1. The modern age
1890 – 1930
An age of crisis

2. index Slide 3: Historical changes Different critical elements:
Slide 4: Philosophical and Literary crisis
Slide 5: Scientific crisis
Crisis’ reactions:
Slide 6: French Symbolists
Slide 7: English poetry
Novel development:
Slide 8: New Dramatic Novel
Slide 9: Old Novel
T.S. Eliot:
Slide 10: Eliot’s Mythical Method
Slide 11: Eliot’s Objective Correlative
Slide 12: Anthropology

3. Historical chances
Industrialization of France, Germany, Japan and United States
Creation of an atmosphere of tension that brings to alliances
1914: alliances bring to the First World War outbreak
Many lose their faith in liberal democracy, capitalism and in the Victorian idea of progress
European domination on the world ends: USA and Russia are the two greatest powers
1870’s – 1880’s: economic depression causes unemployment
Beginning of the Welfare State: governments accept that states must control a part of the economy
Marxism offers a secure future to a generation which has no faith in traditional values
1917: Lenin and the Bolsheviks establish a communist economy in Russia

4. Philosophical and literary crisis
The most profound fear of the Victorians is neither political nor social; it was religious:
Divine plans disappear: people experience a sense of isolation
The only sure point of reference for an individual is himself
Writer’s different reactions:
T. Hardy and J. Conrad: believe in cultivating a stoical dignity and acceptation
V. Woolf, D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster: substitute personal relationship to divine love
H. Belloc, G. K. Chesterton and T. S. Eliot: ignore their doubts and become Christians
G. B. Shown and H. G. Wells: dedicate themselves to social reform
There are no values to which refer: characters speak for themselves presenting their point of view
The novelist disappears from his work

5. Scientific crisis
Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics are shown to rest on false assumptions
A. Einstein: space and time do not exist as separate
H. Bergson and W. James: past and future exist together with the present in people’s mind (“stream of consciousness”)
S. Freud: people’s behavior depends very largely on the unconscious part of their minds; man’s power of reason finds no space
C. Jung:
Man’s unconscious mind contains his racial memory (primitive memory about the evolutionary race experiences)
Certain figures or objects in the ordinary world had great symbolic: only the psychologist, or perhaps the poet, discover the symbolic meanings

6. French Symbolists The Symbolist poets influence:
Certain figures or objects in the ordinary world had great symbolic: only the psychologist, or perhaps the poet, discover the symbolic meanings
French Symbolist poets (end of the 19th century):
Mallarme and W.B. Yeats (elaborates a complete symbolical system)
Give mystical significance to their impressions of the world of the senses
Use language which spoke to the reader's irrational part
The Symbolist poets influence:
The writers of the Aesthetic Movement
Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot: American poets that produce an anti-Victorian poetry

7. English poetry
Poetry (end of the 19th century): is sentimental, elegiac and pastoral; it can not find a solution to the philosophical and literary crisis
T. E. Hulme:
Looks for a new order that Western society needs
Art should be impersonal like Neo-Classicism had been
Writers have to return to a Pre-Romantic idea of man
Verses have to be Classical: controlled and dominated by critical reason
T. S. Eliot: expresses better Hulme’s theories and is influenced by Pound
T. S. Eliot and E. Pound: write in a difficult and obscure way, with literary references

8. New Dramatic Novel
The narrator is invisible: characters tell and represent the story
The scene substitutes the old novel
The author is hidden or doesn’t appear: ambiguity and uncertainty permeate the novel
Modern novelists: insert Aesthetic values in novels
H. James:
Explores the flux of his mental experience (“stream of consciousness”)
The interior monologue appears where there is no perception for logical connection
The reader has to listen to one of the characters: understand his identity
Old Novel: narrative structure
New Novel: dramatic structure

9. Old Novel Structure: narrative
Omniscient narrator: alternates summaries of previous events, personal commentaries, scenes, characters’ description, conversation, reported conversations, conclusions
Summary = panoramic vision
Description = close up (primo piano)
Scene= sonorous (close up)
H. Fielding, J. Austen, W. Scott, C. Bronte, C. Dickens, W. M. Thackeray and A. Trollope:
Omniscient narrator: 3rd person and in 1st person narrations
De Foe and Moll Flanders
Protagonist: speaks with the same voice of the author

10. Eliot’s Mythical Method
Myth and ritual in T. S. Eliot:
Potential means of ordering and transforming into significance contemporary experience
It is simply a way of controlling and ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history
Eliot and Joyce's technique for presenting
Eliot compresses and alludes: condensation of the “immense panorama”
Joyce expands the moment to infinitude
Both elevate their ideas/assertions using the mythology

11. Eliot’s Objective Correlative
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked
If the matter (thought, feeling, action) is too much we have a lack of unity; we say too much
If the experience is buried by the words we have another kind of discrepancy and strain; we are speechless
A successful artistic creation requires an exquisite balance between, and coalescence of form and matter

12. Anthropology J. Fraser, The Golden Bough, 1890:
New interest in mythology and pre-history
Sources of art lay in the “unconscious”, which can be a collective unconscious as well as a personal one
Interest in the man beneath the surface of so - called “civilization”
Discussion on the ancient myth of the Grail and on primeval customs
We seem to move on a thin crust which may at any moment be rent by the subterranean forces slumbering below

13. source and author Source: School: Class: Student:
School:
A. Einstein high school, ISIS della Bassa Friulana, Cervignano del Friuli
Class:
5^ ALS
Student:
Scarpin Cosetta