revolutionary against the Spanish empire in South America) were inspired by it.
The Reign of terror and the Reign of Napoleon
1793 Revolutionaries execute King Louis XVI, the French Revolution becomes the Reign of Terror. Even Robespierre was executed. Until 1799 when Napoleon Bonaparte staged a coup, the French Republic was in a state of confusion. Napoleon became a dictator of continental Europe using aggressive military tactics. 1815 Napoleon Is defeated in the Battle of Waterloo by a coalition of British, Prussian and Russian forces. Writers, artists and thinkers reacted to these event in different ways.
Romanticism
Prizes the free expression of the individual’s thoughts and feelings. Values: love of nature, respect for ordinary people and interest in fantasy. Reverence for nature a reaction to the increasingly urban and industrial character of Europe. Poets like Wordswort declared themselves free to write about everyday people and events in the language of everyday speech. Inspiration in exotic settings, medieval ballads, supernatural myths and courtly tales. Poets like Victor Hugo, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire experimented with rhyme, meter and themes.
Progress, Pollution and Poverty
The Industrial Revolution gave rise to a prosperous middle class but poverty
raged amid the growing lower class.
Explosion of scientific knowledge many technological achievements: steam
engine, electric dynamo, steel, telegraph, electric light, repeating rifle.
Building of factories, steamboats and railroads.
Farm workers moved to the cities but lived in slums. (poor areas)
Charles Darwin created a theory of evolution
Marx and Engels ideas established Communist systems around the world.
European Imperialism increased domination in other countries.
The Realist Creed
Reaction against Romanticism in half of 19th^ c.
To console himself for family lose he wandered alone in the country collecting impressions that would inspire his poetry. Graduated from Cambridge but with little interest in careers. He was Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s friend and collaborated on Lyrical Ballads (1798) volume that ushered in English Romanticism. Chose the Petrarchan sonnet form to express social themes. He was regarded as the foremost living English poet. In 1843 he was name Poet Laureate of Great Britain. The Prelude is his masterpiece (1850).
THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US
This relatively simple poem angrily states that human beings are too preoccupied with the material (“The world...getting and spending”) and have lost touch with the spiritual and with nature. He says that even when the sea “bares her bosom to the moon” and the winds howl, humanity is still out of tune, and looks on uncaringly at the spectacle of the storm. Another interpretation is that people are not realizing what is happening – “like sleeping flowers” (vv.7) till they will complain about their numbness - “The winds that will be howling at all hours” (vv.6) -. In the sestet, the speaker dramatically proposes an impossible personal solution to his problem—he wishes he could have been raised as a pagan, so he could still see ancient gods in the actions of nature and thereby gain spiritual solace. By the end of the poem William sarcastically and sadistically daydreams of “Proteus rising from the sea” and “old Triton blow his wreathèd horn”: another reference to natural disasters that are going to establish nature’s power over human greed. His thunderous “Great God!” indicates the extremity of his wish—in Christian England, one did not often wish to be a pagan.. On the whole, this sonnet offers an angry summation of the familiar Wordsworthian theme of communion with nature, and states precisely how far the early nineteenth century was from living out the Wordsworthian ideal.
George Orwell (1903-1950)
Born in India as the son of a colonial civil servant, at the age of one his mother and him moved back to England. He won a scholarship to Eton but ended up joining the police in Burma. However, he grew dissatisfied and he resigned. He decided to become a writer and to live among the poor. He journeyed to Paris and during a short time he worked as a teacher in a private school. Afterwards he got a part time job in a second hand bookshop. Published: -1933 published Down and Out -1934 Burmese Days -1935 A Clergyman’s Daughter -1936 Keep the Aspidistra Flying and The Road to Wigan Pier. 1936 voluntaries to participate in the Spanish Civil War as a Republican. In 1938 published A Homage to Catalonia and suffered tuberculosis. He spent several years in Morocco and published Coming Up for Air, Animal Farm and 1984 while working at BBC.
Animal Farm
Satirical allegory of the 1917 Russian Revolution, is applicable to the latest rebellion against dictators around the world. He tried to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole. Great commercial success partly because international relations were transformed as the wartime alliance gave away to the Cold War. Demonstrates how language can be used to control minds. Orwell’s subtitle is “A Fairy Story”, but there is no stated moral at the end. The names and the descriptions fit characters in real life. Chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels (between 1923 and 2005).
ANIMAL FARM
- Old Major, the prize boar, calls a secret meeting of all the farm animals on Manor Farm. He states that a rebellion against their human master, Mr Jones, will one day come.
- A cow starts the rebellion by walking into the store-shed. The animals end up chasing Mr Jones off the farm.
- Now they are free, the animals all agree on the Seven Commandments that they will live by. The farm is renamed 'Animal Farm'. There is hope for a better future.
- The pigs start to order the other animals around and take more food than they should.
- The animals bravely fight off a human attempt to retake the farm, this becomes known as 'The Battle of the Cowshed'.
Adopted by modernists to disrupt narrative realism. Fiction, represents the flow of a character’s thoughts, perceptions and feelings. Subjectivity of viewpoint in terms of both subject matter and its formal treatment. The style has been linked with the rise of Psychology as a science. The term was coined by the philosopher William James. Technique that allowed to explore the idea of feminine prose too Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Leaps out traditional narrative techniques, goes to the character’s mind directly. Follows loose, metaphorical associations of words and phrases. Omits articles and inserts ungrammatical constructions.
A warring world
Ideas shaped literature and events. WWI devastating and deep effects, is seen in the works of poets like Wilfred Owen who served in the forces. The Lost Generation appeared in the U.S. with anti-war writers ( T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald ). The world is portrayed beneath the superficial and ephemeral. Their works anticipated the Great Depression. 1920s African-American authors depicted their authentic lives contrasted with the popular portrayal of the black Jazz Age. Popular fiction and the detective genre flourished (Agatha Christie, Philip Marlowe).
Wilfred Owen
Poets wrote their experiences of combat in WWI (Like Siegfried Sassoon or Rupert Brooke). Worked as a tutor in France before joining the army. First his work was patriotic (Anthem for Doomed Youth) The slaughter of the Somme and the influence of Sassoon toughened his verses. By the end of his poems focussed on the surreal nightmares that he had. Was killed at the age of 25, and was still learning his craft. Valued for his moral and artistic integrity in powerful poems about man’s inhumanity to man.
Vocabulary at Dulce et Decorum Est
Dulce et Decorum Est: the first words of a Latin saying. Fully says Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori: it is sweet and right to die for your country. Great honor to fight and die for your country. Flares: rockets which were sent up to burn with a brilliant glare to light up men and other targets in the area between the front lines Distant rest: a camp away from the front line where exhausted soldiers might rest for a few days, or longer Hoots: the noise made by the shells rushing through the air Gas: poison gas. From the symptoms it would appear to be chlorine or phosgene gas. The filling of the lungs with fluid had the same effects as when a person drowned. Helmets: the early name for gas masks Lime: a white chalky substance which can burn live tissue Panes: the glass in the eyepieces of the gas masks Cud: normally the regurgitated grass that cows chew usually green and bubbling. Here a similar looking material was issuing from the soldier's mouth High zest: idealistic enthusiasm, keenly believing in the rightness of the idea
DULCE ET DECORUM EST
The boys are bent over like old beggars carrying sacks, and they curse and cough through the mud until the "haunting flares" tell them it is time to head toward their rest. As they march some men are asleep, others limp with bloody feet as they'd lost their boots. All are lame and blind, extremely tired and deaf to the shells falling behind them. Suddenly there is gas, and the speaker calls, "Quick, boys!" There is fumbling as they try to put on their helmets in time. One soldier is still yelling and stumbling about as if he is on fire. Through the dim "thick green light" the speaker sees him fall like he is drowning. The drowning man is in the speaker's dreams, always falling, choking. The speaker says that if you could follow behind that wagon where the soldier's body was thrown, watching his eyes roll about in his head, see his face "like a devil's sick of sin", hear his voice gargling frothy blood at every bounce of the wagon, sounding as "obscene as cancer" and bitter as lingering sores on the tongue, then you, "my friend", would not say with such passion and conviction to children desirous of glory, "the old lie" of "Dulce et decorum est".
UNIT 8: POST-WAR WRITING (1945-1970)
Writers like Léopold Sédar Senghor believed it was a necessary response to years of imperialism, while others like Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, felt it tended to idealize Africa’s pre-colonial past. Debated in which language they should write it: the colonizers or they own. 20th c. women struggled to establish cultural identity; most women had no political voice or representation in literature. The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir analysed women’s secondary status in society and denounced to be felt as an object.
Elie Wiesel
He grew up among the devout Hasidic Jews of Sighet, a village in Romania’s Carpathian mountains. News from the outside world rarely filtered into this remote community. When Nazis arrived in 1944 and rounded up all of the Jews, Wiesel and his family had no idea that they were being sent to Nazi death camps. He was first in Auschwitz where his mother and younger sister were gassed to death. Elie and his father were made slave labourers and then sent to Buchenwald, another concentration camp. His father died of starvation and disease. He was a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, turned to writing as a way to keep alive the memory of the atrocities committed during World War II. Draw attention to the plight of Cambodians, Soviet Jews, South African blacks and other victims of persecution throughout the world.
Night
He worked for a French newspaper while still a student at the Sorbonne in Paris. His friend, the writer François Mauriac, encouraged Wiesel to record for humanity the horrors he was endured. Wiesel waited ten years before writing about his wartime ordeal: “I was afraid that words might betray it”, he later explained. Night (1958) is one of the most significant and powerful accounts of Nazi atrocities ever written. Jews were not the only victims of the Nazi mass murders; a similar fate awaited gypsies, political opponents, homosexuals, captured Resistance fighters in conquered lands and others. About 12 million people were killed and nearly 6 of them were Jews. In Auschwitz about two and a half million people were executed and another half million died of starvation and neglect.
NIGHT
Night is narrated by Eliezer, a Jewish teenager who lives in his hometown of Sighet, in Hungarian Transylvania. His religious teacher, Moishe the Beadle, is deported. In a few months, Moishe returns, telling a horrifying tale: the Gestapo (the German secret police force) took charge of his train, led everyone into the woods, and systematically butchered them. Nobody believes Moishe, who is taken for a lunatic. In the spring of 1944, the Nazis occupy Hungary. Not long afterward, a series of increasingly repressive measures are passed, and the Jews of Eliezer’s town are forced into small ghettos within Sighet. Soon they are herded onto cattle cars, and a nightmarish journey ensues. After days and nights crammed into the car, exhausted and near starvation, the passengers arrive at Birkenau, the gateway to Auschwitz. Upon his arrival in Birkenau, Eliezer and his father are separated from his mother and sisters, whom they never see again. In the first of many “selections” that Eliezer describes in the memoir, the Jews are evaluated to determine whether they should be killed immediately or put to work. Eliezer and his father seem to pass the evaluation, but before they are brought to the prisoners’ barracks, they stumble upon the open-pit furnaces where the Nazis are burning babies by the truckload. The Jewish arrivals are stripped, shaved, disinfected, and treated with almost unimaginable cruelty. Eventually, their captors march them from Birkenau to the main camp, Auschwitz. They eventually arrive in Buna, a work camp, where Eliezer is put to work in an electrical-fittings factory. In the camp, the Jews are subject to beatings and repeated humiliations. The prisoners are forced to watch the hanging of fellow prisoners in the camp courtyard. On one occasion, the Gestapo even hang a small child who had been associated with some rebels within Buna. Eliezer himself begins to lose his humanity and his faith, both in God and in the people around him. After months in the camp, Eliezer undergoes an operation for a foot injury. While he is in the infirmary, however, the Nazis decide to evacuate the camp because the Russians are advancing and are on the verge of liberating Buna. In the middle of a snowstorm, the prisoners begin a death march: they are forced to run for more than fifty miles to the Gleiwitz concentration camp. Many die of exposure to the harsh weather and exhaustion. At Gleiwitz, the prisoners are herded into cattle cars once again. They
Black Mountain Poets
1950s Also called Projectivist poets or postmodern poets. Charles Olson published his seminal essay Projec6ve Verse. He called for poetry of “open field” composition to replace traditional closed poetic forms with improvised form. It lasted 23 years, but it was one of the most fabled experimental institutions in art education and practice. Visual, literary + performing arts Art teachers: Anni & Josef Albers, Eric Bentley, Ilya Bolotowsky, Willem & Elaine de Kooning... Performing arts teachers: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Lou Harrison, Roger Sessions... Literature teachers: Robert Creeley, Fielding Dawson, Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan, Paul Goodman, Hilda Morley, Charles Olson, Arthur Penn, John Wieners, M.C. Richards Guest lecturers: Albert Einstein, Clement Greenberg and William Carlos Williams
Confessional Poetry
1950s Very personal or “I”, focusing on extreme moments of individual experience , the psyche and personal trauma. Included taboo matters mental illness, sexuality, suicide and broader social themes. Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath , John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Allen Ginsberg and W.D. Snodgrass. Poets concerned with the processes of psychoanalysis than with those of poetry.
Sylvia Plath’s imagery
Lady Lazarus. Lazarus is the man in the New Testament who is raised from the dead by Jesus. Plath gives the name a twist in this poem, one of Plath’s finest poems, by linking it to her numerous suicide attempts. Lady Lazarus contains
the famous line “dying is an art”, among many other haunting and memorable lines and images. You’re. This poem makes far more sense when one realizes that its title, “You’re”, also acts as the first word of each of the statements in the poem. The meaning of the poem also becomes clearer when we realize that You’re is a poem about pregnancy and the unborn child Plath is carrying.
New York School
1950s Informal group of American poets, painters, dancers and musicians in NYC. Inspiration from Surrealism and contemporary avant-garde art movements: jazz, action painting, abstract expressionism, improvisational theatre, experimental music and the interaction of friends in NYC. O’Hara was the centre of the group until his death in 1966. He provided connections between poets and painters as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art. Jane Freilicher, Fairfield Porter, Larry Rivers. Rivers inspired a play by Koch / Koch and Ashbery together wrote the poem A Postcard to Popeye / Ashbery and Schuyler wrote the novel A Nest of Ninnies / Schuyler collaborated on an ode with O’Hara / Rivers painted a portrait of O’Hara Koch, O’Hara, Schuyler and Ashberry were different poets but they had much in common: Except Schuyler, all went to Harvard University Except Koch, all were and/or are homosexual Except Ashbery, all did military service Except Koch, all reviewed art Except Ashbery, all lived in New York City
British Poetry Revival
1960s Revival, modernist-inspired reaction to the more conservative approach to poetry. Paul Buck, Bill Griffiths, Allen Fisher, Iain Sinclair, Gilbert Adair, Lawrence Upton, Peter Finch, Frances Presley, Elaine Randell, Adrian Clarke, Maggie O’Sullivan , Denise Riley, Tony Lopez, Robert Sheppard... Provided a wide range of modes and models of how modernism could be integrated in British poetry. Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain (Horovitz, 1969). First anthology of British Poetry Revival.
New Wave
1960s. Experimentation both in form and content. Science fiction main topic. Literary or artistic sensibility, soft focus opposed to hard science.
Digression, reference and elaboration of detail occupy a great fraction of the
text.
Excessive, complex, showy in quantity and quality.
Providing redundant overkill in features, attachments.
New Formalism
1980s Promotes a return to metrical and rhymed verse. American poetry. Robert Frost , John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate. In the 60s publication of formal poetry became increasingly unfashionable. But Language poets in the 70s had a reaction to the predominance of the informal confessional lyric. Wide division between poetry and its public.
Poetry Slam
1980s. A competition in which poets perform spoken word poetry. Started in Chicago (Get Me High Lounge, 1984), designed to move poetry recitals from academia to a popular audience. Marc Smith began experimenting with existing open microphone venues for poetry readings by making them competitive. Judged by 5 judges selected from the audience or audience’s response.
Postcyberpunk
1990s: Punk subculture with cyber movement themes. Focus near-future unintended consequences of biotechnology revolution. Struggles of individuals, open product of human experimentation against totalitarian governments. Inspiration from Goth. It made science fiction more attractive and profitable for mainstream media and visual arts in general. Daniel Suarez , Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, John Kessel.
New Weird
2000s Developed a series of novels and stories published from 2001 and 2005. Novelists used horror or speculative fiction with open cross genre boundaries. K.J. Bishop , Steve Cockayne, Paul Di Filippo, M. John Harrison, Thomas Ligot, Ian R. MacLeod, Justina Robson, Alastair Reynolds, China Miéville...
Urban , secondary-world fiction that subverts the romanticized ideas about traditional fantasy with realistic, complex real-world models.
AND WE SHALL BE STEEPED
In the poem, “And We Shall be Steeped…” Senghor focuses on the artifacts and the feelings meant to be evoked from his perspective and how he thinks his ancestors intended them. The author creates strong descriptions almost personifying the artifacts, saying “..furniture..heavy, polished, somber, and serene,” and he later says, ” mats of thick silence, cushions of shade and leisure..singing like Soundanese cloths.. friendly lamps to soothe this obsessive presence,” leading into the last line of the poems, ” white, black, red, oh red as the African soil.” He makes it obvious with the title that the future of African people are meant to embrace this, ” we shall be steeped in the presence of Africa,” and that this is the main message he wants us to consider, he wants us to see the deeper intended purpose for life that the ancestors of Africa wanted their culture to hold onto forever.
