THE MODERN AGE 1901-1945

The term modernism refers to a movement which involved Western

literature, music, visual arts and cinema in the first decades of the 20
century.
From an historical point of view, we should mention the two world’s war.
From a social or political point of view, it was an age of achievements,
trade unions became institutions,
feminine movements took root, with campaigns for women’s vote.
Sufraggette, risked their life for the right to vote for women, unfortunately
Many of them were arrested, taken to prison, where they did hunger strike
(sciopero della fame), and they were forced to eat, they were fed, mocked
by men, but they never gave up.

THE FIST WORLD WAR

In 1914, the first world war, severely affected society, but mostly the
young generation.
The youth was disappointed, frustrated, many young soldiers died during
the war, they saw all their certainties fell apart, patriotism first of all.
Nobody imagined the war would have lasted for so many years.
Many young men ended up severely traumatized, war was presented to
them differently, it appeared like a romantic adventure, but when They saw
their friends dying, they understood they were not ready at all, it was only
a carnage.

THE CONDITIONS OF THE SOLDIERS

The soldiers weren’t well equipped, their uniforms were heavy, and they
soaked up when it rained, becoming even heavier.
Many of them lost their boots, founding themselves in bare foot.
Chloride gas became a weapon to fight the enemy, it war corrosive for the
tissues of the mouth, in order to defend themselves, soldiers had to wear
gas masks, which were not practical at all, they were also heavy and hard
to put on.
The soldiers felt abandoned, betrayed by the government, also because it
had to be a fast war, but it ended up being a war of attrition.
Life in tranches was horrible because of the mug, the rain,  the decaying
bodies that rats fed on, the repeated bombings and the use of poison gas in
warfare.

THE PROPAGANDA

The propaganda was crucial in convincing people to go in war, mostly

because joining the army wasn’t compulsory but voluntary.
Women, mothers and wifes were asked to convince their husband, sons, or
boyfriend to join in the army.
Women were used to give a white feather (badge of cowardice, marchio
della codardia) to men who didn’t wear a uniform.
When men were seen walking on the street in plain clothes ( in borghese,
senza uniforme), they were treated as cowards.

VERA BRITTAIN, ( who was the one who wrote the testament of
youth), studied at the university of Oxford, when the war broke out all of
her male friends, her brother and her boyfriend joined the army and went
to war. All of them died, she decided to joined the war as a voluntary
nurse.

In the second world war, if England helped the United State to get rid of
Hitler, it was due to the mathematician Alan Turing. He managed to
decode the special code used by the Germans with the enigma machine.
The messages revealed the positions of the example submarines.
Unfortunately, he was accused of homosexuality, he was given a choice,
the prison, or a chemical castration, which consisted into take a large
amount of feminine hormones.
He accepted the castration, but as he saw his body change, becaming fatter,
he felt ill and committed suicide, by poisoning himself with cyanide.
His reputation was restored by Elisabeth the second in 2017, because the
Turing law was passed, whose aim was to restore the reputation of people
ruined because of homosexuality.

The artistic production

All artistic forms of Modernism share several common features,
- Modern art was marked by originality, and experimentation.
- All the artist had to invent new techniques or way to express their
unhappiness or unsatisfactory.
- The intentional distortion of shapes, which takes place in the cubism,
In 1907 Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque simultaneously and
independently began to develop Cubism. They painted by separating
objects and figures into basic geometric shapes such as cubes, cylinders,
spheres and cones; then they broke them into semigeometric fragments
and reassembled them in order to give various points of view of the object.
Abstract painting, whose main representative was Wassily Kandinsky
(1866-1944), refused to represent external reality and focused its attention
on a line or sign, a shape or color, making it the subject of the painting. In
England, Wyndham Lewis (1884-1957) founded Vorticism. As its name
suggests, this movement tried to incorporate the ideas of violent motion
and apocalyptic change with such natural vortices as tornadoes, whirlpools
and the like; the image was a vortex 'from which, through which and into
which ideas were constantly rushing. Similarly,
Italian Futurism, led by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944),
celebrated the and dynamism symbolized by new technology, by
power speed and motion, by mechanization and by urban settings.
In music there were parallel developments at about the same time. The
Russian composer Igor Stravinsky (1882- 1971) became famous with
Fireworks (1908) and his first ballet, The Firebird (1910). Together with
another composer, Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), the inventor of the
serial system of composition, Stravinsky experimented with dissonance
and distorted musical effects, and rejected the traditional rules of harmony
and composition.

- the breaking down of limitations in space and time, the disruption of the
linear flow or narrative or conventional verse,
- The emphasis on subjectivity, on how perception takes place rather than
on what is perceived;
- in literature, the objectivity provided by an omniscient third-person
narrator was abandoned in favor of new techniques such as the stream of
consciousness;
• the use of allusive language and the development of the multiple
association of words;
- It’s the age of abstract art, which requests knowledge to be understood.
- Artists started to deal also with urbanization and technology, futurism is
an example, the futurists emphasized the machines, the idea of progress,
industrialization.
-The intensity of the isolated 'moment or' image 'to provide a true insight
into the nature of things ;
- the importance of unconscious as well conscious life;
The unconscious was theorized by Sigmund Freud, and brought literature
to focus MORE on psychological investigation, even thought it was
already present, for example in Weathering Heights.
The influence of psychoanalysis was really important also because it
became a way to analyze the works of art.
Freud himself did that, for example with Michael Angelo, in order to
analyze his sculptures.
he wrote also an essay on the tragedy Fedre, by Racine, using
psychoanalysis to investigate it.
- the new settings of the books are usually cities and urban life
- the need to reflect the complexity of modern urban life in artistic form

A new perception of time

William James and Bergson questioned time, they distinguished historical

time from psychological time, finding out it didn’t coincide.
Time is subjective, it can be measured only by our perception, past
present and future coexist in human mind.

A COSMOPOLITAN LITERATURE
In the attempt to build a new system of references, novelists and poets
drew inspiration from classical as well as new cultures to create a new
subjective mythology.
Artists regarded the past as a source which they could reshape in a
personal, original way. For instance, Thomas Stearns Eliot exploited wide
range of influences in his long poem The Waste Land - from Buddhist
sources to the Metaphysical poets or even Dante (also African art). As
regards James Joyce's use of the stream-of-consciousness technique, it is
certainly indebted to Sigmund Freud, William James and Henri
Bergson, but derives from the of dissolution of the novel that process
Laurence Sterne had started in the 18th century.
Absorbing the influences of the past and contemporary ascendancy
coming from abroad, English modern literature was becoming
cosmopolitan, thus moving away from the upper-middle-class milieu of
Victorian society.
THE WAR POETS

They were really educated, they usually belonged to the upper classes,
they frequented Oxford and Cambridge.
Their language is new and original.

Rupert Brooke 1887-1915

Rupert Brooke was born in 1887 and was educated at Rugby School,
where his father was a master, and then went to King's College,
Cambridge.
He was a good student and athlete, and became popular especially for his
handsome looks by him. He was also familiar with literary circles like the
Bloomsbury Group and came to know many important political, literary
and social figures before the war.

He joined up at the beginning of the conflict but saw little combat since
he contracted blood poisoning and died in April 1915, on the Aegean
Sea. He was buried on the Greek island of Skyros. Brooke's reputation of
as a War Poet is linked to the five sonnets of 1914, in which he advanced
the idea that war is clean and cleansing. He expressed an idealism about
the conflict, in which the only thing that can suffer is the body, and even
death is seen as a reward .
Traditional not only in form, his poems show a sentimental attitude which
was completely lost in the brutal turn that war poetry took in the works of
the other War Poets, who lived to witness the horrors of trench warfare.
The publication of Brooke's war sonnets coincided with his death in 1915
and made him immensely popular, turning him into a new symbol of the
'young romantic hero' who inspired patriotism in the early months of the
Great War, when England needed a focal point for its sacrifice, ideals and
aspirations.

THE SOLDIER
The soldier is a very patriotic poem about England, it presents an idealized
image of war, due to the fact the poet died before he could experience the
tragedy and the horror of the conflict.
The ideas and the romantic feelings towards war against the enemy, that
we can read here, were shared by the majority of soldiers.

If 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;

-"think"-> imperative, the soldier speaks to his loved ones, friends and
relatives, and to other soldiers.

- The poet here seems aware that death is a realistic possibility, but he is
not scared.
The awareness of fighting for England seems a form of consolation to him,
Death in war is seen as a reward.
He had the idea of the hero, who fights and dies to defend the motherland.

- This poem sounds like a prediction of the future, because he speaks in

the first person, and you can imagining him dying in a foreign country, as
he did, in Greece.

- The poet says that his body will enrich the soil, because it will became
dust, a richer dust than the earth around it because that dust will be of a
son of England’s who died honorably for his beloved country.
his corpse, full of ideals, is imagined after his death to become an example
for the younger generations, in defense of the motherland.
.His dead body will make wherever he dies a part of England too.

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,

Gave( a cui ha dato), 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.

Blu: landscape
Green: inner growth and private feelings
The speaker views England as a mother, who gave him life, feelings of
joy and gentleness.
he asserts that his body was born in England, in the shape of England.
He was brought up with the English culture, English tradition, he is
completely English.
Her-> personification.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

His heart will be ready to give back to England, feelings of love and
belonging.
Shed away = freed from suffering.
The soldier feels grateful for England, for the feelings and thoughts that
his mother country gave to him.

Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;

And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

-The poet seems to miss England even before he left her,

- he emphasizes the politeness and friendship of the English people.

Nothing is said about the suffering of the soldiers, nothing is said of the
horrors, of the pain that precedes the death of a soldier.

images referring to death

1.‘a richer dust’ (line 4)
2.‘A body of England’s’ (line 7)
3.‘A pulse in the eternal mind’ (line 10).
They suggest immortality, glory and peace
-it’s a Petrarchan sonnet.

WILFRED OWEN
Born in 1893, Wilfred Owen was working as an English teacher in France
when he visited a hospital for the wounded and decided, in 1915, to
return to England and enlist.
1917 was an important year: he was sent to France and he experimented
the horror of the war
in March he was injured and sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in
Edinburgh to recover from the shock. It was there that he met Siegfried
Sassoon, who was also a patient and already had a reputation as a poet.
He read Owen's poems, encouraged him to keep writing and introduced
him to other literary figures.
Owen openly denounced the government, and because of it he risked to be
executed.
It was considered high treason at the time, to not be killed he had to
pretend he was insane.

Owen returned to the front in August 1918. On November 4, 1918, just

seven days before the armistice, he was killed in a German machine gun
attack. His poems are painful in their accurate accounts of gas victims,
men who have gone mad and men who are clinically alive although their
bodies have been destroyed.
He is also notable for the technical innovation of "pararhymes" - half
rhymes, where the consonants in two different words are the same but the
vowels vary - as well: as bis extensive use of assonance and alliteration
haunting quality, a gravity and moral force
These devices gave the lines of his poems a which people must suffer and
die.
In June 1918, Owen was preparing Disabled and Other Poems for
publication.
At that time he was writing the 'Preface' to the book, words which have
now become essential in discussing his work and much of the poetry of
World which make them suitable for any situation in War I: 'This book is
not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. / Nor is it
about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honor, might, majesty,
dominion, or power, except War. / Above all I am not concerned with
Poetry. / My subject is War, and the pity of War. / The Poetry is in the
pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They
may be to the next.
All a poet can do today is warn, about the dangers of the war. That is
why the true Poets must be truthful.
Wilfred Owen wrote his experiences in his poems:
- the gas bombs
- he reproduced horror scenes which created scandals
- he showed the pain and suffering, which had never been done before

dulce et decorum est

THE TITLE: The title means “it is sweet and honorable”, and since it’s
written in Latin, it suggests that patriotism had a long tradition

Stanza 1
- >In the fist stanza, the soldiers are described coming back, retreating,
towards the trenches;
they are tired, scared, they cough and are made blind and deaf, they can’t
even hear the shells.
They are described so fatigued they feel drunk, they are dropping off.
- We can see a strong criticism against the uniforms
- Soldiers are compared to beggars and hags, we see a strong contrast,
since young people should be healthy and strong.
-The poet takes personally part to this event, we understand that from the
use of the 2 person plural.
- the poet uses technical words, he doesn’t want to veil the horrors of the
war

Bent double (piegati in 2), like old beggars (simile) under sacks( criticism
against the uniforms, which are compared to sacks, in order to
underline the fact that they didn’t protect the soldiers from the cold,
or the rain, and they became even heavier when wet),
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, (simile, con le ginocchia che si toccano,
tossendo come streghe) we cursed through sludge (fango),
Till on the haunting flares (bagliori spaventosi) we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge (trascinarsi).
Men marched asleep. (the were dropping of, addormentarsi senza
accorgersene) Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod (metaphor) (avanzavano zoppicando,
calzati di sangue, another criticism against uniforms, the factory
owners, which manufactured uniforms, used only a small part of the
money that the government gave to them to buy the materials, the rest
of the money ended up in their pockets).
All went lame (storpi, zoppi); all blind;
Drunk with fatigue (metaphor), they were so exhausted they felt
drunk); deaf even to the hoots (fischi, sibili, onomatopeia)
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
(they couldn’t hear the rumor of shells/grenades, which contained chloride
gas. They felt silently )

underlined letters: examples of alliteration

The words ‘Bent double’, ‘Knock-kneed’, ‘coughing’, ‘trudge’, ‘limped
on’, ‘blood-shod’, ‘lame’, ‘blind’, ‘Drunk with fatigue’ and ‘deaf’ refer to
physical suffering due to fatigue and the effects of chemical weapons.
The words ‘cursed’ (line 2), ‘haunting’ (line 3), ‘asleep’ (line 5), ‘ecstasy
of fumbling’ (line 9) and ‘yelling out’ (line 11) convey the idea of
psychological uneasiness and fear. Owen gives importance to the
psychological sphere, he deals with the themes of alienation and
dehumanization.

The second stanza deals with the gas attack, the men try to put on their
masks, which were heavy, really hard to put on, in the green light created
by the gas, and the poet’s friend is wounded.
the soldier gets caught by panic, because the mask didn’t fit him properly.
He is stumbling, tripping, the poet feels like being under a green see, while
his friend his drowning.
The tense used here is the present, in order to give more realism and
immediacy to the poem.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy (metaphor, it indicates panic) of

fumbling (un brancolare frenetico)
Fitting the clumsy helmets (another criticism to the uniforms) just in
time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling (gridava inciampava e si
dimenava)
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.(calce) ( similes), —
Dim (dark) through the misty panes (vetri delle maschere appannate) and
thick green light (here the poet moves the attention to himself),
As under a green sea(metaphor, refers to the color of gas), I saw him
drowning.

Stanza 3: The sight of the dying friend returns in the poet’s dreams.
His unconscious makes him live in his nightmares this vision, it was
common between people who suffered traumatizing experiences

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges (si precipita) at me, guttering, choking, drowning
(onomatopoeia).

Stanza 4: The poet describes his friend’s horrible death from chemical
warfare and conveys the message of the poem.

If in some smothering (affannosi) dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon (carro) that we flung him in, (he wants to underline that
war transforms people into beast, such things or actions wouldn’t take
place in normal circumstances)
And watch the white eyes writhing (contorcersi)in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin; (simile)

If you could hear, at every jolt (sobbalzo), the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs (polmoni intaccati dal gas,
lungs became liquid, melted, froth),
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud (amaro come il bolo)(simile)
Of vile, incurable sores (piaghe) on innocent tongues, (the gas attacked
first the mouth)—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest (entusiasmo)
To children ardent for some desperate glory, (he addresses to children
because they would have been the next generation)
The old Lie:
Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori
there is nothing noble or decorous in war; war is an ‘old’ lie because it is
not a new concept but a historic one that has been used many times to
cover up the harsh reality of war. This statement comes after a crescendo
of terrible images, which puts even more emphasis on it

The author here is addressing to the government, the leader of the war,
people home, women who weren’t nurses, who ignored the horrors of the
war.

COMPARISON

The soldier’s mood

Rupert presents a Romantic, idealized image of war, due to the fact that he
had never experienced the tragedy of the conflict,
while Owen has a disenchanted, realistic vision, resulted from a personal
experience.
His attitude to war
He idealized it, He condemned it.
Imagery
Drawn from nature and private feelings, Nightmarish.
The poet’s message
Dying at war brings glory, War and patriotism are deceitful.

THE MODERN NOVEL

Main theme: The individual and the psyche.

Modern novelists concentrated on the development of the character’s mind
and on human relationships.
They were interested in experimenting with subjective narrative
techniques, exploring the mind of one or more characters and giving voice
to their thoughts.
They aren’t interested in what takes place outside

Novelist’s role: To mediate between the unquestioned values of the past

and the confused present, highlighting the complexity of the unconscious.
use of time: Subjective and internal, since it past present and future
coexist in human mind
narrative technique : Stream of consciousness technique; epiphany;
interior monologue; internal point of view.
Sometimes there is no punctuation, no paragraph division

THE INTERIOR MONOLOGUE

The interior monologue is the technique used to express the stream of
consciousness, the unspoken activity of the mind.
-It is the verbal expression of a psychic phenomenon, the stream of
consciousness
- It does not follow a chronological order, it’s not about actions, but
thoughts, feelings. Time dimension can be mixed up, present past and
future can coexist.
- The action takes place within the character’s mind
- Speech is immediate because it is not addressed,without introductory
sentences (this may happen when there isnt a narrator.
- The narrator may be present, for example, in Ulysses, there is no narrator
- It often lacks a formal logical order
There are four kinds of interior monologue:
- the indirect interior monologue, where the narrator never lets the
character’s thoughts flow without control, and maintains logical and
grammatical organization;
- the direct interior monologue with two levels of narration
- one external to the character’s mind, and the other internal; the direct
interior monologue with the mind level of narration, where the character’s
thoughts flow freely, not interrupted by external events;
- and the extreme interior monologue, where words and free associations
are fused to create new expressions.

This monologue can be compared to the psychoanalyst’s couch, as the

character’s mind is free to wander among associations of ideas.

Joyce is the one who perfectioned this technique, in Eveline, for example
he uses 2 levels of narration : outside and inside Eveline.
Outside : the house, the window, what she can see.
 Joyce also experimented the extreme direct interior monologue in
Finnegan's wake: here the narration takes place inside the mind of the
main character while he is dreaming. The words are usually invented and
the associations are fused to create new expressions: the result is a very
original but difficult to read book.

The narrator in Joyce: he disappears when the writer reproduces the

character's stream of consciousness. You won't find “she thought”... so the
narrator, which is usually an intermediate, does not appear. There's no
narrator that introduces the interior monologues.

Stream of consciousness
it’s what takes place in the characters’ mind, emotions, feelings,
sensations, thoughts, the psychic material. It’s a pre-speech level

JOYCE:
o Joyce and Svevo: they were friends but had a difficult relationship.
o Joyce was a difficult person: he was very touchy and he had his
convictions: he wouldn't get married to his partner.
Svevo came from the upper class while Joyce was middle-class. Nora
worked for Livia, Svevo's wife, she ironed for him. Tormented friendship.
If Svevo started his career it was thanks to Joyce.