En Lit

Theatre of the absurd: cosmos is irrational, world order is unintelligible, humans are asocial, incapable of heroism

Man is a stranger, in exile. There is no God. Man is lonely and is confronted by a vast emptiness

Samuel Beckett Waiting for Godot portrays the obsession with human isolation

One is what one is

it is about human freedom and personal responsibility

3 different schools:

1. you can't know what is happening to you but you have to commit
2. we are thrown into the world and have to make choices
3. birth is not your choice but everything else is

The conversation and the action do not make any progress, as if the characters talk just to keep an impression that they are living.

You gotta do something

Painting: night hawks (Topper): urban lonelyness, diner like a glass cage, isolated looks, noone looks at each other, couple's noses look like beaks of hawks

About how it is to be black in America

The protagonist is looking for himself

The story told from the 1st person, no name

Absurd of war and stupidity of military

Catch 22 is a rule in the military which turns everything into the opposite

All ideals of war become absurd: patriotism, nationalism

Movie The rebel without a cause: troubled teenager, chicken run - lost generation 1955

1950s

Escape by taking drugs and travelling to India

Anti-establishment, anti-political, anti-intellectual (but not really)

Kerouac On the road, wild parties, drugs, women, jazz

Pop art (Warhall, Lichtenstein)

pacifist cult of piece and love

Context: murder of JF Kennedy, M L King, Vietnam wars

Purification of emotion, like fear or pity. It results in restoration and renewal

Overweening pride, protagonist must be punished for his sin

The actor is in the middle of the stage and he thinks aloud, reveals his thoughts to the audience, thus the audience understands the conflict (invention of psychology)

Faculty of imitation, pretend, play theatre, children enjoy doing it 

Goat

suffering of the character, catharsis

Free will

Destructive emotions result from misjudgement. Intellectuals will not suffer from such emotions

Religiuos procession, often with narrative structure, a part of medeval seasonal festivals

An extended metaphor

A literary device that conveys hidden meanings through symbolic figures, actions

iambic pentameters, unrhymed verse

• Painting town red (multicultural London)
• R. Kipling: The ballad of East and West

A poem, he is pessimist, literature is an ideological instrument

Sees London as civilization, centre, standard, canon

Sees India as primitiv, sub-standard

• The US: Calving getting into trouble at school

C. makes fun about pledge to the flag

• Africa

Chinua Achebe Dead man's path: shows what happens when you are not culturally sensitive, different cultures should live next to each other

Miracle Plays: medeval England, church was against theatre. Later the church started using plays for the services because many people did not understand Latin. Those plays explained the miracles in the bible. They were performed on the churchyards

Mystery plays: performed by guild on peagants and showed scenes from the bible. Connection between craft and religion (bakers performed Last Supper)

Morality plays: 15/16 cent.: Moral lessons by means of allegory. Religion and personal conflict (Anymal farm)

E (1558 - 1603)

E liked drama, England was a World power. 

Thomas Kyd The Spanish tragedy

Christopher Marlowe Doctor Faustus (popularised the style that Shakespeare used later)

Invention of blank verse: iambic pentameters

William Shakespeare: invented words, thetre set outside, people smelled, ate and threw food at those actors who they didn't like

Macbeth (1606): the shortest play, three witches (like in Greek theatre), soliloquy: inner conflict, weekness vs. greed. Typical shakesperean character: he doesn't know wheter to act.

The gunpowder plot: propaganda 

1798 - 1850

Writing in the language of people

Fiction

Emotional matter in imaginative form

Absurd turms for normal words

Focus on individual and their feelings

Early Rom Poets: Burns, Blake (1770-1850)

The Lake poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey (1800-1850)

Dying young: Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, John Keats (1798 - 1850)

Wordsworth: not religious in the common way, God=Nature, individual must be able to experience God personally. Poetry: spontaneous overflow of feelings, used for men - use of normal language

Elevated position of the poet, golden flowers, eternity, everything will pass, nature

Chiastic structure: beginning in end are the same

Coleridge: interest in everything mystical

The Rime of an ancient mariner: a man mustn't kill the creatures, political freedom

The picture Lonely Tower:

owl - freedom

poet is elevated in the tower

people are down, the listeners

the ruins: savage is closer to nature

Poet is a prophet, writing is a vocation

Percy Shelley: To a Skylark, the poet is elevated, he wants to learn to sing beautifully, was atheist and traveller

John Keats: Poetry should come naturally

Ode to Nightingale: closeness to nature, beautiful songs, beauty of nature and life not so beautiful

The sublime is a key word

Romantics: tourists, Alps, Switzerland, fascinated with science and progress, a lot of experimenting with anymals, electricity

Mary Shelley Frankenstein: science is not enough, it shouldn't be misused

reference to Paradise Lost (Adam, creation of God, not happy)

Hubris: Frankensteil is a tragic hero, thinks he can create life, must be punished for it

1693: John Locke: children are tabula rasa, inscribe, educate

1762: Jean-Jaques Rousseau: Emile: nature wants children to be children before men, children need literature written for them

paintings of children: little adults vs children

Robert Sothey (Lake poets) The three bears

Lewis Carrol: founder of the English nonsense tradition

Louise May Alcott: Little women propaganda for girls, preparing them for their future role

For boys:

Henty: The coral island

Stewenson: Treasure island

Limited number of characters

In media res

Minimum of exposition

quick solution

A Canary for one: omnicsient narrator, foreshadows, 

Third person narrator:

1. Omniscient narrator (present everywhere, may sound like an author)
2. Limited point of view
3. Camera eye: effaced narrator, objective, dramatic

Second person narrator

• The reader is addressed directly

First person narrator

• subjective (moved by thoughts and feelings)
• objective (reports, but no feelings)
• observer

The way the author presents the actions of the story or the way in which the reader is presented the materials of the story

1837 - 1901

Counter movement to Rom

Age of change: industries, photography was beginning, painting were trying to be as close to reality as possible

Urbanization, machine, high birth rate, jobless people, poverty, class tentions

1837-1850 Transition

1850-1870 Victoria's Heyday - stability and prosperity

1870-1901 - economic stagnation

Age of novel

London Fog - steam and smog from trains -> setting in a lot of novels of that time (Dickens)

Women tried to get equality (suffragettes), Britain against slave trade

Entertainment: alcohol (unhappiness), a rat pit, prostitution (Queen Victoria was the model mother of the Empire -all covered, too much moral)

Charles Darwyn

Machines (child labour)

Karl Marx Das Kapital

Pictures by JMW Turner: old ship is broken, the new one with engine is coming in - it's a new age, also iron bridges that replace beautiful landscapes

Education more widespread - reading as entertainment

the rotary press 

Journals, magazines: novels in installments, cliff hangers

Libraries emerged

Thomas Hardy A pair of blue eyes

Wrote a lot of poetry and novels, pessimist, all turns out bad, 

E. Bronte Wuthering Heights (a passionate family living in WH, exposed to the storms, and a mild family living in a sheltered area - the story about passion and reason) B. wrote under a pseudonym, women were not supposed to write back then

Charles Dickens David Copperfield

Bestselling author, lots of money, went on tours. This novel of a semi-orphan making it in life, autobiographical

Joseph Conrad (1857 - 1924)

worked on river Congo, took a lot of stories from there, famous for his complicated characters

Alice Munroe A wilderness station

The story written in letters and other documents, the true story doesn't reach the person, cause she is dead

The commom ground between the 2 stories: Wilderness (Africa, Canada), gradual rise of tension, triangles (characters), conflict between 2 men -> murder, steamer

Differences: Place and neighbours (hostile natives and friendly family), a suicide vs living in wealth but with bad consciosness , Topic (race vs gender), critisism of colonialism vs critisim of patriachal system, traditional narrative vs letters

The legend of spring-heeled Jack: cartoon about a superhero, catching criminals

1890 - 1941

Rejection of tradition, artist movement of renewal

Picasso: art is no longer reality, but perception

Psychology: dismantling the individual

Artists refer back to mythology

Avant-garde: groups of artist who renew, first separated in different cities, like Zurcih, Paris

Dadaism: Zurich, 1916, playing with language, nihilistic ideas

William Butler Yeats, The lake of Innisfree: nature, late romantic poem

Irish revolution, Russian rev, WWI

Poem The second coming: about how things fall apart, as a result of all the wars and revolutions, pessimistic view of the future. It's not God who comes to save everyone, but a beast

Painting and book the golden bough: about development of a society. S. first believes in magic, then in religion and at last in sciense. 

Joseph Conrad Heart of darkness: Journey to Africa, into its heart. Psychological analysis in this book, psychology was becoming popular, movie Apocalypse now (adoptation of the book, a bit differnt context)

Freud: tried to divide the individual into different forms, writers were fascinated with this idea

Joyce Ulisses: psychology again, and the idea, that contemporary history is anarchy.Stream-of-concsciosness-technique (while talking or writing, mentioning other things you notice)

Painting Marching men: faceless soldiers marching to the war

Wilfred Owen Sweet and honourable: famous war poet, was killed in 1918, tells about cruelty of war, the poem is about gas attack when sbd doesn't have time to put on their mask

Gertrude  Stein, lived in Paris, had a house where artists met, was lesbian, lived openely with a woman

William Faulkner The sound and the fury: connection to Macbeth, the title is based on that, the writer of the american south, the 3 parts of the novel are told by 3 brothers, one idiot, second too sensitive and kills himself and the 3rd just a bad person