МИНИСТЕРСТВО ОБРАЗОВАНИЯ РОССИЙСКОЙ ФЕДЕРАЦИИ

I.G.SEROVA

A Guide to English Literature: the 20^th Century

Учебное пособие для студентов-переводчиков 2 курса (4семестр)

2010

УДК 41

ББК 81

С 32

Рецензенты:

Доктор филологических наук, профессор

кафедры немецкой филологии ТГУ Н.В. Ушкова

Кандидат филологических наук

доцент кафедры французской филологии ТГУ Е.И. Давыдова

Серова И.Г. Английская литература ХХ века. Учебное пособие для студентов-переводчиков IV курса.

Пособие предназначено для студентов переводческого отделения университетов и широкого круга филологов, интересующихся современной литературой Англии. Целью данного пособия является ознакомление студентов с наиболее заметными художественными направлениями в литературе Англии прошлого века и их критикой в зарубежных и отечественных изданиях.

2010

Part 1.

The Outline of Lectures.

Lectures 1-2.

Modernism in English literature.

The beginning of the twentieth century saw the rise of the powerful tendency called modernism. The concept of modernism at broadest refers to all innovation, that went on in Europe and the USA since the closing years of the 19^th century through the war and postwar periods. It included a wide range of movements: impressionism, imagism, constructivism, expressionism, surrealism, dada (primitivism). The impulse probably might be the appearance of many scientific doctrines: Einstein’s theory in physics, Freud’s and W.James’s theory in psychology. The early years of modernism provide an instance of what one might call “a paradigm shift” in the aesthetic perception of things. The salient features of modernism in literature suggest the following:

• The unconscious life of the mind is as important as the conscious;

• “Personality” is precarious and fragmentary, rather than substantial and unchanging;

• Our perceptions of life are uncertain and provisional;

• The intense, but isolated image is something that must be in the centre of the author’s attention;

• Supposedly primitive myths can help to grasp and order the complexity of the twentieth century experience;

• Nothing can be taken for granted in literary form and there must be no unthinking reproductions of familiar forms;

• Literary works can never be given a full and absolute interpretation.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was one of the most important modernist writers of the past century. She came from a famous Victorian family – her father, Leslie Stephen, was a distinguished man of letters. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf and together they founded the Hogarth Press.

V.Woolf published 8 novels and a lot of criticism. She was very critical of the Victorian writers, of the boredom and shapelessness of their novels and of their concern for the externals of living. She concludes: “The genius of the Victorian fiction seems to be making its magnificent best of an essentially bad job”. She calls all the Victorians amateurs. The only mature and professional writer to her mind was Henry James.

Woolf is considered one of the greatest innovators in the English language. In her works she experimented with stream-of-consciousness and the underlying psychological as well as emotional motives of characters. Her novels are: “The Voyage Out” (1912); “Night and Day” (1919), “Jacob’s Room’ (1922), “Mrs. Dalloway” (1925), “To the Lighthouse” (1927), “The Waves” (1931), “Orlando” (1931), “Between the Acts” (1941).

Woolf's reputation declined sharply after World War II, but her eminence was re-established with the surge of feminist criticism in the 1970s. Virginia Woolf's peculiarities as a fiction writer have tended to obscure her central strength: Woolf is arguably the major lyrical novelist in the English language. Her novels are highly experimental: a narrative, frequently uneventful and commonplace, is refracted — and sometimes almost dissolved—in the characters' receptive consciousness. Intense lyricism and stylistic virtuosity fuse to create a world overabundant with auditory and visual impressions.

The intensity of Virginia Woolf's poetic vision elevates the ordinary, sometimes banal settings – often wartime environments – of most of her novels. For example, Mrs Dalloway (1925) centres on the efforts of Clarissa Dalloway, a middle-aged society woman, to organize a party, even as her life is paralleled with that of Septimus Warren Smith, a working-class veteran who has returned from the First World War bearing deep psychological scars.

James Joyce (1882-1941) was an Irish novelist, poet and short story writer. He was born in Dublin and educated at Jesuit schools and University College, where he studied modern languages. He was acquainted with W. Yeats, Synge and others, fostering Irish cultural renaissance, but he never was an Irish patriot like them. His dream was to go to Paris and to be a writer and poet there, which he did in 1902.

On 7 January 1904, he attempted to publish A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, an essay-story, only to have it rejected by the free-thinking magazine Dana. He decided, on his twenty-second birthday, to revise the story and turn it into a novel he planned to call Stephen Hero. However, he never published this novel in this original name. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a nearly complete rewrite of the abandoned novel Stephen Hero, the original manuscript of which Joyce partially destroyed in a fit of rage. A story of the personal development of an artist, it is a heavily biographical coming-of-age novel in which Joyce depicts a gifted young man's gradual attainment of maturity and self-consciousness. The main character, Stephen Dedalus, is in many ways based upon Joyce himself. Some hints of the techniques Joyce was to employ frequently in later works — such as the use of interior monologue and references to a character's psychic reality rather than his external surroundings — are evident in this novel.

In Ulysses, Joyce employs stream of consciousness, parody, jokes, and virtually every other literary technique to present his characters. The action of the novel, which takes place in a single day, 16 June 1904, sets the characters and incidents of the Odyssey of Homer in modern Dublin and represents Odysseus (Ulysses), Penelope and Telemachus in the characters of Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, contrasted with their lofty models. The book explores various areas of Dublin life, dwelling on its squalor and monotony. Nevertheless, the book is also an affectionately detailed study of the city, and Joyce said that "I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book". The book consists of 18 chapters, each covering roughly one hour of the day, beginning around about 8 a.m. and ending sometime after 2 a.m. the following morning. Each of the 18 chapters of the novel employs its own literary style. Each chapter also refers to a specific episode in Homer's Odyssey and has a specific colour, art or science and bodily organ associated with it. This combination of kaleidoscopic writing with an extreme formal, schematic structure represents one of the book's major contributions to the development of 20th century modernist literature.

In 1916 he published an autobiographical novel “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, in which he fully applied a “stream-of-consciousness technique”. His other works are: “The Dubliners” (1914), “Ulysses” (1922), “Finnegan’s Wake” (1939). Joyce’s influence on the development of modernism is undisputed, and his works attracted an immense amount of criticism.

D.H.Lawrence (1885-1930) was the first important writer coming from a working class. Lawrence spent most of his life living. Though he died when he was 44 during his short life as a sick person (he had tuberculosis since he was 26) he produced an amazing quantity of work – novels, poems, paintings, translations, plays. His best-known works are: “Sons and Lovers” (1913), «The Rainbow“(1917), “Women in Love”(1917), “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” (1928). He is much read now, as his works are full of spontaneity and sincere description.

Lawrence is perhaps best known for his novels Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love and Lady Chatterley's Lover. Within these Lawrence explores the possibilities for life and living within an Industrial setting. In particular Lawrence is concerned with the nature of relationships that can be had within such settings. Though often classed as a realist, Lawrence's use of his characters can be better understood with reference to his philosophy. His use of sexual activity, though shocking at the time, has its roots in this highly personal way of thinking and being. It is worth noting that Lawrence was very interested in human touch behaviour (see Haptics) and that his interest in physical intimacy has its roots in a desire to restore our emphasis on the body, and re-balance it with what he perceived to be western civilization's slow process of over-emphasis on the mind. In his later years Lawrence developed the potentialities of the short novel form in St Mawr, The Virgin and the Gypsy and The Escaped Cock. Lawrence rewrote many of his novels several times to perfect them and similarly he returned to some of his early poems when they were collected in 1928. This was in part to fictionalise them, but also to remove some of the artifice of his first works.

Lectures 3-4.

Poetry in Britain at the beginning of the century.

At the beginning of the century the most famous English poet was Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936). In 1907 he was the first Englishman to receive the Nobel Prize for literature. Unfortunately he was almost forgotten to the end of his life. Now his reputation is high again. He is much admired for the variety of his subject matter and for the mastery of his craft. His works are: “Plain Tales from the Hills”(1888), “The Jungle Book” (1894) and “The Second Jungle Book”, “Kim”(1902), ”Barrack Room Ballads”, “Just So Stories”, “Mary Postgate” (1915), “The Gardener” (1926).

The tragic character of the time period was felt in the works by Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888 - 1965), who was a leading modernist poet in Britain till after the World War II. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land” (1922) became an indictment of the 20^th century civilization and remains one of the central texts of modernism.

It is a highly complicated poem, which brings together a group of characters as different as a modern typist and a blind priest of the ancient Greece. It brings together the ancient beliefs in the natural world’s movement through life to death and to new life, and the Christian belief in spiritual life after death. The root of the modern world’s unhappiness is seen by Eliot in the fact, that people cannot bring together elements of their experience to make it a complete whole. As a consequence, different styles are used in his poem, a great variety of voices are heard, its language echoes of the Bible and Shakespeare. There are many phrases in other languages, especially in German.

All Eliot’s poems are linked by common themes – memory, the individual’ s relation to time, the timelessness of the human experience, the endless spiritual quest.

His later poem is “Four Quartets”. T.S. Eliot is the author of verse dramas, the most notable of which are: “Murder in the Cathedral” (1935), “The Family Reunion” (1939), “The Cocktail Party” (1949). His work is marked by innovation in poetry: he abandoned traditional verse for free verse with no regular meter or line length depending on natural speech rhythms. In 1948 was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

There are several poets in English poetry, who are known as war poets. The most famous of them are Rupert Brooke (1887-1915), Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967).

Rupert Brooke was born in Rugby and educated in Rugby and Cambridge. He wrote elegant Georgian poetry before the war. When the war broke out, he joined the Navy. One of his five sonnets, “The Soldier”, written shortly before his death in the East Mediterranean of blood poisoning, became widely known:

If I should die, think only this of me,

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is forever England.

S.Sassoon and W.Owen did not share the romantic patriotism of R. Brooke and wrote about the pointlessness, misery and suffering of war.

Possibly one of the best known is W. Owen. The war, as he points out, is fought by the men, who bleed and die, not by the heroes, who are more than human. In one of his poems, “Strange Meeting”, he imagines a meeting in hell with an enemy soldier he has killed, who reminds him of their common humanity. W. Owen was killed in action in France in 1918 several days before the Armistice. Only four of his poems were published during the war. In the draft preface to his collection of poems W. Owen wrote: “My subject is War and the pity of war. The poetry is the Pity”.

S.Sassoon was the one, who survived. He lived a long life, using it to make the war poetry known. As he had known W. Owen personally and admired his poetry, he made a lot of effort to publish it.

The greatest figure in the poetry of the early part of the 20^th century was William B. Yeats (1865-1939). Yeats was active in the Irish renaissance and his works are centered on Irish history and folklore. He produced poetry, drama, criticism, journalism, novels. His works are “The Countess Cathleen” (1892), “The Wind Among the Reeds” (1899) “In the Seven Woods” (1904),”The Celtic Twilight”, ”The Secret Rose” (1897), “Easter 1916”.

Yeats is generally considered a Symbolist poet in that he used allusive imagery and symbolic structures throughout his career. Yeats choose words and assembled them so that in addition to a particular meaning they suggest other abstract thoughts that may seem more significant and resonant. His use of symbols is usually something physical which is used both to be itself and to suggest other, perhaps immaterial, timeless qualities.

Unlike other modernists who experimented with free verse, Yeats was a master of the traditional forms. The impact of modernism on his work can be seen in the increasing abandonment of the more conventionally poetic diction of his early work in favour of the more austere language and more direct approach to his themes that increasingly characterises the poetry and plays of his middle period, comprising the volumes In the Seven Woods, Responsibilities and The Green Helmet.His later poetry and plays are written in a more personal vein, and the works written in the last twenty years of his life include mention of his son and daughter,as well as meditations on the experience of growing old.

Ezra Pound (1885-1972) was prominent in the development of modernism in England. He was born in the USA, Idaho and educated in the University of Pennsylvania. Soon he moved to Europe. He was the inventor of “Imagist” poetry (1912 -1914).

Imagist poetry is an attempt to single out in a short poem a significant moment moment from the flow of life, to crystallize the fleeting experience with an emphasis on its visual aspect (with the parallel to the tiny forms of Japanese poetry, such as “haiku”. In 1914 he launched vorticism, an aggressively avant-garde movement, represented by Wyndham Lewis, a writer and a painter. Lewis saw life as a black farce, where people acted like puppets. As a painter he produced a lot of abstract paintings that were very advanced for their time, but many of them are lost. Lewis and Pound produced a magazine of Vorticist writings and designs called “Blast”. E.Pound did not think much of himself as a poet, but after World War II, when he began to write a very personal kind of poetry, it became clear that he had talent. His ambitious work is “Cantos”, on which he continued to work until his death and which finally consisted of 117 pieces. E.Pound did a lot for promoting the principles of modernist art.