TEXTE LITERARE,
CONTEXTE
CULTURALE ŞI
PREDAREA LOR 
 

 A.OBIECTIVE

 Candidaţii vor dovedi capacitatea de :

 a în
  ţelege şi analiza un text literar la prima vedere prin utilizarea
corectă a termenilor şi conceptelor, noţiunilor de teorie şi critică 
 
literar   în context istoric şi cultural;
ă  prin care un text se plasează î
 a conştientiza şi transmite atitudini culturale (cultural awareness);
 a adecva
  predarea termenilor şi a conceptelor de teorie şi critică 
literară la diverse tipuri de clase;
 
 a selecta texte literare în predarea limbii engleze ca limbă străină;
 a aborda
  temele generale de mai jos cu referire la operele inclu se
 în bibliografie.
 
 

B.TEME GENERALE 

 Power, identity, love in Shakespeare’s plays

and
  sonnets
 Enlightenment ideas reflected in the English
novel
 
  The Victorian character: values in action
  
 Approaches to narrative and character in
British
  and American literature - the realist,
 
modernist and postmodernist paradigms.
  Values, symbols and myths in British and
 American
  literature
 

Literatura britanic ă 
  Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice or Emma 
 Bronte, Emily: Wuthering Heights 

 
Carroll,  
Lewis: Alice ’ ’s  Adventures in Wonderland 
 
 Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness sau Lord Jim 
 
 Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe 

 
Dickens, Charles: Great Expectations sau  Oliver   Twist 
 
 Forster, E. M.: A Passage to India sau A Room With a View 

 
Fowles, John: The French Lieutenant ’ ’s  Woman    sau
  The Magus 

 
Golding  , William: Lord of the Flies     

 
Hardy, Thomas: Tess of the D ’ ’Urbervilles    Obscure 
  rbervilles sau Jude the
U  
 
  James, Henry: The Portrait of a Lady sau The Ambassadors 
  Joyce, James: A Portrait of  the Artist as a Young
    Man 
  sau Dubliners 

 
Shakespeare, William: Sonnets XVIII      Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Hamlet 
 , CXXX;  , A
 
 Midsummer Night ’ ’s  Dream .      
  
Swift, Jonathan: Gulliver ’ ’s  Travels 
  Woolf , Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway sau To the Lighthouse 
 
     
 

Literatura american ă 
 Faulkner, William: Absalom, Absalom sau The Sound and The Fury 
 Fitzgerald,
  F. Scott. The Great Gatsby     
 Hawthorne,
  Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter 
 Hemingway,
  Ernest. The Old Man and the Sea ; The Short Happy Life
of Francis
 
 Macomber   
 Melville, Herman. Moby Dick
 Poe,
  Edgar Allan. The Tell -   Tale Heart ; The Fall of the House of Usher 
-Tale
 Pynchon
  , Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49   
  Twain,
  Mark. Huckleberry Finn 
  Vonnegut,
  Kurt. Slaughterhouse 5 
 
 

Oral Exam
  William Falkner’s “ Absalom, Absalom”: from
 
literary   context.
text to cultural
 

 Written Exam
 Consider the following text: ……
   Contextualize it from a historical and cultural point
of
  view, and discuss its relevance with reference to
its author’s literary canon (2 paragraphs).
  Which of the next thematic approaches do you
find
  best able to reveal its meanings and stylistic
preferences? Argument your opinion. (1
paragraph).
  Analyse the text with the above in view (3
paragraphs).
   
 

Power, identity, love in Shakespeare’s

sonnets and plays
 The Shakespearean Sonnet: themes and poetic
  in …
style
 Shakespeare’s comic worlds: rhetoric and

 
personation in …
 
 Shakespeare’s tragic hero: infringement and

 
identity in …
 

Sonnet XVIII
 Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
 Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
 
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,  
 And summer's lease hath all too short a date;  
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,  
 And often is his gold complexion dimmed;  
 And every fair from fair sometime declines,  
By chance or nature's changing course untrimmed:  
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,  
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,  
Nor shall Death brag thou  wand'rest in his  shade,
 When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st. So  long as men can
breathe or eyes can see,    
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.  
 
 

 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act

 V, Scene One
PUCK:
If we shadows have offended,
 Think but this, and all is mended,
 That you have but slumber'd here  
 While these visions did appear.  
 And this weak and idle theme,    
No more yielding but a dream,  
Gentles, do not reprehend:  
if you pardon, we will mend:  
 And, as I am an honest Puck,  
If we have unearned luck   
Now to 'scape the serpent's tongue,
 We will make amends ere long;  
Else the Puck a liar  call;  
So, good night unto you all.  
Give me your hands, if we be  friends,
 And Robin shall restore amends. 
 
 

Enlightenment ideas reflected in the English

novel

 Swift, Jonathan: Gulliver ’ ’s  Travels 

 
 Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe 

 
  Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice 

 
 

Neoclassicism
  A principle according to which the writing and criticism of literature
should be guided by the rules and principles derived from the be st
of  Greek and Roman writers.
 It dominated French literature during the 17th and 18th centuries.
 It had
  a significant influence in England from the  Restoration
  u ntil
1798.
 
 Characteristics:
  A regard for tradition and reverence for the classics, with an
 
accompanying mistrust of innovation;
 
  A sense of literature as art (i.e. artificed
 ), hence the value put on “rules”,
“conventions”, “decorum”, the properties of received genres;
 
  A concern for social reality and the communal commonplaces of thought

 which hold it together (art is pragmatic and man is its most appropriate
 
subject);
  A concern for “nature”, i.e. the way things are and should be;

  A concern with pride (standing for individual self  -assertion against the
 
status quo).
 
 

 Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745)

 
 Born in Ireland, of Anglo-Irish  Characteristic style:
parents  It combines parody, with its imitation
    of form and style of another
  Writings:  
 work/author, and satire in prose.
 satires
   It moves away from simple satire or
  A Tale of a Tub (1704) burlesque:
 
  The Battle of the Books (1704)   Satire: argues against a habit, practice,

 
 Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
or policy by making fun of its reach or
 
 essays composition
  or methods;
 
 Burlesque: imitates a despised author
 Pamphlets
  and quickly moves to reductio ad
  The Story of an Injured Lady absurdum  by having the victim say
  (1707)  
things coarse or idiotic.  
 
  A Short View of the State of

 
It pretends to speak in the voice of an
Ireland (1727)
 
opponent and imitate the style of the
  A Modest Proposal (1729)  
opponent and have the parodic work
 poems itself be the satire: the imitation would
 
have subtle betrayals of the argument  
 
but would not be obviously absurd.
 

Gulliver’s Travels
 Both a satire on human nature and a parody of the "travellers' tales" literary
sub-genre.

 
It is  
divided in 4 parts:  
 Part I: A Voyage to Lilliput
 
 Part II: A Voyage to Brobdingnag 
 Part  III: A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Glubbdubdrib, Luggnagg  and Japan
 Part  IV: A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms
   
  Themes:
 
 a satirical view of the state of European government, and of pet ty differences
  between religions.
  
an inquiry into whether men are inherently corrupt or whether they become
corrupted.
  
a restatement of the older "ancients versus moderns" controversy .
 Construction:
 
 each part is the reverse of the preceding part;
 
 Gulliver's view between parts contrasts with its other coinciding part.
 
 
 

Daniel Defoe (1660-1731)

Sometimes called the founder of the modern English novel, Defoe established:
 a dominant unifying theme with a serious thesis
 convincing realism (through an almost-journalistic first-person narrative)
 
 a middle class viewpoint
 
 Characteristics:
 
 His works are written in the form of fictional autobiography or diaries to make
  them more realistic.
  There  is no real plot, just a chronological series of connected episodes featuring a
single protagonist.
  The   protagonist must struggle to overcome a series of misfortune s, using only his
or her physical and mental resources.
   ’s self – supporting hero/heroine combines the virtues of Puritanism and
Defoe
merchant capitalism.
  There  
  is no psychological development of the characters, only in their external
condition.
 His  fictional autobiographies anticipate semi – autobiographical novels  such as
“ Jane Eyre”.
   
 

Robinson Crusoe
 It reworks the memoirs of an actual sailor (Alexander Selkirk) i n the story of
Robinson Crusoe;
 
 Plot: Crusoe is a mariner who takes to sea despite parental warn ings and, after
suffering a number of misfortunes at the hands of Barbary pirate s and the
 
elements, is shipwrecked off South America, where, according to his journal,
is able to resist for some 28 years, two months and nineteen day s.
 Interpretations:
  James Joyce: "He is the true prototype of the British colonist… the manly
  independence, the unconscious cruelty, the persistence, the slow  yet efficient
intelligence,
  the sexual apathy, the calculating taciturnity".  
  J.P. Hunter: Robinson is not a hero, but an everyman (he begins as a wanderer,
and ends as a pilgrim, entering the promised land.)
 Like   Jonah, Crusoe neglects his 'duty' and is punished at sea. 
 Puritan morality: Crusoe often feels himself guided by a divinely ordained fate
 
( Providence
Providence  ), thus explaining his robust optimism in the face of apparent
hopelessness.
   
 Protestant work ethic: Crusoe's experiences on the island represents the
inherent economic value of labour over capital. Defoe's point is that money has
no intrinsic
   
value and is only valuable insofar as it can be use d in trade.
 
 

 The Victorian character: values in

action
 Bronte, Emily: Wuthering Heights 

 
Dickens, Charles: Great Expectations 
 
Hardy, Thomas: Tess of the D ’ ’Urbervilles 
  Urbervilles 
   
 

 Victorian Age
 Chronologically comprised between 1837 and 1901 (reign of Queen  Victoria)
 It is equated with England’s rise to the pinnacle of her economic and political
 
power as revealed by the Great Exhibition of 1851 or the Queen ’s Diamond
 
 Jubilee of 1897
  The British colonial empire (covering a vast territory from Canada to India)
 Industrialisation: material progress coupled with the exploitation of the poor an d
the  emergence of a class-conscious working -class (the Chartist movement, the
popularity
  of the doctrine of socialism among some intellectuals like the Webbs
and G.B. Shaw. )
  As a state of mind and pattern of behaviour: Victorian Orthodoxy  manifested  
by middle-class self -complacency, respect for authority and rules, na ï 
 ve
 
confidence in the society ’s concern to reward the individual according to his
merits.
  Anti- Victorian
 Victorian attitudes: writers and artists who did not share the g eneral
eneral
enthusiasm with material progress.
 
 Darwinism further divided the intellectual world (many Victorians lost their
belief in the immortality of the soul.)
 
 

 Approaches to narrative and character in British and American literature -

the romantic, realist, modernist and postmodernist paradigms.
 

 Romantic:  Modernist:
 Bronte, Emily: Wuthering Heights    Joyce, James: A Portrait of the Artist 
   Melville, Herman. Moby Dick     Woolf 
, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway* 
  
Edgar, Alan Poe, The Fall of the House of   
Foster, E.M.: A Passage to India * 
Usher 
    
Faulkner, William: Absalom, Absalom 
 Nathaniel
  Hawthorne,  The   
Hemingway, Ernest. The Old Man and
Scarlet Letter  the Sea 
 
 Realist:    Postmodernist:
 
 Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe   Golding , William: Lord of the Flies 
    Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice 
   Fowles,
Fowles, John: The French Lieutenant ’ ’s 
  
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations  Woman* 
 
  
 Twain, Mark. Huckleberry Finn 
 
 
 _____________________________ 
* See the information and the text
selection in Michaela Praisler, On
 Modernism, Postmodernism and the Novel
(EDP, 2005).
 

Romaticism
 Romanticism is a movement in art and literature that
began
  in Europe in  the late 18th century and was most
influential in the first half of the 19th century.
 Romanticism fosters a return to nature and also values
the  imagination over reason and emotion over intellect.
 One strain of the Romantic is the Gothic with its
emphasis
   
on tales of horror and the supernatural.
 

 American Gothic
  The gothic explores the dark or uncertain sides of human nature.
 Rapid social changes in the nineteenth century cause anxiety in America, nurturing a gothic
 
sensibility in literature.
 In  stories of obsessive or tormented characters who find their most basic assumptions about
the world turned upside-down, these writers challenge their readers to question their own
 values
  and beliefs through exploring the ever-evolving character of American identity.
 Hawthorne ’s works explore the construction of reality through subjective perception, the
past’s inevitable and often malevolent hold on the present, and the agonizing ethical dilemmas
encountered
  by individuals in society. “The Scarlet Letter” works through the painful
inheritance of rigid Puritan faith, dealing with the wrenching implications of its conception of
 
sin; it also expresses anxiety about the torments  
of gender inequality 
 Melville’s Moby-Dick shares a similar interest in the dark truths of humanity; the white whale is
a symbol of ambiguity and uncertainty, and the ship functions as a microcosm of mid-
nineteenth
  century society; Ahab’s hunt is symbolically a rage against God.
  
Often set in exotic, vaguely medieval, or indeterminately distant locations, Poe’s work seems 
more interested in altered states of consciousness than history or culture: his characters often
swirl
  within madness, dreams, or intoxication, and may or may not encounter the supernatural,
functioning as allegories of human consciousness. For example, there are many “doubles” in
Poe: characters who mirror each other in profound but nonrealistic ways, suggesting not so
much the subtleties of actual social relationships as the splits and fractures within a single  
psyche trying to relate to itself.
 
 

Modernism
  A radical shift in aesthetic and cultural sensibilities evident in the
art and literature of the first half of the 20 th century.
 
 It rejected nineteenth-century optimism, presenting   a profoundly
pessimistic picture of a culture in disarray. This despair often
 
results in an apparent apathy and moral relativism.
 
 Literary tactics and devices:
 the radical disruption of linear flow of narrative;
 
 the frustration of conventional expectations concerning unity an d
 
coherence of plot and character and the cause and effect develop ment
 
thereof;
 the deployment of ironic and ambiguous juxtapositions to call in to
question the moral and philosophical meaning of literary action;
 the  opposition of inward consciousness to rational, public, obje ctive
discourse; and an inclination to subjective distortion to point up the
 
evanescence of the social world of the nineteenth -century bourgeoisie.
 

Postmodernism
  The term postmodernism implies a movement away from and
perhaps
 
a reaction against modernism.
 
 If modernism sees man rejecting tradition and authority in favor of a
reliance
 
on reason and on scientific discovery, postmodernism  
stretches and breaks away from the idea that man can achieve
understanding through a reliance on reason and science.
 Postmodernist fiction is generally marked by one or more of the
following
 
characteristics:
 playfulness with language
 experimentation
 
in the form of the novel
 less reliance on traditional narrative form
 
 less reliance on traditional character development
 
 experimentation with point of view
 
 experimentation with the way time is conveyed in the novel
 
 mixture
 
of "high art" and popular culture
 interest
 
in metafiction, that is, fiction about the nature of fiction
 

Characterisation
  The process by which an author presents and develops a fictional character.


 
Character:  
a textual representation of a human being (or occasio nally another
creature).
 
 Key points to note:
  we learn about individual characters from their own words and actions; from what
  other characters say about them and the way others act towards them
  
characters help to advance the plot
 believable characters must grow and change in response to their experiences in the
 
novel.
  Types:  
  protagonist: a story ’s main character
 
 antagonist: the character or force in conflict with the protagonist
 
 round character: a complex, fully developed character, often prone to change
 
 flat character: a one-dimensional character, typically not central to the story 
 
 
 

 Values, symbols and myths in British

and American literature
 Bronte, Emily: Wuthering Heights   Faulkner, William: Absalom,
 Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe   Absalom 
   
 Golding  , William: Lord of the Flies   Hemingway, Ernest. The Old Man
 
and the Sea ;
 Hardy,
 
Thomas: Tess of the  
D ’ ’Urbervilles 
 Urbervilles   Melville, Herman. Moby Dick
      Twain, Mark. Huckleberry Finn 
  Joyce, James: A Portrait of the Artist   
as a Young Man   Edgar, Alan Poe, The Fall of the
    House
 
of Usher 
 Swift, Jonathan: Gulliver ’ ’s  Travels     
  Woolf  , Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway   Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet
 
Letter 
 Foster,
 
E.M.: A Passage to India   
 Fowles
 
, John: The French Lieutenant ’ ’s 
Woman