MODERNISM ‘a general term applied retrospectively to the wide range of experimental and

avant-garde in the literature (and other arts) of the early twentieth century’

modernity: quality of being modern

modernism: artistic response to modernity

seven modernist traits: urbanism, technologism, dehumanization, primitivism, eroticism,

antinomianism (lawlessness), experimentalism
common devices: fragmenting unities, refusal of common norms, use of mythic paradigms,
resolve to startle and disturb
imitative form: homology between content and form

The Modernist Novel:

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)

The way to modernism in literature

18-19th centuries
 social world, social class, gain and loss of social status
 fortune, status, marital position
 shared values, standard of significance public and agreed
 world of fiction known to the readership, presented as objective
 hero more or less on same level as readers

Modernism

 loss of a common world affecting themes and technique

 e.g. Woolf on Jane Austin (”released from the cramp and confinement of personality”)
 what is significant becomes personal and individual
 to represent shifts of mood and feeling
 ordinary incident, situation or object having intense symbolic meaning (Joyce’s epiphany)
 plot based on private perception of the significant in human affairs
 novel taken out of the public arena, emphasis on individual, private sphere and personality
 new concepts of time – time no longer a series of movements moving forward, chronological time
no longer valid or relevant
 past experience retained and affecting the present (Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu (In
(In
Search of Lost Time))
Time))
 new concept of (sub)consciousness
 new view of character
 no need for testing circumstances for characterization, any given moment or short period of time is
capable of revealing his/her essence
 increase in psychological subtlety and diagnosis, states of mind (e.g. Henry James)
 Collapse of public standard of significance + new notions of time + new notions of consciousness:
- new techniques and themes
- new events conditioned by private past (Mrs
(Mrs Dalloway)
Dalloway)
- private stream of consciousness opposed to public events, leading to loneliness, isolation of the
individual (Ulysses
(Ulysses))
 Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)
 General theme: man finds himself in a situation where the normal public codes don’t exist, don’t
work or are not relevant
 Man either finds strength and recovery from self-knowledge and loneliness or goes down to
destruction (or, rarely, does not even realise his predicament)
 Society, politics, economy inevitably corrupt the individual (e.g. Nostromo,
Nostromo, 1904)
 Tragic view: Material interest corrupts human relations and yet the attempt to escape into solitude
results in ultimate destruction. Solution?
 Deeply pessimistic view of man and human society (despite his own comments on his own
writings)

Novels & Novellas

• Almayer's Folly (1895)
• An Outcast of the Islands (1896)
• The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (1897)
• Heart of Darkness (1899)
• Lord Jim (1900)
• The Inheritors (with Ford Madox Ford) (1901)
• Typhoon (1902, begun 1899)
• The End of the Tether (written in 1902; collected in Youth, a Narrative and Two Other Stories,
1902)
• Romance (with Ford Madox Ford, 1903)
• Nostromo (1904)
• The Secret Agent (1907)
• Under Western Eyes (1911)
• Chance (1913)
• Victory (1915)
• The Shadow Line (1917)
• The Arrow of Gold (1919)
• The Rescue (1920)
• The Nature of a Crime (1923, with Ford Madox Ford)
• The Rover (1923)
• Suspense: A Napoleonic Novel (1925; unfinished, published posthumously)

 His fiction illustrates permanent aspects of the human condition: injustice, exploitation and crime
 ”Conrad was a conservative […] - he did not believe that there was any way out of the human
Predicament, and therefore saw political reform as folly.” (David Daiches)
 Heart of Darkness portrays the evils of 19th c. colonialism with extraordinary vividness, yet the
Congo he portrays is the Congo of the mind. (Daiches)
 His message: Idealism corrupts and loneliness can force a man into horrified awareness of his
identity with his own moral opposite (”The Secret Sharer”)
 Man is forced to recognize that his moral opposite, the secret sharer is himself. (e.g. Lord Jim,
Under Western Eyes)
Eyes)

Features of Conrad’s fiction

 1. Oblique point of view, narrative technique
• The story seen through the eyes of three or four persons
• Or, the narrator is a mysterious ” I”
• Occasionally, third person narrator (The
(The Nigger of the Narcissus)
Narcissus) often with a shift from
external to internal narration (stream of consciousness) with confusing frequency
• Typical setting: Narrator relating a story from his past to an attentive circle in a club or aboard
an anchored ship (Youth,
(Youth, Heart of Darkness)
Darkness)
• Reader perceives the plot through the eyes of others. These others have their idiosyncrasies
and blindnesses and the reader never sees the matter in its straightforward clarity

 2. Experiments in chronology
• Flashbacks
• Story told in reverse
• Plot revealed in bits and snatches and fitted together only in the reader’s mind
• Rearrangement of chronology, mixed-up order of events
• Result: air of authenticity, creating suspense by withholding most interesting information to
the last
• Detective story construction

 3. Characterization (some contradictory aspects)

• Real, vivid characters

• However, motivation is sometimes weak; especially true of sinister or abnormal characters.
• Heroes are psychologically accurate in general, we sometimes perceive their inner thoughts
• But often more mystery than psychology in their characterization, often preference to leave a
veil around the characters’ inner thoughts
• Another type of character is the grotesque:
grotesque: the vulgar, disgusting, psychologically twisted
outcast of the tropics = pathological cases lacking human quality (e.g. Schomber, the hotel-keeper in
Lord Jim and in Victory)
Victory)

 4. No conventional plot, no/few women

• No coherent plot (e.g. Youth)

Youth)
• Lack of interest in the conventional love-plot
• Most typical works, e.g. The Nigger of the Narcissus and Typhoon involve no women at all
• Where a love theme occurs it seldom has an essential part in the action
• Frequently woman is the agency through which man is undone, or fails to focus on a problem
(Victory, Lord Jim)
Jim)

 5. Romanticism (?)

• Nostalgia for exotic and unusual settings

• Fascination with place names, odd nationalities and primitive practices
• No real attempt to understand the East and Africa, merely absorbing their mood of strangeness
and communicating this mood to the reader
• Not an anthropologist but an artist who uses his material for the imagination

 6. Insular and Colonial attitude (controversial issues in literature)

• Like most converts, ”Conrad seems more fervent than those born in the creed”
• Tacit assumption that foreigners, especially Germans, Orientals and polyglots are different
from us (the British) and lack the essential moral qualities of the British
• His Germans are usually greedy merchants, rascals or grotesques
• The evil Zangiacomo of Victory who calls himself an Italian is actually a German in disguise

• Conrad seems to be a proponent of the ”inscrutable Orient” concept
• His Chinese, Siamese, Malayan and Javanese characters do not possess the same kind of
mentality as Westerners
• People on other continents are by nature inscrutable, irrational and a little sinister
• Some mysterious racial essence
• With assumption that Orientals and Africans are totally different from the British, he naturally
achieves little understanding of the political and economic problems of these people
• There is sympathy in his attitude but almost no awareness of the political consciousness that
even in his own time was beginning to manifest itself among these people
• In Nostromo he views egalitarianism as a species of barbarism which threatens the finer values
of civilization
 But, as stated earlier:
earlier:
 “Conrad was a conservative […] - he did not believe that there was any way out of the human
predicament, and therefore saw political reform as folly.” (David Daiches)
 Heart of Darkness portrays the evils of 19th c. colonialism with extraordinary vividness, yet the
Congo he portrays is the Congo of the mind. (Daiches)
 His message: Idealism corrupts and loneliness can force a man into horrified awareness of his
identity with his own moral opposite (“The Secret Sharer”)
 Man is forced to recognize that his moral opposite, the secret sharer is himself.
 The Nigerian writer 
writer Chinua Achebe’s “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of
Darkness’” (1975) provoked controversy by calling Conrad a “thoroughgoing racist”:
 Heart of Darkness 
Darkness cannot be considered a great work of art because it is "a novel which
celebrates... dehumanisation, which depersonalises a portion of the human race." , Conrad reduces
and degrades Africans to “limbs,” “angles,” “glistening white eyeballs,” etc. while simultaneously
(and fearfully) suspecting a common kinship between himself and these natives—leading Marlow
to sneer the word “ugly.” 
“ugly.” Achebe also cites Conrad's description of an encounter with an African:
“A certain enormous buck nigger encountered in  in Haiti fixed my conception of blind, furious,
unreasoning rage, as manifested in the human animal to the end of my days.” 
days.” [You can read
Achebe’s essay here: http://kirbyk.net/hod/image.of.africa.html]
http://kirbyk.net/hod/image.of.africa.html]
 According to some critics, Achebe fails to distinguish Marlow's view from Conrad's; Conrad
portrays blacks very sympathetically and condemns colonization. Conrad scholar Peter Firchow
asserts “nowhere in the novel does Conrad or any of his narrators, personified or otherwise, claim
superiority on the part of Europeans on the grounds of alleged genetic or biological difference.”
 The issue of racism can be further complicated in view of the positive representation of Muslims

 7. Fascination with the primitive character

• Conrad sees an elemental wisdom in the savage lacking in civilized man

• Even primitive superstition seems to him imbued with a mystical power
• In several cases his heroes try to penetrate into this primitive wisdom in order to partake of its
strength
• To do this, they must abandon civilization entirely
• They usually fail and the attempt destroys them
• There is a barrier around the primitive heart which no man can breach. Kurtz is one of the few
who break through the barrier and he emerges to die crying, ”The horror!”

”I directed my glass to the house. There were no signs of life, but there was the ruined roof, the long
mud wall peeping above the grass, with three little square window-holes, no two of the same size; all
this brought within reach of my hand, as it were. And then I made a brusque movement, and one of the
remaining posts of that vanished fence leaped up in the field of my glass. You remember I told you I
had been struck at the distance by certain attempts at ornamentation, rather remarkable in the ruinous
aspect of the place. Now I had suddenly a nearer view, and its first result was to make me throw my
head back as if before a blow. Then I went carefully from post to post with my glass, and I saw my
mistake. These round knobs were not ornamental but symbolic; they were expressive and puzzling,
striking and disturbing -- food for thought and also for vultures if there had been any looking down
from the sky; but at all events for such ants as were industrious enough to ascend the pole.
They would have been even more impressive, those heads on the stakes, if their faces had not been
turned to the house. Only one, the first I had made out, was facing my way. I was not so shocked as
you may think. The start back I had given was really nothing but a movement of surprise. I had
expected to see a knob of wood there, you know. I returned deliberately to the first I had seen -- and
there it was, 
was, black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids -- a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that
pole, and, with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth, was smiling, too,
smiling continuously at some endless and jocose dream of that eternal slumber.”
(Heart of Darkness)
Darkness)

Life

 Joseph 
Joseph Conrad, 
Conrad, original name 
name Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski 
Korzeniowski   (born Dec. 3,
1857, 
1857, Berdichev, Ukraine, Russian Empire [now Berdychiv, Ukraine]—died Aug. 3,
1924, 
1924, Canterbury, Kent, Eng.)
 Father, 
Father, Apollo Nalęcz Korzeniowski, a poet and an ardent Polish patriot, and revolutionary against
Russian rule, arrested in late 1861 and sent into exile at Vologda in northern Russia.
 Wife and four-year-old son followed him
 Harsh climate hastened his wife’s death from tuberculosis in 1865
 Conrad’s first introduction to the 
the English language was at the age of eight, when his father was
translating the works of Shakespeare and 
and Victor Hugo. J. Conrad read the works of Sir Walter
Scott, Cooper and Thackeray in Polish and French
 His father was ill with tuberculosis and died in Cracow in 1869
 Responsibility for the boy was assumed by his maternal uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski, a lawyer
 Bobrowski sent 
sent Conrad 
Conrad to school at Cracow and then to Switzerland, but the boy was bored by
school and yearned to go to sea. In 1874 
1874 Conrad 
Conrad left for Marseille with the intention of going to
sea
 Bobrowski made him an allowance of 2,000 francs a year and put him in touch with a merchant in
whose ships 
ships Conrad 
Conrad sailed in the French merchant service
 over 20 years at sea as a sailor (in various ranks), experiences providing ample material for his
fiction (Asia, Africa, North America)
 1889 the 
the Congo (Heart
(Heart of Darkness)
Darkness)
 1886 two notable events: became a British subject in August, and three months later obtained his
master mariner’s certificate
 In 1895 
1895 Conrad 
Conrad married the 22-year-old Jessie George, by whom he had two sons. He thereafter
resided mainly in the southeast corner of England

The Modern Novel, 1900-1930, Modern English Literature, 1890-1960 Dr. Eglantina Remport,
Autumn 2020

Literary market in UK

education – rates of literacy were on the increase

(around 80% of population was literate in the 1890s )
market for literary products was expanding newspaper culture was expanding

-- many writers worked as journalists Great Thematic Variation, 1890s-1920s

E. M. Forster, Howards End (1910)

Wilcoxes

English, empire-builders, masculine, unsentimental

(new world)

Schlegels

half-German, intellectual,

feminine, impractical, devoted to the arts

(old world)

Modern Novel 1

gothic / horror fiction travel writing

realist fiction
social chronicles psychological novels

(James) (Conrad)

(Galsworthy) (Forster)

(Lawrence, Woolf)

Questions E. M. Forster poses:

Is it posssible to reconcile the contrasting values of the families?...and to reconcile the contrasting
values emerging in England at the time?

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925) On the beginning of Modernism:

( Content)

New ideas by the 1910s and the 1920s

Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Henri-Louis Bergson, Albert Einstein, Friedrich Nietzsche

the novel (as a genre) needed to engage with the new ideas

Debate over the renewal of the Genre Content and Form

In or about December 1910 human character changed.

I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered,
or that a hen laid and egg. The change was not sudden or definite like that. But a change there was,
nevertheless; and since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910.
All human relations have shifted – those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents
and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion,
conduct, politics, and literature.

(Virginia Woolf in ‘Modern Fiction’)

 paradigm shift

Mrs Dalloway: The narrative is in a constant state of flux to reflect on life being in a constant state of
flux ( Form)

 H. G. Wells,
 E. M. Forster,
 Virginia Woolf,
 D. H. Lawrence,

‘The Contemporary Novel’ Aspects of the Novel

‘Is Fiction an Art?’

‘Modern Fiction’ ‘The Novel’

Modernist characteristics: sequencing (time) language (style)

relation between main plot and subplot characterisation

She had torn it. Someone had trod on her skirt. By artificial light the green shown, but lost its colour
now in the sun. She would mend it.

Her maids had too much to do. She would wear it tonight. She would take her silk, her scissors, her –
what was it? – her thimble, of course, down into the drawing-room, for she must also write, and see
that things generally were more or less in order.

(Mrs Dalloway)
 stream of consciousness technique

Henry James, The Ambassadors (1903)

H. G. Wells on Henry James’s style: ( Form) formal perfectionist

known for purism

(‘The Contemporary Novel’)

He had dropped back on his bench, alone again for a time, and the more conscious of little Bilham’s
defection of his unexpressed thought; in respect to which, however, this next converser was a still
more capatious vessel. ‘It’s the child’ he exclaimed to her almost as soon as she appeared; and though
her direct response was for some time delayed he could feel in her meanwhile the working of this truth

(The Ambassadors 144)

Style (Form): traditional, sometimes academic Plot (Content): modern, even if not yet Modernist

Mrs Newsome Chad Newsome Lambert Strether Waymarsh

Questions James poses: ( Content)

Is it posssible to reconcile the contrasting values of the families?...and to reconcile the contrasting
values that were emerging in Europe at the time? (1900s)

European values (that are more traditional)

vs. American values (that are perceived to be more progressive)

Compare the theme of reconciliation in James, in Forster, and in Woolf.

Celtic Revival and Modern English Literature, Dr. Eglantina Remport Modern English Literature, 1890-1960,
Autumn 2020

Celtic Revival 1890s-1930s: increased interest in Celtic languages and Celtic mythologies (see Seamus Deane,
Celtic Revivals, London: Faber, 1985) SEAS Library: PR8718.D43

Ireland: increased interest in the Irish language and in Medieval Irish legends (especially: the Cuchulain, the
Finn MacCumhail, and the Sweeney legends)

 John Millington Synge, The Playboy of the Western World (1907)

written in Hiberno-English (special variety of English spoken in Ireland) (Hibernia – Latin/Roman name for
Ireland)
The play has:

   linguistic variety
   linguistic innovations
   and a text that looks different from other pieces from the 1900s

Language (the use of Hiberno-English):

“SHAWN: Aren’t we after making a good bargain, the way we’re only waiting these days on Father
Reilly’s dispensation from the bishops, or the Court of Rome.”

“CHRISTY: It’s that you’d say surely if you seen him and he after drinking for weeks, rising up in the
red dawn, or before it maybe, and going out into the yard as naked as an ash tree in the moon of May,
and shying clods against the visage of the stars till he’d put the fear of death into the banbhs and the
screeching sows.”

“WIDOW QUIN: I’m after meeting Shawn Keogh and Father Reilly below, who told me of your curiosity man,
and they fearing by this time he was maybe roaring, romping on your hands with drink.”

“CHRISTY: It’s that you’d say surely if you seen him and he after drinking for weeks, rising up in the red dawn,
or before it maybe, and going out into the yard as naked as an ash tree in the moon of May, and shying clods
against the visage of the stars till he’d put the fear of death into the banbhs and the screeching sows.”

   the text full of stylistic innovations (embellishments) that give the play a modern / modernist
character
   the Irish words in the text make give authenticity to the play: shebeen, poteen, boreen, banbh,
 Still, many were critical: St John Irvine, for example, said that the play was “contrived literary stuff”
which was “entirely unrepresentative of peasant speech”

Synge’s used the ‘Preface’ of the play to defend the play: “I have used one or two words only, that I
have not heard among the country people of Ireland.”

While a similar (although not identical!!!) story appears in the The Aran Islands, Synge’s travelogue
which was based on his trip to the Aran Islands, the setting of the play is Co. Mayo -- Mhaigh Eo in
Irish, meaning “plain of the yew trees”!

Synge’s play is a very complex play, one that is filled with many political, religious and social issues
that relate to the Ireland of the 1900s. Nonetheless, on a separate note, one that relates to the topic of the
lecture: the play can be perceived as a mockery of the hero-worshipping ethos of the Celtic revival, the
love of heroes and heroic deeds.

Synge was not keen on the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, of which he was a founder, turning into a
“Cuchullanoid” National Theatre.

Synge aimed at achieving theatrical realism on the stage of the Abbey Theatre.

Remport - Celtic Revival - Autumn 2020

 Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)

Flann O’Brien (né Brian O’Nolan) studied Medieval Irish literature (in Irish) at

University College Dublin and learned about the Celtic legends of Ireland.

(Synge himself studied Irish language and literature at Trinity College Dublin and was able to converse in Irish.
He became acquainted with famous European Celticists in Paris, when he was studying languages at the
Sorbonne.)

At Swim-Two-Birds has a title with an Irish origin. The title is a translation of a place name that is found in the
Sweeney legend: Snámh dá Én

Irish legends used in the novel:

The novel has a so-called “triadic structure” (Keith Hopper), which means that there is a story within a story
within a story. The main story of the novel incorporates the old Irish legend of Finn MacCumhail and old Irish
legend of mad King Sweeney.

Observable in the novel are: ● linguistic variety and ● linguistic innovation.

 much of which has to do with the linguistic variety offered by Hiberno- English and by the Irish language
(this may sound an overgeneralisation but both Hiberno-English and Irish sentences are generally more lyrical
and more embellished than English sentences)

This tendency to innovate influences the plot line of the novel: it has three beginnings and three endings, starting
with the opening paragraph:

“Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual
perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant an pre-occupied
expression. I reflected on the subject of my spare-time literary activities. One beginning and one ending for a
book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have

three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one
hundred times as many endings.”

 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)

James Joyce, too, spoke Irish and was known for his use of Hiberno-English in his

works, including Dubliners and Ulysses.

To continue the line of thought started in the discussion of At Swim-Two-Birds: in Finnegans Wake, Joyce gives
up all attempts to write a novel that was conventional either in form or in content.

Finnegans Wake has no beginning and no end – literally. The first sentence of the novel does not start with a
capital letter and the last sentence does not finish in a full stop. This seems to create a circular pattern, one that is
connected to the theme of ‘dreams and reveries’ that recurs every so often in the novel.

Joyce makes use of the old Irish legend of Finn MacCumhail in the novel, starting with the title: Finnegans
Wake.

But what does the title mean, what could it refer to, if it refers to anything?
 Finn again is awake? It is Finnegan’s wake? Or Finnegan is at a wake? (see

The Playboy of the Western World)

Original title of the novel was A Work in Progress, and the novel did look like a ‘work in progress.’ It looked
like a novel that has not yet been finished. But one thing was sure, even then: it was a novel filled with technical
and linguistic innovations that moved beyond anything ever attempted in the English language.

Quotations are taken from John Millington Synge, The Playboy of the Western World, Oxford, 1998; Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds,
Penguin, 1967; James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, Penguin, 2000.

Women Writers, 1950s-1960s,

Modern English Literature 1890-1960s Autumn 2018, Dr. Eglantina Remport

Historical Context:

’’10 years after the end of the war [...] the most striking changes in social mores and external fashions take place
which were to give the post-war world a totally distinct set of attitudes from those of the thirties’’

(Harry Blamires, Twentieth-Century English Literature, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986, 210.) Social Changes, 1950s:

Protest marches around England in support of nuclear disarmament / various political causes (1956 Suez Crisis,
Hungary) / legislation for sexual equality (homosexual practices)

Social Changes, 1960s :

Return of Labour to power: 1964, Harold Wilson PM

Increased migration from the Commonwealth  multi-racial society

Muriel Spark (1918-2006), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1962)

Spark was born in ..; she converted to Catholicism; her later work is more didactic - turned towards Catholicism
to see life as a whole rather than as a series of

disconnected happenings

set in: 1930s - Edinburgh (modern-day Bildungsroman or coming-of-age novel) protagonists: Miss Jean Brodie
(a revolutionary/reactionary teacher)

and the Brodie set

narrative revolving around a love triangle between Miss Brodie, Mr Lowther and Mr Lloyd

some of the main themes: emotional (in)security, sexuality, intimacy, emotional / sexual corruption

Iris Murdoch (1919-1999), Under the Net (1954)

Murdoch was born in Dublin (father a Presbyterian from the Northern, mother an Anglican from the Southern
part of Ireland); she was conscious of the fact that both her parents belonged to minority religious / social groups
in Ireland.

Her novels revolve around characters who desire freedom; her characters have to realise that in order to find
personal freedom they need to accept life’s variety.

- picaresque novel set in London (swift moving action involving a high number of characters)

- protagonist: Jake Donaghue (writer and translator)

- one of the main themes: the tension between non-conformity – conformity

Doris Lessing (1919-2013), The Grass is Singing (1950)

Lessing was born in Persia (today’s Iran) from where the family travelled on to

Southern Rhodesia (today’s Zimbabwe)

Many of her most famous novels describe women’s experiences in colonial societies - themes: victimisation and
psychological disintegration

Women Writers – Remport 1

the novel is set in: Rhodesia

protagonists: Mary Turner, Dick Turner, Moses, Charles Slatter and Tony Marston main theme: Mary Turner’s
struggle for freedom and independence

Mary’s unhappy childhood: father’s alcoholism, mother’s oppressiveness, death of siblings, loveless young
adulthood

 she feels lonely and emotionally impoverished

Mary’s marriage to Dick Turner (an unsuccessful farmer): efforts on her part to reinvent herself in the
relationship

Dick is always away on the farm, Mary runs the house (in an increasingly authoritarian manner), she becomes
physically and emotionally oppressive towards slaves and servants.

Some of the main themes: isolation; social prejudice and hatred; physical fear; sexual and physical oppression;
sexual and social disgust combined with sexual and social desires.

Conclusion:
In the analysed works above all three writers describe the struggle on the part of the protagonist’s or
protagonists’ to achieve emotional and/or sexual freedom in an environment that they perceive as oppressive.

literary s promoting modernism: English review, The Egoist (imagist poetry, Eliot, Joyce),
The New Age, The Freewoman, Blast

 T. S. Eliot: born in St. Luis, Missuri. Harvard, anti-Romanticism of Irvin Babbitt,

critical and philosophical interest, enthusiasm for Elizabethan and Jacobean lit.,
Italian Renaissance. Dissertation on English idealist philosopher F.H. Bradley. Studied
in France, Germany, Oxford. Unsuccessful marriage, friendship with Ezra Pound (The
Waste Land)
 Wrote for the Athenaeum, the TLS, was assistant editor of The Egoist, founded The
Criterion, “The Love Song” was published in Poetry Magazine (US) in 1915, short
poems in Blast.
 Collection of poems: Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)
 1922: “The Waste Land,” decay of culture, veiled in the Grail legend quest; influence
of Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920) and James Frazer’s The Golden
Bough (1890-1915) – archetypal fertility myth, the Fisher King

 Four Quartets” (1943, but individual poems published earlier)

 “Ash Wednesday” (1930)
 Critical essays published in: The Sacred Wood (1922) and Selected Essays (1932)
 Director of publishing firm Faber and Faber
 British subject in 1927.
 Some features of his poetry:
– Juxtaposition of images, interaction
– No connective passages
– Symbolic landscape
– Concealed allusions, not necessarily known sources, own body of references
– Dramatic monologue
– Readers often get the “feel of the poem”
– Interest in philosophy and religion

 Considered himself “classicist in literature, royalist in politics and Anglo-Catholic in

religion,” preferred order to chaos, tradition to eccentricity authority against
individuality – yet his on poetry is highly individual.
– His plays are directly or indirectly on religious themes:
– Murder in the Cathedral (1935) on the murder of Thomas Becket,
– Family Reunion (1939), guilt and redemption in a modern upper-class English
family
– The Cocktail Party, The Confidential Clerk and The Elder Statesman (1950s):
religious theme in modern social comedy.
 Nobel Prize (1948)
 Influential critical essays: Tradition and the Individual Talent (poetry is not self-
expression, poet is medium), Hamlet (hamlet is an artistic failure), William Blake (not
relying on Christian tradition and making up his own mythology), The Metaphysical
Poets (disassociation of sensibility)
James Joyce: full of paradoxes: an Irish cosmopolitan; a modern classicist (also a polyglot);
an elite writer of the people (stream of consciousness, dream-language); a faceless
autobiographer; oppressive father figure, Catholic university; poor children’s school; Trinity
college; graduation from Sorbonne; Martello tower; Nora Barnacle (from Norway, worked as
a chambermaid; had an affair, Bloomsday 16 June 1904 --» they went for a walk; couple ran
away to Europe); settled in France; Lucia the daughter was diagnosed of schizophrenia by
Jung; then moved to Zurich; had iritis and glaucoma; Dubliners is Ireland’s moral history;
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: in the Egoist; experimental Bildungsroman; role of
language in awakening to creativity; key episodes from infancy, childhood, adolescence and
early adulthood of Stephen Dedalus; (stage1: childish- stage4: stream of consciousness)

Aldous Huxley: upper-middle class family; Brave New World: the title: Shakespearean
intertext from the Tempest; forgotten meaning of ‘brave’--» excellent; literary ironony of the
reader thinking the new world is a eutopia; Bermuda off the Caribbean; “the future of
America is the future of the world?”; Lenia; problems with Ford (consumption, industrial);
orgy-porgies: chant; cheap and efficient entertainment (feelies as multi-sensory cinema) to
keep people put; satisfied; stability ensured by genetic engineering (Bokanovsky-process: inv-
vitro fertilization of the human egg, predestination, psychological training-conditioning from
negative reinforcement: books and flowers), sleep-teaching (adolescence and young adults
receive messages while about hedonism, consumerism); the result: unshakeable hierarchy:
must remain constant; no longer went for violence; alphas-betas-gammas-deltas-epsilons;
conflicts: 3 revolutionary misfits attempt to overturn, they represent the potential misfits:
intellectual (Helmholtz Watson, too smart, mental excess), ambitious revolutionary (Bernard
Max, ugly); prophet of doom (John the savage, frustrated by too much reality, arrives from
Malpais to hyper-modern London); rebellion ends in failure, then order and stability is
restored; revolting Alphas banishment to the Falkland islands;

Utopian fiction: etymologically 2 meanings: an imaginary place / an ideal place; (utopia or

eutopia?); you have to destroy in order to create;

mythical prototypes of utopia:

- golden age (ancient), Ovid’s Metamorphoses

- Land of Cockaigne (medieval): Based on Saturnalia and the Feast of
Fools; dreams of the peasantry: the presence of sensual pleasures, the
absence of hunger, illness and hard work

Philosophical:

- Lawgivers: Solon of Athens (insistence of rule of law, so equal

treatment for all) or Lycurgus of Sparta (influenced by Plato, equality
of every male member of Spartan’s military sociality; utopian
radicalism)
- The Polis: Plato’s The Republic: approximation to the ideal: because he
didn’t believe anything perfect could be achieved in our shadow world;
 cooperation of 3 layers: on the top are philosophers, “guardians”
artisans and workers: not gender based!!!!!! also no private property

Religious:

- The Garden of Eden: utopia for religious people, no place for active
human involvement; biblical description;
- The Kingdom of Prester John

Utopia of the Renaissance: Sir Thomas More invented the world Utopia: Form: imaginary
travel narrative set in a frame dialogue

- Setting: geographical displacement (distance, isolation)

- Contents: regimentation, commonwealth, extended family, universal
education (across sexes and ages), equality, ‘good governance’ → a
model for later utopia; originally a satire of More’s contemporary life;
- Shakespeare’s The Tempest; Francis Bacon: New Atlantis; James
Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana

Utopias of the Enlightenment

- nature of man: opposites (Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels: G visits

anti-utopian places)
- nature of man: reservations (Rousseau’s The Social Contract: a
cautious optimist, R proposes a government that would allow everyone
to be free, people would have to sacrifice their own things to achieve
the common good)
- nature of displacement (Louis-Sebastien Mercier’s L’An 2440: laying
foundations to time travel and genre of science fiction)

19th century eutopia:

- Technology rules (Edward Bellamy): looks back from 2000 to 1887;

the time traveler (wakes up from a dream) finds corporate socialism,
that satisfies everyone, public buildings with rain-protected side-walks,
communal dinners, classical music being delivered to every household
by a tube system
- A home-made utopia (William Morris): rural eutopia, anarcho-socialist,
Parliament is a barn, anti-technology

20th century:

- Future in the past: like H. G. Wells’ a Modern Utopia (set on an alien

planet, oversee by a superior intelligence called samurai, genetically
purified superhumans lived there)
- feminist movement’s utopia: Gilman’s Herland: exclusive feminist
utopia
Dystopia: imaginary bad place; obscurity of recent utopians vs the fame of writers of
dystopias the historical upheavals and disasters of the 20th century; (Margaret Atwood,
Handmaid’s Tale; Orwell’s 1984)

Poetry before and after World War II

Experimental Poetry: Already after 1850: tendency to write for a limited group of
cognoscenti rather than for the public

-Symbolist era of the 1890s

Rose to a second climax in the period following the First World War
Poetry tended to become the exclusive possession of schools,
movements and cults, each self-sufficient, believing to be in the
vanguard of modern literature
The poetry produced by these various groups shares at least one
quality: it is never obvious, and it is quite commonly difficult or
esoteric
It is generally the product of highly educated poets who have a wide
background in languages, lit. history and philosophy
Eliot, Rilke, Valéry, Auden and Spender are all men of highly erudite
culture
But they are not academic in attitude; on the contrary, they are often
antagonistic towards university disciplines and academic criticism
• But they are often pedantic and their allusions and their classic echoes are often
obscure for the lay reader
• The most prominent influence on this entire movement is that of the Symbolist school
(e.g. Yeats)
• Interest in sensory associations, but addition of modern Freudian and Jungian
psychology
• The 19th c. Symbolists also share with many modern poets a certain morbidity,
deriving from a repugnance towards materialism and a disillusionment with the ideals
of democracy and science
• There seems to be little consistency in the political attitudes of these poets
– They are all dissatisfied with the status quo
– Eliot objects to the tendency of modern democracy to become mobocracy, and
therefore assumes a royalist and conservative stand
– Auden and Spender, blaming capitalism for the vacuity of modern culture, take
the opposite course and turn towards the Left
– The conservative Eliot and the reactionary Pound appear to be exceptions; the
more typical poet of the century is liberal or radical, cherishing ideals of
individualism

• Wystan Hugh Auden: Born in York, educated at Christ Church, Oxford

• Teacher at school from 1930 to 1935 and later worked for a government film unit
• His sympathies in the 1930s were with the Left. Ambulance driver on the republican
side in the Spanish Civil War (became disappointed there). He travelled in Iceland and
China before going to America in 1939 . 1946: American citizen. Married Erika Mann,
 daughter of Thomas Mann (1935). Taught at a number of American colleges, and was
elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford (1956-60 ). The most active of the group of
young English poets in the 20s in search of new techniques and attitudes to English
poetry - Stephen Spender and Cecil Day Lewis (group soon fell apart).
• Influences:
• Learned poetic wit and irony from T.S. Eliot, metrical and verbal techniques from
Gerard Manley Hopkins and from Wilfred Owen
• Rhythms and long alliterative lines from Anglo-Saxon poetry, the rapid and rollicking
short lines from the early 16th-century poet John Skelton
• From songs of the English music hall and from American blues singers
• About four hundred poems (7 long ones)
• More than four hundred essays and reviews about various subjectsCollaborated on
plays with Christopher Isherwood; The Ascent of F.6 (1936), For the Time Being
(1944), The Age of Anxiety (1947)
• The Depression which upset America in 1929 hit England soon; industrial stagnation
and mass unemployment
• Not the metaphorical Waste Land of Eliot but a more literal Waste Land of poverty
followed
• His early poetry is much concerned with a diagnosis of the ills of England
• The liveliness and nervous force of his early poetry made a great impression, even
though an uncertainty about his audience led him to introduce purely private
symbols, intelligible only to a few friends.
• Gradually, Auden learned to clarify his imagery and control his desire to shock; finely
disciplined movement, clarity, and deep yet unsentimental feeling
• Moved from his earlier diagnosis of modern ills in terms of Freud and Marx to a more
religious view of personal responsibility and traditional value
• But he never lost his ear for popular speech or his ability to combine elements from
popular art with an extreme technical formality
• He was always the experimenter; brought together high artifice and a colloquial tone.
• Some of Auden's most exciting work is found in his early volumes, Poems (1930)
and On This Island (1937)
• For the first part of his career, was very much the poet of his times (i.e. of the
Depression).
• He preferred to confront modern problems directly rather than to filter them, as Eliot
did, through symbolic situations.
• Another Time (1940) shows greater control and less violence.
• Nones (1951) shows most clearly his characteristic way of combining or alternating
the grave and the flippant
• In About the House(1967) and City without Walls (1970), poems are increasingly
personal in tone and combine an apparent air of offhand informality with remarkable
technical skill in versification
• Auden grew increasingly hostile to the modern world and sceptical of all remedies
offered for modern ills
• Refuge in friendship, and in an ever deepening religious feeling
• Dylan Thomas: Born and educated in Swansea, Wales
• Newspaper reporter then "discovered" as a poet in 1933 through a poetry contest in
a popular newspaper
• Eighteen Poems caused considerable excitement because of the strange violence of
their imagery and their powerful obscurity
• A new kind of strength and romantic vividness seemed to emerge in English poetry
after the deliberately muted tones of Eliot and his followers
• Thomas did not, however, turn out to be the founder of a neo-romantic movement
• From his volumes The Map of Love (1939), Deaths and Entrances (1946), Collected
Poems (1953) it became clear that he was a craftsman, and not the loud rhapsodist
that some had taken him to be
• FEATURES
• Images most carefully ordered
• Major theme the unity of all life, the continuing process of life and death and new life
• Biology as a magical transformation producing unity out of diversity
• Unity of man and nature, of past and present, of life and death
• Closely woven imagery (deriving from the Bible, Welsh folklore and preaching, and
Freud)
• His autobiographical work Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog and his radio play
Under Milk Wood reveal a vividness of observation and a combination of violence
and tenderness
• He was a brilliant talker, a considerable drinker, a reckless and impulsive man; he
acted the bohemian poet
• Poetry readings in America between 1950 and 1953 were enormous success; erratic
behaviour,
• Died suddenly in New York

• Philip Larkin: Born in Coventry, educated at the U of Oxford

• Librarian for many years at the U of Hull
• Poems of his first volume, The North Ship (1945) show Yeats’s strong influence
• After discovering Hardy’s Collected Poems, he found his own voice.
• Like Hardy and Auden, he wrote novels (Jill (1946) and Girl in Winter (1947)
• Direct speech in poems may derive from his technique of writing novels
• Dominant figure of “the Movement” – a group of poets including Kingsley Amis,
Philip Larkin, Donald Davie, D.J. Enright, John Wain, Elizabeth Jennings, Thom Gunn,
John Holloway and Robert Conquest
• Their work appeared in the anthology New Lines in 1956
• Reaction to what they believed to be a trend in English poetry from Romanticism to
the Victorian Age to Modernism to Dylan Thomas
• They saw modernism as the continuation of romanticism (despite Eliot)
• They deprived the poet from awareness of his own importance and authority
• Their work is free ”from both mystical and logical compulsions and – like modern
philosophy – is empirical.” (Robert Conquest)
• Larkin’s world revolves around the welfare-state of post-Imperial Britain
• Hardyesque pessimism: loneliness, age and death, sexuality.
 • Collections of his poems: The North Ship (1945), The Less Deceived (1955), The
Whitsun Weddings (1964), High Windows (1974), altogether hardly over 100 poems
(Church Going, High Windows, This Be The Verse)

HANGANYAGOK:

Modern Drama from Shaw to the Theatre of the Absurd I.

-100 year long break in the drama genre

-no significant drama available for stage presentation since 1700s—adressing readers rather
than theatres, great writings, but w/o dramaturgy or visuals it was useless for the stage
-eg.: Wordsworth: Borderers, Shelley: Decency, Prometheus Unbound, Keats: Arthur the
Great-these failed on stage
-this led to a separation of theatre as a medium (forum of entertainment) and drama as a
separate genre
-classic plays eg. Shakespeare kept alive the theatre
-ballad opera (1730’s)
-renewal of dramamodernist reform
-dramatist responded to the cultural crisis first, and rejected the past with its radical traditions,
and looked for a promising future
-most prominent modernist figures of Philosophy, natural sciences and Physics influenced
modernist playwriters:
 Arthur Schopenhauer-The World as Will
 first modern philosophical works, proposing the idea of creative evolution: all men
and natural creatures is the manifestation of an instinctive will to live. The only way to
understand this is through art.
 Friedrich Nietzsche: Das –life is the central category of existence and thought. The
necessity of excessive individualism, the ultimate goal of man is self-reform.
Superman (a man whole) succeeds God, who is dead.
 Karl Marx: Opus Magnum Capital: Hegelian didact of theoretical project of fulfilling
God’s plan->historical changes happen due to class struggles->ideal classless society,
equal share of possession->communism (Lenin)
 Henry Burckson: Time and free will; Creative Evolution: elan vital: the vital force of
all functions and life; he accepted evolution scientifically, but the duration is missing,
evolution process should be seen as elan vital, that is continuously developing
generating new forms, evolution is mechanistic and not creative. The mind’s function
is intuition-theory of time relativity (Marcel Prust- In search of lost time: time is
relative and not linear). Primary source of Irish and British novelists, J. Joyce. V.
Woolf—new narration method: stream of consciousness
 Charles Darwin’s theory- The Origin of the Species: challenging the creation;
evolution is a biological process, in which the fittest survives
 Psychology was a new science in the 1890’s
 Freud: subconscious study, understanding the uncons. activity of the mind, studying
the psyche he distinguished 3 parts of the mind: ID, ego, superego. ID: basic desires
(animalike, food sex ect), our wants and needs-if these are not met one can become
anxious. The ego is trying to meet these desires, that is socially acceptable—getting
 rid of the tension of ID-viewing realism. The superego looks at judgements of right
and wrong, based more on moral values.
 these reform ideas spread in the 1st generation of modernist writers
 Founding fathers of modernist drama: George B. Shell, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Miller, J.
Joyce, Eugene Neil
 But Ibsen’s work was the first literary piece contributing to modernism, most
frequently dramatist
 Georg Brandes introduced the term “modern” in “Main occurrence in 19th century
literature”: edited collection of his uni series from Copenhagen. In the 19th century
literary works there is something in spirit, something unusual which can be called
“modern”. He also wrote sg on Ibsen.
 That was published in 1899 in his place he addresses the most pressing topical
political social and moral issues of his time without unlike GB show his greatest
admirer disciple and successor offering redemptive solutions his often cited Maxim
phrases his inquisitive modernist attitudes.
 His place can be divided on thematic bases into two groups: 1.those of social and 2.
moral criticism. In his pillars of social he focuses on social injustices revealing the
selfishness and corruptness of the rich and the powerful holding the righteousness of
the traditional class division of society to doubt his most popular play A Doll’s house
is an outspoken plea for the rights of women. His first sensational play called Ghosts
is a frank and open treatment of forbidden taboo topics like venereal diseases,
revealing the evils of society and human nature that “are kept hidden and grow in the
dark”.
 His plays of more criticism are storehouses of his reform ideas on which I list here
only a few. Today there are no shoe and changeless principles absolute truths and
absolute right or wrong to which we can appeal true. The new world and all-inclusive
verticality is not just different from, but completely discontinuous with the old one
based on the assumption and belief of eternally established unchanging principles.
 England's first significant literary contribution to European modernism was the
aesthetic movement and within it. Its founder and champion in the footsteps of the pre-
Raphaelites it was a consciously and coherently organized movement imported to
England from France, which by the 1890s had become a firmly established cult of
beauty decadence and like Pooler that is art for art sake in open pursuit of dissolving
Victorian tastes, views and morality by revealing the fallacy's pretensions hypocrisy's
and corruption of the age with the provocative slogan openly sounded “let's be
naughty and bold”. They stirred the pot of lifeless petrified conventions and declared
that the chief end of man is not the person of truth and virtue, but beauty which is
often hostile reformer to->wit fun for fun, beautiful beauty sake without any moral
social constraint.
 The aesthetic movement had its forums organs and dedicated representatives which
explains its rapid rise in the 1870-80s is. Leading organs were two periodicals: the
Yellow book and Disavowed is fine artistic forums with small elitist art gallery's
drawings, paintings, designs and book list rationes, executed by William Morris turn
to Gabriel Rossetti previously, and it had its dedicated theoreticians to Simons and
Walter P., who supplied the ideology for the movement and elaborated is aesthetic
principles.
 The self-appointed leader, most effective promoter and propagandist of the movement
was Oscar Wilde, who created his outfit menace and behavior the image of the static
poet, and became the living emblem of the movement. He was the embodiment of this
new provocative for substrate, irritating figure to model. For the protagonist of the
most popular Savoy opened the decade, Gilbert and Sullivan's patients first staged in
1881. He attended Oxford University where he was instructed by Walter Pater,
influential literary and art critic essayist, fiction writer and chief theoretician of both
the pre-Raphaelite and the static movement. After he graduated in 1877, Wilde moved
to London, where he became the victorious champion of the movement popularizing
its principles through his works and his active propagandistic presence (London,
Leeds). His 15 year-long glorious career abruptly ended by the lawsuit proved against
him by the Marquess of Queensberry, on charges of homosexuality. Wilde brew the
sue, and he got sentenced to two years imprisonment and hard labor. The scandal led
to tremendous revulsion against him England-wide, and his personal disgrace resulting
ended by the time he got released in 1897. After his release he went to France under
assumed name and in three years he died as a ruined and forgotten man. Frank Harris
his biography book. Oscar Wilde’s life and confessions actually conclude the tragic
story of his life. “Oscar Wilde's greatest play was his own life-> it was a tragedy with
gripping”
 Greek implications and he was its most audience data and holds as to his works he
first published The Volume of Poetry, which was followed the collection of short
stories under the title The Happy Prince and Other Tales in 1881. his only novel is the
picture of Dorian Gray appeared in 1891 along with the volume of his critical writings
called intentions to get the graphical liberations of his artistic aesthetic principles
presented in dialogues the most influential piece of the collection is the one called the
Critique as artist, in which he declares that “the critics should aim is to Chronicle his
own impressions and not to give an objective account or estimate of the work
criticized and gold in turn toward ROM under stage in 1892 and rude frive place in
rapid succession full comedies of manners or drawing room comedies and one tragedy
they are in chronological order lady Windermere’s fan 1892 a woman of no
importance 1893 salumi the only tragedy in two editions the French version appeared
in 1893 and the English. A year later an ideal husband also appeared in 1894 and the
last pieces greatest hits the importance of being earnest in 1895 order 5 plays the most
artistic in the complex sense of the term as well as the most representative piece of the
principles of Wilds aesthetics is symbolism and decadence is Salome. “I wanted
tragedy based on the biblical story of the death of John the Baptist described in detail
in Matthew 14” for her it had arrested and imprisoned John as a favor to his wife her
Odious, the former wife of his brother Philip. John had been telling her it it is against
God's law for you to marry her hadn't wanted to kill John but he was afraid of the riots
because all the people believed jaune was a Prophet but at a birthday party for headed
parodius his daughter performed the dance that greatly pleased him so he promised
with vow to give her anything she wanted at her mother's urging the girl said I want to
head of John the Baptist on a tray then the King regretted what he had said but because
of the Valley had made in front of his guests he issued the necessary orders so John
was beheaded in the prison and his head was brought on a tray and given to the girl
who took it to her mother later Jones disciples came for his body and buried it then
 they went and told Jesus what had happened and caught wild in accord with his
aesthetic principles changed dramatic motivation and made salumi fall in love with the
Prophet called you Canaan who as a man of God rejects the approaches of the girl he
considers the hardest daughter herself a harlot in the play it is not her odious tell me
who asks for the profits head to take revenge on him for humiliating rejection when
her dad finds out the truth he sentence is salumi to death so roaming wild sport rail is
the representative of the female ideal of a status is the fun fatal the perfect beauty
brings death upon her admirers and then tag inist alike the play dramatizes the power
of sexuality and a suppressed aggression fueled by sexual drives anticipating for his
related findings in his studies of the subconscious from an aesthetic point of view it is
a play of Aeschylus Ian air and atmosphere full of ill omens implied threats and
menacing gloom do weighted passion of its main characters is displayed by intense
practidiction rich verbal decorum and pictures figurative descriptions wild used
biblical story to give voice to religious skepticism by staging a few tile dispute made
ridiculous of the representatives of different religious sects those of the Jews capitalize
IANS Nazarenes and Pharisees the insert thesis drama provides the main claypit
proper spiritual background voicing the Brazilian views on issues of religion morality
and truth except you can on that is jaune all the loud speakers of the diverse religious
sects fall victim to Wilde’s merciless skating humor the play was first drafted in
English in 1893 and a year later completed in French the first attempts at staging the
play were made by Sarah Bernard the now celebrated French actress of the time.
 they started the rehearsals in the Palace Theatre in London which were banned in the
third week Chamberlin’s under-law forbidding the dramatization of biblical subjects
on the English stages the play finally got staged in the theater lover in Paris in 1896
when wild was already in prison. It was staged again five years later a year after the
death of its author in Berlin. The English public had to wait another four years for his
first performance: in 1905 in London's Bijou Theatre solely conquered all the major
European stages by 1914 and gained worldwide fame through its operatic adaptation
by Richard Strauss.
 What's best new most frequently stage than most popular play the importance of being
earnest had a phenomenal reception at his first night in London St. James theater and
proved to be the greatest state triumph of the century in England it was highly praised
by the most prestigious critics as well what better nonsense I think our stage hasn't
seen and Woodrow day be walkley William Archer praised it as quote irrepressibly
witty and quote Angel words defined it as quote asset are coming with a flavor rare
holiday unquote and ericas person loaded it as the best farcical comedy in language
superion with to any work of that kind a play that comes under no category and quotes
concerning his genre it is a renewed form a fruitful match of the comedy of manners
and the farcical social satire in the spirit of Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Sheridan I
still is plot it is the story of two young men one from the London high society Azure
moncrief the other from the country June Worthing who under the force excuses of
having a brother it is Johnson sues and having a fatalistic friend to support agenos ex
pembury regularly escape from home to have some amorous adventures in the other
sphere of society the town for one the country for the other both of them come across
some such an occasion a young girl in each other's household jaunt falls in love with
Gwendoline agile with sessilee and post tried to engage the chosen girl by showing
and calling themselves earnest which proves to be the main force of attraction for the
girls most of the action revolves around their simultaneous courting and wooing but
their engagement gets into the broken a couple of times by such pretenses as crossing
interests uncertain origin improper social status full wealth false identity's and the
temporary but far from being earnest resistance of the governor's the happy ending
when the two gallons turned out to be brothers Jones origin and true identity is
revealed by the one-time servant of the family who took care of him before he got lost
when they find out that their father's Christian name look forgotten even by his sister
went lizard lady Bracknell was Ernest and that they're brothers the last obstacles
removed and the play ends at the threshold of the double marriage happy ending
granted also by the reunion through recognition of miss prism the governors of Jones
household the one time maid servant of the monk Reeves back then lost their child and
octo shazel the local priest the plot adapt such conventional dramatic top boy as the
story of the foundling to last siblings reunion the discovery of last names and the
recovery of lost identity's topoi that are dramatizes of Oakley sees the boostrix
Shakespeare’s the comedy of errors 12th night under winter's tale the place said he'll
be cool but never earnest or offensive rather forgiving criticism is aimed at the
predominant Victorian social manners and mannerisms the ways of high society
socially qualifying forms of retention and hypocrisy snowberry ignorance idleness
vanity gossiping and lack of honesty seriousness and anything earnest in the life of the
aristocracy the most effective weapon of it's a typical attack on these folds and effects
is with the language and reparti the play is an immense storehouse of verbal jokes
imitating and ridicule incan factual conventional fashionable conversation to hollow
standard formularies warn of cliches of the upper classes language of conversation the
attitudinal foundation of the world depicted ridiculed and discredited is the lack of
earnestness it is a world where you shouldn't take anything seriously since the moment
you do you are lost the play in many respects exemplifies and reinstates Shakespeare's
artistic reads it mirrors onstage a world that is itself a theater the world of masks
grows detentions receipts lies mere illusions to which everybody's insider actor and
spectator of this table machine world of appearances without outside the critics would
condemn it so the game is cheerful providing the audience with unclouded
entertainment the other major tremiti stood the first wave of modernism GB show was
in all respects the direct opposite of wild a stalwart antagonist of aestheticism show
the man was a non-smoker a teetotaler a vegetarian and anti-vaccination list entry
receptionist anti sexist original period of the same stock's disputed forefathers the
perfect opposite of wild beauty scented add onism regarding his professional look
your patience he was the most versatile figure of his age thinker artist and public
figure a self-appointed teacher and preacher of the nation the missionary and
revolutionary of all pervading social and cultural form a puritan more list and eidetic
philosopher a Fabius socialist politician journalist assays penalty and playwright in the
guys over utilitarian artist his served is an immense collection of articles pamphlets
treatises manifestos critics and play supply be lengthy interpretive prefaces and
afterwards prologs and apologues as didactic guides would read and the producers of
his place most of his writings would've products at loud speakers of his personal
idiosyncratic system of ideas a quasi-philosophical aesthetic artistic conglomerate of
boundless intellectual eclecticism a labyrinthine mix of the most similar views ideas
and findings except the action to the current modern strains in politics science
theology philosophy and art his intellectual and artistic Atlantis is the great number of
ambiguities and contradictory ideas in his system that thought made him toast
controversial public figure of his age challenging his contemporaries and provoking
there often open merciless criticism he was a messianic Prophet and the pragmatic
politician a Prophet preaching the necessity of moral renewal and a Fabian socialist an
Epson I treble and a Victorian pragmatist the priest of the creative imagination and the
activists social reform and each ion individualist the loudspeaker of the religion of the
Superman and they voted Republican to mention only a few of his country views
attitudes and commitments his boundless self-esteem made public in often blatant
declarations of his intellectual superiority added further fuel to the fire of his
contemporaries hostility I have collected a few of these serve reflections all in “by
profession I am an original thinker practically I have solved all the urgent problems of
our age for art itself I wouldn't waste as much effort as needed for putting down a
sentence and the last one with the single exception of Homer there is no eminent
writer not Even so water Scotts whom I despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare
when I measure my mind against his no wonder he provokes such bitingly critical
remarks of the leading writers of the age leaving the deer a fool's abound
unintellectual cheese might George Moore the funny man in the boarding house
Winston Churchill the world's most famous intellectual clown than pantaloon in one
the charming Columbine know the capitalist pantomime Saint John Irvine John the
Baptist pretending to be Karl Marx Henry James the unspeakable Irish man William
Butler Yeats Fabien Figaro WA Jordan 1/5 carbon copy of void air aging wells a
second end Ibsen these lawyers abstract and called a kind of unique though by Delissa
theorical these critical remarks still show a kind of popularity the fact that his
provocative presence his public and literary activities sterd the pots of the political and
cultural life of his country he's aesthetic views concerning art poetry and drama are no
less provocative as a utilitarian IST he declared that you tile is superior to do say that
his utility felta pleasing for beauty is only superfluous embellishment for art of any
kind should be before and above all useful is primary times being instruction the
representation of ideas it is the most effective means an instrument of the moral
improvement of both individual and society for art should be the act of ethical reform
the poet of lar Pooler is either a liar or an empty headed daydreamer beauty is a trap
that hides truth from us first comes truth and justice then comes art he said he also
declared that caught except for the drama of intellect no drama as any future and in
full accord with the above statements he opened the fuse the title playwright saying he
wrote plays only because this form of expression was the most effective way of
spreading his teachings for the masses in his place as much as in his other works for
the mass media he openly criticized the social and economic conditions the out dated
institutions the baseness idleness corrupt innocent mediocrity of the people and the
sight of his age and elaborate the detailed still highly controversial and heterogeneous
political model educational and religious reform program for the redemption of
mankind in between 1884 and 1950 he wrote some 50 plays of which a dozen proved
successful in the long run on the stage of the UK the US under continent these plays in
chronological order as follows Mrs. Warren's profession the man candida the devil's
disciple season and Cleopatra man and Superman major Barbara the doctors dilemma
Andrew police and a lion heartbreak house back to Methuselah and see Joan beside
pigmalion the last play of the list same Joan is undoubtedly the greatest achievement
of show the playwright his most frequently staged and film piece it is the work of the
mature author who returned from the world of his scientific obstructions utopian
fantasies to the human scene from the future to the past from the world of
pseudoscientific speculation to the reality of human history the primary source of
inspiration for show to dramatize the glorious career and tragic fall of the most
celebrated national heroine of France the glorious champion of the 100-years war was
the canonization of Jeanne d’Arc in 1920 in his voluminous preface to the play called
jaune the original and the presumptuous show introduces his heroine throwing light on
his motives behind his choice of the theme caught John Lock a village curve girl from
the wax was born about 14-12 burned for heresy witchcraft and sorcery in 1431
rehabilitated after a fashion in 1456 as it needed venerable in 1904 declared blessed in
1908 and finally canonized in 1920 she is the most notable warrior scenes in the
Christian calendar and the queerest fish among the eccentric word is of the Middle
Ages they were professed that most pious Catholic and projector the crusade against
the sides she was in fact one of the first Protestant martyrs she was also one of the first
Apple source of nationalism and the first French practitioner of Napoleonic realist in
warfare as distinguished from the sporting ransom gamboling chivalry of her time she
was the pioneer of rational dressing for women and like Queen Christina of Sweden
two centuries later to say nothing about the innumerable obscure heroines who were
disguised themselves as men to serve as soldiers and sailors she refused to accept the
specific woman's lot and dressed and fold and lived as amended She contrived to
asserting herself in all these ways with such force that she was famous throughout
Western Europe before she was out of her teens indeed she never got out of them it is
hardly surprising that she was judicially burned ostensibly for a number of capital
crimes which we no longer punish as such but essentially for recall unwomanly an
insufferable presumption at 18 Jones pretensions were beyond those of the proudest
Pope or the haughty as emperor said claimed to be the ambassador and plenipotentiary
of God and to be in effect a member of the church triumphant while still in the flesh
on earth she paid tries her own and seven the English King to repentance and
obedience to her commands she lectured to down and overruled statesman and prelates
she pulled the plans of generals leading their troops to victory on plans of her own she
had an unbounded and quite UN concealed contempt for official opinion judgment and
authoritie and for more of his tactics and strategy actually the stage and manik in
whom the most vulnerable hierarchy and the most illustrious dynasty converged her
pretensions and proceedings would have been as trying to the official mind as the
pretensions of Caesar to Cassius I said actual condition was pure upstarts there were
only two opinions about her rumbles that she was miraculous the other that she was
unbearable and words binders on scene junis asset are a genius Chevy in his mid-
South it is a well-balanced composition of diverse generic features reminiscent of
history place faces dramas miracle place romances and prejudice it traumatizes the last
phase also the most decisive period of the 100 years war between England and France
it is no dominant figure in focus to play compositionally is divided into 6 scenes and
the closing epilogue built on the major events of Jones career from the start to the
execution the first scene is about the start of Jones military career the 2nd about two
introduction to the French court and a gaining the leading neutral position in the
French army the 3rd about the liberation of or Liang a major victory that paved proved
to be the turning point of the war the 4th about the plot of the French and English
 military and choose leaders to captured on the 5th about the crowning of Charles the
7th in rhymes and a 6th about the capture trial and execution of John the epilogue the
only truly modern part of the composition stage is the dream of charts 25 years after
Jones execution it is a retrospective rehabilitation of jaune by the denunciation of her
judges glorifying her figure her achievement and martyrdom the play is a synthesis of
shows favorite themes like the nature of the genius the idea of the Superman here in
the guise of a woman the mission of the rebel figures in history nonconformism the
workings of the vital force of evolution and the idealized third sex the champion
emblem of a sexuality show celebrating Jones person the full runner and anachronistic
Lee the first champion of nationalism and Protestant is the two historical and religious
movements that radically changed the course of western civilization in the 16th elite
18th early 19th centuries do the place overloaded with elongated political and
theological disputes reminiscent of its authors earlier thesis dramas it manages to
dramatize an ideal a symbolic figure setting an authentic historical context who in the
course of 500 years got sola fide into a monument by her national cult show avoids
over idealizing his heroine and closer to life by displaying her frailties weaknesses and
the inner struggles of a genius who due to her exceptional qualities a spiritual isolation
is left to her own devices and fated to fight alone against the forces of the state and the
church that resist any attempt threatening the stability of the status or the ground they
rule and authority the last sentence of the epilogue uttered by joining the dream of
charts illuminates the topicality of Jones story and voices on 1st deepest concern about
the future quote oh God that made us this beautiful earth when will it be ready to
receive thy sayings how long oh Lord how long and Woods.

Modern Drama II.: The Theatre of the Absurd (S. Beckett, H Pinter)

 it's major representatives and works with special attention point crowning
achievements of the genre Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Good Dough and Harold
Pinter's The Caretaker, wildly popular both and page as to the critical reception and
onstage as standard repair to our pieces in the most prestigious theaters of the world.
 The titling phrase of our lecture, the name of the dramatic movement “The Theatre of
the Absurd” was coined and introduced into the discourse of Theatre history and
literary criticism by an English critic Martin Asselin, in his ground breaking book of
the same title published in 1961. The Theatre of the Absurd is an ambitious collection
of studies about the work of a number of playwrights, most of them written in the
1950s and 1960s before turning to his literary applications.
 We should clarify the dictionary meaning of the word an umbrella term of various
meanings, since it throws interpretive light on his philosophical and critical use. The
Latin term absolutus means something out of tune, discordant, nonsensical, out of
place look, and clumsy, hence it refers to a way of physical movement. Clumsy->a
certain mental state or condition, stupid, slow-witted, reminded, and the kind of
relation of people or things discordant, disharmonious, mismatched.
 It is enough to recall the full characters of Packagecode, Astragal, Vladimir Pods were
lucky or those of printers, the caretaker asked on Davison Nick. The way they talk,
move, behave, interact and relate to each other to see how each resident of the term is
 dramatized by the absurdist playwrights both in plotting and shaping their characters
in modern English.
 It is a term used in diverse fields of culture, like Mathematics, Philosophy and Music.
In Maths absurd is that which cannot be expressed in finite terms of ordinal numbers
or quantities->in other words that which is beyond calculability, hence irrational in
Philosophy refers to ideas, statements, concepts or simple thoughts that are out of
harmony with reason, common sense thoughts that are in congress illogical,
ridiculous. In music, observes the sound of voice and “a sequence that is out of
harmony, discordant, disharmonious”.
 The term absurd in Ashley's book is derived from an essay by the French philosopher,
Albert C., who defined the human situation as basically meaningless, hence absurd.
 The absurd place by the Russian Artur, other move to Romanian Eugene Ionescu, the
French Jean Jean and the Spanish Fernando Arrabal, the Irish Samuel Beckett, the
English Harold Pinter, and the American Add Vodou be all shared with you, that man
is inhabiting a universe with which she's out of key and whose meaning is
indecipherable; thus his place when it is without purpose, man in such a hopeless
existential state feels the wielded, troubled and obscurely threatened gets victimized
by all-pervading anxiety.
 The origins of the Theatre of the Absurd are rooted in the Avant Garde experiments in
art of the 1920s and 1930s, at the same time it was strongly influenced by the
traumatic experience of the horrors of the Second World War, which showed the total
impermanence of any values, shook the validity of any conventions, and highlighted
the precariousness of human life and its fundamental meaninglessness and
arbitrariness.
 From 1945 under the threat of nuclear annihilation, in the period of the Cold War also
seems to have been an important factor in the rise of the new theatre.
 The Theatre of the Absurd may also be seen and interpreted as an artistic
representation of existentialist revolt, a provocative reaction to the disappearance of
the religious dimension from contemporary life. Ionesco, one of the founding fathers
of absurd drama also defines the state of absurdity: “absurd is that which is devoid of
purpose cut off from his religious metaphysical and transcendent to roots manage lost
all his actions become senseless absurd useless”
 Marty Leslie provides a similar to more elaborate definition in the opening chapter of
his book: The Theatre of the Absurd can be seen as the reflection of what seems to be
an attitude, most genuinely representative of our own time. To hallmark of this attitude
is its sense, that the certitudes and unshakable basic assumptions of full rages have
been swept away, that they have been testing, and found wanting that they have been
described in these cheap and somewhat childish illusions.
 The decline of religious faith was masked until the end of the Second World War by
the substitute religious of faith in progress nationalism, and various totalitarian
fallacies.
 All this was shattered by the war and “the above mentioned outdent coming to Noble
prize winner French existentialist philosopher, writer and journalist, do you throw
such impact-knocking novels as the stranger, the plague and the fall in the myth of
Sisyphus, a collection of essays about various aspects of the absurdity of the human
condition, also a sourcebook of ideas for the absurdist authors provides a rich
 collection of interpreting definitions”. The following quotes throw light not only to the
multiparous philosophical notion of absurdity, but on the place to be discussed, as well
let me cite for illuminating passages from the opening essay on the collection called
An Absolute Reasoning: “a world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a
familiar world, but on your hand in a universe suddenly divested of illusions are lights.
Man feels an alien, a stranger, his exile is without remedy since he’s deprived of the
memory of a last home or the hope of the promised land. This divorce between man
and his life, the actor and his setting is properly the feeling Webb city code #2:
likewise enduring every day, or an UN illustrious, life time carries us, but a moment
always comes when we have to carry it. We live on the future tomorrow, later on
when you have made your way you will understand when you are old enough, such
irrelevancies are wonderful. For after all it is a matter of dying, yesterday comes when
a man notices or says he's 30, thus he asserts his youth but symbols.
 Lee situates himself in relation to time he takes his place in it he admits that he stands
at a certain point on a curve that he acknowledges having to travel to its end he
belongs to time, and by the horror that sees him he recognizes his worst enemy,
tomorrow. He was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in him wants to reject it.
 The revolt of the flesh is the absurd number. 3 men 2 secret the inhuman: a certain
moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspects of their gestures, their meaningless
pantomime make silly everything that surrounds: that a man is talking on the
telephone behind the glass partition-you cannot hear him, but you see his
incomprehensible dump show->you wonder why he's alive. This discomfort in the
face of man's own inhumanity, this incalculable tumble before the image of Bobby R,
this nosier as a writer of today clause.
 It is also the absurd and find the 4th quote: I said that the word is absurd, but I was too
hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said, but what is
absurd is the confrontation of this irrational, and the while logging for clarity who's
called echoes in the human heart” The little representation of the episode features the
human condition is not specific to the authors of the post war era market, labeled as
absurdist in his book, a sense of the absurd and the needs of its artistic representation
is as old as art itself. It is there in the myths of most religions, independence moves,
ancient Greece, in manual Otestamental texts of Judaism, and in the Biblical story of
the life-passion-death, and resurrection of Christ--we can find numerous examples of
it, improves the audience, or the best known works of ancient Greek drama, eg. in the
works of 13th century French nonsense poetry.
 Woodley, the book of nonsense in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through
the Looking Glass in place of the commedia De’l arte, or in the dramatic works of the
major Elizabethan Jacobean playwrites, like Marlow. In his Doctor Faustus, or the Jew
of Malta, Shakespeare->Titus Andronicus soaking clear is
 Visual representation is most dominant in the works of 15th 16th century. Dutch and
German painters like Bush or Matthias, to mention only a few representative
examples.
 A more intense sense of the absurd is characteristics of modernism. In general into
works of the artistic musical and literary Avant guard serving as antecedents in search
for precursors or predecessors, it is enough to mention the soonest painters like Pablo
 Picasso, in Madrid and Salvador Dali, in classical music the compositions of
Schoenberg and band members of the second Viennese of Erik Satie.
 The early 20th century French Avant Garde composers are the closest relatives, and
represent example that these vexations composed in 1893, the piano piece vexations
are thought to be the longest piece of music history of performance, lasting 14 or 28,
hours depending on how the composer's notes are interpreted; and yet the piece
consists of only three lines of music, and they are variations on the same theme. The
instructions state the two performers should already played the bass subject alone, and
then one of the two variations which form a double counterpoint with the theme that is
also being played in the base enormous length comes about because of studies, that the
abbc pattern should be repeated 840 times, and the piece played at a very slow tempo
 It was first performed in its entirety in New York in 1963 by June Cage, the American
composer, music theorist, artist and philosopher, the leading figure of the post war
musical Avant Garde in New York. Interpretations of this radical work differ
considerably: many people see it as southeast biggest, under the same time most
successful piece of Bluff or nonsense of you that seems to be encouraged by the author
instruction given to the pianist, it should sound like the song of the Nightingale with a
toothache and bold. Others interpreted as an attempt to use boredom constructively for
artistic purposes, as a game of endless repetitions with monotone it comes close to
silence. This anomatic serial work is recognized today as a musical milestone in the
Avant Garde, as to the literary predecessors the works of Nikolai Gogol Terrazzo, died
of Mad Men pickle Belyakov, the master and Margarita and Franz Kafka the
metamorphosis the Castle the trial must be mentioned along with Afrasiabi, the French
playwright whose uberoi, a grotesque dramatic fast was published and performed in
Paris in 1896 and was later champion by the surrealists and the tastes in the 1920s,
who recognized the first absurdist drama in it.
 the Theatre of the absurd was not a coherently organized movement: didn't form a
school, didn't share their artistic and aesthetic principles in any forum, didn't
collaborate to set a trend in dramatic literature, yet if we compare their works, a few
new genre specific features that are common character traits of their representative
plays these need to divide into two groups: substantial thematic and formal technical
ones
 Beckett in one of his self-reflective remarks of our splatting relevance announced that
caught to define man needs the inexhaustible capacity of negation and caught a
statement that refers to the ultimate existential crisis of man represented by his
characters in a dialogue with a literary critic jury duty. He made a similar statement:
art is the expression of the fact that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to
express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express
together with the obligation to express, and in accordance with this negative approach
if we want to characterize the nature of an absolute play-> we should take into account
what it is not, and see what remains after numerating the lacking components
 the usual endings of literary traditions in terms of themes and language use and
dramatic conventions in state representation->these plays are devoid of any definite
reliable ideological basis, guiding religious, moral philosophical, scientistic, social or
aesthetic principles representing the state of intellectual disinterest or indifference.
 They are set in a world where there are no certitudes only shattered beliefs all-
pervading doubt and all undermining occasionally even menacing existential
uncertainty a world where discord disharmony is illusion meant misprision and
misunderstanding and the ensuing despair is the normal state of being
 relations and communication a world whose inhabitants is the homework, that is man
deprived or devoid of features that could make his life reason, the characteristic formal
technical features of displays are equally linked as to their aesthetic nature and
peculiar dramaturgical strategies.
 the grounding ideas of the place also dictate the structure, that's why most absolute
display rights give up the logical structures of traditional theater. In most of the cases
they are plotless, in terms of meaningful action that leads from an initial situation
through dramatic changes to an end--appropriate anymore, or conclusion that offers a
solution to the problems and conflicts raised in the course of the action, which in case
of these places without motivation purpose direction and destination lacking realistic
and logical development in short in placelike Bacchus waiting for good over and
game, there is little or no dramatic action as conventionally understood however
frantically the characters performed a clownish business often combined with
elements of black comedy and season with gallows humor serves to the fact that
nothing happens to change direct systems.
 the characters are also formed along the principles of artistic minimalism we do not
know much about their past origins, social background, private or public life, nor their
inner world, their affections, passions, dreams through monologues. Their scratch is
shadows, mirror promises of individuals or groups as public figures moved by forces
they cannot control, often reflecting the influence of comic traditions drawn from such
sources as the committee allative would build. A musical comedy combined with such
theatre arts as mine, and clownish service most of the time they can't go sit and talk
repeating the obvious until it sounds like nonsense. The inadequacy's of verbal
communication language is tuned to the situation, and the characters as the instrument
of miscommunication full of cliches, repetitions, non sequiturs and puns often display
dislocated and old time, like the place of the action is left undefined. We are in for
murder about the time of the action, that is when by the date it takes place close
dictation, since the composite is not linear but cyclical, moved by the repetitive action
and communication linguistic patterns, evoking by the recurring mechanical actions.
 The sense of hollow ritualism, the wear of the action is as uncertain, unspecified,
undefined as the when the locations are arbitrary wake without an informative
geographical association, context. They are mere playgrounds for the actors to present
their meaningless show.
 These are the features that make the generic definition and classification of displays.
Difficult or straight, impossible some of Beck's plays are subtitle labored as tragic
comedies, something displays as comedies of menace, but each such definition is
problematic since the plays themselves the cyst conventional categorization.
 Undoubtedly the greatest representative of the theater of the absurd both by
professional and popular measures concerning the volume of critical works dealing
with his place and his life presence of the world stage is from Europe to America
Japan is Samuel Beckett. His immensely rich written between 1930 and 1989
comprises 8 models, 16 shorter prose works, 7 volumes of poetry, several scripts for
 television, 4 pieces of nonfiction and 20 dramatic pieces, a colorful collection of plays
for the stage and radio.
 As an ardent reformer, he restlessly experimented with diverse forms and means of
stage representation: complete full length plays like Waiting for Godot, or Endgame,
radio plays like Grips last tape, mimes like Act Without Words, one and two television
pieces like Ghost Trio and Quad and Mayor, monologues like Catastrophe, or a piece
of monologue.
 He spent most of his life in France, and wrote many of his pieces over then plays like
in French from the beginning of his career had a profound interest in French language
and literature.
 He wrote his first major piece of criticism and above on the novelist nursing post, but
it doesn't explain his linguistic preferences. Whenever he was asked why he wrote in
Frenc,h he gave evasive answers like quote “it was a different experience or I just felt
like it all because in French it is easier to write without style”.
 the modernist attitude of remaining impersonal or objective as much as it is possible in
the process of writing is one of the hallmarks of his works, which makes it impossible
to use his biography as a guide to his works
 he settled nothing about his life, which he says is dull and uninteresting: “the
professors know more about it than I do” he said to one of his biographers.
 in an interview he surprised the reporter with the following confession that must have
profoundly puzzled the advocates of biographical criticism “you might say I had a
childhood, my parents did everything they could to make a child happy, although I had
little talent for happiness.”
 No doubt the horrors of the Second World War had affected his views and visions of
the words they displayed, but it is impossible to draw any clear analogy between his
works and the events of his life.
 The only exception in this respect is his friendship with the great Irish novelist James
Joyce, who he got acquainted in Paris in 1928., when he as a trendy scholar gained the
most prestigious fellowship of superior's lecture in English literature.
 through his predecessor at his post Thomas McGreevy back at him, an early
acquaintance of Joyce, and joined the group of the novelists, admirers, advocates in
these articles, who among other professional activities collaborated in translating the
first chapters of choices or push Magnum Finnegan’s wake then a work in progress.
 much has been written by the relationship between Joyce and Beckett and about the
influence of the former of the letter Richard Seaver.
 it is Samuel Beckett said “I can't go on our go on horseback” on its own recollections
of relationship in an interview with New York Times writer is where Shankar in the
mid-50s, that voices his use of birth choice on his own works
 “I was never Joyce’s secretary but like all his friends I helped him. He was greatly
handicapped because of his eyes-- I did odd jobs for him, marking passages for him, or
reading to him but I never wrote any of his letters. Joyce was a superb manipulator of
material, perhaps the greatest. He was making words to the absolute maximum work,
there isn't a syllable that is superfluous. The kind of work I do is in which I'm not the
master of my own material the more Joyce knew the boy could be standing toward
omniscience and omnipotence. As an artist, I'm working with impotence and
ignorance. My little exploration is the whole soul of being, that has always been set
 aside by artists as something unusable, as something by definition incompatible with
art” and later he added “Joyce told me what it meant to be a real artist, and hoot some
critics see the dramatized replica representation of packets relationship”
 Beckett had already published dozens of short stories, and 6 novels by 1949, when he
wrote his first stage play Waiting for Godo, the opening piece of a long and fruitful
dramatic career.
 it was the first significant achievement of the Theatre of the absurd in English that
made his name long worldwide, and started the glorious career of absurd drama in
English literary history.
 undoubtedly it was the greatest hit of the post war era, and acknowledged milestone in
the history of modern drama that raised interest in the works of other absurdities
 to play in French and later translated into English, it was first staged in the Theatre
Babylon in Paris in 1952. the English audience had to wait another three years for the
first English performance in the London Arts Theatre in 1955.
 According to subtitle, it is a tragic comedy but his authorial definition proved
misleading, since the bold doesn't conform to the dramaturgical and compositional
views of any traditional dramatic genre.
 it may be defined either that journaliste probably or as the composition of a
postmodern morality play, and an interlude, or as a tragic farce.
 the general uncertainty is due to the group test combination of the theological and
biological interests, since the play simultaneously treats the gravest theological issues,
like the crucifixion of Christthe meaning of his sacrifice, the last judgment, the
second coming prospects of Salvation and damnation with the bases body functions
and biological concerns of the characters (hunger diseases, pains, physical suffering
and insomnia)
 in many respects it is an anti-play: the stage manifestation of the of the back at Ian
principle of negation since none of its composition elements conform the established
dramaturgical rules of stage representation and the deep-rooted expectations for a
traditionally proper well-made play.
 these deconstructive tendencies are present and active in all of its components, the
opening sentence of the dialogue alley anticipates the action of the whole plot, or
rather is absence.
 as a literary critic Vivian Mercier famously remarks in a study: “Waiting for Godo has
achieved a theoretical impossibility, a play in which nothing happens that yet keeps
audiences glued to their seats. What's more since the second that is subtly different
reprise of the first. He's written a play in which nothing happens twice.
 it's plot divided into 2 parts is a successive set of repetitive movements of physical and
mental interactions representing by the cyclicality, rather state than robotic process,
only put two and lucky change but since their transformation happens off stage. we
can see only the result of the changes upon their return in the second act
 does romantic action as the title promises is waiting itself a state of inactivity, will
oppose action facility here synonymous with passion that suffering in the physical
sense of the wordsee Aastronaut’s swollen feet, Vladimir's problem with his
bladder, blindness and Lucky's dumbness and passion in the theological sense form
the references to Christ’s sufferings and crucifixion.
 they are waiting for time to pass in the hope that sooner or later something happens
that may bring some change in their life, and as the allegorical representatives of
mankind they are also waiting for redemption by the 2nd coming of the Messiah.
 the characters by the names assault identifiers also remind us of the medieval morality
plays. The generic identity of his protagonists Vladimir is Russian, astronauts French,
Italian, Lucky’s English, and international cost without any recognizable national
character flooding. Ponzu and Lucky are master and servant, they make the diachronic
part representing what is left of conventional, social relations based on the hierarchical
relation of superiority and inferiority of the top dog-underdog. The second one is
different from the first, the Messenger of Kodo, the titling of stage character of the
play whose sole task is to deliver his Masters vague repetitive messages.
 the identity of Kodo, a mysterious softish character is obscure. nothing is known about
him, except for his promises to come. he may be a wealthy landowner or employer
was promised on job for the two homeless bodies, may be here to local representative
of a God --their world go back as refused the identification of God,
 obeyed God saying “if I had meant God, I would have said so in the play” and called
for this interpretation if we read this name as a combination of the English word God
and a friend diminutive suffix OT-thus it means little God additive, little Mindy serve
the little thing
 God who is supposed to be omnipotent is as soon as anything else in the play, thus this
integration is in full accord with the all-pervading absurdity of the packets back at
world
 the setting according to the author instructions is a country road, a tree in the middle of
a utopian dystopian noble end is no less absurd. It is a place with no visible character,
that is good like roads everywhere only for passing from 8 to be not for an allocated
stay needed for dramatic action, unless it's just waiting the selection of the play, a
temporal define prolonged state of inactivity the time of the action is equally
unspecified inclusiv vertiv--said somewhere in between the past, recalled by
fragmentary memories and the future anticipated by vain hopes and empty promises
 it is as indefinite as any other composing element of the play, yet it is the main
concern of older 4 characters and it's existentialist ignition is the most dominant
philosophical issue, treated in accord with related views of the existentialist thinkers
first and foremost coming and Heidegger time or rather than characters constant
awareness of and preoccupation with it is the ultimate source of the all-pervading
anxiety that determines the existential state for longer genre specific dramaturgical
strategies
 I would highlight reductionism minimalism the frequent use of repetitive structures
contrast of binary oppositions communication gaps poses silences the group does
mechanical routines of circus performances and the paraphernalia of burls of the silent
era back
 it was fond of and often adapted to his place strategies that beside the frequent punts
quibbles and all kinds of wordplays and non sequiturs are the primary sources of
humor into play bison a new heal the French dramatist famously defined in 1953
review of its super food Transformers as the music horse sketch of Pascal's Pensée’s
as played by the threatening clouds
 as to the critical appreciation of Beckett, Richard Seaver writes in the preface of his
packet reader published in 1976 hold since the first full length study of packets works
written by Nicholas gassner in 1957 there has been during the intervening decades a
flood of criticism probably not only the real meaning but the sources influences the
symbols their style the method ad infinitum and to Beckett no doubt at nauseam if the
present rate of exit Jesus continues and there is no sign of its abating it has been
calculated that by the end of the century buckets would have been the subject of move
scholarly probes than that of any other right released of the English language with the
exception of Shakespeare, and even will may soon have to move over and quote it is a
flattering prophecy which is refuted by Beckett himself who wrote the following in
one of his letters to Alan Snyder an American theater director who directed the 1956
American premiere of several packets Waiting for Godot
 “I feel the only line is pretty fused to be involved in exegesis of any kind and to insist
on the extreme simplicity of dramatic situation and issue my work is a matter of
fundamental sounds no joke indeed made as fully as possible and I accept
responsibility for nothing else if people have headaches among the overtones, let them
and provide their own aspirin”
 the same prophecy may have been made about the critical reception of the second
prominent member of the British theater of the absurd, the admirer follower and
successful packet: Harold Pinter, who's ever growing popularity in the last 50 years
today approach is that of both on page and stage.
 for the critical investigation of his works it is inevitable to take certain facts of his
biography to consideration. his origin is quite obscure, we do not have any reliable
facts about his dissent his ancestors which some say may explain the obscurity of his
character's past origin, social background what we do know is that he was born into
Logan class, as the son of a Jewish tailor. he grew up in London’s East End in a
working class area this environment left his marks on his works, both considering
the setting the social media. the characters and their language, the characteristic
sociolect they use in his place he is widely considered to have been the most
professional playwright of the period.
 he started his acting career at his age of 16 and touring company in 1946. for a short
period he studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, but in 1948 he left
after two terms to join a repertory company as a professional actor
 Pinter told island and England and it various acting companies appearing on the name
David Baron in provincial repertory theaters until 1959, by the time he started writing
place he had enough professional experience and practice both as an actor and stage
manager to be in full control of the art and craft of dramatic composition
 like his predecessor, he was a conscious dramatic fully aware why was doing well
composing his place the following self-reflective remarks may be taken as fragments
from and never fully written professional biography that reveals some features of his
arse poetic the excerpt is taken from a conversation with Richard find later published
in the 20th century February 1961
 “I didn't start writing plays until 1957 I went into a room one day and saw a couple of
people in. it this is that with me for some time afterwards, and I felt that the only way I
could get expression and get it off my mind was dramatically. I started off with this
picture of the two people and let them carry on from there. it wasn't a deliberate switch
 from one kind of writing to another, it was quite a natural movement: I started with
people who come into a particular situation. I certainly don't write from any kind of
abstract idea, and I wouldn't know a symbol if I saw one. I don't see that there is
anything very strange about the caretaker for instance and I can't quite understand why
so many people regarding the way they do it seems to me a very straightforward and
simple play the germ of my place I'll be as accurate as I can about that I went into a
room and so one person standing up one person sitting down and a few weeks later I
wrote the room I went into another room and so two people sitting down and a few
years later I wrote the birthday party I looked through a door into a third room and so
two people standing up and I wrote the Caretaker. I'm convinced that what happens in
my place could happen anywhere, at any time, in any place ordered events may seem
unfamiliar at first glance if you press me for a definition I'd say that what goes on in
my place is realistic but what I'm doing is not realism I'm not committed as a writer in
the usual sense of the term either religiously or politically and I'm not conscious of
any particular social function I write because I want to write. I don't see any
blackheads on myself and I don't carry any banners ultimately. I distrust definitive
labels and hold these self-reflective remarks.
 some of the striking differences between the works of Beckett and Pinter: both labeled
as absolutists, the kept the prose writer came to the stage from above that is from the
lofty Heights of fiction driven by little inspiration
 Pinter’s art, his writing career as a professional actor thus back its approach to the
stage at least the beginning of his dramatic career is deductive. Pinter is always
inductive if packet is a symbolist, he is a realist if buckets word is of overly universal
reference.
 Pinter focuses on the particular the local a difference most obvious in their choice of
locations settings in terms of spatial definition or the lack of it back it avoids timing
both in the setting of the action and in dramatizing timeless states by repetitive
recovering actions
 Pinter prefers precise timing representing a linear process the equivalent of the
conventional plot of a play Becky Scotty Tessa everyman like painters markedly
English both in their language cliches of communication interests occupations
mannerism mannerisms and gestures
 Beckett’s characters are static stuck in a state of being painters are dynamic driven
step-by-step to an inevitable fate like dramatic turn in their life leading to a conclusion
packets characters ago
 Pinter’s rather fear in the spectators as if they had divided the elements of Aristotle’s
catharsis between themselves painters of comprises 31 place ribbon for the stage and
the silver screen is pattern best known most frequently stage plays out the Birthday
Party from 1958, The Caretaker from 1960, The Lover from 1963, The Homecoming
from 1955, Old Times from 1971, Betrayal from 1978, and One Folder from 1984.
Beside the stage plays he wrote 27 screenplays for films, 14 short prose pieces short
pieces short stories one novel and eight volumes of poetry
 in the following short concluding section I'll enlist a few other specific Pinteresque
features that may be taken into consideration for the critical analysis of his place with
special regard to the Caretaker to play in your reading list
 Esther genre: most critics use the term comedy of manners and act definition of the
Caretaker as well who's been corrected.
 Davis lives under the constant pressure of being threatened by the hostile forces of the
outside world the location of the action in most cases a restricted space and existential
confinement like a room functioning both as a home, a place of hiding or escape,
granting temporary safety and isolation from the menacing outside word
 full characters for Davis Ashton’s room is a haven that he's reluctant to leave all
through the play, and from where due to his trespasses must be expelled.
 the time of the action is a short critical period in the characters life, leading to a
climatic turn
 Davis’s story starts with a nice change in his life when he's received with full
accommodation by Aston his room and it abruptly ends with the climatic turn when he
is expelled from it by the two brothers
 the source of the dramatic conflict is often the permanent threat of repressed violence,
occasionally servicing inaction repressed violence and a permanent threat of its
servicing generates and keep some tension in the cattle as well
 Davis with his jacknife in his pocket is constantly on the alert to defend himself,
should the occasion arise
 in most cases the primary source of dramatic tension is the lack of label information
about the characters past identity, motivation and purpose is generating the state of all
pervading existential uncertainty
 Davis’s identity is obscure, even his name is questionable, and for some reasons never
clarified
 he is reluctant to go to Sidcup and fetch the papers; he says he left there some years
before-that would prove his identity of the dramaturgical strategies of strange
representation
 minimalist is the most prominent both regarding space time number of characters
background information and communication both the scenery and the props are
endowed with dramatic agency that is have representative function adjusted to the
themes, situations, characters and personal relations
 the best examples in the Caretaker: other tools ask them constantly and obstinately
fumbles with the purpose of fixing something to prove but he is able to keep his
environment his life under control
 another example is a statue of the Buddha that is broken into pieces in a critical
moment of the action pink's language. his characters’ verbal communication is
realistic, colloquial, prosaic, devoid of critic diction based on repetitive patterns,
frequently broken by pauses or silences indicated in the text, signifying item
miscommunication the evasion of communication or its incompetence in transmitting
meaning humor in those cases derives from miscommunication misprision
misunderstanding mismatched characters they're opposite add occupations clownish
routines verbal and actual automatisms bunters place as much alive and popular
worldwide as packets and their work has left its mark on the place of their successe,s
Irish English and American alike who keep the spirit of the theater of the absurd alive