Literature and Culture. Second Semester. Lecture 1. The Victorian Age.

Queen Victoria reigned from 1837 to 1901.

. A post-industrial age in the first urbanised country of Europe, the first in world trade and on the way to becoming the greatest empire the world had known.

The Industrial Revolution had created great accumulation of wealth on the one hand and the pauperisation of the dispossessed rural people who had moved into towns with nothing to sell except their labour. A period of great social unrest (the Chartist Movement), of social division to the extent that Benjamin Disraeli, who was one of England's Prime Ministers over the period spoke of the "two nations".

. A postmetaphysical age. Geological theories of catastrophism (according to which the earth had been created and destroyed several times, as it could be deduced from the unrelated layers of fossils), the Bridgewater Treatises

On Astronomy and General Physics (theorising astronomy in terms of flux, emphasising the
instability of the universe), evolutionary theories had created a metaphysical crisis, the decay of faith, universal doubt and scepticism.

1832. Young MP, Thomas Babington Macaulay, argues in favour of political reform: People crushed by the law have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws ..." Let the law incorporate new groups, and they will defer to the state system. The reform of the legislation extended progressively the right to vote, incorporating, first, the middle class, and afterwards the entire male population in the political system. The political map changed in favour of the middle class.

Religious movements.

. Unitarianism (Joseph Priestley, James Martineau, W.J. Fox) had derived from Locke and Newton a doctrine of determinism and necessarianism. Adverse to liberalism, substitution of free will for necessity. An iron system of moral duties was developed including: domestic mission, work for the good of the community, public spirit, patriotism and philanthropy. Against the wicked world of selfishness and passion (associated with the self-willed aristocrats, the drinking and gambling party addicted to anti-social behaviour); it was through suffering and self-sacrifice that one could accede to a wholesome life.

. Evangelicalism. Belief in progress and social reform, work ethics.

. Methodism. Stressing the importance of self-scrutiny. One's mind should be permanently watchful of morally objectionable motives and purposes. It fostered a sense of guilt in each human being, including children. At the same time, it spawned a century of autobiographical writing, in which people were laying bare their motives for actions, doubts, scruples, etc.

Reformers.

Isobel Armstrong (Victorian Poetry) distinguished two groups of reformers.

The Radicals, including utilitarianists (followers of Jeremy Bentham and James Mill), social theorists of the positivist school, such as J.S. Mill and dissenters.

According to Bentham (Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation"), man never seeks inward perfection. He is only swayed by two principles: pleasure and pain, which are the foundation of his behaviour to others. Society is a collection of persons pursuing each his separate interest or pleasure. A good government will keep in mind the interests of the numerical majority. General utility is the foundation of morality, metaphysics being abandoned in favour of political economy and philosophy.

J.S. Mill develops his version of positivism which means awareness of the individual's struggle against the oppressive social body ( On Liberty), of the split between public and private in the modern, capitalist and bureaucratic society. Against metaphysics and transcendentalism, stressing the historicity of all institutional forms of life.

W.J. Fox (editor of Monthly Repository) works out a plan for institutional reform: redistribution of wealth, education of the poor, culture made accessible to the workers, abolition of the taxes on knowledge.

The Conservatists. Arthur Hallam and the Cambridge Apostles. Against the Reform Bill, yet also repudiating aristocratic privilege. Reform was possible through culture, education and religion.

Hallam: essay on Cicero: a disciple of Epicurean epistemology seeing emotion as the ground of consciousness and knowledge. The mind is a flux of sensations, and man acts

mainly from feeling. There are no permanent, valid truths in the universe. Individual character is revealed by emotional projection on objects. Reflection is also necessary for cognition. Therefore the poem emerges from two consciousnesses: the double poem ( Marianna, The Lady of Shallot) is an example of poetry of sensation (the heroines expressing what they feel) doubled up by a poetry of reflection (an outward narrator observing them from the outside). Myths, legends, previous texts are considered, in Herder manner, links which unify nations through time. It is in culture one can find stability, permanence.

Alfred Tennyson (

Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, 1830) begins by writing sensuous, purist poems which engage in a
dialogue with previous texts (they are intertexts, for instance, Marianna which borrows its epigraph and situation from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure).

The poetry of the radicals.

Robert Browning, associated with W.J. Fox, wrote social fictions, sensuous and social art, not pure and idealised. His rhetorical masks (invented personae) are the product of social interaction and of historcized forms of class and gender relations. Their thinking and speech are shaped by their contacts with institutions (political, religious, artistic). Dramatic Lyrics (1836, 1842), Men and Women (1855). Advertisement to Dramatic Lyrics (1842): his poetry is "lyric in expression, dramatic in principle... utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine." The poem is an expressive fiction of a psychological moment. Subjects and social processes are intertwined.

The Dramatic Monologue.

Hallam: "a graft of the lyric on the dramatic". Marking the end of romantic self-expressionism and individual solipsism, the end of poetry as an aesthetic whole.

Metaphysical uncertainty had discredited monologism. The new hybrid generic forms are the expression of conflicting values and of scepticism: there can be no unique or unified perspective on any situation.

Political explanation: a form of dramatic eloquence instead of pure lyricism could be a more efficient instrument of reform.

J.S. Mill: Eloquence supposes an audience; the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet's utter unconsciousness of a listener [... ] Eloquence is feeling pouring itself out to other minds, courting their sympathy, or endeavouring to influence their belief, or move

them to passion or to action. (

Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties).

Epistemological explanation:

"In the first half of the century the concept of psychology was shifting from an earlier focus on the human soul or mind, as distinct from the body, to embrace both mind and body through mental pathology - aberrations and diseases. (...)

.... the dramatic monologue ... challenges dualism (body and soul, public and private, culture and nature) through representing the self not as a separate unit, but as tied to linear history and an open cultural system. It also represents the contradictions and differences of the self in language, continually enacting the doubled subject as both homogeneous "true person" and heterogeneous, disappearing moment of speech or signification. ... the monologue form thus shifts aesthetic ideologies from homogeneity and wholeness to continuity and incompleteness. Combining lyric with narrative and dramatic elements, it disrupts atemporal universality, introduces mimetic particularity, and emphasises the dialogical nature of language, challenging as it does so idealist notions of the essential and single self. (E. Warwick Slinn, "The dramatic monologue". In

A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture. Edited by Herbert F. Tucker. Blackwell, 1999.)

E.W. Slinn identifies three functions of the dramatic monologue in relation to psychic conditions:

1. Showing how the solipsism of isolated personal feeling leads to delusion and visions of omnipotence ("Porphyria's Lover" in Madhouse Cells, 1842).

2. Culturally interventionist function, (escape from solipsism). A form of cultural criticism, showing how psychological conditions are grounded in history. Benthamite aesthetics: fictional constructs are culturally indispensable, essential to language and conceptualization, intervening substantially in the world, effecting choices and actions. (Andrea del Sarto, 1855).

3. Representing the dynamic process of subjectivity in process, speakers proffering versions of "the dangerous edge of things", energetically

excessive, ambivalent. (

Bishop Blougram's Apology).

Essay topic:: Ascribe one of Browning's monologues to one of the types mentioned above.

The end of monologism characterises early Victorian fiction as well. The god-like, omniscient narrator and puppeteer is still present in Thackeray's Vanity Fair, for instance. However, the dominant tendency is that of substituting epistemoplogical relativism for omniscience. In the Bildungsnovels, such as Dickens's

David Copperfield and Great Expectations,

the protagonist travails through errors and self-ignorance towards enlightenment through experience of the world and with the help of other characters. In Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte) or Bleak House (Ch. Dickens) there is disjunction of voices and perspectives, indeterminacy of focalization and narratorial control.

In Wuthering Heights, for instance, there are several framing divisions of the text:

1. Lockwood's recurring frame of the story of the Heights and of Nelly's account of that story (1801-3). 2. Nelly Dean's recurring frame. 3. The enframed plot of Heathcliff and Cathy (1771-1801).

The novels is an exercise in hermeneutics (interpretation), and the reader is invited to participate in it, as none of the narrators (including the insert narratives of Cathy, Zilla, Joseph, Isabella and Heathcliff) can be aligned with the author's "official" point of view.

Fiction too tends towards generic hybridity, mixing up elements of romance, the picaresque novel and the historical novel. Features of the historical novel:

- a shared social self and problems of a corporate order displace romantic self-inquiry.

- personal identity appears serially (a classed, raced and gendered social body).

- focus on social change, customs, conventions instead of the human soul against a cosmic setting.

- society is an entity with characteristic features, not a pastoral, timeless setting. - characters are evolving entities, not immovable types. -society is not natural but an artefact of common belief.

Features of romance

- romances value the individual's rights over society's needs. - characters are heroic, rebels, passionate, mysterious. - intense relationship with nature

- intense emotions, suspense, supernatural occurrences, terror, madness - suprematization of childhood

Essay topic: "Wuthering House /Jane Eyre between history and romance".

Literature and Culture. Lecture 1-2 (continued).

1. The poetics of the realist novel.

George Eliot and G.H. Lewes

indebted to Auguste Comte ("System of Positive Polity") Assumptions:

. objectivist view of knowledge (the mirror of reality may be defective, as empirical reality is not worth being reproduced under its accidental aspects, but the author can testify to the verdicity of its making "what that reflection is" - as if taking the oath in the witness box). The author places a screen of "an ingeniuos web of probabilities" between his mind and reality: maybe not a faithful picture of empirical reality but a valid epistemological construction, based on what is probable, on inner, logical consistency. Knowledge is aligned with correct perspective.

. palpable end or closure: ensuring aesthetic order or cultural meaningfulness.

. people are the growth and outcome of the past, shaped by traditions, customs, institutions, environemnt.

. society obeys the same laws of growth as biological life. Reciprocal influence between self and social medium.

. language is transparent, given in common to the community of speakers, at one with the world. Eliot:

the main elements of grammar are simply indispensable facts of human existence: that I am not you, that He is neither of us, that the sky is still the sky though it may be either bright or sunny ...
- Eliot (review of Ruskin's Modern Painters:

realism is the doctrine that all truth and beauty are to be attained by a humble and fithful study of nature, and not by substitutinjg vague forms bred by imagination on the mists of feeling, in place of definite, substantial reality .
.

Art is the nearest thing to life, it is a mode ... of extending our contact with our fellow men beyond the bounds of our personal lot. All the more sacred is the task of the artist when he undertakes to paint the life of the people [instead of] the manners and conversations of beaux and duchesses.
. "Notes on Form in Art":

the conception of wholes composed of parts bound together by common likeness or mutual dependence.

Features of realist novels:

. a leap from Benthamite egoism to Feurbachian humanism (scientific law + humanist spirit, seeing the self reflected in another, understanding human nature in general, not only one's narrow interests). Rooting value in the human collective.

. collision between corporate and individualist ideologies. From novels of individuation to the assertion of society.

- from region to class (a formation of social relations ina whole social order) - interlaced processes . competing values in equipose

. different points of view, centrally aligned by the omniscient narrator who negotiates between private consciousness and a common social situation

. the positivists' totalizing narratives (Middlemarch: Lydgate and scientific rationalism, Bulstrode and evangelicalism, Dorothea and romantic self-achievement.

Essay topic: Dickens's Bildungsnovels inbetween individuation and realist class consciousness.

2. The ethical aesthetic of Matthew Arnold.

. subjectivity is turned into material for critique and inevstigation (I. Armstrong).

. poetry should eschew the relativistic spirit of the time, political and ideological involvement or narrow class interests. It should provide a timeless story of great human action.

. poetry is reflection, from a high standing, on past experience, at a remove from it.

. grand style: to compose and elevate the mind by producing moral efffects

. seeking inner perfection and intellectual freedom, look for the best in the whole of life and history, not the calss spirit but the general human spirit.

. seeking the honourable integrity of stoicism.

Literature and Culture. Lecture 3 Mid-century Victorians and the Kantian heritage.

Immanuel Kant's essay, "An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment ?" points to a disparity between culture and society: the forces of enlightenment had not truly penetrated the age. To be enlightened: to use one's own reason confidently, without the aid of another. Gerard Delanty , Modernity and Postmodernity (Sage. 2000: 11-13):

The Kantian Self is a centred ego who inhabits a culturally decentred world. [...] Religion no
longer provides a principle of cultural unity because the modern age has witnessed the separation of the cultural spheres of knowledge (science), art and morality from each other.

Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason. The age

of criticism: in which reason is only satisfied with what stands the test of free and open examination. The public use of reason is to be contrasted to the "private use of reason". Public reason is intellectual discourse, whereas private reason is primarily institutional (the use one makes of one's reason in a certain civil post or office). The public use of reason pertains to academic discourse and to the public sphere of discourse, of which the chief characteristic is argumentation. The critique of tradition enters the discourse of modernity. Criticism means argumentative renewal and rejection of foundational acts. Matthew Arnold

- "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" (Essays in Criticism. First Series, 1865).

Denies the superiority of the creative effort of the human spirit over the critical effort. Man discovering the power of his mind which should take an objective view of things, free from political or practical considerations. The private use of reason: when the mind applies itself to narrow party and sect interests (Whigs and Tories, Irish and English Catholicism, religious sects, etc.). The cognitive sphere should grow autonomous from the religious.

"The Literary Influence of Academies". The academic discourse imposes high standards in matters of intellect and taste. The intellectual work of a nation which has no centre or intellectual

metropolis like an academy betrays a note of provinciality.

- Culture and Anarchy: Arnold's

collection of cultural philosophy.

"Sweetness and Light" - a correlative of Kant's "enlightenment", borrowed from Swift, a writer of the English Enlightenment. The disinterested pursuit of knowledge: a desire for the things of the mind simply for their own sake, which sets culture as the quest for inner perfection, at variance with the mechanical and material civilization.

"Barbarians, Philistines, Populace". The centred Kantian moral Self (obeying moral laws having a necessary and universal character) undertakes a critique of the fragmented social body whose members pull into different directions: the self-willed aristocrats pursuing private pleasure, the middle class engulfed in vulgar materialism, the anarchic working class threatening social peace. Unless they were educated, their access to power could cause social chaos.

"Hebraism and Hellenism". The critique of the traditional, foundational spirit of Hebraism with emphasis on obedience to inherited customs and usage. A defence of the Hellenistic, open mind, playing freely about the object of observation, while deploring,. however, its moral relaxation.

- Dover Beach

As the sea of faith had receded, as religion could no longer provide cultural and spiritual unity in the postmetaphysical age, as society had become a battlefield of people at each other's throats, let the two lovers unite into a centre of mutual affection and understanding. The ethics of right conduct by the other (

let us be true to one another) is autonomous of all private worldviews in a world divided
against itself. That is why the modern situation (the lovers withdrawn to Dover Beach and looking over to the embittered French land at the time of the 1848 revolution) is no different from ancient woes such as those described by Sophocles. A timeless situation (present-day Europe as well as ancient Greece), a look at the world of historical experience from above and from afar, a composed, lofty tone, Arnoldian "quiet" landscapes of moonbleached shores.

Isobel Armstrong (

Victorian Poetry) sees the poetry of

G.M. Hopkins as an exercise in the phenomenology of perception and the

self-reflexive construction of representation in light of H.L. Mansel's elaboration of I. Kant (

Metaphysics or the Philosophy of Consciousness). The objects of consciousness are discrete

individual phenomena (pied, spotted, selved) whose attributes are distinctness and clearness (inscape, individual and distinctive design). I. Kant's account of Vorstellung (representation) doubles up into immediate and reflexive. The object of perception (a landscape, as in

Pied Beauty, a bird, as in The Windhover)

is first individualised as inscape, an object of consciousness, and then the object of intuition is turned into a sign, a fact of language. His poems are usually self-reflexive, commenting on their constructed, linguistic nature, generic type, etc.

H.A. Clough's poetry reflects on the Babel of voices in mid-century: the discourses of progress and evolutionism, the realist novel supporting the ethos of the middle class and mirroring the life of "the people" (G. Eliot), were running counter to an idealist of the moralist-aesthetic school (Arnold) who takes refuge into solipsistic meditation, away from the gregarious masses of "people". Dipsychus is a double-voiced poem: a romantic idealist's effusions being accompanied by a sceptic and cynical voice. With him, poetry descends into the ordinary realities of everyday life: general wants, ordinary feelings, the common, unheroic facts of human nature. Generic hybridity is complete, Clough mixing freely lyric, drama and narrative.

Transgressing the Modern

Gerard Delanty (Op. cit: 3.): "The foundation of modern culture is the doctrine of the autonomy of the self and its project of self-determination, a doctrine that has presupposed particular spatial and temporal structures, such as those associated with the nation-state, the industrial and urban life-world, and the sites of massified education and consumption which have all provided the foundations of a unified self. Central to this is the relation of the Self to the Other [...] The self received its affirmation of identity only by reference to an unknowable other, be it God, exotic and primitive peoples, nature ... adversaries of war, the mad, the poor, criminals. For modernity, this was a project of mastery, for self-determination was also a project of the determination of the Other. "

John Jervis,

Transgressing the Modern: "the grotesque body transgresses its own limits, is
excessive in its very nature: it is dirty, uncontrolled, incomplete, ugly ... it is regenerative but also devouring, destructive. It is opposed to what has been called the body of modernity: static, closed, a well-bounded individual, decorous, attempting to approach ideals of beauty.

"Colonialism became a regime of representation ... The

identification with the primitive, imaged as dark, feminine and profligate, remained a dis-identification with white, patriarchal bourgeois society.[...] Henry Mayhew, a sociologist, revealed "a deep, ambivalent fascination with the world of rats, feared as libidinal creatures. They emerged from the city's underground conscience as the demonized Other."

Theories of atavism and degeneration (Haeckel, Darwin, Ray Lancaster), the changing cognitive structures of the mind in the later half of the nineteenth century also changed the cultural models of interpretation. Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Alice used to define her identity in relation to inferior social others: Mabel who lives in a cottage and lacks her intelligence and education. Now she falls through a rabbit rat, joins the underworld of Haeckel's philogeny (history of the species) with extinct species and atavistic leftovers. Her body becomes unstable, distorted, uncontrollable However, the cognitive advantage of the Kantian self (the sphere of logical and linguistic games, artefacts, rules of social games such as cricket or the caucus race, cards) helps impose her rule on the animal underworld released from the unconscious of her sleeping mind.

Contrariwise, in

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (R.L.Stevenson) and in The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde), the control of the
rational, non-libidinal self can no longer be established. Jekyll's body is split up into the decorous, handsome self, and the deformed libidinal self which is gaining control.

The urban space is interrupted by enclaves of indecent, low life conduct. The urbane gentleman "goes native" (like a native in the colonies).

Essay topic: Compare and contrast realist and gothic constructions of Self and Other in

Jane Eyre/ Wuthering Heights/ Great Expectations and in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde/ The Picture of Dorian Gray.(the rational self controlling
social, racial, colonial others or being invaded by them)

The Pre-Raphaelite School, a body of poets and artists, founded by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, created a counter-culture of opposition to Victorian progressivism and positivism, this time from the aesthetic pole of the divide.

In light of Kant's

Critique of the Aesthetic Judgement, the work of art should be autonomous from all alien
impositions (moral, religious, etc.), an end in itself. They aestheticized their proper existence, withdrawing from the Philistine present into pre-modern, medieval worlds. Features:

. defiance of academic standards and conventions of representation (the law of perspective is abandoned, they paint in the open air and after non-professional models, etc.)

. the cult of the aesthetic value as an end in itself (Rossetti, The House of Life, a sonnet-sequence). . the desire to baffle the conventional middle class public. . non-conformist attitudes to love, morals, religion.

. love of sensuous beauty in the absence of moral inhibitions and as a new religion .

Literature and Culture. Lecture 4. The End of the Century in England. (Naturalism and the Aesthetic Decadence)

. Cultural Narratives.

. The introduction of Herbert Spencer's phrase "the survival of the fittest" into late editions of Ch. Darwin's Origin of Species imparted a teleological design on biological theories of evolution and natural selection, while also producing an overlap of social and biological models of reality. The social body was seen as a jungle world of the ruthless fight for survival, an aggregate of beings subject to heredity laws and uncontrolled outbursts of atavistic leftovers. Family traits are being preserved through heredity, the individuals also being bearers of the capacity for mutation. The individual life is a playground of biological factors, having no relevance in itself.

Evolutionism was counterpointed by new theories of regression and degeneracy (Edwin Ray Lankester), which, coupled with the theory of the death of the universe (the second law of thermodynamics, the law of entropy - Helmholtz and Clausius, popularised in England

by John Tyndall in Light and Sound) bred a pessimistic world outlook, known as nihilistic universalism.

. Arthur Schopenhauer, emulated by Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill, was the philosopher of Studies in Pessimism, defining the human condition as suffering and death drive. The Christian, personal God was displaced by an unconscious and impersonal force, the blind, Immanent Will to which man's individual will is subservient.

According to wave theory, light, heat and sound are interchangeable expressions of a single system of energy which pulses through the universe borne in the medium of "luminiferous ether". With backing from physiological psychology (our perceptions are a synaesthetic mix, a combination of sensations impressed on the various sense organs), this physical theory of the universe as flux and of the mind as stream of impressions offered the epistemological ground of impressionistic art. Thomas Hardy.

. Break up with realism. Reality is a "psychological phenomenon", subjective life caught in some flow of consciousness, a character's, the artist's, a reality like the inside of a hot house, beyond the reach of reason.

. Emulation of role-models, a sense of belonging to a trend, a movement of ideas. "The Science of Fiction", an essay of 1891. A poetic art inspired by mile Zola's Roman Exprimental, where a parallel is established between the work of the experimental scientist and the naturalist writer: as well as a scientist, the novel is experimenting with ideas, verifying a hypothesis. Refusal of mimesis (art is not copyism) and of "the idle trade of story-telling", of the traditional linear and chronodiegetic narrative. Hardy made the first step towards the creation of the modernist spatial form: the narrative structure is built on leitmotifs, recurrent themes and images, and the end is a return to the beginning (counter-evolutionary, counter-progressive view, the absence of moral improvement), to a fresh manifestation of the Immanent Will. Hardy: to see in half and quarter views the whole picture. The same kind of experience (Tess victimised by males who take advantage of her defenceless, vulnerable self) is repeated again and again. Characters go through experiences similar to those of their ancestors. Tess knows her story is only the repetition of previous lives in her family's past. Hardy plays similar tunes in novels and poems (such as Tess's Lament, the expression of the death drive, or Heredity:

I am the family face;/ Flesh perishes, I live on,/ Projecting trait and trace/ Through time to times anon,/ And leaping from place to place/ Over oblivion.) The human body is a site of permanent change, a mixture of
evolutionary phases: "for all her bouncing handsome womanliness, you could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or the ninth sparkling from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of the mouth now and then." (Tess of the D'Urbervilles).

The gridding

of Hardy's works to the physical notions of the universe as a closed system in which the amount of energy remains stable shows the degree to which scientific ideas fed into his poetic temper. The individual lives are perpetuated through vibrations inaudible to us but physically there, overlapping temporally distant forms of existence as if the universe were "full-fugued", built like a musical structure of counterpointed variations of a theme (a vision of the world underpinning the "fugued" narrative structure). "In a Museum": the voice of a fossilised bird and the voice of a woman he had heard the night before continue to pulse as sound-waves through the universe.

. The construction of Hardy's characters is indebted to Herbert Spencer's biological theories of society and essentialist ideas about gender differences which fuelled the emerging discourse of sexology. We see them combined with current theories on racial differences (Georges Cuvier, Comte de Gobineau). According to Theodule Ribot, the lower passions and instincts had a prior adaptive role in human evolution, and, therefore, they can overcome the qualities of reason and self-control. In 1883 Havelock Elis, a gender theorist, reviewed Hardy pointing out the fact that his women are amoral, instinctual, demonic, that they have no souls. Hardy's Dorset country, going back to the prehistoric origins of Britain, is peopled by a rustic, wild "primitive phase of society". Here, the heavier Tutonic and Scandinavian element is modified by the primitive roots of earlier races. The peace of the ecological niche, of ancient rural festivals, where the needs of environment and organism are well-matched, is disturbed by the intrusion of capitalism, the peasants' dispossession of their land, their transformation into migrants from place to place in search of work, with nothing but their labour to sell. Characters, such as Tess or Sue and Jude (

Jude the Obscure), suffer from an unstable relationship between body and mind.
Their psyche is a battleground for an encounter between the primitive heritage and the cultural acquisition through schooling or social displacement.

Steps on the way to fin-de-siecle aestheticism. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Indebted to John Ruskin's distinction between free aristocratic societies and capitalist or slave societies, shaped by work and labour, brutishly materialistic, cynical and competitive. In the latter, the grotesque imagination - caricature, parody, pastiche, distortion - is a response to social and psychological oppression. These artists and poets bridge the Coleridge and the Bentham schools of thought, taking up myth and rethinking it for a different politics. The conservative ideology of timeless mythology or past traditions (of the Middle Ages) is rewritten serving a test case for individual conscience against authority. They overlay narrative with lyric and drama, and write a sort of democratic poetry, having two kinds of content at once (Isobel Armstrong). The female figure is the agent of moral and social transgression, in revolt from society's moral hypocrisy.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti: The Blessed Damozel: the heroine takes erotic desire to heaven, love and her physical beauty being set above religious values. The sensuous body, whose beauty is an end in itself, displaces the mystic body and religious symbolism. There is a shocking mixture of the ribald and the pious. In Jenny, a philosophically inclined speaker is reading the body of a beautiful, sleeping prostitute.

William Morris, The Defence of Guenevere: the heroine defends her case before Arthur's court, setting passionate love above moral conventions and chivalric notions condemning her to a loveless marriage born of dynastic politics. They were publicly condemned for their transgressive aesthetics. In

The Fleshly School of Poetry (1871), Robert Buchanan calls them "public offenders spreading
the seeds of disease", blasphemous and politically radical.

Algernon Charles Swinburne' s

Poems and Ballads (1866) follow Baudelaire's challenge of conventional morality

by a perverse sense of beauty. The aesthetics of evil is centred on the female figure: destructive, governing the cycles of birth and death, pathologised, a beautiful face hiding the maladies of the soul, possessed of transgressive knowledge, who fascinate and repel.

Laus Veneris, The Garden of Proserpine, Cleopatra are evil

enchantresses, keeping the gates to death. The aesthetic decadence Walter Horatio Pater

Tuning his aesthetics to current scientific theories in his essay on Coleridge: biology, modern science, in general, had discredited the eternal outlines Coleridge had been seeking: evolution is permanent, the mind is a stream of sensations, the types of life themselves are evanescing into each other by fine gradations.

In Postscript to Appreciations: rejecting both classicism (dead to substance) and romanticism (dead to form) and pleading for the complete fusion of content and form, as in music.

"Diaphaneit": an early essay launching a programme of regeneration of the world through art: to treat life in the spirit of art, which should be more aesthetic than intellectual or moral. Sensuous beauty is the supreme value. The picture of the universe in flux engenders an aesthetic of fleeting and refined sensuous impressions recorded within the inner theatre of the mind. (Marius the Epicurean).

Affined to the spirit of Anatole Baju's 1886 Le Decadent.

Oscar Wilde in reply to the accusation of supporting decadent art ("The Decay of Lying"): the highest art is purely imaginative, dealing with what is unreal and non-existent. Next in line is the art which takes life as part of her rough material, recreating it and refashioning it in fresh forms. It is indifferent to facts, invents, imagines, dreams. The third stage is when Life gets the upper hand and drives Art into the wilderness: this is the true decadence.

The

Picture of Dorian Gray: an impressionistic novel, a record of a mind's world, of the growth
of the aesthetic self: not being made, as by Comtian necessitarianism, not making the world, as in romantic heroic history, but making itself. Consciousness in flux requests an art which is never static : an art that is necessarily immobile [conveying]

the sense of swiftness and motion (p.1).

The changing portrait is more of a diary of Dorian's life. Under the influence of Lord Henry, Dorian aestheticizes his life, turning it into a work of art. His life is chaotic, like the whole of life, the beauty of the portrait makes him desire to "gather up the scarlet threads of his life, and to weave them into a pattern". His life cannot be separated from the changing patterns on a work of art. He is poisoned by a book, which seemed to "contain the story of his life before he had lived it".

A Rebours (Against Nature) by Huysmans determines the course of his life,

inverted the traditional relationship between reality and art. Basil Hallward is hesitating between traditional art and its early modernist critique. Art is sort of autobiography - he has revealed his own soul in the picture -, it is the inviolable property of the Author (signing it, claiming ownership), it is isolated by its frame from reality and it has a moral end: Dorian's physical beauty reflects his inner purity. Dorian rejects this sort of morality calling it "Phillistinism". From autobiographical criticism, we see Wilde moving to rhetorical criticism: the text rather than the Work, of an impersonal, vanishing, ultimately dead Author, replaced by Dorian, the reader and entering into a sort of mutual relationship with him. "It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors." Works of art have the power to shape reality, the lives of those who contemplate them. He falls in love with his own image, and it is the picture that spurns his desire to turn living into an experiment in the sensations and impressions that its intense, heightened form can throw up. As well as Tristan Corbiere, Wilde believes that masks, artefacts constitute reality. With the self-inflicted death of Dorian, the picture resumes its youth and beauty, Dorian is recognized by his jewels, etc. Dorian can kill the Author but not a work of art. The order of artefacts is immortal. (Schopenhauer's order of culture, of ideas or representations, versus the world as blind, unconscious Will). The three characters stand for the three stages of the relationship between art and reality: Basil realises his mistake, of self-expressionism and of leaving life unaltered, without mist or veil; he ought to have painted him in the costume of dead ages and not directly (realism of method). Dorian errs trying to realise his ideal of the beautiful in an imperfect medium, through intense living. Like Sibyl Vane

before him (the actress who wants to leave the stage and get married), the moment he touches life he mars it (sinking deeper and deeper into crime) and it mars him. In the end, seized with remorse, he judges himself by moral standards and tries to destroy the portrait which had changed his life. Art is immune from moral constraints. It is only Lord Henry who embodies the Baudelairean dandy living only through the aesthetic in contradistinction to the laws of nature, being convinced of the conventional and relative value of moral laws. He echoes Pater's aesthetics: "the Greeks believed in the harmony of soul and body (...) we have separated them and have invented a realism that is vulgar, an idealism that is void.". Essay topics:

1. The world as will and idea in Tess of the d'Urbervilles. (there are two forms of survival through time: hereditary features, the family face, which dies with each individual, and a certain artefact incorporating human skill, which travels through time unchanged; identify it !)

2. The relationship between part and whole in the naturalist/ impressionistic novel. (identify repetitive situations and motifs testifying to a heightened awareness of form in comparison to the realist novel).

Literature and Culture. Course 5. High Modernism. Epistemological sources and literary works.

Modernism (reaching its climactic point between the 1910s and the 1930s) was a movement of movements, a matrix of trends rather than a school unified by a common aesthetic programme. It was an international phenomenon, cutting across European borders and the Transatlantic divide. The major contributors in Britain were not only natives (W. B. Yeats, T. E. Hulme, J. Jozce, Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence) but also Joseph Conrad, a Polish immigrant, and American-born Henry James, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. Major trends: Imagism, Vorticism.

Wyndham Lewis, editor of the Blast magazine and founder of vorticism. The Blast Manifesto was issued in 1914. Proclaiming the autonomy of pure form, no longer serving a certain ideology or non-aesthetic values

: Mercenaries were always the best troops. Our Cause is NO-MAN's. In revolt
from the romantic tradition but also opposed to the radical contemporary

vanguard movement in Italy (Marinetti's futurists):

The North and the South are diametrically opposed species.

T.E. Hulme: "Romanticism and Classicism" (Speculations, a volume of essays published posthumously in 1924). A theory of art backed up by De Vries's mutation theory: a new species comes into being in a jump (not through accumulations) and remains fixed as long as it is in existence. Dubbing himself "a classical poet who remembers that he is mixed up with earth". His imagist technique places the physical landscape and the perceiving mind in relation. Imagism is the phenomenology of perception: the way the mind grasps images of concrete objects and the way they are combined and processed. Art is reduced to a convention, which decays in time and goes out of existence (for instance, the blank verse of Elizabethan drama). Images form visual chords, two images uniting to suggest a third which is different to both. The concatenation of images resembles a syllogism. The logic of the imagination may be said to replace the logic of concepts. Original statement: Mallarm: "instituer une relation entre les images exacte, et que s'en dtache un tier aspect fusible et clar" Probable sources: Wilhelm Wundt's psycho-physical parallelism, Alfred Binnet's theory of reasoning through images and Henri Bergson's concept of duration (

Matter and Memory). No single image can convey the intuition of duration, but many
diverse images, borrowed from very different orders of things, may form clusters or a vortex guiding the mind to a certain intuition.

Ezra Pound: The Imagist Manifesto in the March 1913 issue of Poetry: the image is "an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time".

T.S. Eliot: the Objective Correlative defined in his essay on Hamlet as "an equation for an emotion": a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events, which shall be the formula of that particular emotion such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience are given, the emotion is immediately evoked."

Both Pound and Eliot emphasized the importance of tradition on condition it is "made new".

T.S. Eliot: "Tradition and Individual talent": "the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his

place in time, of his contemporaneity."

Changing views of time coming from:

Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy of cyclic time in The Second "Untimely Meditation":

the past and the present are one, that is to say, with all their diversity identical in all that is typical and, as the omnipresence of imperishable types, a motionless structure of a value that cannot alter and a significance that is always the same.

Ezra Pound: "Praefatio" to The Spirit of Romance: "It is dawn at Jerusalem while midnight hovers above the Pillars of Hercules. All ages are contemporaneous. It is B.C., let us say, in Morocco. the Middle Ages are in Russia. The future stirs already in the minds of the few." The past is needed in order to redeem the chaos of historical time. Present-day Ireland, alienated from her heroic past and swamped in materialism, can benefit by a recollection of Byzantium and its refined culture ("Byzantium" and "Sailing to Byzantium"). History needs renewed contact with the eternal. Yeats invented images whereby to represent formless time through stylistic arrangements (vortex, gyres, the phases of the moon). Eliot's quotations from great works of the past are an attempted recovery of the meaningful from the past.

Henri Bergson:

Essai sur les donnes immediates de la conscience (1889). There are two conceptions of time: pure duration, the succession of
conscious states when the ego simply lives, without separating its present state from its former states, fusing them into a spatial whole. It is internal time, it cannot be applied to the world outside because the individual cannot perceive duration unless it is cut into segments and thus spatialized. Real time is that in which people live and is not recoverable until after it has been experienced. Virginia Woolf describes them in her essay, Modern fiction: the successive events of the time measured by the clock are disconnected atoms, while memory traces the pattern they score upon consciousness. The stream of consciousness novels rescue past experience from randomness and meaninglessness, because the act of writing spatializes experience, organizing and analysing it. The self grows by reinscribing its past experience, by anaylzing its past perceptions, it is a synthesis of past selves, it is memory (Matter and Memory).

In the stream of consciousness novels, there is a double temporal scheme: time measured by the clock and the subjective, inner time of involuntary memory.

The characters are constructed as centres of consciousness, the narrative voice

(third person but focalizing the plot through characters, using their point of view and stylistic register) commuting from one consciousness to another. Anthropology

1869: The Anthropological institute was founded (carrying forth the researches of The Ethnological Society of London).

Sir James G. Fraser, author of The Golden Bough, and practitioner of the Comparative Method: comparing the habits of primitive man with those of civilised humans, exposing contemporary barbarity. For instance, the myth of the golden bough (priesthood could be assumed, in a sacred grove dedicated to Diana at Aricia, south-east of Rome) by plucking the bough and then killing the incumbent of the temple. The myth of rebirth through slaughter is compared to the Druidical reverence for the mistletoe. Narrative frame: that of voyage of discovery, of exploration. Myths were acts of language, originally devised to explain rituals. They survive in religion, literature and art, while primitive rites die out in time. Putting together a variety of ethnographic sources and trying to discover a meaningful plot out of information culled from different societies. This is what T.S. Eliot does in The Waste Land: contemporary western civilization has decayed to a primitive, spiritually dead phase, but it can be redeemed through an assembly of art works contributed by western cultures. Spiritual paralysis has inverted all energies in The Waste Land (of the Fisher King, whose sickness contaminates the whole land): water is not a symbol of fertility but the threat of death by drowning; married couples are alienated and bored, marriage ends up in abortion, love is reduced to sexuality, people experience fear, guilt, humanity goes through armed conflicts or racial, class and gender antagonisms. The Grail Knight on the quest for life and fertility finally discovers them in the creative spirit of art.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899). Through colonial exploitation, Europe was reverting to prehistory, to forgotten and brutal instincts and monstrous passions. Kurtz, the Empire man socialized in Europe becomes a ruthless extortionist of ivory in Africa, a pray to primitive instincts, walking back on all fours to the jungle and refusing to be brought back to a "civilisation" which now has revealed its insensitivity to human suffering, its rapacity and barbarous nature lurking beneath a veneer of sophistication. A parallel is established between the narrator's African experience and Englands prehistoric past. The loss of the realist author's moral and cognitive certainty (omniscient narrator) is reflected by the character-narrator telling the story of another, which he finds dark, incomprehensible, filtered (and possibly modified) through his consciousness. The embedded narrative frames contribute a multiplicity of points of view: no unique and absolute truth about man and society is available anymore.

[Unnamed narrator [ Marlow [ The Chief Accountant and the Manager of the Central station, The Brickmaker, The Russian Harlequin, The Company Representative, The Cousin, The Journalist, The Intended ] Unnamed narrator] Eugenics

Darwin, Origin of Species: socially deleterious states, ranging from pauperism to mental illness, resulted from heredity.

August Weismann's discovery of heredity plasm in 1883.

Sir Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius (1869): human character determined by heredity. Coined the term "eugenics" in his

Inquiries into Human Faculty (1883).

1895: Karl Pearson opened his Biometric Laboratory at University College, London.

Fears of degeneration in the late 19th century: forty percent of recruits from Manchester declared unfit for military service. The inefficiency of the Empire revealed by the Boer wars.

R.R. Rentoul: anxious over the children begotten by the diseased, idiots, imbeciles, epileptics, the insane. Pollution of the race, a form of "race suicide".

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness opens with a bleak image of the Empire: a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.

T.S. Eliot disputing his contemporaries's idea of being "well-born" (the first female speaker and the Smyrna merchant): he rejects the eugenics of biology or social affluence in favour of the art-born cultural icons of the dying Western civilization (according to Oswald Spengler's The Decay of the Western World).

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway: Lady Bruton, an old woman "of pedigree", "well-nourished and well-descended", discusses sterilization of slum children with Richard Dalloway and Hugh Whitbred over lunch. They are concerned about national health, taking segregationist attitudes.

Aldous Huxley's dystopic Brave New World imagines a de-humanized society of individuals artificially hatched and subject to eugenic practices of segregation. Nietzscheanism

In Ecce Homo: defining himself as "something tremendous", not a man but dynamite. He was Schopenhauer's disciple who had recommended selective breeding and the biological multiplication of men of genius. Adverse to democracy, cultivating the "superman". The philosopher of egotism emulated in England after the Victorian ethic of abnegation. Virginia Woolf despised lowbrows while being the hostess of London intellectual elite (Bloomsbury circle).

Modernist art was written for an elite and it was defended by F.R. Lewes (in the Scrutiny magazine) as part of The Great Tradition against mass culture and "Americanization".

T.S. Eliot replied to "Professionalism in Art", an article published in

Times Literary Supplement (1918, where making the technique of art too difficult is denounced as decadence) in the 5th issue of the Egoist: it was precisely such ineffectual positions of writers that
accounted for "British slackness". Psychoanalysis

Depth psychology influenced the construction of modernist characters in the privileging of the subconscious determinism of the mind. Introspection, autoanalysis is their characteristic activity. It is through their associative reminiscencing that their past lives are reconstructed. The narrative structure of Breuer and Freud's 1895 Studies on Hysteria is replicated by modernist fiction: the episodic and fragmented narratives of self-observing speaking subjects, who are being watched by a narrator who is privy to their mental processes. They are impressionistic narratives triggered by associations, shuttling between the short time scheme of present experience and the long-time scheme of "pre-history".

Sexology: the male as the originary and normative state, while women were seen as oinferior, instinctual creatures (Otto Weininger:

Sex and Character).

Essay topic:

"The Mind of Modernism: analyze one of the novels/ poems in the bibliography in light of the contemporary movement of ideas, listed above).

Literature and Culture 6. Poetics and Politics of the Modernist Novel.

The first world cataclysm, which had destroyed so many lives, had caused a crisis of confidence in governmental politics and a sense of the absurdity of history. The Bloomsbury Group, which began in 1905, centred on Virginia and Leonard Woolf but originating among the Cambridge Apostles, also included painters, art critics, economists, and other leading intellectual figures of the time. They were leftist in politics, critics of war, imperialism, patriachal, gender and colonial discrimination, open to new ideas and theories, such as analytic philosophy and psychoanalysis.

Although they were looking elsewhere for solutions to social and political disruptions, the novels of high modernism do reflect on contemporary politics.

James Joyce

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

A Knstlersroman whose plot is the becoming-artist of Irish Stephen Dedalus, the pattern of development from childhood to maturity being mirrored by progressive generic complexity and command of language: from babytalk and tales to rhetorical mastery and literary affiliation to the legacy of Wilde and Yeats, that is, the aesthetic and symbolist beginnings of modernism.

Interior monologue in the first person allows the reader free access to the thoughts of the characters. The growth of Stephen's mind begins in the five senses: hearing the story of the moocow, sight (the father with the hairy face), taste (of the lemon platt), touch (the warm and cold bedsheets), smell (queer smell of the oil sheet, his mother had a nicer smell than his father). It continues with his education at a boarding school, at Belvedere in Dublin and his entry to University.

As a child he is assailed by incomprehensible quarrels of the grown-ups, subject to questioning and punishments, threatened that, unless he apologises, the eagle will pull out his eyes. Stephen chooses though the Promethean egocentric rebel path, trying to extricate himself from his

birth-determined positioning summed up in the hierarchical nine-line address in the geography book:

Stephen Dedalus/ Class of Elements/ Clongowes Wood College/ Sallius/ County Kildare/ Ireland/ Europe/ The World/ The Universe. He rejects Irish nationalism, Irish
Catholicism, freeing himself from the bonds of time and place, denying his natural parentage and seeking sonship with Daedalus, the artificer, the builder of the labyrinth and the father of Icarus who had spurned the ground trying soar up to the sun. His choice of a self takes him through the usual errors of an inexperienced youth. He thinks that gifts of money (opening a loan bank for his family) can help him "build a breakwater of order and elegance against the sordid tide of life without him". He runs out of his money which is a lesson in the changing fortune of liquid capital. The priestly figures of his Catholic education do not meet his expectations either. Father Dolan's pandybat is not only an improper use of physical punishment on the path to spiritual salvation but also part of a set o icons which shows the church to be going against nature. The director proposing that Stephen enter the priesthood stands with his back to the light, leaning an elbow on the brown crossblind (blind to the cross ?), the light from behind touching "the curves of the skull" - a death-image -, looping the chord of the other blind as if proffering a noose. He feels that the Dean's language is "an acquired speech" for him, the conqueror's foreign tongue: I have not made or accepted its words. It is politics, therefore, that determines Stephen to invent a language of his own mind, the artist's figurative language which renders the world around him intelligible. As well as in Ovid, where Dedalus is said to "improve the work of nature", Stephen is trying to transfer the gross earth into its sound and shape and colour attributes, into a representation of the mind which is "an imperishable substance". The search for ideal substances in reality is doomed. His dream of coming upon a Mercedes, Dumas's idealised literary heroine in the flesh, ends up in bitter disappointment. On the contrary, his imagination will replace a bird-woman whose heart is a rose (his Muse) for the prostitute who had polluted his mind and body. By refusing to accept the Eucharist and go away to France in pursuit of an artist's career, he leaves behind, not only his natural mother whose heart he breaks in the process, but also Mother Church and Mother Ireland, his religious and national sources and authorities. Stephen speaks of women as if quoting from Otto Weininger ( Sex and Character): he will detach himself from "the weaknesses of their bodies and souls", displacing woman in the act of giving birth. The mode of art necessitates the act of "artistic conception, artistic gestation and artistic reproduction". He "felt the rhythmic movement of a villanelle" ("The Villanelle of the Temptress"), as if he had been in labour. Once out of nature, the peasant figure of the woman can no longer stir sensuous desire in him. She has become the virgin goddess of the art cult.

Ulysses
(1922)

The novel opens with Stephen back from France, mourning his mother of whose death he feels guilty, and living in a fortress or tower on the outer fringes of Dublin together with a student in medicine, Buck Mulligan, and Haines, an English student to which Irish language and custom are the object of an outsider's

research. Stephen is still entertaining his artistic ideal, at the same time doubling up, in the novel's mythic hypotext (underlying mythic pattern), Homer's Odyssey, as Telemachus, the son of Ulysses, whose name means "Far from the War". Stephen stays away from the intestine battles over hegemony among the various national and racial groups of Ireland, dedicating himself exclusively to art and science. He teaches history while remaining himself uninvolved, like Homer's Nestor who does not himself respond to Hector's challenge but urges the Greeks to do so by telling a story from his youth (how, in his youth, he had fought a duel with Ereuthalion in a war against barbarians). In the second episode, which is a history lesson and a conversation with Mr Deasy, an Ulster Protestant Unionist, Stephen tells children an anecdote which is a symptom of his unconscious feel of guilt, instead of teaching them history (he defines history in Laforgue's way, as a nightmare out of which he is trying to wake up), while the Unionist is shown to be actively engaged in the political struggle over hegemony in Ireland: supporting the British, blaming the Jews for economic failure etc. There is no one to one correspondence between Joyce's characters and mythic archetypes. As Bloom, the advertising canvasser, mutates from Ulysses to Sindbad, from voyager to narrator of his voyage, Stephen too moves through positions or role-models: Telemachus, Nestor, Proteus, Hamlet ...

The first six episodes display a temporal and thematic overlap. The action starts at eight in the morning and ends at about three in the morning of June 16, 1904. Stephen (The "Telemachus" episode) is forced to live in the company of an Irishman who is studying the body and despises Stephen's idealism. The other companion is the English conqueror. Leopold Bloom ("Calypso") too is estranged from his wife who is having an adulterous affair. In Nestor, Stephen is trying to escape from present-day politics into history which is personal or family history. In "The Lotus-Eaters", Bloom , who is more interested in the history of his race across the ages than in that of Ireland, seeks escape in an exchange of letters with Marta Clifford which makes his adulterous attempt into a putative affair, in the relaxation of a bath, in religion.

The third episode ("Proteus") reveals Stephen's authentic world: the workings of his mind, which is a shape-shifting reality, like the classical sea-god. In the sixth ("Hades"), Bloom goes to a funeral at the same time revealing the obsessions of his personal hell: his wife's adultery with her impresario, the hostile attitude of Irish nationalists to Jews, the painful memory of his father's suicide and his son's death.

From the seventh ("Aeolus") to the fifteenth ("Circe"), the plot journeys between the socio-historical world, revealing its disorder and pettiness (the world of drinking bartenders, commercial deals, food stores, cheap entertainments, stereotyped fashion magazines, personal and racial conflicts) and the sphere of logos: the newspapers as a synthesis of a day in the world's life, parodying tabloid journalism and the way it juxtaposes heterogeneous information and construes an artificial representation of events, or a history of English styles which parallels the development of a foetus, meant to reinforce the opposition between logos and nature ("Oxen of the Sun"). The protagonist of Ulysses is Everyman choosing among mental and bodily lifestyles:

In Ulysses Joyce wished to display moral, intellectual and physical man entire, and in order to do so he was forced to find a place, in the moral sphere, for the sexual instinct and its various manifestations and perversions; and, in the physiological sphere, for the reproductive organs and their functions. James Joyce,

Ulysses/ A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Edited by John Coyle, 2000: 18).

The last three episodes ("Eumaeus", "Ithaca" and "Penelope") trace the "Nostos" (return plot) of the male spirit reaching anagnorisis, recognition of true values and abandoning the principle of reality. Bloom and Stephen, who've just come out of the Night-town of debauchery and drinking, are reunited in the former's home. Bloom, who had previously disparaged Stephen an "intellectual" lying inebriated on the floor of a brothel discovers in him a "teacher" in a catechism scene: language of an analytic sort is a self-sufficient game, bracketing reality out of its questions and answers. Bloom and Stephen shut Molly out, left to her reminiscensing of love affairs, while they achieve communion as a sort of mutual exchange of identity: Blephen and Stoom. Bloom asks Molly to serve him breakfast in bed, instead of serving her himself, and rises from a trader's mode of thought to command of language: he will become a narrator, capable of self-reflection, of shaping his own self in a story of his one-day roaming through Dublin.

Molly's interior monologue of run-on sentences, lack of capital letters and punctuation reveals her lack of knowledge concerning the laws and rules of the man-built world through abstractions. Her libidinal energy stands for Mother Earth turning on itself since the beginning of time, before the flows of nature were restrained by the categories of culture.

The novel has an encyclopaedic character, some of the characters being genuine essays in philosophy, theology, history, art criticism and even scientific theories. The psycho-physical parallelism of Wundtian psychology, as well as Nietzsche's binary, the will to life/ the will to power, structures a plot unfolding in two interwoven strands: a naturalist plot (of the body ending up in Hades) and a symbolic plot (of regeneration through art). The juxtaposition of multiple perspectives on the same events and scenes was characteristic of cubist art. The structure has been defined as "allotropic" (the property of certain chemical elements to exist in more than one distinct form) or parallax (the same object appearing differently according to various perspectives).

Types of discourses amalgamated in Ulysses (excerpted from "Calypso"): . focalised narration:

His eyes rested on her vigorous heaps (focalised through Bloom).

. Woods his name is .... (interior monologue) .

Would she buy it too, calling the items from a slip in her hand ? (free indirect speech)

And a pound and a half of Denny's sausages (free direct speech: reproduced exactly without
quotation marks)

Doubly-oriented speech (which refers to another speech act): the discourse of cheep women's magazines in "Nausicaa": Gerty was dressed simply but with the instinctive taste of a votary of Dame Fashion ... a neat blouse of electric blue ... with a smart vee ...

Or the style of American tabloid journalism applied to an episode of the classical Antiquity:

SOPHIST WALLOPS HAUGHTY HELEN SQUARE ON PROBOSCIS . SPARTANS GNASH MOLARS. ITHACANS VOW PEN IS CHAMP.

Virginia Woolf

Mrs Dalloway

By shifting focus from one centre of consciousness to another in the opening of the novel the narrative voice focalizes through characters their various reactions to two events which polarise their attention: the passage of car with drawn blinds, in which royalty is supposed to drive by, and an the advertising skywriting of an aeroplane. The poverty of outward events and the richness of inner life of the mind are thus pitied against each other. Traumatic memories of the recently concluded war, their victims (Septimus Smith's nervous breakdown because of a shell shock experience), the ethnic conflicts it had generated (everybody's hatred of inoffensive Miss Kilman, simply because she was German and her delirium of persecution as a consequence), the decay of the Empire, the inefficiency of the political and governing class allow history to steal into the stream of consciousness of the characters through the back door of perception and memory.

The insensitivity of traditionalist doctors such as Holmes and Bradshaw, the eugenists' project of putting away the victims of the war and sterilise the slums in order to secure the health of the nation, the segregationist and eugenist ideology of both doctors and parliamentarians concur to ally science and politics against the victims of social poverty, marginalisation, colonisation, war etc.

The novel also betrays the indubitable influence of

psychoanalysis in the construction of characters: Septimus suffers from war-induced neurosis, Clarissa Dalloway, from defence psychosis, Miss Kilman, from a delirium of persecution. Both Clarissa and Peter, the man she had loved in her youth and abandoned, betray symptoms of sexual repression, and both reach the stage where the repressed contents of their unconscious reach the light of the conscious ego. As Septimus had distinguished himself in the war, being diverted by a traumatic experience from war propaganda, while Clarissa had cherished in her youth dreams of social resistance and reform, Woolf allows a woman to stand as the more advanced critical consciousness in the novel and as the survivor.

Economic depression, news of totalitarian politics in the Soviet Union and Germany, the Civil War in Spain awaken writers to a sense of their civic responsibility in the thirties.

George Orwell ("Inside the Whale") finds public causes more pressing than philosophical and aesthetic issues. The literary works of high modernism looked now like as many meaningless manipulations of words. The ego-centred narrative, the autonomous self of the artist creating self-standing worlds like God sounded queer under the emerging threat of totalitarianism which stream-lined the individual or simply stamped him out of existence.

Virginia Woolf herself admitted that one could not be young and sensitive at a time like that and yet remain indifferent to what was going on around ("The Leaning Tower").

George Orwell

Nineteen Eighty-Four

Evgeny Zamyatin created the Russian dystopia by suggesting the disappearance of the free individual in the totalitarian age already from the title: We.

In Orwell's dystopic work it is the whole of civilization that is threatened with extinction:

. the individual is kept under permanent surveillance through technology and overt policing. However, the power system is trying to keep up appearances through a parody of protection and of family: the dictator who has everybody being observed through the tele-screen is called "Big Brother".

. individuals are completely estranged from one another in

the slogan- and hate-world. Social life and relationships resemble the surrogate food and synthetic clothes: artificial, inhuman.

. history is constantly being rewritten. The nations loses its memory living in chimerical present open to any version in the future.

. language is "pruned" and reduced to an artificial idiom which block self-expressionism as well as communication

. economic and technological impoverishment is counterbalanced by ideological propaganda.

. censorship is internalised, the individuals confessing to imaginary crimes under psychological pressure or torture.

. society is governed by psychotic individuals mastered by the will to command and to dominate.

. Winston Smith, the protagonist, is the narrative vehicle taking the reader through an entropic plot of attempted redemption and final fall (the reverse of the Biblical script). He tries to resist the pressure of the regime, seeking salvation in memory and writing - the basic agents of civilization - but the monstrous pressure the totalitarian system puts on him empties him out of any trait of personality and humanity.

Essay topics:

1. Mythic parallelism in Joyce, or, the way to render reality and history meaningful. 2. Joyce, Woolf, and gender politics. 3. The babble of discourses in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man/ Ulysses.

4.
Voice and point of view in Mrs Dalloway.

5. Ulysses and Nineteen Eighty-Four: two versions of dystopic history. 6.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or, the Making of the Modernist Artist.

Literature and Culture 7. The Post-War Age

I. Existentialism J.P. Sartre,

Existentialism Is a Sort of Humanism (1946)

As humanity was trying to recoil from the horrors of the recently concluded war, a climate set in of radical distrust of the values of the western civilization which had proved inefficient in avoiding a world cataclysm. According to Heidegger and Sartre, man is thrown into a world which is not of his making and not even of his understanding. A universe in which there is no a priori good or values, because there is no infinite, perfect consciousness to conceive it. In a godless universe, man cannot fall back on pre-existing truths and values, on rules to legitimize his behaviour; he is free to choose and he is also responsible for the choices he makes. Man only exists to the extent that he fulfils some project, constructs himself through a public form of objectified selfhood. The identity of Racine is the totality of his plays. Man defines himself in relation to others: the other is indispensable to his own image of himself. Existence precedes essence: man is nothing in the beginning. He acquires an identity (essence) according to his choices which engage other human beings, to the values he introduces into the world.

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot. (1957). Minimalist and absurdist drama. Vladimir and Estragon, a pseudo-couple of literary tramps, are thrown onto an almost empty, stripped stage with one tree in a desolate landscape for scenery. They are waiting for a mysterious Mr Godot (God, Gott: English and German for God) who never shows up. They get the double visit of the Boy, his messenger who has no message to deliver. They confuse Godot with Pozzo, an overbearing squire who plays God with his servant, Lucky, exposing him to the whims of his absolutist power over him, including that of exterminating him through exploitation and cruelty. The modern parody of the Greek drama Messenger reverses religious symbolism: although the Boy minds the goats and his brother, the sheep, it is the latter God punishes. The Boy cannot explain why: there is no divine justice in the world. Man's life in an absurd world is purposeless, meaningless (waiting for ... waiting). Estragon wonders if God sees him: there is no telling under the sky of deus absconditus (hidden God). But there is the auditorium surrounding them. And they are talking to each other, making words, asking each other questions, contradicting each other inventing something to prove that they exist. It is conversation, even of a minimalist plot, and role-playing, the human creative project, that gives them substance. Even if their waiting is pointless, they have a sense of fulfilled duty against all odds: We have kept our appointment. An anti-play, with no plot, self-reflexive (Vladimir and Estragon define their role-playing as popular art: pantomime, circus, music hall, although their speech is a mixture of the formal and the minimalist speech, a collision of levels deliberately subverting the modernist high art/ low art divide).

POSTSTRUCTURALISM

. The age of television and interfaced computer networks, the virtual reality of anonymous, parentless material, virtual reality or cyberspace whose information multiples of its own accord. Human operators trigger processes they can no longer control, as signs concatenate and produce themselves. Hyperreality: reality is already saturated with signs, aestheticized, art and the media cannot be said to represent reality, as reality itself imitates the icons disseminated by the audio-visual and fashion industry. Illusiory community, in which people are strangers to one another, only connected by an abstract network of representations, like actors in a play who know the plot but not the cast. Cosmetic surgery, electronic control of reproduction and birth, body technology, cyber eroticism collapse the boundary between the human and the machine. An empty culture of images and simulacra, multiplying already authored icons, rewriting the already written, recording CDs of which none can be said to be original, exhibiting, within museum space, objects from the everyday world, etc. The concepts of originality and subjectivity yield to inscription, intertextuality (horizontal relationship: allusion to and quotation of other texts) and architextuality (vertical links from the literary discourse to non-literary discourses), parody, pastiche, language games. The crisis of the idea of the avant-garde.

R. Barthes:

The Death of the Author: (and birth of the reader, as the interpretation of a text
which is "a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash ... a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture, calls for a reader who is himself "the space on which all quotations are inscribed"). The Author-God descends to the status of scriptor, who has no personal passions, humours, feelings, biography, psychology, being instead armed with an "immense dictionary" (language and cultural resources). Literature is a matter of codes (Barthes, S/Z), of communally accepted generic conventions. . Features of postmodernist literature:

- metafictional (directly addressing the reader, discussing literary conventions, commenting on the text, exposing its made-up nature, including characters who are aware of being just textual figures). Jeanette Winterson:

Boating for Beginners, Written on Her Body)

- intertextual. A text reading another text, for instance, William Golding reinscribing and subverting Ballantine's Coral Island in

Lord of the Flies.

- transhistoricity (bringing together characters from different times: Angela Carter,

Black

Venus)

- de-naturalization (there are multiple worlds, not just one, multiple, parallel plots according to parallel worlds accessed through the character's different choices). Three plots and endings in The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles.

- character construction obeys the logic of alterity rather than that of identity: they keep mutating, according to various plots.

- de-doxifying principle (everything is culturally constructed: history, identity, gender roles, ethnic differences) . End of doctrine (no universal truth) and birth of discourse (institutional discourses take material forms: lifestyles, institutional practices). In The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles lays bare the discrepancy between Victorian lifestyles and cultural icons: the language of moral and religious piety versus the reality of business contract marriages or brothels.

- distrust of master narratives (totalizing schemes, such as progress, social and political utopias)

- from modernist phenomenology of perception (there are as many perspectives on the action as the number of characters) to phenomenology of language: different languages construct different worlds. For instance, Doris Lessing playing with conventions in

The Golden Notebook: realist novel ( Free Women) versus psychological novel ( The Shadow of the Third in the The Yellow Notebook), fiction versus diary ( The Blue Notebook), diary within a diary ( The Blue Notebook ), novel within a novel ( The Shadow of the Third in The Yellow Notebook), real life as source for fiction and the public selling and
distribution of books ("Source" and "Money": the narrator's experiential sources of the novel entitled "Frontiers of War" and the financial transactions of its distribution in The Black Notebook).

Essay topics:

. Reading [...] in a postmodernist key. (pick up a novel and illustrate one of the salient features listed above)

The French Lieutenant's Woman: Intertext and Architext (horizontal links to other
fictional texts and vertical links to non-literary discourses).

Literature and Culture 8. Postmodernism I. The poststructuralist (deconstructionist) phase.

. G. Vattimo (

The End of Modernity 1985 and The Transparent Society, 1992): The disintegration of Fascist and Marxist meta-narratives
in post-war society, the demise of dominant ideologies allowed of fragmentation to set in. The global system of values fell apart into rival ethics, aesthetics and cultures. The liberation of differences, the pluralisation of society rendered any single utopian project irrelevant. Early modernity had started with utopia. Postmodernity replaces it with the heterotopy of coexisting different cultures. The aesthetic sphere undergoes de-differentiation: the implosion of the aesthetic into the social field and into the economic (the commodification of art), the hybridization of discourses cutting across disciplinary borders (literary, scientific, moral, philosophical) or the nature/culture divide. Baudrillard speaks of "transaesthetique".

. Deconstructionist philosophy explodes the hierarchical categorical systems of metaphysics, dismissing the myth of origin, hegemony, structure (centre versus margins), autonomous subject, stability and determinacy of meaning. Artists multiply already authored icons, rewrite, paint the already painted etc. A work of art is no longer seen as the original creation of a god-like Author but as a knot in a field of interactions designated by Roland Barthes as "play" ("De l'oeuvre au texte"/ From Work to Text, 1971). The Text is "woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages (what language is not ?), antecedent or contemporary, which cut across it and through it in a vast stereophony. The intertextual in which every text is held, it itself being the text-between of another text, is not to be confused with some origin of the text (...) " The Author may come back in the text as a "guest". If he is a novelist, he is inscribed in the novel like one of his characters, figured in the carpet; no longer privileged, paternal, aletheological, his inscription is ludic. He becomes a paper-author. The I which writes the text is never more than a paper I.

FICTION

John Fowles

The French Lieutenant's Woman.

The novel is constituted through what Gerard Genette (Palimpsestes 1982) calls "transtextuality": all that which puts one text in relation with other texts:

1. A special case of Intertextuality (co-presence of two texts) or Hypertextuality (adaptation of an anterior text), as the text plays with the conventions of a realist novel whose action is set in Victorian England at Lyme Regis. The quay is "redolent of seven hundred years of English history", including the siege of the Spanish Armada during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and the rebellion of the Duke of Monmouth against his father, Charles II. Fowles strokes the key of intrusion and of revolt against paternal authority. He enters the field of a generic space - the Victorian novel - with a subversive purpose. The conventional plot of a young man, Charles, who is tied to a conventional Victorian beauty and a banker's daughter, Ernestina Freeman, through a marriage contract redacted in the language of business and financial arrangements, while having an affair with a passionate woman and also a social outcast, Sarah Woodruff, is first deployed and subsequently critiqued, transformed and multiplied according to the contemporary poetics drawing on the theories of Roland Barthes and the narrative practices of Alain Robbe-Grillet and other nouveaux-romanciers.

2. Paratextuality: the relation between the text and its paratexts: prefaces, dedications, epigraphs etc. The chapters are preceded by quotes from nineteenth-century texts. Fowles is apparently writing a historical novel, but, instead of appealing to documents or other records of the past, he establishes a relationship with anterior representations of the age in Victorian literature, with previous texts. He rewrites what is already written. A quote from Hardy's "The Musical Box" introduces a chapter in which Ernestina is presented as a Victorian doll, obeying in a mechanical way social conventions and customs. Her relationship to Charles is indirectly commented on by a citation from Arnold's poem about a similar alienation of the lovers parted by "the unplumbed salt estranging sea" etc. Non fictional texts, belonging to Darwin, Marx or socio-medical texts (1849 City Medical Report) are interwoven in the narrative structure of a novel oriented to the cultural construction of Victorian England rather than the materiality of its historical life.

3. Metatextuality: the critical relation between one text and another. In this case, one can speak of self-referentiality as well, for the intrusion of the real author speaking in his own voice in Chapter 13 is the occasion for a comment on the nature and purpose of his own writing. He dismisses the assumptions of the realist school: that the Author stands next to God, being omniscient and decreeing, that the action and characters are life-like. That is just one more convention because even autobiography is a fictionalized, romanced report on one's past. The author turns into an impresario orchestrating baseless illusions. He becomes a role-shifter, a guest in his own novel, joining Charles on a train, an impresario watching his characters making their a choices from a distance. The plot branches into three trajectories, according to an overall scheme made available by Victorian fiction which the pluralistic vision of postmodernism

can accommodate within one single novel: the conventional ending with marriage bells, Charles choosing the properly behaved Ernestina and her father's money. In the romantic key, Charles follows the promptings of his heart, marrying Sarah. Finally, from the end-of-the century new woman and aestheticist, nonconformist perspective, Sarah chooses to remain single and independent. The novel becomes a machine for generating interpretations. It has no basic design, main theme, teleology or ideological agenda.

4. Architextuality (awareness of genre, generic taxonomies). In Chapter 13, Fowles reveals his deliberate play with generic conventions. His novel is a generic mix: novel, autobiography, concealed book of essays.

Mantissa: a brilliant jeu d'esprit, a satirical

onslaught on poststructuralist notions which had become stereotypes, including the critical reception of

The French Lieutenant's Woman. This is an example of critifiction: a critique of his

novel's criticism in fictional form.

POETRY

Ted Hughes

The Hawk in the Rain (1957). Lupercal

(1960)

Written in the existentialist vein. The murderousness of nature, its bloodymindedness, the threat of reversion to a chaos of the elements reflect on recent history. The images of birds of prey, beats or even flowers (To Paint a Water-Lily) whose roots go deep into the mud which has incorporated the dead corpses of the fight for survival are counterbalanced by the foregrounded language and form of the poem (The Thought-Fox) as the redeeming force of poetry in a world which has gone astray.

Crow (1970). Cave Birds (1981).

The disintegration of metaphysics, the denial of the

cultural myths of the West. The poems demythologize master narratives, the heroic tradition of the antiquity, the chivalrous order of the Middle Ages, the ideas of divine Creation and the principles of unique origin and hierarchy.

Inherited narratives are turned upside down: God is dull and impotent, while Crow, the principle of indeterminacy, a demon of genetic energy, an archive of infinite forms that get replayed ad infinitum, takes his place in a universe without design, intelligence or purpose ( A Childish Prank, Apple Tragedy). Crow is like a black whole into which the western civilization has collapsed: he is destroyer and victim, St George and the Black Beast he is fighting. Complete de(con)struction is needed for a new constructivism, a healed and redeemed social order.

DRAMA

Harold Pinter

The Dumb Waiter (1957)

Two hit-men are waiting in the basement for their next assignment while senseless deliver food orders are coming through a speaking tube. A parody of the Eucharist for one of them is going to be the very next victim, his body being served up without any redeeming effect. A warning that participation in destructive actions can backfire. The victimiser may become the next victim. The atmosphere of mysterious menace, the absence of meaningful action, the ignorance as to the circumstances and purpose of one's existence within society belong to the stock in trade of absurdist drama.

The Caretaker
(1960).

The early, existentialist or absurdist stance. The silver-forks-bourgeois-drawing-room has been displaced by the lower-class "kitchen-sink" decor with the tramp figure at the centre of the action. The loss of identification papers, of job, credentials, reference, papers is the material signifier of man feeling lost in a society emptied of its religious, metaphysical and cultural roots. The institutions meant to rehabilitate their patients' mental health but instead drive them crazy, Aston bringing destitute Davies home only to be derided by him as "nutty", Mick trying to pass his brother to Davies and bullying the tramp to defend his brother's honour but in fact because his own had been impaired are parodies of such "care taking" in alienated societies as comes closer to practices related to funerals.

The Homecoming
(1964)

Teddy, a professor of philosophy in an American university, returns with his wife, Ruth, to his father's home in London. Max, a retired butcher, his brother Sam, a driver, Lenny and Joey, Max's other sons make up a male company suffering from the absence of mothers and wives, fighting one another, experiencing the loss of family affection and even of the traditional bonds between father and sons or between brothers. Ruth starts flirting with all of them, shifting through female positions as would-be mother-wife-prostitute. As she seems to offer them the alternative of a family of sorts, her own marriage goes to pieces. Teddy decides to return to America alone. Symbolical gestures, such as the men lighting their cigars - lighting the kettle in The Dumb Waiter - suggest the absence of transcendental values, the absence of enlightenment in an international world of butchers-criminals. The role-reversals, the lack of plot resolution (the curtain falls on a scene of inconclusive relationships between Ruth and her new male company), the demise of philosophy in a society which is no longer grounded in a set of values or communal truths bespeak the deconstructionist phase of Pinter's career.

One for the Road (1984)

Pinter opens his play to the political in the context of the postmodernist return to history and society in the eighties. Nicolas, the interrogator of an imaginary carcereal regime, treats his prisoner, ironically named Victor, to torture and cruelty (including the rape of his wife and the execution of his son) instead of the final drink offered to the convicts before the departure to the place of execution. Pinter is interested in the psychology of those who accept to be the instruments of evil: Nicolas defends himself by speaking in the first person plural and insisting on his not being alone but part of a system. Those who fall out of the network of power are alone and eliminated. Individual responsibility and resistance do score a moral victory and remain the solution to the alternative of political totalitarianism.

Essay topics:

.The Postmodernist Trans-Text (identify one of the cases listed above and apply to one primary source mentioned in the course set reading).

. A Deconstructionist Approach to ... (optional primary source) . War and Literature. Cultural icons of human entropy.

Literature and Culture 9. The Historical Turn.

. The 1980s: the post-deconstructionist age, the global spread of neoliberalism, the rise of multiculturalism, anti-foundationalism. In a word, the emergence of a postmodern, postindustrial, postcolonial, and postnational era.The exclusive concern with textuality, with linguistic structure, makes room for a renewed interest in the historical, social and political conditions which shape identities and individual subjectivities. "New Historicism", a concept evolved by Louis Montrose (

Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture) and Stephen Greenblatt (Shakespearean Negotiations), later replaced with "cultural
materialism", proceeds on two basic assumptions: the historicity of texts (they are culture-specific) and the textuality of history (we only have access to past events through documents which do not convey the unadulterated truth about them but a certain, ideologically-determined, perspective). History-making and interpretation are always dependent on the power system and the sort of knowldege it legitimises or invalidates. For instance, the history of the Enlightenment, an ideology based on the cult of reason, has excluded the contribution of alchemy to the development of physics and chemistry because alchemy was considered a quack science, a fraud. The philosophical source is Michel Foucault's concept of "genealogy" ("Nietzsche, Genealogy, History",1971), the idea that the discourse of social norms and values is the outcome of power relations. The new historian's concern is "not a decision, a treaty, a reign, a battle, but the reversal of a relationship of forces, the usurpation of power, the appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those who had once used it".

. Homi Bhabha (

The Location of Culture). The collapse of meta-narratives (the emancipatory,

totalizing myths of the Enlightenment, such as scientific progress, the civilising mission, the grand narratives of nation and empire, the cult of reason) had coincided with the eruption of "a range of other dissonant, even dissident histories and voices". Alternative histories attempt to uncover what official history has left out, silenced or marginalised.

. Peter Middleton and Tim Woods (Literatures of Memory: History, Time and Space in Postwar Writing, 2000:21): "Postmodern historical fiction is unconvinced that there is a single unitary truth of the past waiting to be recovered, and is more interested in who has or had the power to compose "truths" about it, whereas historical realist fiction tends to assume that the literary narrative has a special power to present the past in a language of the present and give direct access to the thoughts, speech and events of that other time without distorting their significance."

. These novels written against historical orthodoxies (official historiography) are also called "post-historical", and one more characteristic is the presence of the self-reflexive commentary on the nature and means of historical representation. That is why Linda Hutcheon has

labelled them "historiographic metafiction" (A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, 1988). These novels point to multiple truths in their histories of the past, question and reverse old received versions in irreverent, parodic and playful and generically mixed narratives. They are novels against rather than about history. They are spectral, as the past is felt to be haunting the present and therefore in need of being exorcised.

. Prototypical models: Jorge Luis Borges, the school of Latin-American magic realism (Gabriel Garca Mrquez, Carlos Fuentes, Isabel Allende. In England, John Fowles' 1969 The French Lieutenant's Woman. Salman Rushdie, Shame

The implied author speaking in his own voice introduces Omar Khayyam, the protagonist, as an anti-hero, a confused, dizzy, insomniac, day-dreaming obese. He is the offspring of an illegitimate relationship between one of the Shakill sisters and one of the departing British soldiers who had left behind an India split into two states: India and Pakistan. The split soul generated by religious fundamentalism (Islam) is thus doubly manifest: on the one hand, the sisters' decision to throw a party in honour of the British officers in order to enjoy the last of their financial wreck discovered after their father's death. The hedonistic ethos of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat, translated into English in the late 19th century, had fuelled the decadent spirit of the age. On the other, the overwhelming sense of guilt generated by the moral constraints of their religion makes the three sisters hide away from society and assume a collective responsibility for transgressive sexual conduct. Not knowing the identity of his real mother, living in isolation and shame of the people outside his prison-home for no fault of his own, the child experiences the world as labyrinth. The figure of the child (see also the "midnight children" born on the day India was granted independence) is emblematic of historical uprooting. In its fanatic opposition to India, Pakistan chooses ideology over the natural continuity with the historical past. Identity, both individual and collective, is revealed to be a question of fictions, ideological constructs (Pakistan is an acronym, made up of the alphabetic letters designating the tribes that went into its making), of displacements in time. The "truth" about Pakistan is what its leaders claim to be the case; in fact, a fiction, a lie serving their political agenda. The narrative is written counter-historically, widening into allegorical and symbolic patterns. Time is measured according to the Quran, marked for the religious origin of the Prophet's flight to Mecca. The name is given an invented etymology: Peccavistan from "Peccavi. I have Sind" attributed to an English coloniser. The historical trauma is the effect of colonization, but, at the same time, the decision of the independent state to proceed to secession on account of religious differences had further contributed to historical uprooting, to the compromise of the idea of the nation and its historical identity. History becomes a question of successive reinscriptions on an ideological basis:

Who commanded the job of rewriting history ? - The immigrants, the mohajirs. In what languages ? - Urdu and English, both

imported tongues, although one travelled less distance than then the other. It is possible to see the subsequent history of Pakistan as a duel between two layers of time, the obscured world forcing its way back through what-had-been-imposed.(...) To build Pakistan it was necessary to cover up Indian history, to deny that Indian centuries lay just beneath the surface of Pakistani Standard Time. the past was rewritten; there was nothing else to be done.

. The characters are based on historical personages: Raza Hyder and Iskander Harappa stand for Mohammad Zia and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto engaged in a fierce struggle over power during the 1970s and 1980s. If Pakistan is a "palimpsest", "a picture full of irreconcilable elements", "a failure of the dreaming mind", why would not the author feel free to mix up fact and fiction ? In his version, repressed womanhood assumes uncanny forms: Hyder's daughter metamorphoses periodically into a beast, the past is recreated on Rani Harappa's eighteen embroidered shawls, while Bilkis Hyder is vanishing under her veils. The dictator is murdered by Omar's "mothers" as a wish-fulfilment strategy on the part of the author or an injunction to an imaginary reader who experiences dictatorship:

How does a dictator fall ? There is an old saw which states, with absurd optimism, that it is in the nature of tyrannies to end. One might as well say that it is also in their nature to begin, to continue, to dig themselves in, and, often, to be preserved by greater powers than their own. Well, well, I mustn't forget I'm only telling a fairy-story. My dictator will be toppled by goblinish means. "Makes it pretty easy for you," is the obvious criticism; and I agree. But add, even if it does sound a bit peevish: "You try and get rid of a dictator some time."

. The first-person narrator comments on his condition, on the hybrid realist-fictional status of his writing, on the generic definition of his protagonist (anti-hero), on the dilemma of writing meta-historiographic fiction: "I, too, face the problem of history: what to retain, what to dump, how to hold on to what memory insists on relinquishing, how to deal with change."

. The critique of New Historicism coming from liberal humanism in Malcolm Bradbury's Doctor Criminale: the extreme relativism generated by the poststructuralist decree of the death of man, art, and history renders judgement impossible. The hermeneutics of suspicion affects all historical figures, regimes and events in the same way, power is everywhere demonized and the individual, hiding behind the myth of the universally guilty system can escape the examination of his individual responsibility. Graham Swift , Out of This World

A novel about recent history which explodes the notion of history as the teleological praxis of self-conscious agents. History is not a grand narrative of scientific and social progress through ages, it is reduced to warfare whose traces have been left behind in the very crust of the earth

since prehistoric times. History is also de-naturalised; events being now "hyperreality", a matter of simulation ("the camera first, then the event"). The landing on the moon was carefully planned to serve some propagandistic agenda, Armstrong's message to the world had been rehearsed, nothing is original or spontaneous. The very means of what ought to have conveyed the bare truth, photo-journalism, is exposed as distortion of reality through the selection, cuts and mixing of the empirical stuff. There is no historical change in a world which is saturated with signs, in which people think and behave as if programmed by the media and fashion industry: "And how did you learn to walk, to stare, to stroke your jaw, to light your cigarette or toss it aside, in just that way ? You learnt it from the movies. (...) So that it's no longer easy to distinguish the real from the fake, or the world on the screen from the world off it." Peter Ackroyd,

Chatterton

The novel is one of Ackroyd's almost manneristic exercises in the reinscription of history. His revisiting of the past are meant to reveal the unreliability of the cultural artefacts which mediate our access to it. A contemporary hack writer, Charles, discovers a portrait of Chatterton, a poet of the late 17th century, known to have committed suicide when only seventeen years old, which, unlike Wallis's painting of the death scene, shows the poet at a mature age. His 10-year-old son, Edward, a figure of the truth-telling child, as in Andersen's tale, dismisses the portrait as a "fake". Philip, Charles's friend, undertakes to find out the truth about Chatterton and to write his true biography. They go to Chatterton's Bristol, but the manuscripts they find turn out to be fakes. The painting itself, on closer examination, looks like a palimpsest: it contains the residue of several different images, painted at different times, which finally dissolve into clots of colour. The search for truth, origin, authenticity is permanently frustrated: Philip discovers, in a library, that the best-selling novels of Harriet Scrope were the plagiarised work of another novelist (Harrison Bentley), her own "autobiography" was a fiction, written by her assistant, Merk, the assistant of a famous recently dead painter claims to have painted his latest works. Chatterton himself had invented a monk of the fifteenth century, Thomas Rowley, in whose name he had published poems written however, in the obsolete idiom of that age. Writing is never completely original but a matter of "new and happy combinations" of old stuff, according to the expectations of the readership (at that moment, thirsting after imaginative heirlooms of the past after having swallowed too much of the dried-up, rationalistic spirit of the Enlightenment). A painter's model for a death scene will always be someone else, a living man (whether George Meredith, in Wallis' case, a nineteenth century poet and novelist, or someone else). Both life and history are a mediated, constructed affair, "everybody copies", as Charles remarks, the original being lost in the abyss of time. Seamus Heaney

A Nobel-award winner, born to an Irish Catholic family. His life in British Ulster exposed his to religious and political conflicts: between the Irish and the English, Catholics and Protestants. Surpassing both, he prefers to defer to "the government of the tongue", to assert his loyalty to his language, English. His identity, shaped by education, alienates him from his family. In his poem entitled "Digging" (Death of a Naturalist, 1966), he sees himself uprooted from the soil of his home, shut up inside the house and looking out of the window at his father toiling outside. His instrument is no

longer the space but a pen: his selfhood has been disengaged from biology and family history and, instead, shaped by culture. He can see the justice of his "wronged people" but overt conflict would make one look like primitive Tarzan "swinging into the Bastille". He chooses to be "a feeder-off battlefields" - the Ulster troubles beginning in 1969 -, to meditate on history rather than engage in action. North is a volumes of poems drawing on the photographs published by Danish archaeologist P.V. Clob in his book,

The Bog People. The bodies of the victims of sacrificial rituals or tribal
punishment, preserved in the Danish and Irish bogs, set Seamus meditating on the victims of sectarian killing in Ulster during his own time. The image of a female body, drowned as a punishment of adultery, bearing traces of the unnatural suppression of life in a young human being, congers, in the poet's mind, the similar one of Irish women, shaved, covered in feathers and tar and exposed to public shame for having dating English soldiers. History no longer means change and improvement but analogy, presenting to speaker's view the disheartening image of atavistic energies cyclically irrupting even among civilised peoples: "the exact, tribal revenge" illo tempore as well as in contemporary Ulster.

Essay topic:

The fictional-factual model of history in ... (choose one of the literary works mentioned in the bibliography, and identify historical and invented personages and events. Comment on the symbolic function of the fictional elements).

Literature and Culture 10. Multiculturalism. The Academic Novel.

I. Anti-Colonialism in the 50s. Resistance to colonialism in the 50s. Resistance to colonialism among the colonized people consequent on the rise of third-worlds in opposition to super-powers. Black artists contest negative media stereotypes with positive representations of colour-people. Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks, 1952. Black skin splits under the racist gaze revealing signs of bestiality, irrationality, violence. The undifferentiated white body is presented as the norm.

II. Postcolonial Theory in the 1970s. Multiculturalism in educational reform was seen as a solution to racial conflicts fuelled by the government's policing of black neighbourhoods in the 70s and early 80s and the negative depiction of immigrants in the media. The minorities were granted access to regimes of representation in the political journalism, university campus and art.

Stuart Hall: "New Ethnicities" 1988. Benefiting

from the encounter with the poststructuralist crtitique of western metaphysics and hegemonic systems, black cultural studies critics focused on the ethnic cultural aspect denying the existence of essential biological differences among races.

III. Post-Racism. Homi Bhabha evolved a psychoanalytic mode of theory in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He moved away from the nationalist, third-worldist view, arguing that the colonial encounter undermines the clear-cut distinction between East and West, colonizer and colonized, metropole and periphery. An in-between zone is created for the emregence of new, hybrid identities, trans-cultural forms constitutive of plural cultural selves.

IV. Globalization. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri: Empire (2000). The global or new era coming after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Cold War. The nation is no longer the centre of political force, we are now in a realm of empire, a notion, however, charged with a new meaning. It refers to the existence of multinational corporations, the mobility of labour, the transnationalist and regionalist distribution networks, the global flows of people and commercial goods.

Themes of postcolonial novels: diaspora, hybridity, migrancy, hyphenated identity.

David Dabydeen, The Intended (1991). A novel written with Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness in mind. Young members of various ethnic minorities meet in London trying to get work, money or even access to public representation. The narrator is an immigrant who is trying to mimic the imperial model, who assimilates the western critique of the colonized people. A black teenager, Joseph, undertakes a critique of Conrad'd novel in terms similar to Edward Said's (Orientalism) and Franz Fanon's. He dismisses his friend's mythic interpretatiton calling his attention to racial prejudices: the white light of England and the Thames represents the norm which wants "to blot out the black ... and reduce the world to one blinding colour." As Kurtz has descended among the Africans, has taken a black mistress to himself and refuses to return to England, he is silenced, his speech being reduced to the repetitive words "the horror, the horror". He is ousted from the order of language, of humanity. Joseph sees himself alienated into "masks" by the guardians policing his room:

"And don't you think,' he said, 'that when Marlow say nothing about Kurtz in the end, is because nothing is left to say, because Kurtz became nothing ? He became a word, just a sound, just the name "Kurtz", like the colour "black" ? Conrad break he down to what he is, atoms, nothing, a dream, a rumour, a black man. And all the time I nothing (...) But all the time they see you as animal, riot, nigger, but you know you is nothing, atoms, only image and legend in their minds."

Benedict Anderson: Imagined Communities (1991). A study in the imaginative construction of modern nations less with political boundaries than around a common language, tradition and history.

Malcolm Bradbury, in his novel,

Doctor Criminale (1992), examines the reverse. A young English journalist, Francis
Jay, goes east after the rise of the Iron Curtain to produce a television documentary on a celebrity of the former communist bloc: Doctor Criminale. He is informed of the grievances of easterners over the loss of their national identity during the years of foreign occupation and the analogous threat under the new conditons of globalization. The low costs of production attract movie-makers from the West who make local space (Budapest) feel alien: "Now we are Paris, now we are Moscow, now we are Nice, now we are London, now we are Sydney, Australia. Never of course Budapest". The monuments of the recent past had been emptied out even of the alternative value they had been ascribed: the myths of political totalitarianism. See the course-book on V.S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men.

The academic novel.

The emergence of the welfare state (the caring society providing for education, social assistance, health, unemployment, etc.) after World War II led to the democratization of the higher education which became the factor of upward mobility. The consumerist boom did away with major differences among people in point of dress, the ownership of homes and cars. The traditional class system based on status and economic distinctions has given way to a system of four professional classes (from high-skilled to low-skilled) - the salaried middle-class- and an underclass of unskilled workers. Consequently, the fiction depicting class struggle and upward mobility through the archetypal plot of a man of poor means seducing a woman with inherited wealth and family connections (See John Braine, Room at the Top, 1957) has almost vanished. The academic novel has replaced the class novel. Main representatives: David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury. The character types are mainly distinguished by their allegiance to schools of thought and political commitments, the international scholarly conference is the occasion for modern pilgrimages of acdemics whose pretentiousness is often the target of a satirical design.

Essay topic:

"Mimicry and the Cultural Encounter between colonial and metropolitan in V.S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men."

Literature and Culture 11. MODULE 2. Revisionary Lectures on Historical Codes of Representation.

Postmodernism: The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Hyper-realism of Simulation.

. Brian McHale, Constructing Postmodernism (Routledge, 1992). Literary works construct world-models. Postmodernism is characterised by ontological uncertainty, the collapse of the boundary between fiction and reality, space is represented as multiple and time as reversible or branching into multiple pasts, presents and futures. Fictional reality is heterogeneous, fluid, metamorphic, made up of discursive fragments, allusions, echoes of other characters, other texts. Different languages construct different worlds. The postmodernist literary space is a map of its imminent end, a trope on the apocalypse. . Jean Baudrillard, "The Hyper-realism of Simulation" (in

Symbolic Exchange and Death/ L'Echange symbolique et la mort, 1976).

The contemporary world is a radically abstract place from which reality has absented itself and all is simulacrum (copies without an original, signs with no referent in a supposedly "real" world which might escape codification, reduplication through the popular media). Reality is the reduplication of the real through another reproductive medium, such as photography. From medium to medium, the real is volatilized, becoming an allegory of death. The classical representation was a matter of interpretation, comment, keeping a distance from the objective reality. In postmodernism, reality itself is hyperrealistic, reproducing models, scenarios, icons disseminated by the media.

Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

The question of authorship and history is brought down to mere play-acting, reduced to the illusory space of the stage. Rosencrantz and

Guildenstern, the king's agents of destruction are turned into selfless actors who play parts in the King Claudius's script of which they have no knowledge and get executed according to Hamlet's written warrant. They have no will of their own, no power over their own lives, being inscribed within texts written by others. Whatever is translated to a medium of reproduction loses its relevance to a real world. An actor who is hanged in earnest on the stage elicits no pity from the audience, as the space of simulacrum is reality-proof; the actors cannot suspend their disbelief. Art is no longer expected to render the true image of the "body and form of time". The language of the popular media pervades everything. Here is the celebrated scene of Hamlet with the skull in the language of sports news: [Horatio] gets the skull and then passes it back to Hamlet who sends it into the audience with a stylish overhead kick."

Martin Amis, London Fields.(1989)

The action of this black comic (and dystopic) novel is set in 1999 which qualifies it for the tradition of millenary, apocalyptic writings. Violent winds have killed people and destroyed trees, disturbing the very roots of life on earth. The sun sinking lower and the earth tilting on its axis foretell a full eclipse, and there are rumours and prophetic dreams about impending explosions of nuclear bombs in Warsaw and in London. The end of the millennium hadn't brought about the end of the world as well, but then again, nobody had had the necessary hardware before ...

Samson Young, an American journalist afflicted with cancer and suffering from a writer's block, reads an advertisement in the New York Review of Books which gives him the opportunity to exchange his apartment for the London residence of a successful English playwright and novelist, Mark Asprey. On coming over he realizes that the reality in whose close observation and documentary reproduction he had been engaged till then was all made up. He can only turn into a writer of fiction, like Asprey whom he envies, by allowing himself to be caught in a web of textuality.

Keith Talent, a working class minor delinquent and a darts player, gives him a drive from the airport which is overcharged, and introduces his American guest to the motley and Cockney world of the Black Cross pub. It is here that Sam meets the mysterious Nicola Six, a trained actress, whose name suggests the Beast of the Apocalypse (the figure six and the association of her name with "Old Nick", the Devil). She is apocalyptic in several ways: she has broken even the hearts of the heartbreakers, she has managed to ruin even the unscrupled gigolos. She cheats on men being convinced that they themselves lie to each other in the same way as they lie on TV. She has learned the lesson of the world, and keeps playing her tricks on men of various status: to the despicable Keith, she plays the whorish, rich and knowing woman of the world, while to Guy Clinch, an upper-class banker, she poses as a timid virgin and an expert in the high culture which he admires. As she reduces life to sex, having no other emotional or intellectual commitments, the perspective of growing old frightens her. She decides to get someone to murder her according to her dream vision of the end of the world and of her own death on November 5. She dumps her diaries in a rubbish bin beneath Sam's window who recovers them and, excited by the "announced murder" thriller, sets out to write a ready-made story using the diaries and closely observing it come to pass. On November 5,

Nicola is actually murdered, but the world goes on. It seems that nothing ever dies except the heart of humanity, which becomes dark, insensitive, mistaking generosity for foolishness, playing tricks on honest people, enjoying the multi-media simulacra, and, as Asprey, the hack but wealthy pulp novelist remarks, doing without truth and honesty: "it doesn't matter what anyone writes any more. The time for it mattering has passed. the truth doesn't matter any more and is not wanted." He is subtly alluding to the search for criminals ("wanted"): social evil has become commonplace, and the quest for the truth, meaningless..

The author function has become a highly mediated affair. Sam is working, not with facts, but with narrative stuff: Nicola's diaries, Guy's short stories imbued with an idealism that dooms them to lack of readership, Keith's pub reports on his sexual conquests, darting diary and fake brochure of goods and services. They are as many reports on non-reality or hyper-reality. Nicola extorts money from Guy telling him that she wanted to help her friend, Enola Guy, a refugee from the Cambodian war, and her "Little Boy". The money she gets in this fraudulent way is a gift to her lover, Keith who spends it on clothes and funny accessories. Guy does not recognise the historical reality behind them (they are the names of the aircraft and of the atomic bomb itself which was dropped on Hiroshima), because not even a high-minded person like himself will care about history.

Keith is only interested in television (especially pornographic movies) and tabloids, his vocabulary being borrowed from sports news and gossip columns: "Tears at the dartboard, lachrimae at the oche: this was Keith's personal vision of male heroism and transcendence, of male grace under pressure. He remembered Kim Twemlow in the semi of last year's World Championship. Kim and Keath: they were men. Men, mate. Men." This is a parody of Virgil's "Sunt lacrimae rerum" (Aeneas weeping at the memory of scenes from the Trojan war which he revisits in Cartage), while the dartboard is reminiscent of Robert Delaunay's dartboards coloured in all the hues of the spectre as a painterly exercise in the decomposition of light as symbol of creation. The urban world has displaced the corn fields of pastoral England and the natural rhythms of life or family affections.

The reading of the diary had misled Sam into believing Keith to be Nicola's "chosen murderer". As Guy finds out the truth, Sam offers to take upon himself the retaliation task, as he was doomed to die ("on the deadline") anyway. He strikes her with a car tool and then swallows an overdose of pills. He leaves two notes for Asprey: one in which he names him his executor (charged to destroy the manuscript) and the other in which he wonders whether Asprey might not have set him up. Nicola had shut herself up in a room and burned one of Asprey's books, so she owed him another book. She had dumped her diaries in Sam's view so as to entice him to write the novel. Had Sam actually been the surrogate Author's mandated narrator ? Sam complains that Nicola had overwritten him, because his story with Keith as murderer hadn't worked; "it is you" Nicola used to tell him. "It was always you". It is the story than engenders the facts, and the story is drawn from a web of intertextuality. Reality is not simply bracketed, as it is in canonical modernist works, it can no longer be separated from its simulacrum.

Assignment: Compare the relationship between myth and reality in Eliot's The Waste Land and the relevance of the Fisher King figure and the Grail to contemporary New York in The Fisher King.

Literature and Culture, 12. Postmodernist modes of representation (conclusion)

Post-modernism marks the farthest departure from Modernity (the epistemology and ideology of the Enlightenment) Meta-narratives of the Enlightenment: . Belief in reason, progress and science.

. Science is the master discipline and is constructed as rational discourse and as a set of analytic procedures leading to well-defined and all-inclusive taxonomies, to hierarchical and hegemonic systems of classification.

. Poetic principles are rooted in operations of the mind as defined by empiricist and rationalist philosophy. . The body is regarded as inferior matter. . Myth is dismissed as superstition. Postmodernist deconstruction of the meta-narratives of modernity:

. The provisional status of all definitions of value rationality and truth.

. The collapse of the boundary between the rational and the irrational, the mind and the body, high and low art, high technology and street subcultures.

. All foundationalist and totalizing systems of thought are discredited, as the very basis of objective and materialistic philosophy - the postulation of a material and stable reality outside social semiosis (representation through signs) - is removed. Jean Baudrillard calls this culturally constructed reality "hyper-reality".

. Magic and religion of the "New Age" type have become mainstream, spiritualist movements have created websites dedicated to

the occult, angelmania being one of these esoteric pursuits.

. Human memory is displaced by electronic memory. Memory is no longer a record of personal experiences and affects but a palimpsest of discursive fragments disseminated by the popular media, implanted in the brain by the incessant flow of mass information.

. Emphasis on a body destabilised by technology (cosmetic surgery or medical prosthesis) and subjugated to addictions typical of the consumer society. Status is defined by the ownership of a cell phone, personal stereo, a fax machine, a computer, etc. Identity is no longer individual but defined in relation to a set of collective representations and life-styles. People have become members of illusory communities held together by an abstract network of representations.

. Simulacra (copies without an original) are the building blocks of postmodernist literary texts.

Types of Victorian representations: transgressing the Modern.

. The move from scientific rationality to phenomenology, from belief in knowledge systems of universal validity to time-bound and multiple interpretations. All definitions of value rationality and truth are given a provisional status.

Basic critical source: Linda M. Shires, "The aesthetics of the Victorian novel: form, subjectivity, ideology" in

The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel. Ed. by Deirdre David. Cambridge University
Press (2001: 61-76).

- The different phases of the Victorian age may be connected through issues of aesthetic form, construction and subjectivity which register the departure from the ideology of the Enlightenment and the realist mode of representation in the direction of modernism.

Features of realist modes of representation and reading conventions:

1. Reality is stable, consistent and given in common to implied author, narrator, characters and readers.

2. Third-person omniscient narrator. Even if there are several points of view in the novel, there is a hierarchy of discourses, the omniscient narrator being placed in a privileged position: all points of view

are centrally aligned with his/ her vision, the omniscient narrator being also the centre from which moral judgements are issued in view of creating conformity to the bourgeois code of values, of shaping the reader ideologically and ethically.

3. The construction of form and of characters is a model of coherence and consistency.

4. An intelligible plot and an unambiguous ending or closure. The ending is that of marriage or death.

5. Huge casts of characters, complex plots and cliffhanger sections due to serialization in literary magazines.

A counter tradition transgressing the modern (the Enlightenment) emerged from the early phase of the Victorian Age, whose central paradigm is Emily Bront's novel, Wuthering Heights. It opened the way to aesthetic and ideological transformations.

1. The narrator is no longer omniscient but unreliable, an inadequate interpreter of events both as a rationalist and a man of feeling. Lockwood is making wrong guesses about the identity of the characters he meets at Wuthering Heights, he mistakes a harsh world of oppression and revenge for a fairy land, he shares his improper view of events with other narrators who are not more comprehensive than himself with respect to the nature of events and the character of the persons involved in the plot.

2. The novel becomes more self-conscious, reflecting on its nature as a fabricated house of fictions. The tropes of writing and reading and the writing and reading scenes are making a meta-fictional comment on the novel. Wuthering Heights starts "1801", as if it were a diary entry or a newspaper report, and ends with the reading scene of young Cathy and Hareton reading from the same book. The love plot itself is largely one of Cathy teaching Hareton how to write and read.

3. Reality is given in fragments and it is hard to interpret. It resists penetration, in the same way in which the building of the Heights, with its closed gate and chain barring the entrance, opposes Lockwood's entry.

4. The novel becomes mixed in genre, problematizing reading conventions. It is a blend of asocial romance and a domestic novel of realist socialisation .

5. Instead of a hierarchy of discourses, with the narrator privileging one over another, there is a cacophony of discourses and narrative voices, the reader being placed in a choice situation: he is pushed to set one perspective against another and make his own guesses and predictions. He

himself is just an interpreter rather than the beneficiary of cognitive and moral enlightenment.

5. The novel reproduces and questions totalizing narratives or meta-narratives. In Middlemarch, George Eliot shows the failure of Idealism, scientific rationalism and Evangelical Christianity embodied by scholar Edward Casauban and Dorothea, doctor Tertius Lydgate and banker Nicholas Bulstrode. They fail because they are not aware that experience is a permanent flow which cannot be frozen into timeless truths. Casaubon is searching for the original myth in and age when geographic explorers had revealed the existence of disconnected mythologies all over the world, Dorothea thinks her prospective husband was a cross of the rationalist scholar and spiritual philosopher in an age dead to wither, Lydgate dreams of discovering the original tissue at a time when the cell had been discovered, Bulstrode takes his prosperity for a sign of providential election, but one day his past returns to destroy him. In Chapter 15, the narrator is expounding on the poetics undewriting the novel: it gives the image of the web weaving together certain human lots, while "the tempting range of relevancies called the universe" is being ignored.

6. There is constant emphasis on epistemological issues such as, how we see, know and interpret. Conrad's Preface to the Nigger of the Narcissus (1897) mentions the author's desire to make his reader hear, feel and, above all, see, to provide him/her with the material for personal interpretation. Dorothea is tragically mistaken about the possibilities of fulfilling her destiny, her own desires or Casaubon's character: "Miss Brooke argued from words and dispositions not less unhesitatingly than other young ladies of her age." Her self-assuredness is dangerous because "signs are small, measurable things, but interpretations are illimitable".

7. The narrator draws the readers attention to his role as epistemological mediator: George Eliot through the textual metaphors of the "drop of ink" and the "defective mirror", Joseph Conrad's Marlow by confessing to his partial access to events and the character of people: the reader only knows them through him, a witness experiencing confusion, doubt and bewilderment.

8. Victorian literary discourses intersect with many cultural discourses of the period, such as religion, science and political economy, taking up issues of racial difference, evolution and breeding, labour unrest, class mobility through liquid capital, degeneracy and entropy, etc. These discursive negotiations produced sub-genres: the industrial novel, the detective novel, the Newgate (a famous prison) novel, the science-fiction novel.

9. The abrupt change of generic kind foregrounds the artificial, fabricated character of the plot and the fact that the author is playing with modes of representation rather than trying to render a truthful image of some particular empirical experience. Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, for instance, is divided into two distinct parts. The first tells the story of Jim, first mate aboard the steamship Patna, who jumps it the moment it threatens to sink. In the second part of the novel, he takes refuge from his painful experience to an exotic and fictional Sumatran

island, Patusan, where he is taken for a hero being called "Lord Jim" by the natives. His plans for a coffee plantation and the intrusion of the emissaries of European capital destroy the Edenic world initially placed beyond the reach of a corrupt civilization, "beyond the end of telegraph cables and mail-boat lines". The probing into the psychological intricacies of a consciousness in trial yields to the symbolic plot of romance.

Sometimes the subjective perspective (of a female character, in Bleak House) is juxtaposed over a male, detached and ironic view of events. The two a played against each other, none is endowed with a privileged cognitive status.

10. Reality is presented as unfathomable, only known in fragments, and as a source of epistemic doubts. The author, Conrad says in the Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus, can only place "fragments" of experience "before all eyes, without choice and without fear". It is "doubt which is the inseparable part of knowledge" (Lord Jim) that creates solidarity among human subjects, as "a collection of partial views may offer more than a single view, which must itself always be partial, even if it believes itself to be whole. What other authors might have understood as utterly fragmenting, Conrad views as a challenge. In his belief system, doubt serves to bind us all together." (Linda M. Shires, Op. cit.: 63).

11. The stable self comes under stress, being replaced with split selves (Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde), mutating bodies (Dracula) or changing bodily shapes (Alice in Wonderland).

12. Poetry itself is expected to be useful to society, and, consequently, it too becomes hybrid, appropriating issues of cultural and social importance, turning into a public discourse on issues of faith, the woman's status in society, education, public morality, institutionalized religion etc. "Double poems" keep two readings in tension, affirming and contesting Victorian ideology, as in Browning's "Bishop Blougram's Apology", modelled on Cardinal Wiseman, the first Archbishop of Westminster, head of the Roman Catholic Church, who was a sophisticated ecclesiastic, but also a worldly person, who made room for doubt as an alternative to dogmatism. He legitimised doubt as another kind of faith, while rationalism seemed to him shallow, simplistic and naive. Anxiety, dread (a concept defined by proto-existentialist Kierkegaard in The Concept of Dread, 1844) destabilise the rationalist's confidence and cognitive security. Rational argument and binary thought cannot account for the complexities of the human soul. In Browning's poem, Bishop Blougram famously says:

Our interest's on the dangerous edge of thing/ The honest thief, the tender murderer/ The superstitious atheist ....

13. The Victorian poet's overt engagement with issues of politics and ideology materialised in generic hybrids: mask poems, dramatic monologues, narrative poems. The "I" of an emotional unmediated experience providing a structural centre in Romantic poetry is displaced by narrative masks, by dramatic personae who try to make sense of the world and of their own experience. They are distanced from the poet's own view

of the situation, which prevents the reader himself from identifying with them. They often question undisputed truths, laying bare their constructed character (they are made-up fictions serving society's dominant ideology) and raise problems of how to interpret human experience (See Browning's Fra Lippo Lippi).

14. Two readings are kept in tension in women's rewriting of male genres or responding to poems by men about women. For instance, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Catrina to Camoens", in which she assumes the persona of the girl who was loved by the sixteenth-century Portuguese poet Camoens, or her Sonnets from he Portuguese , where she displaces Theoc ritus who had sung the happy hours bringing Adonis back from the underworld. She too is rescuing a male lover from anonymity by dedicating her sonnets to him. Christina Rossetti appropriates the male sage discourse (discourse of wisdom) in "Consider the Lilies of the Field"), rewriting Jesus' parable in Matthew 6: 27-30.

Essay topic: "Transgressing the Modern: Victorian expressions of epistemological uncertainty/ entropic modes of vision/ lost security of selfhood/ aesthetic disunity (generic hybrids)."

Literature and Culture 13. Modernist Modes of Representation. The modernist deconstruction of the meta-narratives of the Enlightenment.

1. History is no longer conceived of as teleological progress (movement towards some purpose realised through self-conscious agents) but as cyclic. According to Nietzsche (Second Untimely Meditation and The Genealogy of Morals), humans never live to engage in genuinely new action, because "the past and the present are one, that is to say, wtih all their diversity identical in all that is typical and, as the omnipresence of imperishable types, a motionless structure of a value that cannot alter and a significance that is always the same."

Writing on the threshold between Victorian and Modernist, George Bernard Shaw takes the same unhistorical attitude to the past events in his history plays: "I never worry myself about historical details until the play is done; human nature is very much the same always and everywhere. Given Caesar, and a certain set of circumstances, I know what would happen, and when I have finished the play you will find I have written history." (

The Cambrdige Companion to George Bernard Shaw. Edited by Christopher Innes, 1998: 195). The
anachronistic elements of Shaw's plays are justified by his Nietzschean view that the plots of history have "a value that cannot alter and a significance

that is always the same". It is only that people are not aware of the meaning of their actions at that time. Cauchon, Lemaitre and Warwick judge Joan La Pucelle (Saint Joan) in terms of a later age, of the Reformation of the churches (Joan is a Protestant who will not allow of a priest of a peer to interfere between herself and God) or even of Victorian Macaulay's history of the English Empire (the right of England to rule over less civilized races for their own good). As Shaw explains, "they were part of the Middle Ages themselves, and therefore as unconscious of its peculiarities as of the atomic formula of the air they breathed." However, he has them "saying the things they actually would have said if they had known what they were really doing. "

Shaw takes the jump from being to representation (Martin Heidegger's brand for the age: "The age of representations"). There is no essential identity but only historically constructed versions of identity. Joan of Arc was burnt for heresy in 1431, rehabilitated in l456, designated venerable in l904, declared blessed in l908 and canonized in 1920. The genealogy of morals is Nietzschean as well: the source of values is some convenient fiction or fable. he Inquisition well knows that Joan is innocent, but her uncommon conduct is seen as a threat to the stability of the existing order, an invitation to anarchy. As Shaw says in the Preface, miracles are just staged performances which create faith, and religious beliefs are nourished by poetry rather than by revelations. History becomes a matter of textual practices and rhetorical conventions. Shakespeare's Caesar and Cleopatra was just "a page of Plutarch furnished with scenery and dialogue". We search for the truth about what really happened and we are only faced with historical narratives contaminated by the interests of those who wrote them. Histories follow the "law of the genre", conventions of composition and rhetorical strategies rather than unadulterated relics of the past: "you cannot even write a history without adapting the facts to the conditions of literary narrative, which are in some respects much more distorting than the dramatic conditions of representation on stage." (Shaw interviewed on Arms and the Man).

2. The early modernity myth of social progress, of mankind's advancement through knowledge towards an improved stage of civilizationis reclassified as dystopia. The Victorian anxiety about degeneracy and regression had led to the foundation of the Eugenics Society in 1989. It was trying to defend society from the multiplication of the degenerate, physically and socially unfit and to encourage the better stocks to reproduce themselves. In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, the Renaissance melioration plot (the title is borrowed from Shakespeare's the tempest) is rewritten as a dystopia of modern technology. Humans are artificially born and divided into the Alphas, fit for reproduction, and the unfit Betas, Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons. In the world of mass production and Ford cars, there is no place for the humanities or for arts, love descends to promiscuous mating, traditional family bonds, art, religion, emotions, desires are replaced with the universal remedy of soma, a pill of self-oblivion, devised by an inhuman state machinery which controls everybody's lives.

Utopian projections of the best of all possible societies end up in the nightmare of totalitarianism (George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four).

3. The Cartesian, rational and unitary self is displaced by a body-determined and derived mind: conscious behaviour is symptomatic of repressed contents in the unconscious through the operation of social taboos.

Alfred Booth Kuttner, "A Freudian Appreciation" , 1916. A study in D.H. Lawrence's novel Sons and Lovers from a psychoanalytic perspective. The boundary between science and art (Kant's theory of the separate spheres) is transgressed in the name of their mutual relevance: But it sometimes happens that a piece of literature acquires and added significance by virtue of the support it gives to the scientific study of human motives. Literary records have the advantage of being the fixed and classic expression of human emotions which in the living individual are usually too fluid and elusive for deliberate study." This sounds like a voice of the rational scientific Enlightenment, with the important difference that the object of research is man's unconscious: that which the average man will either be unaware of, or reluctant to acknowledge in the light of reason or consciousness: For a new truth about ourselves, which may seem altogether grotesque and impossible when presented to us as an arid theory, often gains unexpected confirmation when presented to us in a powerful work of literature as an authentic piece of life. When at last we recognise ourselves we like the thrill of having made a discovery." Literature becomes an invaluable accessory to the psychology, and a writer may be an anlysand who helps the reader become aware of some repressed drives or traumas and in this way heal him as effectively as a psychiatrist. Kuttner applies Freud's theory of the unconscious processes of deflection and transference (love for the mother deflected to sister and then to some woman outside of the family circle) to Lawrence's Sons and Lovers read as a study in the protagonists fixation on his mother.

4. Consciousness is determined not only by the individual subconscious but also by archetypal representations of the collective subconscious. According to T.S. Eliot, "the prelogical mentality persists in civilized man, but becomes available only to or through the poet." ("The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism"). Poetry "may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate" The study of primitive man furthers our understanding of civilized man. Unlike the eighteenth-century histories of Empires and of the civilizing mission, Eliot looks to "War-Paint and Feathers" among primitive communities for keys to an understanding of advanced civilizations. "Eliot's wastelanders are collage portraits in which the lineaments of contemporary men and women draw on those of mythical or literary personages. They are based on a new concept of personality influenced by Bradleyian theories of subjective-.objective centres of experience or Jungian presuppositions of a universal substratum that underlies personal consciousness." (Viorica Patea, "T.S. Eliot's Poetics of the Mythical Method" in Modernism Revisited. Edited by Viorica Patea and Paul Scott Derrick, Rodopi: 2007). The third that always walks beside each individual is he who is spoken of, a piece of language, an absence filled with words, a text (unlike the actually present interlocutors speaking in the first and second person). Each individual being or act acquires meaning by being slotted into one of these textual frames: ancient myths, legends, Biblical journeys, Classical

stories, art works of the west, bits of history ...). A man walking in the streets of a modern city calls out to another: "Stetson, you who were with me in the ships at Mylae". The recently concluded war looms in the penumbra of other battles with their heavy tolls of human lives: Mylae, a Sicilian harbour, witnesses a battle in 260 BC but also Garibaldi*s victory. The unhappily married lady of The Game of Chess is enlarged through projection into plots of famous wretched couples: Cleopatra, Philomel, Dido. T.S. Eliot undertakes a sort of Heideggerian "Destruktion": searching for the origins of Europe's collective memory, digging up the successive deposits of cultural narratives. Unlike the meta-narratives of the Enlightenment, the mythological structures of the East and of the West are now given in fragments, as "withered stumps of time". This affects modernist poetics and writing practices: "The new poetics resorts to cubist aesthetics and privileges a complex mode of ever-shifting temporal dislocations, narrative and rhetorical discontinuities and unexplained alternations of past and present, reality and myth. Within the framework of these montages, dramatic action loses its linear progression and ceases to compose mere sequences. The new experimental form rescues reality from the flux of photographic naturalism and re-composes it into a new geometry (...) that reproduces the simultaneities and syncronicities of consciousness. (V. Patea, Op. cit.)

Essay topic: From Victorian to Modernist, or, from the Age of Phenomenology (interpretation) to the Age of Representation. The focus on the split between reality (the given) and art (the re-presented).