N o reference!!!!! All of content are your analysis.!!!!
Eliot includes many allusions in
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” including multiple Shakespeare
works, the Bible, and mythology. Pick one of his allusions and analyze
the way in which the allusion contributes to the overall meaning of the
poem. As with the other analyses, you should write two to three
paragraphs, no intro or conclusion.Introduction to the Twentieth
Century
The Literature of Modernism
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Disillusionment – the attitude behind
20th Century Modernism
What brought on this disillusionment?
1. Instability in the British Crown
Victoria, 1837-1901
Edward VII, 1901-1910
George V, 1920-1936
2. Marxism vs. Capitalism
3. Darwin vs. human intellectual determinism
4. Sir Ian Frazier’s The Golden Bough vs. moral progress
5. Nietzsche vs. reason
6. Physics vs. predictability in nature
7. Freud vs. rational thought
Most of these ideas had been around since the 19th Century, but
they had not yet completely dominated thought or
destroyed the optimistic faith in religion, progress, and
materialism.
One event causes people to lose what little optimism they have left – WWI – 1914-1919
One historian said, “all the
ingenuity of ‘civilized’
man was called forth in
the service of murder
and destruction.”
What about WWI (as opposed to
other wars) created this kind of
universal disillusionment and loss
of faith?
After the war:
Artists who created the representations of the
world no longer trusted ideas that previously
gave a sense of order to the world:
God
Humans as some kind of special or
superior creation
Reason as the supreme human faculty
Even the idea that life was worth living
What do you do if old systems of
order don’t work for you anymore?
Create new ones!
Modern Writers looked within themselves for
ways to order human experience
The result was SUBJECTIVITY, one of the most
remarkable characteristics of modern
literature
Preoccupation with the self, consciousness, the
process of perception
(In the visual arts, this is seen in Impressionism)
One of the most striking methods of subjectivity
in Modernism is FRAGMENTATION, whereby
artists “break apart” things that used to give
meaning and put them together in new ways
to derive a more lasting meaning from them.
T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land can be described by
the phase he uses to describe the world:
“a heap of broken images”
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow.
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu,
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
“They called me the hyacinth girl.”
–Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Other ways authors attempt in Modernism to
create new order and new meaning:
Juxtapositioning (collaging)
Stream of Consciousness
Use of irrational (alternative) logic – connected to
dream experiences which take action out of logical
space and time – Surrealism connected to this
Stripped down mythology – myth not used to its
magical or religious associations, but to create
parallels between contemporary world and the past
(The Waste Land relies on ancient fertility myth of
the dying and reviving king)
A Modern Literature Mantra
Show, don’t tell!
“Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself” Wallace Stevens
At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird’s cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.
The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow…
It would have been outside.
It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep’s faded papier-mache…
The sun was coming from the outside.
That scrawny cry–It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality
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“Of Modern Poetry,” Wallace Stevens
The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had T
o find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.
It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one. The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark, twanging
An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives
Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly
Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,
Beyond which it has no will to rise.
It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.
Introduction to Contemporary
Literature
Contemporary literature is that literature written
roughly between WW II and the present
It is more accurate to speak of contemporary
literatures than a single vision of literature
As with most changes in literary periods, this is
explained through social and political shifts
WWII –
War, bad in itself, had taken America out of
depression
Women had gone to work in the factories,
but, after the war, were sent home to open
jobs for men
The atom bomb was devasting, but held
the promise of cheap power
War, then, produce both negative and
positive outcomes
Then came
The Cold War
Vietnam
Conflicts over human rights (civil,
gender, etc.)
Deepening poverty
(and now terrorism)
Rather than searching for some universal
meaning, as Modernism did, people began
to search for meanings that applied to their
distinct circumstances
One author claims that “America had
becomes a cacophony of competing
voices, all demanding a piece of action”
These sometimes competing voices
characterize contemporary literature
It is a literature that values all human
expeirence
We get:
African American literature
Feminist literature
Gay and lesbian literature
Caribbean literature
ETC.
Expression in Contemporary Literature is
also different from Modern Literature
Modernism demanded that the objects of art
be the immediate objects of experience
“No ideas but in things”
Contemporary literature focuses instead on
describing emotional states
“No ideas but in feelings”
Postmodernism
One “type” thought within contemporary
literature that is in direct contrast with
modernism
Modernism tries to show that art can provide
the meaning and order lost in modern life
Postmodernism, rather than trying to force
meaning on the world, accepts the
premise that the world is meaningless and
instead sees art at the vehicle for playing
with the nonsense that is the world
Postmodernism critiques the “Big Stories” a
culture uses to explain its practices and
beliefs (democracy is good [America],
capitalism will collapse on itself [Marxism])
Postmodernism says these large stories
hide the contradictions inherent in human
life and societies, projecting an order that
isn’t there and can’t be there
Disorder is what is real
(Some have claimed that 9/11 was the death
of Postmodernism – why would they make
this claim?)
Ladies and Gentlemen,
to the Gas Chamber
By Tadeusz Borowski
Borowski
1922-1951
1943 – imprisoned by Nazis for illegally
printing his writing (Poles were not allowed
to publish) – sent to Birkenau/Auschwitz
Joined Communists after war – thought it
would prevent things like the death camps
from every happening again, but found he
was wrong
1951 – committed suicide by GAS
The Breaking of the Glass
Jason Sommer
He observed that the rabbis present were very gay. So he seized a costly goblet…and broke it before
them. Thus he made them somber. – Talmud
Make me a wedding glass of crystal
to outlast the shrillest pitches
of a solid scream,
the heel above the temple
and the people dragged
along the shards.
One true form of tears
is heaps of glass—
from windows with their faces kicked-in
and the family’s crystal
and all the unlucky mirrors of the houses
now with their several million faces
that cannot reflect.
God gave Moses a mouth
that brimmed with glass
that when he spoke
his pain was keen
and the blood came to his face.
This was His way of saying:
I am the Lord
My voice is in
the gusting of the wind
and the stuttering of men
and the breaking of the glass.
Ladies and Gentlemen…
While this could be read as a coming of age
story, the narrator wants to repress
whatever knowledge he might gain from
his experience
Narrator
Tone – matter of fact, as if this is an
everyday situation – this compounds the
sense of atrocity
Attempts to avoid making judgments…
But can’t – and we can determine his
real position from the lapses in objectivity
2019 – paradise imagery – But can’t be
Eden – must be post-fall (Babel of
the multitudes) – humans can’t
work together in united and
purposeful concern
Why does narrator attempt this objectivity?
To protect himself from the surroundings
He must become part of the system to survive
Physical VS Spiritual survival
Woman and her child – 2025
When the spiritual intervenes, the narrator
gets sick
He is getting sick because he is “eating the
flesh” (figuratively) of other humans
His sympathetic nerveous system cannot
take it.
Irony – the story is full of it
Paragraph 2 – lamenting lack of “usual recreation”
Decorum of Nazi Guards
Church bells ringing in the distance
Sociable world of “Canada”
Red Cross Truck – p 2023
The forms of civilized life –
even the sacred persists
(This makes the camp and
Nazi program even more
obscene)
How do prisoner/laborers get swept into the Nazi
evil?
They get food from those who will be
exterminated (cannibalism) – They fear they will
run out of people
But in his descriptions, Borowski makes sure we
know the laborers are sharing the same insectlike, animal-like existence of the other inmates (p
2020)
Indeed, they are kept in buildings that used to house
diseased animals
The laborers view on religion (p 2018)
How does the story show us the Nazis were able
to exterminate so man?
Deception by the Nazis – p 2022
By the prisoner laborers – p 2028
How do the victims gain some measure of
superiority?
Denial of connection with other victims
Creating an isolation of the OTHER (the attitude
on which prejudice thrives)
Henri p 2024
Why is the blonde woman (who reminds the
narrator of a woman he once knew) important?
p 2026-27
The anti-hero (again)
The narrator crawls under the rails
A little girl runs around, mad
A dead hand clutches his, and he vomits
Order returns, but it is the twisted order of the
fascists
This is an ANTI-TRAGEDY – from the clear
tragedy, nothing noble is affirmed, and it is
presented by an anti-hero
WHY IS THE ANTI-HERO DIFFERENT FROM
UNDERGROUND MAN AND J. ALFRED
PRUFROCK???
William Butler Yeats
1865-1939
Yeats considered one of the greatest poets in the
English language because of his description, his
symbolism, and his mythic vision.
The four stages of Yeats:
1. Dreamy, escapist poetry
2. Direct, clear, sometimes political poetry
3. Metaphysical, full expression of his mystic
and mythical model of history. Here Yeats
creates a new way to order meaning (ala
modernism)
4. Physical and psychological poetry
Easter 1916
1. What was the political scene before
everything turned into a “terrible beauty”?
2. To what image is the memory of the
martyrs transformed in Stanza 3?
3. Does Yeats believe the
martyrs’ sacrifice
was necessary?
4. What image does Yeats
use in the final stanza to
represent the martyrs?
The Second Coming
Yeats’ Historical Theory
•Uses Gyre for the model
•History happens in periods that resemble Gyre
•Over time, the Gyre widens until eventually it
collapses
•At the center of the Gyre is the idea around which
that period of history focuses/moves
•When the Gyre collapses, it is replaced with a new
Gyre (period of history), with the antithetical idea to
the previous period at its center
What is the centering idea for the period of history in which Yeats (and we) live?
What does the sphinx mean?
How does the sphinx relate to the “passionate intensity” of the first stanza?
What historical events might Yeats have witnessed to support his “prophetic” idea
of what was happening to history?
The Guest
Albert Camus
Existentialism (again)
Christianity and most monotheistic faiths – essence precedes existence
who we are is defined (as essence) by our creator, before we even
have physical existence
Existentialism – existence precedes essence
we exist – just that – until and unless we “create” our own essence
We “create” who we are through the act of making choices, and those choices
are the only things that give our lives meaning
Choices we are faced with almost always involve other people, so we are defined
through our relations with others (we make meaningful choices or destructive
ones)
Major existentialist figures: Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus
Camus also concerned with:
Absurdism: A belief that our need for meaning is greater than the ability of the
universe to be meaningful – all philosophical positions absurd.
Moralism: A philosophical enquiry into the ethical implications of the human
condition.
The French/Algerian conflict
From: http://www.historytoday.com/martin-evans/french-resistance-and-algerian-war
“During the 1950s the Algerian struggle against France and its white settlers for
independence inflamed passions and hatreds in both countries.”
“The French conquest of Algeria began in 1830. In 1848 Algeria was annexed as three
French departments. During the nineteenth century there were two waves of French
immigration: post 1848 and post 1881. At the same time Algerians were systematically
pauperised. Traditional patterns of land ownership were dismantled and French settlers
were allowed to buy or confiscate land. In 1954, French Algeria was a society rigidly
polarised along racial lines, economically, politically and culturally. On the one side there
were one million French settlers; on the other nine million Algerians. So from the outset
the relationship between Algeria and France, French and Algerians, was a racist, colonial
one, based on violence.”
“The Algerian war started with the insurrection organised by the National Liberation
Front (FLN), on November 1st, 1954, and lasted until 1962 when Algeria became
independent. During those eight years one million Algerians died.”
Brief clip of Youtube film on French-Algerian war
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gHrJHNiN0k
Themes in “The Guest”
Revolt
Feeling of alienation and exile in the world.
Freedom
Brotherhood
Responsibility
Inevitability of choice
Responsibility for another’s fate
The system vs the individual
Guest-host relationship
There are two major choices that must be made in the story. One is Daru’s, and
the other is his “guest’s”.
Daru’s is a moral choice (moral consequences to whatever he decides).
The Guest’s is an existential choice – truly – ultimately between living or dying.
What you must think about in reading the story is why these two characters make
the choices they do. Mostly, your final exam questions on this story will ask you to
discuss this question.
Think about how Daru’s isolation may contribute to his situation and, thus, his
decision.
Think about how the political/cultural conflicts may contribute to both characters
decisions.
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