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Definitivat Engleza 2011 UNIVERSITATEA DUNAREA DE JOS Galati PDF
Definitivat Engleza 2011 UNIVERSITATEA DUNAREA DE JOS Galati PDF
CONTEXTE
CULTURALE I
PREDAREA LOR
A.OBIECTIVE
Romantic: Modernist:
Bronte, Emily: Wuthering Heights Joyce, James: A Portrait of the Artist
Melville, Herman. Moby Dick Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway*
Edgar, Alan Poe, The Fall of the House of Foster, E.M.: A Passage to India*
Usher Faulkner, William: Absalom, Absalom
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Hemingway, Ernest. The Old Man and
Scarlet Letter the Sea
Realist: Postmodernist:
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe Golding, William: Lord of the Flies
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice Fowles, John: The French Lieutenants
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations Woman*
Twain, Mark. Huckleberry Finn
_____________________________
* See the information and the text
selection in Michaela Praisler, On
Modernism, Postmodernism and the Novel
(EDP, 2005).
Romaticism
Romanticism is a movement in art and literature that
began in Europe in the late 18th century and was most
influential in the first half of the 19th century.
Romanticism fosters a return to nature and also values
the imagination over reason and emotion over intellect.
One strain of the Romantic is the Gothic with its
emphasis on tales of horror and the supernatural.
Romantic elements in Wuthering Heights
(Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England)
The dynamic antagonism or antithesis in the novel tends to subvert, if not to reject literary conventions; often
a novel verges on turning into something else, like poetry or drama. In Wuthering Heights, realism in presenting
Yorkshire landscape and life and the historical precision of season, dates, and hours co-exist with the
dreamlike and the unhistorical; Bront refuses to be confined by conventional classifications.
The protagonists' wanderings are motivated by flight from previously-chosen goals, so that often there is a
pattern of escape and pursuit. Consider Catherine's marriage for social position, stability, and wealth, her
efforts to evade the consequences of her marriage, the demands of Heathcliff and Edgar, and her final mental
wandering.
The protagonists are driven by irresistible passionlust, curiosity, ambition, intellectual pride, envy. The
emphasis is on their desire for transcendence, to overcome the limitations of the body, of society, of time
rather than their moral transgressions. They yearn to escape the limitations inherent to life and may find that
the only escape is death. The longings of a Heathcliff cannot be fulfilled in life.
Death is not only a literal happening or plot device, but also and primarily a psychological concern. For the
protagonists, death originates in the imagination, becomes a "tendency of mind," and may develop into an
obsession.
As in Gothic fiction, buildings are central to meaning; the supernatural, wild nature, dream and madness,
physical violence, and perverse sexuality are set off against social conventions and institutions. Initially, this
may create the impression that the novel is two books in one, but finally Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering
Heights fuse.
Endings are disquieting and unsatisfactory because the writer resists a definitive conclusion, one which
accounts for all loose ends and explains away any ambiguities or uncertainties. The preference for open-
endedness is, ultimately, an effort to resist the limits of time and of place That effort helps explain the
importance of dreams and memories of other times and location, like Catherine's delirious memories of
childhood at Wuthering Heights and rambles on the moors.
American Gothic
The gothic explores the dark or uncertain sides of human nature.
Rapid social changes in the nineteenth century cause anxiety in America, nurturing a gothic
sensibility in literature.
In stories of obsessive or tormented characters who find their most basic assumptions about
the world turned upside-down, these writers challenge their readers to question their own
values and beliefs through exploring the ever-evolving character of American identity.
Hawthorne s works explore the construction of reality through subjective perception, the
pasts inevitable and often malevolent hold on the present, and the agonizing ethical dilemmas
encountered by individuals in society. The Scarlet Letter works through the painful
inheritance of rigid Puritan faith, dealing with the wrenching implications of its conception of
sin; it also expresses anxiety about the torments of gender inequality
Melvilles Moby-Dick shares a similar interest in the dark truths of humanity; the white whale is
a symbol of ambiguity and uncertainty, and the ship functions as a microcosm of mid-
nineteenth century society; Ahabs hunt is symbolically a rage against God.
Often set in exotic, vaguely medieval, or indeterminately distant locations, Poes work seems
more interested in altered states of consciousness than history or culture: his characters often
swirl within madness, dreams, or intoxication, and may or may not encounter the supernatural,
functioning as allegories of human consciousness. For example, there are many doubles in
Poe: characters who mirror each other in profound but nonrealistic ways, suggesting not so
much the subtleties of actual social relationships as the splits and fractures within a single
psyche trying to relate to itself.
Realism
Realism is an aesthetic mode which broke with the classical demands of art to show life as it
should be in order to show life "as it is."
The work of realist art tends to eschew the elevated subject matter of tragedy in favour of
the quotidian; the average, the commonplace, the middle classes and their daily struggles
with the mean verities of everyday existence (these are the typical subject matters of
realism.)
Realism and the novel:
George Levine: a selfconscious effort, usually in the name of some moral enterprise of
truth telling and extending the limits of human sympathy, to make literature appear to be
describing directly [] reality itself.
Ian Watt: realism portrays all the varieties of human experience and identifies a belief in
the individual apprehension of reality through the senses. The texts characters within their
environment, the used language, a realistic plot and the authors claim of truth, all attempt to
reflect a correspondence between life and literature .
Roland Barthes: the narrative or plot of a realist novel is structured around an opening
enigma which throws the conventional cultural and signifying practices into disarray. But the
story must move inevitably towards closure, which in the realist novel involves some
dissolution or resolution of the enigma: the murderer is caught, the case is solved, the hero
marries the girl. The realist novel drives toward the final re-establishment of harmony and
thus re-assures the reader that the value system of signs and cultural practices which he or
she shares with the author is not in danger. The political affiliation of the realist novel is
thus evident; in trying to show us the world as it is, it often reaffirms, in the last instance,
the way things are.
Modernism
A radical shift in aesthetic and cultural sensibilities evident in the
art and literature of the first half of the 20th century.
It rejected nineteenth-century optimism, presenting a profoundly
pessimistic picture of a culture in disarray. This despair often
results in an apparent apathy and moral relativism.
Literary tactics and devices:
the radical disruption of linear flow of narrative;
the frustration of conventional expectations concerning unity and
coherence of plot and character and the cause and effect development
thereof;
the deployment of ironic and ambiguous juxtapositions to call into
question the moral and philosophical meaning of literary action;
the opposition of inward consciousness to rational, public, objective
discourse; and an inclination to subjective distortion to point up the
evanescence of the social world of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie.
Postmodernism
The term postmodernism implies a movement away from and
perhaps a reaction against modernism.
If modernism sees man rejecting tradition and authority in favor of a
reliance on reason and on scientific discovery, postmodernism
stretches and breaks away from the idea that man can achieve
understanding through a reliance on reason and science.
Postmodernist fiction is generally marked by one or more of the
following characteristics:
playfulness with language
experimentation in the form of the novel
less reliance on traditional narrative form
less reliance on traditional character development
experimentation with point of view
experimentation with the way time is conveyed in the novel
mixture of "high art" and popular culture
interest in metafiction, that is, fiction about the nature of fiction
Narrative discourse (Gerard Genette)
narrative:
story (histoire): the succession of events being narrated; it provides the content of the tale in the order in which
events actually happened to characters, an order that does not always coincide with the order in which they
are presented in the narrative;
discourse/narrative (rcit): the actual words on the page, the text itself from which the reader constructs both
story and narration (narrative is produced by the narrator in the act of narration);
narration: the act of telling the story to some audience, and thereby producing the narrative. However, just as
the narrator almost never corresponds exactly to the author, the audience (narratee) almost never corresponds
exactly to the reader.
tense: the arrangement of events with respect to time; it involves the notions of order (i.e. the relationship between
the chronology of the story and the chronology of the narrative); duration (i.e. the relationship between the length of
time over which a given event occurs in the story and the number of pages devoted to it; that which produces the
sense of narrative speed); frequency (the relationship between the ways in which events may be repeated in the story
- the same event may occur more than one - and in the narrative - a single event may be described more than once.)
mood: the atmosphere of the narrative which is created by the distance between narration and story[1] and
perspective, which refers to the point of view of the narrative.
voice: the voice of the narrator; it helps determine the narrators attitude to the story being told and his reliability in
relation to the way in which the story is told.
[1] The greatest distance is achieved when the narrator is one of the characters in the narrative, filtering the events
through his consciousness, as well as by the absence of descriptive detail which greatly diminishes the effect of reality;
consequently, the least distance requires a minimum presence of the narrator and a maximum of information
Point of View
The perspective from which the reader views the action and characters. The point
of view determines the limitations and freedoms that the author has in presenting
the plot and theme to the reader.
Major types of point of view:
first-person (observations of a character who narrates the story): the narrator speaks as
I, and is himself a participant in the story as:
a fortuitous witness of the matters he/she relates,
a minor or peripheral participant in the story,
the central character in the story
third-person:
OMNISCIENT: the convention in a work of fiction that the narrator knows everything that
needs to be known about the agents and the events; is free to move at will in time and place,
to shift from character to character, and to report (or conceal) their speech and actions; and
also that the narrator has privileged access to the characters thoughts and feelings and
motives, as well as to their overt speech and actions. Within this mode, the narrator may be:
INTRUSIVE (not only reports, but freely comments on and evaluates the actions and motives of
the characters, and sometimes expresses personal views about human life in general)
UNINTRUSIVE (IMPERSONAL or OBJECTIVE) (i.e. describes, reports, or shows the action in
dramatic scenes without introducing his own comments or judgements.)
LIMITED: the narrator tells the story in the third-person, but within the confines of what is
experienced, thought, felt by a single character (or at the most by very few characters) within
the story. This technique later evolved into STREAM-OF-CONSCIOUSNESS narration, in
which we are presented with outer observations only as they impinge on the current of
thought, memory, feelings, and associations which constitute the observers awareness
Characterisation
The process by which an author presents and develops a fictional character.