What is useful? „As for the life of the business man, it does not give him much freedom of action. Besides, wealth is obviously not the good that we are seeking, because it serves only as a means; i.e. for getting something else.” „Happiness, then, is found to be something perfect and self-sufficient, being the end to which our actions are directed.” „But what is happiness? If we consider what the function of man is, we find that happiness is a virtuous activity of the soul.” Aristotle, Ethics

„Is literary history necessary „Is literary history necessary? In the strictest sense, the answer must be no: it is possible to read books with appreciation and enjoyment without cluttering one’s head with dates and movements. And it is demonstrably possible to write great literature with little or no sense of one’s place in a great tradition. Shakespeare would have had very little idea of his historical bearings, whilst Chaucer would have been bemused by most Old English poetry. Donne would have coped dismally with the ‚dating’ passages on which infant critics now cut their teeth and learn to nuzzle their way through a text. The truth is that literary history is a relatively modern invention…” –Pat Rogers, The Oxford Illustrated History of English Literature

What good is it to own the stars? "And what good does it do you to own the stars?" "It does me the good of making me rich." "And what good does it do you to be rich?" "It makes it possible for me to buy more stars, if any are discovered." "This man," the little prince said to himself, "reasons a little like my poor tippler . . ." Nevertheless, he still had some more questions. "How is it possible for one to own the stars?" "To whom do they belong?" the businessman retorted, peevishly. "I don't know. To nobody." "Then they belong to me, because I was the first person to think of it." "Is that all that is necessary?" --Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, 1943

Gabriel Marcel: The Mystery of Being „Il semble bien plutot en réalité que nous soyons á la recherche de quelque chose á partir de quoi des normes deviendront pensables.” (It seems that in reality we are rather in search of something beginning with which norms become thinkable) “…la réalité qui nous concerne le plus directement n’est en aucune maniére comparable á quelque chose que nous pourrions toucher ou atteindre.” (the reality which concerns us most directly is not in any manner comparable to anything that we could touch or reach.)

Realism (description of the surface of things) is combined with symbolism and suggestiveness (to suggest a truth which is hidden from human perception). Science is no more seen as an objective truth. There are competing theories to describe the world. –from Dr. Dósa’s lecture notes

--the education act of 1870 made elementary education compulsory and universal=large literary public, literature divided into popular and high-brow --Queen Victoria dies in 1901 (end of conventional religious beliefs- Darwin) --movements for home rule had begun in the colonies (changing perception of the other) Gauguin, Conrad, civilisation=conscious, primitive=unconscious --1900 foundations of quantum theory laid by Einstein, Freud publishes Interpretation of Dreams --Edwardian period—King Edward VII 1901-1910 --1905 Einstein The Special and General Theory of Relativity (space and time no longer absolute) --The Georgian Period—George V 1910-1936 --The Great War 1914-18 (WWI)

„Only forty years passed between the moment Einstein determined that any kind of mass could be converted into energy—that’s what E=mc2 means—and the moment atom bombs obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki and nuclear power stations mushroomed all over the globe” –Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

„During the First World War, Germany was placed under blockade and suffered severe shortages of raw materials, in particular saltpetre, an essential ingredient in gunpowder and other explosives…True, saltpetre could be replaced by ammonia, but that was expensive to produce as well. Luckily for the Germans…a Jewish alchemist named Fritz Haber, had discovered in 1908 a process for producing ammonia literally out of thin air. When war broke out, the Germans used Haber’s discovery to commence industrial production of explosives using air as a raw material…the discovery won Haber (who during the war also pioneered the use of poison gas in battle) a Nobel Prize in 1918…” --Harari

--1911-15: Sir James Frazer, leader of the Cambridge School of Anthropology, publishes The Golden Bough (12 vols., abridged 1922). Frazer discovered a coherent ritual pattern in diverse mythological materials: the sacrificial killing of the king as the main fertility rite. He showed that the Christian myth of a dying and resurrected god was merely one of an enormous class of similar myths. It was evidence that we can find universal ideas in different communities in different ages and that underneath modern skeptical intelligence there are elements of mystical, primitive, ancient ways of thinking. --the linguistic turn--In 1916 Ferdinand Saussure publishes his Course in General Linguistics. Saussure introduces a synchronic view of language, and is concerned with the structure and uses of language in the present. There is an arbitrary relationship between linguistic sign or signifier, and the thing it refers to --Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921): ‘the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.’ --Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921—26 counties of southern Ireland gained independence --women given the vote in 1928

Surrealism seeks the truth by suspending reason Freud restored confidence in irrationality, the primitive, the mythical and the original or true self uncorrupted by civilization Ezra Pound wants to achieve ‚the exact curve of the thing’ as opposed to…an interpretation of or ready made approximation to the thing* „The relative status of the human was a central recognition of Modernism itself. Lawrence, for example, writing in 1914 about the work that was to become The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920), rejected the „old stable ego” of humanist ethical characterization because he only cared „about what the woman is—what she is—inhumanly, physiologically, materially--…what she is as a phenomenon (or as representing some greater, inhuman will)…** *taken from lecture notes by dr. Attila dósa **Michael Bell, „The Metaphysics of modernism” in the cambridge companion to modernism

The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali—time as a continuous flow in human consciousness

In the sciences empirical observation is replaced by speculative, theoretical approaches (Einstein), as observation was problematic in subatomic scales. As a result, science is seen as a construction of the human mind before it is a reflection of the natural world.

„We can utter words such as ‚wave particle duality’…but it is extremely hard to understand at a deep, intuitive level this dazzling feature of the microscopic world.” –Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe

But this point of view by no means embraces the whole of the actual process; for it slurs over the important part played by intuition and deductive thought in the development of an exact science. As soon as a science has emerged from its initial stages, theoretical advances are no longer achieved merely by a process of arrangement. Guided by empirical data, the investigator rather develops a system of thought which, in general, is built up logically from a small number of fundamental assumptions, the so-called axioms. We call such a system of thought a theory. (Einstein, The Special and General Theory of Relativity)

„…Hardy could never stop entertaining the possibility of a spiritually animated landscape, no matter how utterly he faced the earth’s stark otherness…this tension produces Hardy’s greatest poems, poems in which we are assured that the landscape is devoid of spiritual presences at the same time that we are tempted, if only by metaphor, to search for those presences” –James Longenbach, „Modern Poetry” in The Cambridge Companion to Modernism

The Darkling Thrush (29 December 1900) BY THOMAS HARDY I leant upon a coppice gate When Frost was spectre-grey, And Winter's dregs made desolate The weakening eye of day. The tangled bine-stems scored the sky Like strings of broken lyres, And all mankind that haunted nigh Had sought their household fires. The land's sharp features seemed to be The Century's corpse outleant, His crypt the cloudy canopy, The wind his death-lament. The ancient pulse of germ and birth Was shrunken hard and dry, And every spirit upon earth Seemed fervourless as I. At once a voice arose among The bleak twigs overhead In a full-hearted evensong Of joy illimited; An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, In blast-beruffled plume, Had chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloom. So little cause for carolings Of such ecstatic sound Was written on terrestrial things Afar or nigh around, That I could think there trembled through His happy good-night air Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew And I was unaware.

„Was modern civilization all a „Heart of Darkness” „Was modern civilization all a „Heart of Darkness”? Was it an arid „Waste Land”? True enough, figures of nihilism, of degeneration and despair, circulate quickly both in the work and in the responses to the work. The loss of faith; the groundlessness of value, the violence of war, and a nameless, faceless anxiety—no one is likely to be surprised by such a list of disturbances, at once individual and social. But here we come to a further complex effect of the passion for technique. Not only did it solicit attention to the close particulars of a genre at a given historical moment; it also opened a field of action, a theatre of conviction, within the wider social failure. „ --Michael Levenson, introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Modernism