Riassunto esame Cultura e Letteratura Inglese II, prof. Polopoli, libro consigliato Storia della Letteratura Inglese, Bertinetti

Molly lies in bed and she think of her day. Various scenes and memories of her life, present,

but above all, past life, crowd her mind. In particular, she thinks about her husband. The

extract begins with her thinking about nature and this seems to reveal her positive attitude

toward life. Her thoughts seem to be a sort of hymn to nature. There are several words

connected to nature: she evokes colours, shapes, sounds.

Then her reflections turn to atheism and religion, and she distances herself from atheism,

rejecting those who don’t believe in God.

Now we have the first yes. She now remembers when she was with her husband and she

think of how she got him to propose to her. Then we have a series of yes, she goes back in

the past. Then she thinks of her past in Gibraltar where her father was a soldier. The exotic

atmosphere of Gibraltar is described in a confusing way. Then she says, “how he kissed me

under the Moorish wall…” the reference is not for Bloom because it’s mixed with memories

of kissing other men.

The word flower(s) repeated at least 8 times in the passage: all sorts of shapes and smells

and colours and fields of oats and hat, primroses, violets, rhododendrons, fig trees, rose

gardens, jessamine, geraniums, cactuses. They are connected to the house, herself, all

women, nature, Gibraltar. They all convey the idea of life, people who love and appreciate

nature and are overwhelmed by passion. Molly is in harmony with nature. Through these

images of nature and life she thinks of the essence of her own life, of what she has lived

with passion, giving a positive idea of life and the text becomes a living thing. Even her

memories are positive, we have these young girls with coloured costumes, the idea of

handsome men.

The Dead is the last and the longest story in Dubliners, the one in which the main themes of

the collection (paralysis, stagnation, decay) reach their climax. The main theme is death,

which runs throughout the story. The text. There is a horse who runs around for no reason,

meaning the futility of life is a reference to death. Moral lesson in his mind: a sense of glory

is linked to someone who dies young. These tears are the symbol of his new awareness, now

he is aware of something new: revelation and epiphany.

Idea of vagueness: region is a state of being, a state of mind. He moves towards this

dimension because of a process of self-revelation. He looks at himself and he discovers

another man as in a mirror. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world:

the solid world itself, which this dead had one time lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.

A world which cannot be touched, so it's grey, indefinite. The solid world is one of

mediocracy. He realises his own limits and his identity slowly disappears. From this point

on, there is a state of being that goes beyond the real; Gabriel has no coherent identity. The

snow covers everything. Gabriel's ego dissolves, he feels humiliated (he has been rejected

by his wife). The image of the snow also conveys the idea of paralysis, and becomes a

symbol of solitude, isolation, silence, alienation from society. There is a sort of dialogue

between Gabriel's consciousness and unconsciousness.

Realistic style. Joyce was obsessed with the idea of common place. In this case, even if the

style remains realistic, he moves away from realism to go towards a more intimate tone,

which is also required by the theme.

Context. At the beginning appears a name: Lily, which is the name of a funeral flower,

symbol of death. There are different levels of death:

 There are the “dear departed” (really dead) such as Gabriel's murderer or Michael

Furey (Greta's first lover).

 The moribund such as Julia and Kate, the two old ladies who are Gabriel's aunts, the

remind the final grasp to life.

 Gabriel. Age is not a requisite for inclusion in this classes. Even if you are not old,

you may belong to the moribund. Death doesn't depend on the age. There are people

who are spiritual and emotionally dead.

 Living dead. Those who remain alive but fail to live because they haven't understood

the true essence of life, they live as ghosts, their lives are wasted.

 The true protagonists of the story are those people who are alive but don't live.

Plot. Gabriel is a journalist, who one night goes with his wife to the Christmas party

organised every year at the home of his aunt Julia. The high point of the party is the

Gabriel's well-received speech, applauded by everyone. He feels satisfied. But before

leaving the party, Gretta hears an old Irish song and it reminds her of a young man called

Michael who had been in love with her when she was younger and who had died because of

tuberculosis at the age of 17.

When the couple go back to their hotel, their feelings are completely different. Gabriel is

happy and satisfied and filled with desire for his wife. Gretta's thoughts go back to the

memory of his young love. Gabriel is consumed with physical passion; his wife is far away

from him. Once in their room at the hotel his wife falls asleep, Gabriel remains awake. He

thinks of the events of the night, he watches his wife with pity. Now he feels far away from

his wife too. Looking at the snow outside the window he thinks of the futility of the lives

that surrounds him and the futility of his own life.

The revelation that Gretta has been living a dead life, in contrast to the remembered

romance of her youth, destroys Gabriel's certainties and he realises that his existence is

unreal. He thinks that his wife looks at the past considering it as a romance, the romantic

aspect of her life. He discovered a new reality far from the one he has lived. The harmony

between the two is destroyed forever.

Araby is a bazar’s name. The story is about a boy's first love, but on a deeper level: it's

about the world in which he lives. The title refers to the enchanting and charming East and

the charm of distance places mixed with the allure of the new love. But the consequences

are not positive at all because the exotic promise of the bazar and the love for the girl are

frustrated. This girl is his friend's sister, the love for this girl symbolises a desire for change.

At the end the narrator arrives at the bazar, but he does not experience the freedom of the

enchanting East. The story concludes with the boy experiencing an epiphany, which is not

positive.

T.S. Eliot (1888-1965). He was an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a

royalist in politic. His poetry is complex and almost incomprehensible, dark. He believes the

crisis is epistemological; there’s no link between the explainer, the explanation and the

explained. The link between subject and object has been destroyed: there’s only chaos. So,

this is where he starts from; then, he asks: who’s the innovator? The one who interrupts the

dialogue with tradition. But then, what’s tradition? It is what has been in the past, what’s

part of us, the innovator almost needs tradition: that’s what he’s made of. So, we can’t really

‘destroy’ it. Literature, books, always speaks about the past – there’s always a link between

texts, and this is tradition. So, he defines himself as the ‘greatest modernist’ and the

‘greatest classicist’, since he knows all about tradition: Latin, Greek, Italian, Shakespeare,

Cleopatra. He always refers to classic culture. Everything has to do with the past. He says:

the first one who speaks about cheeks as ‘just like roses’ is a poet; the second one is an idiot.

According to T. S. Eliot, tradition is a-temporal, past and present are simultaneous.

Perspective on the XX century

In his 1923 review of James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot focused on one of his generation’s

recurrent anxiety: the idea that art might be impossible in the XX century. The reasons are

many and complex, but they were all related to the collapse of ways of knowing that had

served the Western mind at least since the Renaissance and had received canonical

formulation in the XVII century in the science of Newton and the philosophy of Descartes.

The crisis was essentially epistemological and was related to the uncertainty about how we

know. Their crisis was at once a cause of despair and an incentive for the innovation in the

art. One of the things that T. S. Eliot calls into question is the use of epistemology as a

reference point. Epistemology is the theory of knowledge, of its methods and, above all, of

its validity. According to him, meaning is meaningless (even though it might look like a

paradox). The idea that the subject can describe and know the object on the assumption that

they both are stable identities is called into question. This means that the separation between

subject and object is just a dream: the separation between the explainer, the explanation and

the explained doesn’t exist at all. According to him, interpretation is a never-ending process,

because it has to do with the origins of the intertextual relations.

Foucault will say ‘everything has already been told somewhere else’. In post-modernism,

we will speak about the ‘copy of a copy’ and the idea of ‘simulacra’. If there’s this sort of

dialogue among text, literature becomes self-referencing, calling attention to itself as

language. In the Wasteland, in fact, there’s a continuous instability, images and words

continuously vanish and fade, they become something else. The traditional theory collapsed,

different cultures coexist; even in only one perspective there’s a simultaneity of views. Even

the process of reading is ‘about itself’ – ‘reading is about reading’.

T. S. Eliot is considered as the greatest of the poetic voices of the XX century; he was

American by birth, but English (and European) by choice. In 1910, he moved to Paris,

where he studied at la Sorbonne, where he studies Bergson’s theory of la durèe: Bergson

believed that time was a human experience. In Paris he was deeply influenced by French

authors such as Verlaine, Baudelaire.

He then moved to Germany to complete his studies, and when the WWI started, he moved

to England, where he met Ezra Pound. At Oxford, he studied Greek Philosophy.

As for the influence of the symbolists on him, it has to be found in his sense of music in

poetry: he paid attention to the sounds of words. The influence of Baudelaire is to be found

in the charm of modern cities, and even their squalor.

Thanks to them, T. S. Eliot got rid of the past of Romantic tradition. From the Imagists and

Ezra Pound, he learnt about simple, clear, and precise words and images.

But perhaps it was Dante who influenced him the most: in fact, T. S. Eliot establishes a very

important relationship between Dante’s medieval Inferno and the contemporary world and

modern society. He also focused on John Donne, who belonged to the Metaphysical poets,

whose poetry was obscure, based