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Letteratura inglese II

Letteratura inglese II. Introduction to Modernism (Penguin) 23 February 2009. The role of the artist. Artist’s isolation (in a world where the artist sees the masses as ignorant of cultural and moral conflicts)

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Letteratura inglese II

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  1. Letteratura inglese II Introduction to Modernism (Penguin) 23 February 2009

  2. The role of the artist • Artist’s isolation (in a world where the artist sees the masses as ignorant of cultural and moral conflicts) • Yet (with some exceptions, i.e. late Eliot) the intelligentsia no longer fostered a coherent and accepted set of values. • Mass Civilisation and minority culture (F.R. Leavis) • Artist’s refusal to compromise with the unifying and homogenising tendencies of the age. • Yet, the artist is unable to retreat into private worlds (commitment to social and political change).

  3. Countryside / Metropolis • Decline of a rural way of life (nature’s poetry?) • Urban landscape (evocation of a simpler way of life, primitivism, Conrad, as a response to this) • Darwinian notion: the survival of the fittest

  4. Gender • The rise of the “new woman” (Shaw’s analysis of femininity, suffragette movement for women’s rights to vote. • D.H. Lawrence: the relation between man and woman is the problem of today

  5. Relativism • Relativism (loss of the basic structural certainty which arose out of the fixed viewpoint of Renaissance perspective) • Picasso’s rebellion against perspective • Anthropology: ‘Primitive cultures’ as different ways of organising societies

  6. ‘Man’ • Freud: man as prey to instinctual desires • Darwin • Marx: ‘Man’ as outcome of social and economic forces (It combines with long minority tradition of radicalism unfavourable to the cultural and social consequences of industrialisation and commercialism) • Death of God

  7. William James, Principles of Psychology (1901) • “Consciousness … does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A ‘river’ or ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described… let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life”

  8. Empire • 1919: Gandhi (mass revolutionary pacific movement)

  9. Questions of popular culture • Media, Photography • Radio (Hitler, Mussolini) and social consensus • Cinema • Exchange: Techniques of Joyce, Picasso, surrealism, etc., utilised by the mass media; but the avant-garde looked for its source material within the world of popular artefacts and culture (Dada’s cult of the ready-made)

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