Pitt State English Comps Study Helper: Modern (British)

Showing posts with label Modern (British). Show all posts

Wednesday, May 4, 2016

Modernism/Poetry

Forces

Science (Darwin, Einstein, etc) & technology
Psychology (freud)
History (Marxism
Urbanization
Lit movements of realism and naturalism
New aesthetics redefining the understanding & representation of physical world

A sense of the shrinking significance of the individual which imparts a sense of powerlessness & diminishing sense of the value of individual life
Heisenberg & Dohr - Quantum mechanics, exploration of our unstable world ( can't measure both position & velocity of atom simultaneously) which (in combination with Darwin, Einstein, & Freud) called reality itself in question

What is true & real?

This affected the arts very much

Shift from Victorian, Omniscient narrator (3rd person) to a subjective, individual narrator who doesn't have a full grasp on the world, as historically the narrator in literature had.

Left with imperfect, human perspective, which is very much reflected in the modernistic Arts
Modern British Literature
"Beyond the Pale" breaking down literary conventions
T.S. Eliot - "making all things new" not making things new
Probing nervous quality in exploring ultimate questions - Is there a God? Is it possible to connect with others
Form reflects content
In Media Res
Imagism: more in fewer words
Readers get inside characters brain
alienation - we can never really get to know someone else
Technology
Urban/city - being surrounded by people but not connecting
Fragmentation
Making it difficult - opposite Victorian pedagogy
Multidimensional - different POV's
Turned inward - self-reverential & cannibalistic (beginnings of meta narrative
Individual psyche/stream of conscience
Lack of definitive endings
Return of the repressed - woman, working class, religious, ethics, and sexual perspectives

Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse

Set out to write a novel that mapped the psychological unconscious. Instead of detailing the many things characters say and do to one another, she concentrated on the innumerable things that exist below the surface of speech & action - stream-of-consciousness is key to this.
High modernist
split in 3 parts
stream of consciousness, but jumping characters - heads
Ramsey Mr. Ramsey phiosophy prof made career in youth, trying to recapture that in adulthood. super greedy. Almost like a child. Requires sympathy from family, esp. Mrs. Ramsey
Main focus is on Lily Briscoe - someone who takes care of family - she's a painter
Entire story is about them
Novel set in their summer home
Nothing happens, no characters involved
Psychological surreal passage of time, examining how time moves

Like really intense poetry

Intro, 10 years pass during that section, including WWI, 2 children die, Mrs. Ramsey dies. Mr. Ramsey grows more needy
Comes back to summer house after 10 years, decide to go to the lighthouse. James, Cam, Mr. Ramsey
Cam has realization about her father in this section that she actually admires him, instead of resenting him
Lily completes her painting of the lighthouse here
Majority of characters female, but Mr Ramsey so needy of these women, always interrupting them, so doesn't take their needs into consideration.
p 35. Mr. Ramsey's deep musings about intelligence, fame, and how long it lasts, the bleak reality about the rock outlasting Shakespeare, his "little light"
p36, right before "VII" unfamiliar, isolation, waste of ages
p36-37 - James hatred for his father
pg 36-37 - Mr. Ramsey's requirement of sympathy, needy
p37 - Mr. Ramsey's want of sympathy - "fatal sterility" wants his barrenness made fertile"
p37 - Mrs. Ramsey trying to give him symapthy "creating" the rooms in the house where can find ease, metaphor for soothing him - knitting, flushing needles
p38 - James feels all her strength leaving as she gives him sympathy, "to be drunk & quenced be the break of brass, the arid, scimitar of the male"
p38 - Mrs. Ramsey only a shell to know herself by

she's exhausted, feeling "The rapture of successful"

p39 - her dissatisfaction, her lying to him about his most recent book
p40 - "inadequacy of human relationships"
p41 - She needs to be needed, self-satisfaction in helping
p42 - pettiness of herself and human relations, flawed, and despicables
p44 - Fate to be alone, desolate, waste away on spit of
p45 - Deceptive appearance, "It was a disguise"
p46 - Mr. Ramsey, fows on self "absorption in himself"
p50 - Deceptiveness of appearnace, half truths
Gender roles brought into question in novel, predominately pivoting on Lily Briscoe

Lily rejects gender conventions
Has no plans to marry - odd at time, questioned by Mrs. Ramsey
Plagued by artistic self-doubt, a similar self-doubt to Mr. Ramsey, through his is a doubt about his professional work & Intelligence
Lily's self-doubt is fueled by Transley's idea that women can't (or weren't meant to )paint or write.

But Mrs. Ramsey (on the otherhand) taken on the conventional role of wife and mother and accepts the plans that go along with that

but at the same time she realizes how strongly she influences people (matchmaker, supports her husband, Tansley is basically in love with her etc)

Mr. Ramsey muses that his wife and 8 children are a fine contribution to "the poor little universe"

very modernist (bleak, pessimistic) look at the world

Woolf tried to show with this novel that life's intellectual psychological or emotional shakes can be as high in the dining room/lawn as they are in the bedroom/battlefield

Goes against subject matter of the Victorian novels with their complex ploys in mostly exotic/important places
Woolf's novel focuses away from WWI, Mr. Ramsey's philosophy etc, & instead focuses on the character's mind

At the dinner, heart of the novel, each guest impressions are given and each is remote "rough & isolated & lonely" much like each character in As I Lay Dying.
At the dinner, the chaos becomes (momentarily) in harmony as Mrs. Ramsey is present, but when she leaves someg uests scatter and the harmony is lost

P97, when the candles are lit & everyone is sitting there, Mrs. Ramsey uses her uneasieness & things are in order, as opposed to outside which appears rippled, having

When Mrs. Ramsey leaves, Lily notices the disentigration of the group
Time passes
Whereas "the window" a 120 page section, essentially encompasses 1 day "Time passes" encompasses a time span of 10 years, during which time any things happen

Mrs. Ramsey dies
WWI takes place, Andrew Ramsey dies in war (France)
Prve Ramsey (the beautiful one) dies in childbirth
The house isn't visited by anyone (except a house maid) for 10 years, during which time the house succumbs to the ravages of time (mold, dust, weeds, etc) - but is brought back to life by 2 maids before Lily returns

Woolf depicts the passage of time here as cruel & relentless - everything sinks into oblivion

Human beings are secondary concerns here for instance, Mrs. Ramsey's death is barely mentioned and moved on from, whereas Victorian novels would spend ample time on the deathbed scene & human sentiment

Lily attempts to finish painting, attempts to provide the sympathy for Mr. Ramsey that he desires, can't and therefore feels like a failure. She pities him deeply
Mr. Ramsey, James, & Cam finally voyage to the lighthouse
With Mrs. Ramsey dead, Mr. Ramsey turns to Lily and his children to satisfy his need for sympathy
Mrs. Ramsey lives on through Lily's memory
Cam grows to respect her father & longs to show him she loves him without betraying James, as they both agreed to travel in silence to spite their father
Image of the mutilated fish thrown back to sea by the fisherman (boy) is important:

Very modernist image
symbol of the paradoxical modern world: very cruel, yet possible to live in
Calls back to the deaths of Mrs. Ramsey, prove Andrew

By the end of the novel, Lily has finished her painting. She doesn't care what its fate is; hung up, in the attic, or destroyed – so long as she had her vision captured
James' view that one would need 50 sets of eyes to truly see someone, both represent woolf's technique in writing the novel: only by presenting a collection of varied subjective character views could she capture a true likeness of her characters & their world
Distance is the key to reconciling competing impressions: James now has a more complete view of the lighthouse & Lily, having had 10 years to think about Mrs. Ramsey, sees her more fully: recognizes her dated ways and her manipulation
Focuses on the small stuff, mundane
Mrs. Ramsey is always exhausted from giving
look for knife scene
her heart gives out symbolic
Chaos ensues because Mrs. Ramsey is gone
Lighthouse - male
Bay - female

Themes/modernism

stream of consciousness, fragmentation
Whole 2nd section very poetic & complex, very modernist
questions of individuality
Very long sentences, like Faulkner, lengthened by semicolons
p5 - atheist translations
p 7 bleak pessimistic language
p19, Lily's inadequacy insignificance
p20 Ramsey's natural air of solitude
p25 the inner workings of Lily's mind - the gnats & kitchen table
Some one had blundered - p18, 25, 30, 33

p30, Mrs. Ramsey understands the meaning of those words (epiphany) but still doesn't know what he was referring to

p30 stream of consciousness of Mr. Ramsey, on walking in on Lily & Mr. Bankes
p31. James hates his father, "folly of woman's minds" enrages Mr. Ramsey
32 Mrs. Ramsey "nothing but a spouse sopped full of human emotion" - her feelings about her children using her, feeling of insignificance found her husband
p33, Mr. Ramsey happy about solitude, his "splendid mind" children divinely innocent, defenseless against a doom he perceived
p33-34 alphabet as representation of scale of human intelligence, most people don't even make it to Q, which is where he's stuck

p34 "r" out of reach, failure

p34-35, 2 classes of men
p35, death wish, but he'll die standing

Thursday, April 21, 2016

WWI, Yeats, and Auden Bundle

Modernism - form and content coming together

Yeats

The Second Coming - Mystic

Human history was constructed of alternating 2000 year cycles called gyres and was characterized by values antithetical to its predecessor

2000 octo 1 AD - Pagan gyre beginning with Zeus' rape of Leda
1 AD to 2000 AD - Christian gyre beginning with the birth of Christ

Yeats envisioned these gyres as interlocking
3 dimensional cones, they are spinning

Man is represented by the falcon
Spirits mundi - jung, collective unconscience opposite of Holy Ghost
Awakening of man's animal nature. Not an apocalypse, just a new phase
Difficult to read
Questioning of religion (traditional religion anyway)
asking ultimate questions
alienation
fragmentation
ambiguous ending (Byzantuim)
Imagism
He writes about Irish things in Irish ways and deplores the dead feeling of poems like "The Waste Land"
Themes

Irishness
Beauty of Nature
Mysticism
Life is fleeting, keeps moving on

Easter 1916

Most used for blind patriotic purpose which the poem cautions against
About the change in Ireland but also about the cost of those changes

Owen - Anthem for doomed youth is also a sonnet

Look for comparisons - soldiers to other things
Loss of manhood with physical and mental disability
How are they modernist? asking life's ultimate questions

alienation, questioning of traditional institutions

Psychological
Probing, nervous quality of expbring ultimate questions

Auden

Lyrical and personal

Brooke - The Soldier

Pro-war propaganda
Sonnet

Not Shakespearean more like Petrarachan sonnet
mixes the two just like he is talking about
Mixing himself
Volta is between 8 and 6

Sassoon

Fought in France
Helped wounded soldiers
wounded himself
refused to return
hospitalized
returned to front
wounded again
poetry seen as unpatriotic and/or grotesque
Glory of women

anti-propaganda
misogynistic?
Questioning
Suggest that they put medals above the lives of their men
those at home have an unrealistic idea of the war front

"Glory of Women"

Ironic
Uses puns: "you and us"
Retire = run
talks to German mothers at end

They knit socks
even German women think of men as soldiers
women have chivalric image in their minds

makes war seem less glorious
even playing field of all soldiers
all women the same

"They"

Bishops response completely inadequate
imagism
lack of the definite ending
questioning religion
in media res

Bishop thinks they will be changed in good ways. The ways the soldiers list are bad ways

Once again those at home misunderstood the war.

"The Second Coming." WB Yeats

How do the first 2 lines of the poems illustrate the third?

In the 1st 2 lines, the falcon keeps spiraling higher and further but away from its master, away from safety, where things fall apart and the center cannot hold.

What might the falconer symbolize, and what else in the poem supports your notion?

The falconer might symbolize safety and control, which is supported by the fact that "anarchy is loosed" once the falcon gets further from the falconer

Line 4: what is the effect of calling it "mere" anarchy?

Anarchy is an extreme end of the spectrum at control (and lock throat and the world "mere" down plays it a little, of moronically?

How do lines 7 and 8 illustrate disorder?

The best lock all conviction, while the worst/are full of passionate seems to be the opposite of how logic would dictate. They expect is turned upside down.

What might the "rough beast" portend (a "portent" is synonymous with an "omen")?

Rough beast, to me, points toward the devil, but the mention of Bethlehem later obviously points to Jesus

What characterization of the beast is suggested by its description?

The words "rough" and "slouches" combined with the word "beast" suggest evil to me

Explain (interpret) lines 19 and 20:

The last 20 centuries, the centuries following Christ's birth, have been doomed by him from the beginning, when he was in a "rocking cradle"

List words in the poem that indicate circularity/cycles?

turring and turring, tyre, round, reel, rocking

How do these images of cycles support the poem's thesis?

The cyclical words come back to the idea of Christianity, of the 2nd coming, that Jesus was born and will be born again, so to speak

The last line contains a paradox. What is it, and why would a paradox fit this poem quite well?

The paradox is that before something is born, it shouldn't be able to slouch towards Bethlehem "to be born; this is an impossibility. The paradox is fitting because we have already seen several paradoxes so far, and with the word being turred upside down in the context, why not make language and logic turn upside down as well.