3. Литература модернизма: жанровые модификации романов в.Вулф

MODERNISM (aims to break with traditional and classical form – romantism and realism) Modernism was set in motion, in one sense, through a series of cultural shocks. The first of these great shocks was the Great War, which ravaged Europe from 1914 through 1918, known now as World War One. In contrast to the Romantic world view, the Modernist cares rather little for Nature, Being, or the overarching structures of history. Instead of progress and growth, the Modernist intelligentsia sees decay and a growing alienation of the individual.

The end 19th century was a crucial point in European and American culture. This time was associated with anxiety and uncertainty about future. The situation was aggravated by revolutions and wars that burst out at the beginning of the XX century. People are disappointed in reality; thereafter they are no longer satisfied with traditional ways of describing reality, i.e. realism. The idea of ​​the fatality of modern times underlies the new philosophical concepts. The perception of the world as chaos makes a person vulnerable, helpless, and lonely. He no longer seems to be a master of the world as it was in times of rationalism.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

One of the two major modernist figures who experiments in an extreme way. She was born in 1882 and died in 1941 when she drowned herself. From her earliest childhood she had been surrounded by intellectuals. She suffered several personal losses, her mother died when she was very young, which was followed by a series of family tragedies, which made her prone to depression.Virginia Woolf was one of the first feminists.

In realism objectivity is reached by an accurate description of events, outside of characters’ perception of reality. In modernism, objectivity is based on the sum of characters’ subjective views. Thus, a reader is allowed to see an event from different angles and only a reader builds the objectivity himself.

Stream of consciousness (поток сознания): The device claims to create most tangible illusion of presence, of witnessing a character’s emotions and feelings. A character’s thoughts are presented in such a way, as if a reader overhears them in the mind of a character.

In “The Waves” there are six narrators, a first-person narration. Virginia Woolf dilutes characters’ monologues with nine interludes, written in third-person, which describe a sea at varying stages. These interludes symbolize changes that characters undergo during their whole life. Thus the author includes symbolism into the novel which could not have been demonstrated in characters’ monologues. As the story develops and as characters grow older, the picture changes: “The sun had not yet risen.” corresponds to characters’ childhood. “The sun rose higher.” relates to the time when children go to school. “The sun rose.” refers to their time in college, etc.

Mrs Dalloway (1925)

To the Lighthouse (1927)

Orlando (1928)

4. Литература модернизма: жанровые модификации романов Дж.Джойса.

James Joyce (1882 – 1941)

Method - Stream of consciousness (поток сознания)

Центральное произведение «потока сознания» в литературе — «Улисс» (1922) Джойса, продемонстрировавшее одновременно вершину и исчерпанность возможностей метода «потока сознания»: исследование внутренней жизни человека сочетается в нём с размыванием границ характера, психологический анализ нередко превращается в самоцель.

Примером одной из ранних попыток применения подобного приёма может служить прерывающийся и повторяющийся внутренний монолог главной героини в последних частях романа Льва Толстого «Анна Каренина».

-the breaking of grammatical rules

-punctuation is neglected

-colloquial language

The novel Ulysses focuses on one day – June 16, 1904 – in the life of Mr. Leopold Bloom, a middle-aged Jewish man living in Dublin, Ireland. The groundbreaking stream-of-consciousness style allows the reader not only to trace the actions of Bloom's day, but also to follow the movement of his thoughts, to hear the inner timbre of his needs and desires, his joy and his despair. In doing so, the novel nearly breaks the back of realism (literature with a goal of portraying people and events as they exist in the real world).

5. Творчество Б.ОНоллана.

Brian O'Nolan (1911 – 1966)

6. Роман-антиутопия в творчестве Дж. Оруэлла.

George Orwell (Eric Blair) (1903 – 1950)

Eric Blair was born in 1903 in Motihari (Bihar, India) in the then British colony of India, where his father, Richard, worked for the Opium Department of the Civil Service. After finishing his studies at Eton, having no prospect of gaining a university scholarship and his family's means being insufficient to pay his tuition, Eric joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma (Myanmar). He resigned and returned to England in 1928 having grown to hate imperialism (as shown by his first novel Burmese Days, published in 1934, and by such essays as 'A Hanging', and 'Shooting an Elephant'). He adopted his pen name in 1933, while writing for the New Adelphi. He chose a pen name that stressed his deep, lifelong affection for the English tradition and countryside: George is the patron saint of England (and George V was monarch at the time), while the River Orwell in Suffolk was one of his most beloved English sites.

Soon after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Orwell volunteered to fight for the Republicans against Franco's Nationalist uprising. As a sympathiser of the Independent Labour Party (of which he became a member in 1938), he joined the militia of its sister party in Spain, the non-Stalinist far-left POUM (Workers' Party of Marxist Unification), in which he fought as an infantryman.

In 1944 Orwell finished his anti-Stalinist allegory Animal Farm, an allegory of the corruption of the socialist ideals of the Russian Revolution by Stalinism, and the latter is Orwell's prophetic vision of the results of totalitarianism.

In 1949 his best-known work, the dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, was published.

Orwell is also known for his insights about the political implications of the use of language. In the essay "Politics and the English Language", he decries the effects of cliche, bureaucratic euphemism, and academic jargon on literary styles, and ultimately on thought itself. Orwell's concern over the power of language to shape reality is also reflected in his invention of Newspeak, the official language of the imaginary country of Oceania in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Newspeak is a variant of English in which vocabulary is strictly limited by government fiat. The goal is to make it increasingly difficult to express ideas that contradict the official line - with the final aim of making it impossible even to conceive such ideas. (cf. Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis). A number of words and phrases that Orwell coined in Nineteen Eighty-Four have entered the standard vocabulary, such as "memory hole," (дырка в памяти) "Big Brother," (диктатор) "Room 101," (комната пыток) "doublethink," (двоемыслие) "thought police,"(полиция нравов) and "newspeak" (новояз - пропагандистский язык, предельно сужающий возможности выразить что-л., выходящее за пределы узкого круга навязанных носителю идей).

Fiction

• 1933 – Down and Out in Paris and London

• 1934 – Burmese Days

• 1935 – A Clergyman's Daughter

• 1936 – Keep the Aspidistra Flying

• 1939 – Coming Up for Air

• 1945 – Animal Farm

• 1949 – Nineteen Eighty-Four

Non-Fiction

• 1937 – The Road to Wigan Pier

• 1938 – Homage to Catalonia

In the book 1984 By George Orwell, Winston Smith, the protagonist, lives in a world where the government attempts to control the bodies and minds of the civilians. He and Julia, a woman he meets about mid-novel, together hold to the belief that the party can never take away their love towards each other, and hatred towards the omnipotent government. However, in the end, the two are proven wrong when they are captured, taken to the Ministry of Love, and physically and mentally tortured. The party succeeds in molding their minds and, after Winston comes back to his dull life, he professes his love towards Big Brother and betrays Julia by ceasing to love her. Many readers of Orwell's novel are angered by this ending because it shows them how easily they can let the government manipulate and control their minds which undermines their ability to think for themselves. However, this point is necessary to the work because it is the final contribution to Orwell's message of the dangers of a totalitarianism authority.

Персонажи: Winston Smith, Julia, O’Brien, Emmanuel Goldstein, secondary characters

Места: Oceania (Australia and New Zeland), Eurasia and Eastasia (China, India, Indonesia)

Министерства: Ministry of Love, Ministry of Peace, Ministry of Plenty, Ministry of Truth, Room 101

Группы: Outer and Inner Party, Proles, The Brotherhood, Thought Police

Концепты: Newspeak, Doublethink, Two + two = five, Thoughtcrime, Telescreen, Memory hole, Goldstein's book, Two Minutes Hate, Hate week, Prolefeed, Unperson, Ingsoc

7. Э. Берджес и его роман «Заводной апельсин». 

DYSTOPIA - an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad. The opposite of Utopia.

Anthony Burgess (1917 – 1993)

Satiric anti-utopia

A Clockwork Orange (1962) deals with violence, illustrated in a long line of incidents. A short (150-page) novel, it is written in the first person, narrated by Alex (anti-hero), a terrifyingly violent teenager. The atmosphere of killing, blood and assaults is so exacerbated, the characters’ language is so full of Russian influences (so many Russian words, adapted to English=слэнг Надсат; написаны латиницей).

What are the most important parts of the book are the ethic question of human essence and experimental language based on a fictional slang. The title is adapted from a piece of slang as well. It is a part of a Cockney expression as queer as a clockwork orange, which could, but not necessarily, be a sexual allusion to homosexuality.

The book has three untitled parts, of which each contains seven numerated chapters. Each chapter starts with the same utterance What is going to be then, eh? This repeats during the whole book many times and expresses the idea that, in spite of the effort not to be, Alex ́s and his friends ́ life is monotonous and empty as their parents ́. In fact, drugs and violence every day could become the same monotonous after some time as going to work.

The novel is set in unspecified time in future and in unspecified metropolitan city. A reader only knows that it happens after the Second World War and after 1960 ́s, which are the only two time references in the book. The indefinite setting emphasises timelessness, a possibility than it could happen at any time. Moreover, according to Burgess ́ attitude, this phase of human existence regularly repeats without end.

Characters are not described in detail. There are only few remarks. Other members of the band, Pete, Georgie and Dim, are described as a group with typical image inspired by the subculture of the fifties and sixties. The narrator, Alex, is also the protagonist. He is violent but witty, honestly, unlike his friends, and considers himself to be the leader of the group, which afterwards leads to a conflict with his three companions.