Transcript Dias nummer 1 - Aalborg Universitet

Tekst- og litteraturhistorie i de
engelsksprogede lande
Session Five: Modernism
Agenda
• Modernism
– Sculpture
– Painting
– Music
– Architecture
– Literature
W.B. Yeats, ”The Second Coming”
(1920)
•
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and
everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the
worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those
words out
•
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the
sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a
man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about
it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert
birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I
know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking
cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come
round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
W.B. Yeats, ”The Second Coming”
(1920)
•
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and
everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the
worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
•
Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the
sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a
man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about
it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert
birds.
•
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming!
•
The darkness drops again; but now I
know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking
cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come
round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
•
• William Wordsworth
• Thomas Hardy
• W.B. Yeats
• Apocalypse now!
• After 2000 years, civilization is crumbling
and a different cycle of history is at hand
Two kinds of change
•
•
•
•
Radical change
Discontinuity
Rupture
break
•
•
•
•
Development
Continuity
Bridge
line
Golden Bird, 1919/1920,
Constantin Brancusi
Red Stone Dancer, 1913-14,
Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri.
Wyndham Lewis,
Composition 1913
Ford Madox Brown, Work
Victorian painting of city scape
Picasso, Seated Woman with Wrist
Watch, 1932
Victorian portrait
Picasso, Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon. 1907
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Bower
Meadow.
Igor Stravinsky, Le Sacre du
Printemps
• Rhythm: time signatures
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, The Farnsworth House
(1946 to 1950)
• Functionality: glass, concrete, and steel
Victorian mansion, San Francisco
(1850-1915)
The Modernist Manifesto
The Modernist Manifesto
• T.S. Eliot, ”Tradition and the Individual
Talent”
• New ideas of poets, poetry, and the past
Depersonalisation
• ”The progress of an artist is a continnual
self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of
personality” (2322)
• ”Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion,
but an escape from emotion; it is not the
expression of personality, but an escape
from personality.” (2324)
Wordsworth, ”The Preface”
• I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the
emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity
gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was
before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does
itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition
generally begins, and in a mood similar to this it is carried on; but
the emotion, of whatever kind, and in whatever degree, from various
causes, is qualified by various pleasures, so that in describing any
passions whatsoever, which are voluntarily described, the mind will,
upon the whole, be in a state of enjoyment. If Nature be thus
cautious to preserve in a state of enjoyment a being so employed,
the Poet ought to profit by the lesson held forth to him, and ought
especially to take care, that, whatever passions he communicates to
his Reader, those passions, if his Reader’s mind be sound and
vigorous, should always be accompanied with an overbalance of
pleasure.
Modernist Narrative: Virginia Woolf,
”The Mark on the Wall”
• What happens? Who, what, where, when?
• What happens to narrative? Compare to
premodernist examples of narrative.
– Story – plot
– Character – characterization
– Imagery