BERI-1.

predavanje

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

1901-10 reign of Edward VII Edwardian England- if you see this term somewhere, it
probably refers to this time

1902 End of the Anglo-Boer War- South Africa, colonial wars had their culmination in
W. W. 2
1903 Henry Ford founds Ford Motor Company

-Wright brothers make the 1.successful airplane flight

1905 Albert Einstein theory of special relativity

-Impressionist exhibition, London

The signs of modernism
-1910 Post-Impressionist exhib, Lo

WORLD WAR I
1910-36 Reign of George V

1917- The Royal House of Saxe- Coburg- Gotha becomes The House of Windsor(the
Germans were not very popular, so the name was changed)

1914-18 W. W. I

1916 Easter Uprising in Dublin (but they will have to wait for their independence)-this year is
a theme in poetry; all these events appear in Brit. and Irish lit.

1918 Armistice - An armistice is the effective end of a war, when the warring parties agree to
stop fighting. It is derived from the Latin arma, meaning weapons and statium, meaning a
stopping.

-Franchise act grants vote to women over 30 (in parliamentary elections; in local elections
they were allowed in 19th c.)

1920 Treaty of Versailles. League of Nations formed

IRISH INDIPENDENCE
1921 Formation of Irish State with Northern????????

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Economy and politics:

1929 Stock market crash. The Great Depression begins

1933 Hitler comes to power in Germany

1936-39 Spanish Civil War

1936 Edward VIII succeeds George V but abdicates for personal reasons (to marry Mrs.
Simpson) in favor of his brother, crowned George VI

WORLD WAR II

1939-45

1940 Fall of France. Battle of Britain

1941-45 The Holocaust

(Voices from WWI-in all arts not only lit.)

The murder of Archduke Ferdinand

Russia and France at war with Germany and Austria

Germany attacks Belgium

August 4 1914 Britain declares war on Germany

Real reasons:

Rival Imperialism

International armaments race- industrialized countries tried to take advantage

Alliances:

1914-Turkey + Germany

- Japan joins Britain and France

1915- B + Germ+ Fr
-Italy+Britain+Fr.

1917 the US

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New war strategies and technologies produced no breakthroughs:

1915- The Germans use of poison gas at the second battle of Ypres
-War from the trenches

1916 the Brit. introduced tanks on the Somme

The Consequences:

The battle causalities greater than those of WWII

1918 Spanish flu, 5-10 million people died worldwide

-A sense that the bases of the civilization had been destroyed

RUPERT BROOKE 1887-1915

Educated at Cambridge
-Liberal culture of Brit. Imperialism
Symbolic of patriotic Englishman

A typical poet of this time- young, educated, joined the war- believed in changes and that
Britain was the greatest country in the world: civilized, enlightment

-Officer in the Royal Navy (one abortive expedition to Antwerp)

-Died of dysentery on the way to Gallipoli
-Buried on the Greek island of Skyros

The Soldier

f I should die, think only this of me:

That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

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-typical metamorphosis of B. Imperialism, wherever you find English bones-England;
imperialist, prestige mythology

SIEGFREID SASSON 1886-1967

Educated at Cambridge

Fought at Memetz Wood and in the Somme Offensive

Decorated with Military Cross

Nicknamed Mad Jack-single armed to war

Wounded in 1917

A willful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the war is being deliberately
prolonged by those who have the power to end it.

This war, upon which I entered as a war of defense and liberation, has now become a war of
aggression

-they would have killed him for saying these things, but he was a hero, so they simply called
him mad

The General

-(he sent then to the front line to die, because they have criticized him)

"Good-morning; good-morning!" the General said

When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of em dead,
And were cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
"Hes a cheery old card," grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.

But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

ISAAC ROSENBERG 1890-1918

Wanted to be a painter

1915 Returned to Engl. from South Africa and enlisted in the army?

Killed in action

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Louse Hunting

Nudes - stark and glistening,

Yelling in lurid glee. Grinning faces
And raging limbs
Whirl over the floor one fire.
For a shirt verminously busy
Yon soldier tore from his throat, with oaths
Godhead might shrink at, but not the lice.
And soon the shirt was aflare
Over the candle he'd lit while we lay.

Then we all sprang up and stript

To hunt the verminous brood.
Soon like a demons' pantomine
The place was raging.
See the silhouettes agape,
See the glibbering shadows
Mixed with the battled arms on the wall.
See gargantuan hooked fingers
Pluck in supreme flesh
To smutch supreme littleness.
See the merry limbs in hot Highland fling
Because some wizard vermin
Charmed from the quiet this revel
When our ears were half lulled
By the dark music
Blown from Sleep's trumpet.

-talking about war, but not directly; different type of enemy

-vermine, verminous brood- usu used for enemies

-like mock-epic

WILFRED OWEN 1893-1918

Could not decide whether he ought to enlist

Enlisted in1917 and fought in the Battle of Somme

Apologia pro Poemate Meo

I, too, saw God through mud

The mud that cracked on cheeks when wretches smiled.

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 War brought more glory to their eyes than blood,
And gave their laughs more glee than shakes a child.

Merry it was to laugh there

Where death becomes absurd and life absurder.
For power was on us as we slashed bones bare
Not to feel sickness or remorse of murder.

I, too, have dropped off fear

Behind the barrage, dead as my platoon,
And sailed my spirit surging, light and clear
Past the entanglement where hopes lay strewn;

And witnessed exultation

Faces that used to curse me, scowl for scowl,
Shine and lift up with passion of oblation,
Seraphic for an hour; though they were foul.

I have made fellowships

Untold of happy lovers in old song.
For love is not the binding of fair lips
With the soft silk of eyes that look and long,

By Joy, whose ribbon slips,

But wound with war's hard wire whose stakes are strong;
Bound with the bandage of the arm that drips;
Knit in the welding of the rifle-thong.

I have perceived much beauty

In the hoarse oaths that kept our courage straight;
Heard music in the silentness of duty;
Found peace where shell-storms spouted reddest spate.

Nevertheless, except you share

With them in hell the sorrowful dark of hell,
Whose world is but the trembling of a flare,
And heaven but as the highway for a shell,

You shall not hear their mirth:

You shall not come to think them well content
By any jest of mine. These men are worth
Your tears: You are not worth their merriment.

November 1917.

-contradictory

absurd/er- prominent world view, no meaning

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- Paradox you dont go to the trenches to find beauty, God, friends

-Unless you join the war, you shall not know what aching is about

Dulce et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares2 we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest3 began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots4
Of tired, outstripped5 Five-Nines6 that dropped behind.

Gas!7 Gas! Quick, boys! An ecstasy of fumbling,

Fitting the clumsy helmets8 just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime9 . . .
Dim, through the misty panes10 and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering,11 choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud12
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest13
To children ardent14 for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.15

8 October 1917 - March, 1918

1 DULCE ET DECORUM EST - the first words of a Latin saying (taken from an ode
by Horace). The words were widely understood and often quoted at the start of the
First World War. They mean "It is sweet and right." The full saying ends the poem:
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori - it is sweet and right to die for your country. In
other words, it is a wonderful and great honour to fight and die for your country

2 rockets which were sent up to burn with a brilliant glare to light up men and other targets in
the area between the front lines (See illustration, page 118 of Out in the Dark.)

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 3 a camp away from the front line where exhausted soldiers might rest for a few days,
or longer
4 the noise made by the shells rushing through the air
5 outpaced, the soldiers have struggled beyond the reach of these shells which are now
falling behind them as they struggle away from the scene of battle

6 Five-Nines - 5.9 calibre explosive shells

7 poison gas. From the symptoms it would appear to be chlorine or phosgene gas. The
filling of the lungs with fluid had the same effects as when a person drowned
8 the early name for gas masks
9 a white chalky substance which can burn live tissue
10 the glass in the eyepieces of the gas masks
11 Owen probably meant flickering out like a candle or gurgling like water draining
down a gutter, referring to the sounds in the throat of the choking man, or it might be a
sound partly like stuttering and partly like gurgling
12 normally the regurgitated grass that cows chew; here a similar looking material was
issuing from the soldier's mouth
13 high zest - idealistic enthusiasm, keenly believing in the rightness of the idea
14 keen
15 see note 1

- decorus- beautiful, appropriate

- its sweet and meet to die for ones country- he went to war with this phrase in mind

- The confusion of morality, ethics and aesthetics; art and real life

MODERNISM

Some major authors

Questioning: the certanties that had provided a support for traditional modes of

social organization, religion, morality an the concept of human self( dissappointment )

WW I&II- not about cultures, the same culture enviroment; religion- more or less the ame
religion; morality- civilized war of 20th ct.

Influential thinkers: F. Nietzsche, K. Marx, S. Freud, J. G. Frazer(anthropologist- The

Golden Bough)

Architecture: Vienna 1890-1910

traditional forms and materials abandoned

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Modernism in painting:

Perspective and direct pictorial representation

Depth in the painting, illusion of reality

Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Futurism

Music:

Melody and harmony are abandoned

Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Hindemith- cacophony

Literature:

A rejection of traditional realism:

Chronological plot, continuous narrative, omniscient narrator, closed endings

Modernist Features:

Eclecticism/ Waste Land

Aleatory form/ Found Art; Dadaism ( painting), advertisements from newspapers, garbage
turned into art

Parody/ The abandonment of the divine presentations of authorship

author not omniscient anymore

Fragmentation:

A lament, pessimism and despair about the world which finds its representation in those
fractured art forms

The lost sense of purpose

A lost coherence

A lost sense of values

Modernist Asceticism:

Modernists react against elaborate art of the 19th c.

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Decoration is a crime

Fierce Asceticism/ Minimalism- short forms

JOSEPH CONRAD

Heart of Darkness 1902- a novelette

Born in Poland

English is his 3rd language

Personal Experience: In 1890 arrived in Africa and traveled up the Congo river, looking for
Antoine Klein, an agent of the company

Artists Quest:

art itself may be defined as a single- minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to
the visible universe-the artist becomes the major protagonist of the quest

the artist descends within himself- subconscious mind

dreams and symbols- symbolism ( Freud is important)

Multiple quests:

Historical- The Thames

Economic- Brussels- goes to get a job, expeditions

Anthropological- they look at those natives, Curts- M. doesnt like him, but admires him,
finds the primitive within himself

The setting:

The Thames

Conrad never states that the rest of the story is set in Africa

The Congo Free State

Brit. colonial empire was at its height at the end of the19th c.: India, Malaya, Hong Kong,
much of Africa

Africa- a place of physical darkness, paganism, diseases, insanity, African savages, cannibals-
prejudices- there were no cannibals in Africa

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Criticism:

H of D and the Nigger of the Narcissus

Banned in many schools and libraries in the US because they contain the word nigger

Chinua Achebe Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist

women: fiance- white, calm, civilized

African- wiled, full of life

-In Brit. lit. - a great change in aesthetics- dark people are beautiful

MODERNISM IN POETRY

W. B. YEATS 1865-1939

Life and career- long; stayed a poet until his old age, mature poetry- the best

The Coat

I MADE my song a coat

Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world's eyes
As though they'd wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there's more enterprise
In walking naked.

- a transitional poem; his early interests- irish mythologies; influence. Shelley, but here he
abandons the old irish myth., spiritual type of poetry

nakedness- symbol

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Symbolism/ Imagism

Symbolism as Ultra Romanticism

Romantics rejected the mechanistic world view, which was dominant in the 18th c.
(Weltanschaung); world=mechanism, God=clock, a swiss mechanism

The Romantics- say that its not a full experience of life- rational, reason oriented, emo;I
think, therefore I am, they say I feel, therefore I am

Symbolists reject Naturalism (Zolas noves as laboratory experiment)

Naturalism- experiment---symbolists say that disecting life eventually kills it

From Romanticism to Symbolism:

English Romantics influenced E. A Poe, Poe influence symbolist poets in France toward the
end of the 19th c., French symbolists influenced Engl. and Amer. poets of the 20th c.

EDGAR ALLEN POE

The symbolist manifesto

that indefinitness is an element of the true music(of poetry)

-compares poetry to the art of all arts(music-spiritual effect)

Poetry should be like music- suggestive and indefinite

Symbolism suggests the meaning- several meanings

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot HOLD;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

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 Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

- symb. poem, can be interpreted in many ways

Yeatss Conceot of history circular- repeated, only different names

Falcon cannot hear the falconer- theres something wrong in the world, things fall apart-
fragmentation the bases of the Western civilisation falling apart

Mere anarchyupon the world- bloody events, no order

ceremony of innocence is- democracy, which is is a procedure- abandoned

-in every war:intelectuals and the best-pacifists, the worst- leaders

His poetry- visionary; symbols and visions

Revelation- resembles Johns apochalipse

Yeats not a traditional Christian; involved in all sorts of occult, mistic religion,
spiritualist, using mediums

sound- important in modernist poetry; The Second Coming- almost like a spiritual seanse,
calling the spirits- they appear and respond out of spiritus mind out of which all symbols
come out- you can get connected through the subconscious of your mind- like the internet

Lion body+human head, sphinx human identity- change of the self

He divides human history in 2 parts: from 2000 b.c. (Babylonian empire) to the Christs
birth and after- New world

Sailing to Byzantium

THAT is no country SFOR OAD men. The young

In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,

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 The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

too dyahnostic- but no answers

He found spiritual art in Byzantine art and culture- has 2 Byz. poems
- admired artistically, not for political reasons
- appealing- spiritual arts
- influenced by Blake and Byzantine churces
- shows the difference between western and Byz. culture
- At the beginnig resembles some rom. sonnets and Chaucers Canterburrry Tales
- He rejects that kind of world- young world, not the world of spiritual experiences

The split between East. and West. Church:-iconographic features

-Byz.-usu still fig., conventional, with no human
expression, background=soul
-Raffaelo- Madonna- longing in her face; he used
his lover

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Leda and the Swan

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower[15]
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

- contradicts his spiritual art

- seems to be supressing sexuality
- 2nd stanza- Zeus irresistible
- 3rd stanza-product of this love- 2 eggs:2 fatal women- Helen of Troy (broken wall),
Cytemnestra(burning roof, killed Agamemnon)
- the poet assumes female identity
- the poet= inconcious instrument of some kind of force
- symbolism=ultraromanticism

T. S. ELLIOT 1888-1965

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