Tempo, spazio e mito nelle sperimentazioni del Novecento

1. Tempo, spazio e mito nelle sperimentazioni del Novecento Nella cornice della crisi e del rinnovamento delle arti del primo Novecento, il corso analizzerà le avanguardie moderniste nei vari campi della poesia, del racconto, del romanzo, e delle arti visive, concentrandosi in particolar modo sulle coordinate spazio-temporali e sulla ripresa del mito come metalinguaggio. Dopo aver inquadrato estetiche, movimenti e relativi manifesti, l’attenzione si focalizzerà su opere dei seguenti autori: Walter Pater, W. B. Yeats, Hilda Doolittle, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf.

2. Bibliografia • Testiprincipali: • Walter Pater, Imaginary portraits (Denys L’Auxerrois) • E.M. Forster, Collected Short Stories (The Story of a Panic; Other Kingdom) • V. Woolf, To the Lighthouse • Poesie di Yeats e H.D. • Testi critici: • P. Childs, Modernism, London and New York, Routledge, 2000 • P. Childs, The Twentieth Century in Poetry, London and New York, Routledge, 1999 • M. Vitale (a cura di), H. D., Visioni e Proiezioni, Napoli, Liguori, 2006 • C. Corti, “Il recupero del mitologico”, in G. Cianci (a cura di), Modernismo/Modernismi, Milano, Principato, 1991 • S. Bercovitch (ed.), The Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. V: Poetry and Criticism 1900-1950, Cambridge U. P., 2003 • R. Ciocca, “Il ritorno di Apollo e Dioniso. Vitalità del mito nella letteratura inglese tra Otto e Novecento”, in Classico/Moderno. Percorsi di creazione e di formazione, a cura di M.T. Giaveri, L. Marfè, V. Salerno, Messina, Mesogea, 2011 • Testi di approfondimento: • J. Hillman, Saggio su Pan • F. Nietzsche, La nascita della tragedia

3. Contents 1 The concept of crisis and renewal in the scientific and philosophical thought of late XIX and early XX century 2 Time and space coordinates in the arts 3 Post-impressionism 4 Imagism and Vorticism 5 The study of myth and the mythical method 6 Walter Pater’s Imaginary Portraits 7 The poetry of W. B. Yeats 8 The poetry of Hilda Doolittle 9 E. M. Forster’s short stories 10 Virginia Woolf and the novel

4. Chapters of discourse • Dates • Roots, antecedents, forerunners • General Features • Conception of history • Language • Art • Space and time • The subject • Myth and symbol • Poetry (Imagism, Vorticism) • Prose (short story, the modern novel)

5. A FEW KEYWORDS • MODERNITY • MODERNISM • MODERNISMS • POSTMODERNISM

6. A few keywords • CRISIS (epistemological) • INDUSTRIALISATION • URBANISATION • SECULARISATION • WAR • IMPERIALISM • MITH

7. Modernism: REACTION TO MODERNITY • Apocalyptic reaction (Eliot, Yeats, Pound, Lawrence) • Disintegration (close-knit rural community) • Fragmentation, anonymity (urban society), ephemerality, insecurity, division of labour, alienation, mass-culture, displacement, mechanisation, nature’s enslavement, neurosis

8. Modernism: THE TRADITION OF THE NEW • Celebratoryreaction (futurism, vorticism, bohémien cosmopolitanism, avant-garde) • ‘il faut être absolument moderne’ (Rimbaud) • ‘make it new’ (Ezra Pound) • ‘blast and bombardiering’ (Wyndham Lewis) • renewal of social and political customs • Suffragism, the new woman, socialism, democracy, social justice, openness, sexual frankness, new understanding of time and space, speed, mobility, communication, travel, dynamism, new languages, experimentalism

9. DATES • genre-bounddefinition includes authors associated with innovation (Donne, Blake, Sterne, Coleridge) • time-bound definition: wide: 1880s-1945; 1890s-1930s focused: pre-war years pars destruens (Blast) Post-waryears reconstruction (rappel à l’ordre)

10. DATES 1907Notes on Language and style by T. E. Hulme (Image school) • convention Vs subjective experience • “Each word must be an image seen” • 1910 “In or about December, 1910, human character changed. …All human relations have shifted – those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature.” (Woolf, post-impressionism exhibition organised by Roger Fry) • 1914 Vorticism

11. Dates • 1922 annus mirabilis: T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, J. Joyce, Ulysses, K. Mansfield, The Garden Party, V. Woolf, Jacob’s Room • 1939 terminus ad quemFinnegans Wake (post-mod.) • 1960s the term modernism widely used as a description of a recognizable literary phase that was over. 

12. DATES: POLITICS AND SOCIETY • 1882 married women’s property act • 1888Local government act – London county council • 1889 London dock strike • 1893 formation of Independent Labour party • 1897 National Union women’s suffrage societies • 1900 Labour Party • 1902 Education act for secondary education • 1903 E. Pankhurst founds the Women’s Social and Political Union • 1905 Sinn Fein, Irish Nationalist party • 1908 Old age pensions introduced • 1911 National Health Insurance act • 1912 Militant agitation for women’s suffrage • 1913 Suffragette demonstrations in London • 1916 Easter rising in Dublin (poem by W. B. Yates)

13. DATES: POLITICS AND SOCIETY • 1917 Russian revolution • 1918 Vote for women aged thirty • 1919 first woman elected in Parliament • 1920 Oxford admits women to degree • 1922 Irish Republic (except Ulster) • 1924 First Labour Government • 1926 General strike • 1927 General strikes declared illegal • 1928 Women’s right to vote as full as men’s • 1929 New York’s stock exchange collapsed • 1932 Hunger march of unemployed to London • 1936 Edward VIII abdicates • 1944 Secondary Education compulsory for all

14. DATES: SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY • 1893Four-wheel car of Karl Benz • 1895 Marconi’s telegraphy • Roentgen’s X rays • 1898 Curies discover radium and plutonium • 1900 Planck’s theory of quantum • 1903 Wrights brothers first flight • 1905 Einstein’s theory of relativity • 1911 Amundsen reaches South Pole • 1913 Bohr discovers atom’s structure • 1918 Rutherford separates atom • 1919 First flight on the Atlantic • 1922 Founding of British Broadcasting Company • 1928 First talkie (sound) film • 1929 Fleming’s penicillin • 1935 Fermi fixes atom • 1945 Nuclear Bombs on Japanese Towns

15. ROOTS, ANTECEDENTS, FORERUNNERS UNDERSTANDING OF REALITY MARX NIETZSCHE Masters of ‘suspect’ FREUD founders of hermeneutics SAUSSURE Modernity as the age of the ‘world picture’ (Heidegger)

16. Karl Marx (1818-83) • ideological character of truth and common sense(objectivity) ‘false consciousness’ • Economy world view ideology

17. F. Nietzsche (1844-1900) End of metaphysics, death of God (aforisma 125 La Gaia Scienza)

18. “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that the existence of the world is justified” “It is a dream. I will dream on” The Birth of Tragedy (1872) Life like art is a ‘purposiveness without purpose’, lived for its intrinsic value and not for some transcendental end. To experience life in a pre-dualistic dimension of mutual belonging between subject and object, man and nature, in a Dionysian sensual fashion (aesthetics= pertaining the senses) over an Apollonian post-Socratic attitude which demanded control by reason over the body, the matter, the instincts.

19. Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is (Become what you are Vs Know Yourself) • Thus spoke Zarathustra (the over-man, a new creative creature capable of living artistically transcending religion, morality, social conventions and habits) • Beyond Good and Evil: “We moderns, we half- barbarians. We are in the midst of our bliss only when we are most in danger.”

20. S. Freud (1856-1939) • Unconscious dimension Consciousness as sublimation and repression • Pleasure principle and reality principle • Civilization as product of postponement and repression • (displacement of morality: human behaviour, society and even history are not to be judged but interpreted)

21. 1856 born in Freiberg in Jewish family • 1860 family moves to Vienna • 1873 studies Medicine • 1876 enters Institute of Physiology directed by von Brucke • 1881 degrees in Medicine • 1882 meets Joseph Breuer, begins to work in hospital as assistant to T. Meynert, specializes in nervous disturbs • 1885 scholarship to attend Charcot lessons in Paris • 1886 back in Vienna works as specialist in nervous disturbs • 1895 publishes Studisull’isteria with Breuer in which the method of free associations is applied • 1896 death of father • 1897 begins aoutoanalysis • 1899 publishes L’interpretazionedeisogni • 1901 Psicopatologiadella vita quotidiana • 1902 meetings every wednesdays of Psychological Society to become in 1908 Psychoanalytical Society • 1905 Tre saggi sulla teoria sessuale, Il motto di spirito e la sua relazione con l’inconscio

22. 1906 knows Carl Gustav Jung • 1908 Caso clinico del piccolo Hans • 1909L’uomodeitopi, goes with Jung and Ferenczi to America where he gives the Cinque conferenzesullapsicoanalisi, receives laureahonoriscausa in psychology • 1910 International Psychoanalytical Society in Norimberga • 1913 Totem e tabù, breaks with Jung • 1920 Al di là del principio del piacere • 1921 Psicologia delle masse e analisi dell’io • 1922 L’Io e l’Es • 1925 Inibizione, sintomo e angoscia • 1926 meets Einstein in Berlin • 1929 Il disagio della civiltà • 1934 first draftofL’uomo Mosè e la religione monoteistica • 1936 Nazi seize warehouse of publishing house, T. Mann writes speech for Freud’s 80th birthday, proclaimed member of Royal Society • 1938 Vienna occupied by Nazi, Freud leaves for London • 1939 dies

23. Ferdinand de Saussure 1857-1913 Course in General Linguistics (1916 from students’ notes) ‘language as a system of differences with no positive signs’, relationship between word in its graphic or spoken form (signifier) and the thing it represents (signified) is arbitrary and conventional. Constructed-ness of meaning: language does not describe the world but constructs it. Language is not a window on reality but a net superimposed on it through which we ‘see’ the world. Language is the access to reality with its ‘already given’ ideological, historical, conventional implications. Reality is ‘pre-read’ by language.

24. Ludvig Wittgenstein • TractatusLogico-philosophicus (1921): “The limits of my language are the limits of my world” • In Jacques Derrida’s (1930-2004) terms: the subject is inscribed in language, he is a function of language.

25. LITERARY FORERUNNERS Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Decadence, Symbolist Movement • Exploration of new forms of subjectivity: ennui as a combination of apathy and boredom which rendering the subject inactive also makes him hypersensitive and thirsty of new and strong sensations. “Civilization develops in man only a many-sided sensitivity to sensations … through the development of that many-sidedness man may perhaps progress to the point where he finds pleasure in blood.” (Dostoyevsky)

26. Art for art’s sake • Rejection of art’s traditional role as arbiter of moral truths “poetry cannot, except at the price of death and decay, assume the mantle of science or morality; the pursuit of truth is not its aim, it has nothing outside itself” (Baudelaire) • O. Wilde, Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”

27. Ivory tower and flaneurs • Aloofness of the artist “The only refuge left to us was the poet’s ivory tower, which we climbed, ever higher, to isolate ourselves from the mob.” (Gerard de Nerval) • the artist as flaneur , strolling observer who watches the world but is not ‘seen’, keeps his extraneousness

28. Writing as a form of art • Rejection of romantic ideal of art as product of natural inspiration replaced by torturing pursuit of technical skill and craftsmanship “Last week I spent 5 days writing one page”(Flaubert)

29. SPACE and TIME • “the keynote of Modernism is liberation, an ironic distrust of all absolutes, including those of temporal or spatial form.” (Bradbury and McFarlane) • “We should ask for no absolutes … Once and for ever, let us have done with the ugly imperialism of any absolute. There is no absolute good, there is nothing absolutely right. All things flow and change, and even change is not absolute.” (D. H. Lawrence)

30. Greenich Creation of world standard time at the International Prime Meridian Conference of 1884. Convened in Washington, D.C., at the behest of a group of American metrologists and engineers, the goal of the Prime Meridian Conference was to establish the meridian of longitude passing through Greenwich as the spatial and temporal zero point for global cartography and civil time measurement.

31. Einstein: Relativity theory (1905) no physical law is entirely reliable, the observer’s position will always affect the result, making it relative and contingent. Measured rates, dimensions, and masses depend upon the speed or acceleration of the observers with respect to the object they are observing or upon the presence of mass nearby. Time and space are neither uniform nor homogeneous because their measurement depends upon the physical context of the observer.

32. H. Bergson, Essai sur le données immédiates de la conscience (1889) • reality subjectively experienced as different from the linear, regular beats of mechanical time which measures all events by the same gradations; psychological time measured by duration: varying speed at which the mind apprehends the length of experiences according to their intensities for each individual.

33. MODERNIST TIME/SPACE • The homogeneous, objective, empirical standard against which our internal time and space can be tested are gone, and with their disappearance the way in which we think about the world has altered.

34. Modernist treatment of time • flashback, anticipations, repetitions, jumps, dislocations of time-sequence, reversibility of personal time; stream of consciousness as non-linear, multiple and discontinuous technique to render the interrupted elliptical repetitive flow of subjective thought; development of spatialized rather than chronological structures

35. Modernist treatment of time • Proust: “Reality takes shape in the memory alone” • Pound‘s image as an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time • Joyce’s epiphanies: “revelation of the whatness of the thing”, when “the soul of the commonest object … seems to us radiant” (Stephen Hero, I version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

36. Woolf’s moments of being, compression of time/space which produces insights and sudden revelations. “it was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to … and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure … which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores. Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened. It was over – the moment.” (Woolf, Mrs Dalloway)

37. Joyce: In Ulysses superimposition of spatial axis upon time sequence interpolating ex abrupto previous narrative sections to give the idea of simultaneity “The action takes place in time, but the meaning is created spatially; or, as Thomas Mann said, ‘musically’.” (Levenson) Rhythm and pattern, musical structure for Forster

38. Time as stasis and suspension,non-events • Modernism uses our normal temporal expectations, and then frustrates or complicates them (Kermode) • Checov, The Three Sisters (moving to Moscow) • Kafka, The Trial (imputation) • Musil, The Man Without Qualities (aspiration to perfection, excess of possibilities leading to paralysis) • Beckett, Waiting for Godot (the coming of Godot)

39. LANGUAGE Linguistic Turn. Conventional character of language. Separation between words and things. The access to the world is not guaranteed Language as social, not natural nor divine, phenomenon “its simple relationship to the world, of naming and describing, no longer appeared to apply trans-parently, as ambiguity, irony, misunderstanding and the ineffable seemed commonplace… words, as Alice found in Wonderland, could mean so many things that they were difficult to control, they had become unstuck from referents” (Childs)

40. Crisis of Language Crisis in communication • “I was a bad civil servant” … “I was lying when I said that I was a bad civil servant” (Dostoevsky, MemoriedalSottosuolo) • “That is not what I meant at all” (Eliot, Prufrock) • “Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream—making a vain attempt (Conrad, H. o. D.)

41. “We think we understand each other, but we never really understand.” (Pirandello, SeiPersonaggi…) • “You had to recognise that words had lost their value in the Nineteenth century, particularly towards the end, they had lost much of their variety, and I felt that I could not go on, that I had to recapture the value of the individual word, find out what it meant and act within it.” (Gertrude Stein)

42. Form over Content • “There was so much to doubt: the foundations of religion and ethics, the integrity of governments and selves… But if the fate of the west seemed uncertain and shadowy, the struggles with the metrical scheme of lyric poetry or the pictorial space of a cubist painting could seem bracingly crisp. Shining luminously from so much of the work is the happiness of concentrated purpose and the pride of the cultural labourer believing fully in the artistic task at hand” (Levenson)

43. POETRY For Aristotle the supreme exemplars of poetry were Tragedy and Epic; for the most part of Western history: drama and heroic narrative typify verse. After Romanticism: drama retires in the domain of prose; the epic function is taken over by the novel, the archetype of poetry is to be found in the lyric. The long poem almost disappears: most of the large-scale poetical works of modern times are composed of sequences of short poems. Sustained structures and fully worked-out conceptual schemes become superfluous to poetry. The lyric can be the expression of a transitory mood or a momentary illumination.

44. PROXIMATE ANTECEDENTS Rhymer’s Club (Yeats, Dowson, Johnson) derived suggestions from French symbolism through A. Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899) Models: French verslibre*, Japanese haiku, Dante and stilnovism *Baudelaire is the first modern, the first to accept the de-classed position of the poet who is no longer the celebrant of the culture to which he belongs, the first to accept the squalor and baseness of the modern urban scene, but he is not a modernist. For a new language and a new verse movement to match the changed status of the poet we have to wait for the next generation… for Rimbaud

45. T. E. Hulme, School of Images, 1907-12 (“a desire for austerity and bareness, a striving toward structure and away from the messiness and confusion of nature and natural things.” Modern Art, 1914) E. Pound, H. D., R. Aldington, Imagism, 1912-16 (image as an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time)

46. ‘to purify the dialect of the tribe’: language had to be dry, hard, precise, presentation had to be direct, concrete, concise, avoiding prolixity, abstraction (‘the adequate symbol is always the natural object’, Pound), self-indulgent lyricism, and second-hand romantic mannerisms and sentimentalism, attitude had to be contemplative, classical, intellectual, disciplined to achieve technical mastery, poetry had to aspire to the condition of sculpture, reality was to be seen in definite visual flashes or images, spatialised synchronicity had to replace diachronical narrations.

47. “Words and expressions should be chosen with precision for their intensity, the everyday transcended in the ideal, and linguistic profundity achieved by typographical experimentation and lexical accuracy”(Childs) • Manifestos • Flint, Imagisme, 1913 • Pound, A few dont’sby an Imagiste, 1913*** • Anthologies • Pound, Des Imagistes, 1914 • Amy Lowell, Some Imagist Poets, 1915-17 (3 vols.)

48. AUTUMN A touch of cold in the Autumn night – I walked abroad, And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge Like a red-faced farmer. I did not stop to speak, but nodded, And round about were the wistful stars With white faces like town children. (T. E. Hulme)

49. Above the dock • Above the quiet dock in midnight, • Tangled in the tall mast’s corded height, • Hangs the moon. What seemed so far away • Is but a child’s balloon, forgotten after play. (T. E. Hulme)

50. The Sunset • A coryphée, covetous of applause, • Loth to leave the stage, • With final diablerie, poises high her toe, • Displays scarlet lingerie of carmin’d clouds, • Amid the hostile murmurs of the stalls. (T. E. Hulme)