Appunti completi del corso di Cultura inglese II (secondo semestre)

Cultura inglese II

Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak Whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break. Act 4, Scene 3, Macbeth, Shakespeare.

Programma

Il corso verte sulla rappresentazione letteraria e individuale del tragico, utilizzando a tal fine gli strumenti offerti dai Cultural Studies e dalle Medical Humanities nella loro dimensione multidisciplinare. Tematiche centrali saranno: il tragico nel suo incarnarsi nella forma artistica della tragedia, gli approcci culturali e terapeutici alla dimensione del tragico che si sono stratificati nel tempo. Il corso include un'ampia gamma di testi: testi teatrali, reportage giornalistici, saggi filosofici e in generale testi utili a rappresentare l'esperienza passata e contemporanea del tragico.

• Unità 1 I Cultural Studies; le Medical Humanities; il tragico.
• Unità 2 La tragedia; William Shakespeare e Macbeth.
• Unità 3 Il tragico nel dramma contemporaneo (Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Arthur Miller).

Materiale di riferimento

Qualunque edizione, purché integrale e in inglese:

• William Shakespeare, Macbeth.
• Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot; Catastrophe.
• Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman.
• Harold Pinter, The Caretaker.
• AAVV, Introduzione ai Cultural Studies. UK, USA e paesi anglofoni. Roma, Carocci, 2016.

Una raccolta di materiali critici sarà messa a disposizione dal docente all'inizio del corso.

Modalità di verifica dell’apprendimento e criteri di valutazione

Per gli studenti frequentanti, è prevista la preparazione e la presentazione in sede di esami di un testo Power Point connesso alle attività del corso, che andrà a integrare la consueta procedura di valutazione orale.

Lesson 16/02/2023

Triangle constitutes the main focus of our first lesson, there are 3 angles:

• Cultural Studies.
• Medical Humanities is quite a recent phrase and we will discuss about it in the next lessons. It is a relevant label because it has to do with our possible future as possible mediators.
• Tragic and Tragedy (meant as a theatrical genre).

Cultural studies

A brief recap of the concept Cultural Studies. What does Cultural Studies mean and what is Culture?

Cultural studies don’t establish a proper hierarchy between the various cultural production we are not in front of a pyramid where at the top of it you have the classical culture and literature and at the base of it you have for example graphic novel or pop music, etc. Cultural studies are interested in the various productions of culture and no matter where they come from. This implies a concept of culture that is quite different from the one we have been brought up. Cultural studies imply culture not with the capital C because if I speak of culture ≠ Culture.

Culture with a capital C it means that there is only one culture.

During the last century this one Culture in England was the one that was practiced and taught in Cambridge and Oxford. This was the one and only Culture; all the other cultures were not relevant.

Now the people who practice cultural studies don’t share this view any longer, so we have many cultures, we prefer to think that every group identifying from an ethnic, ideological point of view produces its own culture.

Example If you go to a football match and you are an Inter supporter, you belong to that culture (the culture of the people who support inter soccer team) and you have to behave in a proper way because this is implied by your culture, so you have to dress in a proper way, you have to seat in a certain area, you have to sing the proper anthem, etc. This is a process of cultural production, and this is relevant. This is culture and this culture behaves in a certain way, it includes and excludes according to certain parameters (you can’t go there with a Milan t-shirt). These groups follow a discourse.

This is an example of what a culture is for cultural studies practitioners: a culture is the expression of a coherent group. and this implicates the fact that there’s no culture better/worse or more/less important than the others.

Every different group produces its own different culture.

Founding fathers: Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, Edward Thompson this is triad that is at the beginning of the cultural studies.

Richard Hoggart (1918-2014)

Hoggart broke the ice in this field with the text The uses of literacy in 1957.

He was a sociologist of humble origins who had the opportunity to study (not a literary critic) sociology thanks to various programs promoting studies among humble people he was the first one to look at the cultural habits and practices of the working class in their free time.

At that time this was an entirely new concept culture before 1957 was meant with the capital C, so Culture was what was taught in Cambridge and Oxford.

Studying the cultural habits of the working class was something groundbreaking at that time also because the working classes were not supposed to have a culture and were not supposed to have cultural habits.

Results his study showed that the working class:

• Went habitually to music halls and not to the proper theatre.
• Used to read comics and detective stories instead of classic literature. (graphic novels) (romanzo giallo).

1 In Inghilterra il music hall era lo spettacolo di varietà. In Italia prende il nome di spettacolo di rivista (in inglese non è letteralmente traducibile) e consisteva in canzonette, ballerine discinte, roba leggera. Faceva spettacoli di questo genere Erminio Macario, a Torino.

Hoggart judgement was very negative he said ‘’It was much better once when the working class had a huge cultural oral tradition, now this is lost, and the working class is only interested in music hall and so on […]’’.

This was his belief because in 1957 he couldn’t see that certain literary genre such as the detective story or the graphic novel could be very complex from a cultural point of view. This aspect was something that he entirely missed and it explains his sever, strict and negative judgement.

Anyway, what’s important is that thanks to the groundbreaking innovation (consider culture not with the capital C) now there are studies about cultures and not about the Culture.

Raymond Williams (1921-1988)

Williams published Culture and Society (1958) and Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976, and later).

In the first publication of Keywords, he focused on four main keywords that he thought were important:

• Culture it was meant in the sense that we are meaning today: culture as expression of a coherent group - cultures and not Culture.
• Ideology.
• Ethnicity.
• Discourse.

He later went on writing and enlarging this book with new keywords and the correspondent definitions in the following years.

There are many editions of this book.

Edward Palmer Thompson (1924-1993)

Thompson was an historian with interest in the making of the working class. This was groundbreaking at that time because previously historians were interested in other topics rather than the working classes.

The title of his famous work is The making of the English working class.

2 The method wasn’t very scientific because the Cultural Studies were just born and they were just at the beginning of a new discourse.

3 They consider culture as something more inclusively (a flexible term) and this open the door to many activities/other things ≠ if they consider culture as something static and with just one form, they will stick with it.

The 3 founding fathers broke the ice and began to consider culture in a different way.

Birmingham centre for contemporary cultural studies (CCCS) - 1964

A very important date for the Cultural Studies is 1964 when at the University of Birmingham, the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) was founded.

The first director was Hoggart and it was definitely closed by Tony Blair at the beginning of our century because:

• Officially he wanted to save money for universities.
• Unofficially because he wanted to punish the Birmingham Centre for the criticism towards him, but despite of this, Cultural Studies are still alive.

There was a magazine produced by the Centre that went on publishing making us aware of the progresses of cultural studies.

Originally, Cultural Studies in England were associated with sociology (thanks to Richard Hoggart) and then they expanded to television studies as well (huge difference with Italy: literature approach).

4 UK: in a way they still are linked to sociology ≠ Italy: they were appropriated by literally studies so there is a huge difference. There is the same approach but with a different target, more literature than sociology in Italy.

For the Cultural Studies a crucial notion is that of text:

• Technically text: a coherent set of signs arranged to transmit a message (Y. Lotman).
• Practically this means that a text is everything or anything (for the approach of the Cultural Studies) that can be analysed.

So, for example, advertisements, novels, posters, poems, songs, signals, images, movies, etc. all these things speak, sometimes they speak verbally and sometimes they speak with icons.

Example: the traffic sign it speaks and tells us things clear but without the oral language.

To understand it we have to be a coherent group that reacts to the language in a proper way.

5 Utilizzare le parole come testo e non il libro/brano/etc. in sé con Shakespeare non ci sono pagine ma atti, scene e versi.

Tragic and tragedy

• Tragic theatrical genre about something tragic.
• Tragedy drama, theatre, embodiment of tragic on stage.

We are all acquainted with the idea of tragic because we are all human beings so we can experience the tragic in our personal life directly or indirectly (when I see the tragic that happens to someone else like through television) so, the idea of tragic is something that is rooted in our life even if we are always trying to avoid this concept.

This idea is different among people: something that is tragic for someone can be just a sad event for someone else. It depends on how you symbolise that event. The thresholds of (soglia, principio, limite) something tragic are not the same for everyone:

6 Death tragedy for everybody -vs- Unrequired love tragic for somebody and just simply sad for others.

The tragedy is properly the embodiment of tragic on a stage, so it belongs to drama, to theatre.

Nowadays, by tragedy we mean something that is deeply connected with drama, and this is surprising because it has not always been so. The term/label tragedy can be intended:

1. Restrictively this means that you are just referring to:

• The Greek tragedy that flourished in Greece starting from the 5 century b.C.
• The Elizabethan tragedy that flourished in England approximately between 1576 and 1640 (Shakespeare’s great era).

If we consider tragedy as a proper dramatic genre, we can find only 2 great moments in the western history of the proper flourishing of tragedy in this case tragedy has a proper structure:

• It is divided in acts (usually 5).
• There is a climax (/cliffhanger).
• It deals with the fall of a great and usually noble character (caduta di un personaggio: think of Hamlet, noble, King Lear) or Macbeth (Scottish King).
• Usually, this kind of tragedy is in verses, not in prose (even if sometimes Shakespeare and his colleagues use prose).

This definition is technical, but it has a problem: if we use the term tragedy restrictively, we miss a lot of Tragic texts that are not properly tragedies structurally but they are sombre and deal with sad and extreme things, with the dark side of our existence (Tragic mood).

Samuel Beckett defined Waiting for Godot a tragicomedy in 2 acts because it has a tragic background but there are also moments that makes laugh.

2. Inclusively all the ‘’serious’’ theatre if we think of tragedy in a restrictive way this text is not a proper tragedy because it is not in verses, it deals with middle class people, there is not properly any fall of the main character. But if we think of tragedy in an inclusive way, it is a tragedy because it makes us think of the sad things of life. It has a tragic mood. The inclusive approach is more flexible and it enables you to include works by Beckett, Pinter, Pirandello, etc. (il prof preferisce utilizzare questo approccio).

Example ‘’Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore’’ by Pirandello.

Mind that we are adopting a western perspective (Europe and North America) do not forget that there are other perspectives, for example the Noh theatre, the ancient oriental theatre rooted in Japan.

Tragedy’s approach is lay (laico) or secular for some critics, if there is a Christian environment, there is a compensation from Heaven, that prevents proper tragedy, because there is an afterlife, so there is no end to your own life (compensation from Heaven prevents proper tragedy) [Se c’è una forte componente religiosa nella persona del dramma, la Tragedia fa molta più fatica a “formarsi” perché essendoci l’idea dell’Aldilà non si vive la tragedia nello stesso modo (non tutto è perduto). Un esempio è Shakespeare (è cristiano)].

Other theatres adopt different labels, the distinction of inclusive and restrictive tragedy has nothing to do with other cultures and theatres (it is something that is proper of the western perspective).

The western perspective is not the only one, it is just our perspective this is important for the Cultural Studies because the point of view can influence the results of our studies.

Lesson 17/02/2023

From a western point of view…

The first appearance of the term tragedy in the English language is in the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer that came out around 1387 (not related with Theatre).

7 The tales are in verse and have a very strong narrative element (unlike Boccaccio’s Decameron where the novellas have a

It appears in one of the tales it was not associated with Theatre but with a narrative/poetic context.

This also happened with the term Commedia in the Italian language the first appearance of the term is in volgare, in Dante’s Commedia. Even in this case it’s not related with Theatre.

The fact that at that time the term wasn’t associated with Theatre (but with Drama and Poetry) is very curious because nowadays when we think about Tragedy or Commedia, Theatre is the first thing that comes in mind.

But basically, we can’t talk about Tragedy without mentioning Aristotle (384 b.C. before Christ - 322 b.C.), Greek philosopher, who in 335 b.C. published his famous Poetics, Aristotle’s Poetics, La poetica di Aristotele.

In his literary work Aristotle discuss about the term Tragedy in a dramatic way (il nostro dopo Cristo) he identifies 6 elements that will be the emblem of Tragedy until today (he became an authority for the western world):

• Plot.
• Character.
• Theme.
• Language.
• Rhythm.
• Spectacle.

Pay attention to b.C. and a.d. do not mix them up.

So, if authors wanted to write a Tragedy they must follow Aristotle’s pattern, provided that (purché/a patto che) they could read Aristotle’s work as far as we know Shakespeare and his contemporaries could not read Aristotle because the Poetics wasn’t translated in English yet. So, it was very likely that Ben Johnson (one of Shakespeare’s colleagues), who was a very cultivated man, could have read Aristotle but it was very unlikely that Shakespeare (or many of his contemporaries) could have read Aristotle.

Maybe Shakespeare could have heard something about Aristotle’s Poetics, but he never managed to read it (he couldn’t read Greek because he had not a proper line of studies, he never went to university unlike Ben Johnson). That’s why when Ben Johnson writes a tragedy, he follows Aristotle’s prescriptions but when Shakespeare writes his tragedies sometimes, he follows the pattern but sometimes not.

Aristotle was the theoriser of the Tragedy and there are other things to add:

Aristotle’s spoke of catharsis, a kind of tragic pleasure according to Aristotle, one of the main elements of Tragedy was that the audience could experience a kind of inner purification of feelings.

Something that took place in front of a Tragedy and not in front of a Comedy according to his view.

We still use this label.

When someone watches a Tragedy, he/she will experience a kind of inner purification of feelings because will identify with the main character in a way that you become a part of him, and you follow his tragedy. He/she will identify as a witness, and you suffer with him this is how the catharsis is produced.

This is an extremely criticised concept some people say that you don’t identify yourself, some other people say that identification is not something to be looked for, some people say that identification is something that works against the understanding of the message that is in the Tragedy.

This last belief was of B. Brecht, a famous German dramaturg (he was a theorizer of Drama) according to Brecht, identification must be avoided and not looked for because if you identify with the character you miss the moral and the meaning, you are too involved and your brain does not work properly, you can’t judge the message because you are too much involved.

Brecht prevented the audience from identifying with the characters because when you are at the point of identifying something happens that does not enable you to go on with the identification (for