The age of anxiety

THE AGE OF ANXIETY st

In the 1930s a new generation of writers came to the fore. Unlike the 1 th

generation of Modernists, these writers were all born at the end of the 19

th

century or at the beginning of the 20 .

These writers grew up in a world which had gone through the shock of WWI

and of developments in science, philosophy, psychoanalysis, etc.

having to live in a world with no values and tradition was not a painful

discovery, as it was for the Modernists, but rather an appalling reality. To Auden

and Orwell, for example, the Waste Land of Eliot was not just a creation of the

mind but a reality.

The first works came out during the Great Depression of the 1930s

characterised by social unrest and mass unemployment.

Like the first Modernists, these writers felt the solitude but they didn't adopt

nihilistic attitudes or experimental techniques, preferring more traditional forms

and less obscure language.

The second generation of Modernists believed in the necessity for the artist to

not isolate himself from society.

The poets took up Socialism as the only possible answer to the problems of

society.

The Age of Anxiety came to an end with the traumatic experience of WWII.

The poetry of WWII caused less shock than that of WWI because it had been

preceded by a long tradition of anti-military, anti-imperialist literature. Poets

had already experienced or heard about the horrors of WWI, had lived the

Depression and the rise of Fascism in Europe.

LOUIS MACNEICE

– Ireland, later educated in England, Oxford.

– Brilliant use of descriptive detail, images, humour

– Rejected systematic explanations of life in favour of more personal

responses to the world.

STEPHEN SPENDER

– A poet and a critic

– He strongly believed in the social and political function of poetry →

worked as a propagandist and defended the poet's rights to deal with

political subjects. WYSTAN HUGH AUDEN

– One of the “progressive poets” of the 1930s. These writers held left-wing

views and were concerned with social problems.

– “Poems” → his first important verse collection, edited by T.S. Eliot.

– He went to Spain during the civil war → shocked from the horrors of the

war.

– He went to Iceland with Luis MacNeice → they wrote “Letters from

Iceland”

– 1940s → new approach to life: he rejected politics and embraced

emotional solitude. He turned to Christianity.

– America → he became an American citizen.

– st

He was influenced by the 1 generation of Modernists but his intellectuals

background was different. Like them he was influenced by Freud studies

and Greek mythology but he was more concerned with Germanic

tradition rather than Romantic, as we can see in his travels (Berlin,

Iceland...).

– He used many different sources: Anglo Saxon alliterative verse,

traditional and medieval ballads, American blues, etc.

– Especially in 1930s and early 1940s, Auden's poetry often dealt with

social problems that he treats with a light hand, never stopping to do

political propaganda.

– “The Unknown Citizen”, poem written in 1940 which expresses Auden's

criticism of the modern world by means of a sarcastic epitaph to a modern

hero or saint: the unknown citizen. The State has erected a monument to

him and his virtues are those of passivity and conformity.

ALDOUS HUXLEY

His most famous work is “Brave New World”, a negative utopia about future

world where man is completely crushed by a totalitarian system based on

science and technology.

It is an anti-utopian novel. Unlike More's Utopia, Huxley's vision is utterly

pessimistic and the world he creates is presented as a model not to be followed.

The title is taken from the words of Miranda, the girl who in Shakespeare's

“The Tempest” lives on a desert island, when for the first time she sees human

beings: “Oh brave new world./That has such people in it”.

The story takes place in London AF632, which corresponds to 2540.

AF → “Anno Ford”, the new world's history dates from the birth of Henry

Ford, the American car producer.

This future society is organised on strictly scientific principles and everything is

planned from a man's birth to his death. There is no place for free choice.

Possible tensions are eliminated by the use of a drug, an hallucinogen that

eliminates depression and fear.

One of the citizen visit an Indian Reservation in New Mexico and bring back

with him a savage who, at the beginning, is fascinated by the new world but he

soon revolts against the lack of privacy and freedom. He influenced the citizen

that was with him and another character. These two were exiliated while the

savage is kept for scientific experimentations as an animal in a zoo. He decides

to kill himself.

– The driving force behind Huxley's novels is a complete rejection and

bitter denunciation of modern life.

– Main themes: bitter view of scientific progress, conviction that material

progress cannot compensate for the inevitable loss of art, religion, culture

and capacity of feeling, the denunciation of a society founded on the

culture of violence. GEORGE ORWELL

– Pen name of Eric Arthur Blair. Born in India and educated in England.

– Bad treated in school because he was not wealthy

– He worked for the colonial service but he resigned his commission “to

escape not merely from imperialism but from every form of man's

dominion over man”.

– Spain, civil war → shocked because he saw the manipulation of Socialists

ANIMAL FARM

Political fable describing how the animals on a farm rebel against their cruel

master. The animals decide to run the farm themselves- a parody of workers

running factories and farms in the Soviet Union- but in a short time the pigs

gain control over other animals and start to behave as cruelly as the human

master.

The animals of the far are a metaphor of the workers in modern society: like

them, they are exploited, no matter who the masters happen to be.

The sad conclusion is that the animals lack of social consciousness and

revolutions will fail and will result in new forms of oppression.

More specifically, the novel satirises the corruption of Socialism in the Soviet

Union.

A scene is important: the farm's pigs are walking on 2 legs, like man. Their

parade is a parody of military parades but the message is that the former leaders

of the revolution have learned to behave exactly like the tyrant they brought

down.

Inequality becomes an article of the law: “All animals are equal but some

animals are more equal than others”.

No surprises that at the end of the book pigs behave exactly like humans,

listening to the radio, reading newspapers, smoking a pipe...

NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR

It is a dystopian novel.

Orwell presents a terrible future under the control of Big Brother and where

there is no privacy because of monitors called “telescreens” watching every step

people take.

Everything is controlled: press, communication, language, history and thought.

The language is made of a very poor lexic in order that people would find it