1
6. Introduction to 20th century British drama
G. B. Shaw, J. M. Synge, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, John Osborne
drama in the 19th century:
two main trends: frivolous entertainment,
book drama: not meant to be acted
revival of drama at the beginning of 20th century: two directions:
1. Irish revival (renaissance) high poetic quality
2. reappearance of the drama of ideas (G. B. Shaw)
George Bernard Shaw (1856--1950)
Life:
born in Ireland father: businessman, a drunkard
mother: a professional singer, moved to London
Shaw in Dublin with father
joined his mother at the age of twenty
dependant on his mum, bohemian,
later interested in politics: socialist ideas
Fabian Society: middle class organization
established in 1884 to promote the gradual spread
of socialism by peaceful means
married a fellow-Fabian: Charlotte Payne-
Townshend
working: reviewer
drama criticism: literary realism!
main source: Ibsen
famous pamphlet: The Quintessence of Ibsenism
the idealists: deceive themselves
the majority who dont care: the philistines
the realists: who see through all this
Shaws aim in theatre: destroy illusions, ideals, masks
drama: a forum for considering moral, social, political issues
(Widowers Houses: the abominable housing conditions in England;
Mrs Warrens Profession: prostitution)
heighten the awareness of the audience
a writer of comedies! his humour unmatched by his
contemporaries
Mrs Warrens Profession
not performed for 8 years (1894--1902), bad reputation
basic conflict between mother and daughter!
questionable financial foundations of mothers wealth
Mrs Warren: a prostitute (operated on the contintent, Vienna, Bp, English morality,
more hypocritical)
tension: Mrs W: uses corruption and at the same time wants to rise above it?
later: returns to the Fabian position: you you stay within the system and reform
it gradually from within
serious moral concern
art is justified by affecting the morals of society
aim: shock the audience, make them uncomfortable, make them
think
Later phase:
no longer believes world can be changed socially
salvation in the personal, biological sphere
influenced by Henri Bergson (Creative Evolution) Nietzsche, Hegel,
Schopenhauer
life itself is a mysterious, impersonal force = life force
objective of this life force = greater and greater understanding of itself
woman: special role primary helper
of the life force, bearing children
plays exhibiting this philosophy: Man and Superman (parody of
parliamentary democracy, attack on Fabian socialism, plot:

flows Don Giovanni, but the woman takes the initiative) Back
to Methuselah
Abbey Theatre: 1904
Saint Joan
long preface
20th century recast of St. Joan
unwomanly woman, masculinity overemphasized, modern
dialectical view of history: Joan = an agent of history/life force
(progressive and regressive forces)
not a tragedy: in the long run Joan will be justified
the revival of Irish drama
poetry brought back
influenced by Irish nationalism
turns to Irish past for writing material
Irish mythology, the legends of pre- and early Christian era
one central hero: Cuchulain, defender of Ulster, known for
his terrifying battle frenzy
theme: rural life, peasantry
language of the peasants
In writing The Playboy of the Western World as in my
other plays, I have used on or two words only that I
have not heard among the country people of Ireland, or
spoken in my own nursery .
in countries where the imagination of the people, and the language
they use, is rich and living, it is possible for a writer to be rich and
copious in his words, and at the same time to give the reality, which is
the root of all poetry, in a comprehensive and natural form.
In Ireland .. .we have a popular imagination that is fiery, and
magnificent, and tender; so that those of us who wish to write start
with a chance that is not given to writers in places where the
springtime of the local life has been forgotten, and the harvest is a
memory only, and the straw has been turned into brick
from J. M. Synges Preface to The Playboy of the Western
World
[National Literary Society (1892)]
2
aim: to promote Irish literature, music, art
lectures, concerts, lending libraries
W. B. Yeats: his manager
dramatists of the revival: Yeats, Sean OCasey, J. M. Synge, Lady
Gregory
W. B. Yeats dramas
all of them in verse, short one-act plays
early phase: longing desire, search for ideal beauty
first play: Countess Cathleen
Countess offers her soul to save the poor
sacriligious act: but she will be admitted to
heaven
= embodiment of self-sacrifice and beauty
poet in the drama: Aleel = biographical
Cathleen N Houlihan
spirit of Ireland personified by an old woman who
rouses her people to the national struggle
second phase: international, interest in Japanese drama (Noh drama)
no setting, no expensive props, dependant on actor and words
John Millington Synge
The Playboy of the Western World: performed at the Abbey Theatre in 1907
tragicomedy (3 acts) set in Michael James Flahertys public house on the west
coast of Ireland
Language a dynamic force to transform life
insignificant Christy Mahon appears in the village, claiming he killed his own
father by driving a spade (loy) into his head
celebration of the villagers
Bravery is a treasure in a lonesome place and a lad would kill his father,
I m thinking, would face a foxy divil with a pitchpike on the flags of hell.
the pubkeepers daughter Pegeen falls in love with him
also several village women

Christy: Well, its a clean bed and soft with it, and its great luck and
company Ive won me in the end of time two fine women fighting for
the like of me till Im thinking this night wasnt I a foolish fellow not
to kill my father in the years gone by.
In act 2 father turns up and destroys the illusion Christy created
Old Mahon: Running wild, is it? If he seen a red petticoat coming
swinging over the hill, hed be off to hide in the sticks, and youd see
him shouting out his sheeps eyes between the little twigs and the
leaves, and his two ears rising like a hare looking out through a gap.
Girls, indeed!
villagers turn against him
he attempts to kill his father a second time to regain his popularity
reception: nationalistic riots in Dublin
depiction of Irish peasants
unsettling: subversion of accepted sexual roles
antithetical to the Abey Theatres mission ???
ambivalent reference to the poet-figure: Christy presented as a poet:
Pegeen: its the poets are your like fine, fiery fellows with great rages
when their tempers roused
also: truly ambiguous and ironic idea of heros and heroism
great talkers are synonymous with bravery and heroism
fantasy and reality: What matters? Words or deeds?
use of imagination to escape from reality
villagers: unable to accept the fact that they have created the
fantasy and now it has become reality.
1930s: resurgence of poetic (religious) drama (in England)
T. S. Eliot: Murder in the Cathedral 1935, commissioned for the Canterbury
festival
martyrdom of St. Thomas a Becket
influence of Greek tragedy, medieval morality plays liturgical
minor revival of religious plays followed
(1930s, 1940s, 1950s: absurd drama, see later lecture)
3
1950S: Angry young men = dominant literary force of the fifties
disaffection with class system, pedigreed families, elitist universities, hypocrisy
dislike for anything high brow and phoney
social background:
after WWII, creation of welfare state, living living standards for the poor had
increased drastically, but power still in the hands of the elite
uncertainty about traditional gender roles
belligerent, dissatisfied working-class male protagonist
expressed in novels: Kingsley Amis Lucky Jim, John Wain: Hurry on Down;
Alan Sillitoe: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner
John Osborne (1929-1994): Look Back in Anger (1956)
realistic drama, no novelty in form, but in content
The hero,
Jimmy Porter:
although the son of a worker,
education: on the border of the middle class
upward mobility threatened by the more privileged
Jimmy Porter continues to work in a street-market and vents his
rage on his middle-class wife and her middle-class friend.
7. Virginia Woolf: modernism, feminism, impressionism (1882
1941)
Life:
father: editor and critic Leslie Stephen, London
educated at home in a highly intellectual environment
traumatic adolescence: death of mother when she was 13
half sister Stella two years later: breakdowns for the rest of her life
Father died 1904, favourite brother: two years later provoked an
alarming collapse
also possible sexual abuse by half brothers George and Gerald
Cornvall: memories of a lighthouse

part of Bloomsbury Group with sister, painter Vanessa Bell (E. M.
Forster, biographer and essayist Lytton Stratchey, famous economist
John Maynard Keynes)
Here met Leonard Woolf, married: 1912
Hogarth Press: 1917
Lesbian relationship with Vita-Sackville West
1941: drowned herself
Her last letter to her husband:
I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible
times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am
doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You
have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been
happier 'til this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life,
that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I
can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely
patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that everybody knows it. If anybody could
have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your
goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been
happier than we have been.
Theories of maleness and femaleness (feminism)
two books of feminist polemic: Room of Ones Own, Three Guineas
Room of Ones Own
1.
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well if one has not dined well.
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write
fiction
imaginary life of Shakespeares sister: emphasis on financial independence and
autonomous space
2.
Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we
generate this imponderable quality which is yet so invaluable, most
quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. .. Hence
the enormous importance to a patriarch who has to conquer, who has to
rule, of feeling that great numbers of people, half the human race
indeed, are by nature inferior to himself. Women have served all
these centuries as looking-glassess possessing the magic and delicious
power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. .
mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action. if she begins to
4
tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for
life is diminished. How is he going to go on giving judgement, civilizing
natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at
banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least
twice the size he really is?
women as mirrors reflecting the figure of man at twice his natural size (hindering
the improvement of the situation of women)
3.
But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the
values which have been made by the other sex; naturally, this is so. Yet
it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and
sport are important; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes
trivial. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the
feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene in a battlefield is more
important than a scene in a shop
assumption of womens difference
concept of a female literary tradition
The weight, the pace, the stride of a mans mind are too unlike her own
for her to lift anything substantial from him successfully.
difference. cultural rather than biological
need for the study of the psychology of women by a woman
4.
And there is the girl behind the counter too I would as soon have her
true history as the hundred and fiftieth life of Napoleon or seventieth
study of Keats All these infinitely obscure lives remain to be
recorded
exploration of the private sphere: women have sat indoors all these millions of
years, the very walls are permeated by their creative force
Mrs Dalloway (1925) one day of an average society lady: Mrs Dalloway
said she would buy the flowers herself.
anticipating postmodern views
5.
in each of us two powers reside, one male, one female; and in the mans
brain the man predominates over the woman, and in the womans brain
the woman predominates over the man. The normal and comfortable
state of being is when the two live in harmony together, spiritually
cooperating. Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that the great

mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is
fully fertilized and uses all its faculties.
androgynous mind: modernist desire for totality, unity:
Tiresias in Eliots The Waste Land
Orlando (1928): fantastical biography
in her age men are now writing only with the male side of their brains
also political implications: connection between pure, self-assertive virility and
fascism
reflection in Mrs Dalloway (1925):
the typical male associated with the aggressive aspects of
Western civilisation: power, dominance, colonisation (first
world war: To the Lighthouse, 1928)
also: with language, words and reason but lacking intuition and
sensitivity
questions for study: Identify some such male characters.
How do they exhibit these characteristics? Can you
identify symbolical objects associated with male self-
assertion? What kind of human qualities are contrasted
with male aggression and who exhibit them?
Literary impressionism, poetic style (the essay: Modern fiction)
The mind receives a myriad impressionstrivial, fantastic, evanescent,
or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an
incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape
themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls
differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but
there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could
write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon
his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no
comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted
style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors
would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged;
life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us
from the beginning of consciousness to the end.
Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which
they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent
in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the
consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully
in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought
small.
from the essay Modern Fiction
5
attention to details, nuances, processes rather than hard facts, descriptions
materialist opposed to the spiritual writer: the flickerings of that innermost flame
which flashes its messages through the brain,
disregard of standard narrative conventions such as coherence, probability
in her novels:
narratives are uneventful, common place, hardly any plot (Mrs Dalloway: how a
middle-aged housewife prepares for her evening party)
narrative filtered through, even dissolved in the characters consciousness
intensely lyrical prose: abundant with auditive and visual impressions
Mrs Dalloway 1925
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off
their hinges; Rumpelmayers men were coming. And then, thought
Clarissa Dalloway, what a morningfresh as if issued to children
on a beach.
What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when,
with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had
burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air.
How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early
morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and
yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did,
standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to
happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off
them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh
said, Musing among the vegetables?was that it?I prefer men to
cauliflowerswas that it? He must have said it at breakfast one
morning when she had gone out on to the terracePeter Walsh. He
would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot
which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one
remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and,
when millions of things had utterly vanishedhow strange it was!a few
sayings like this about cabbages.
narrative technique: free indirect discourse
narrated in the third person singular, but author and character
discourse merges (stream-of-consciousness technique)
dominated by the workings of the mind: memories
time-span: one day, but memories embrace a whole life:
especially one summer at Bourton

literary cubism: several perspectives in play
no reliable knowledge: only impressions of the different
characters about each other
She would not say of any one in the world now that they were
this or were that.... she would not say of Peter, she would not
say of herself, I am this, I am that
important themes:
aging and death
lives of men and women: different possibilities and perspectives
alienation: especially male-female
contrasted with an idealized female-female relationship which
psychologically corresponds to pre-Odipal mother-daughter
relationship, and is looked for in the past
Mrs Dalloway: Clarissa and Sally Seton
in To the Lighthouse: Mrs Ramsay and Lily Briscoe
(males: always an intrusion)
sensitivity: to experience life to the full, the role of the artist
Septimus Warren Smith: a war veteran, shell shock,
psychologically unstable, commits suicide
parallels between Clarissa and Septimus!
question: Find parallels as you are reading the novel!
contrast: Clarissa is in love with civilization, refusing to
acknowledge the aggressive, masculine aspect of the
world
questions: Which objects might symbolize efficiency,
civilization? Which character admires civilization the
most? How does Septimus react to these aspects of the
world? How does he ultimately help Clarissa
experience life on a deeper level?
(at the party towards the end)
Then (she had felt it only this morning) there was the terror; the overwhelming incapacity, ones
parents giving it into ones hands, this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there
was in the depths of her heart an awful fear. Even now, quite often if Richard had not been there
reading the Times, so that she could crouch like a bird and gradually revive, send roaring up that
immeasurable delight, rubbing stick to stick, one thing with another, she must have perished. But that
young man had killed himself.
6
Somehow it was her disasterher disgrace. It was her punishment to see sink and disappear
here a man, there a woman, in this profound darkness, and she forced to stand here in her evening
dress. She had schemed; she had pilfered. She was never wholly admirable. She had wanted success.
Lady Bexborough and the rest of it. And once she had walked on the terrace at Bourton.
..
The clock began striking. The young man had killed himself; but she did not pity him; with the clock
striking the hour, one, two, three, she did not pity him, with all this going on. There! the old lady had
put out her light! the whole house was dark now with this going on, she repeated, and the words
came to her, Fear no more the heat of the sun. She must go back to them. But what an extraordinary
night! She felt somehow very like himthe young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he
had done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. He made
her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun. But she must go back. She must assemble. She must find
Sally and Peter. And she came in from the little room.
8. THEATRE OF THE ABSURD
"Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose.... Cut off from
his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man
is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless"
(Martin Esslin).
Absurd Theatre can be seen as an attempt to restore the
importance of myth and ritual to our age, by making man
aware of the ultimate realities of his condition, by
instilling in him again the lost sense of cosmic wonder
and primeval anguish. The Absurd Theatre hopes to
achieve this by shocking man out of an existence that has
become trite, mechanical and complacent. It is felt that
there is mystical experience in confronting the limits of
human condition. (Jan Kulik)
philosophical roots: existentialism
emphasises action, freedom and decision as fundamental to human
existence

opposed to the rationalist tradition and to positivism.
indifferent, objective, "absurd" universe without a given meaning
"The Theatre of the Absurd: European plays in the late 1940s, 1950s, and
1960s, also: a particular style of theatre
term coined by critic Martin Esslin,.
Departure from traditional theatrical conventions:
realistic characters:
* characters appear as automatons speaking in clichs
* failing memories fail (in Godot they are not sure who Pozzo is
when he turns up the second time)
* they hardly remember their past (in Godot: fragments
about a warm summer day; Birthday P: Stanley has
illogical, incoherent memories)
* recognition scenes, discursive thought ruled out
realistic situations:
* Time, place and identity: ambiguous and fluid (we dont know
where Godot takes place; the characters are not sure about the
time, how many days have passed etc.)
* even basic causality frequently breaks down. (Birthday P: We
dont know what Goldberg and McCann want from Stanley)
* Meaningless plots, repetitive or nonsensical dialogue
* dream-like, or even nightmare-like moods. (Estragon: several
dreams; Birthday Party = a nightmare)
Samuel Beckett: 1906-1989 (Nobel prize: 1969)
Life: Irish Protestant well-to-do family (born on a Good Friday, 13, Friday)
Relations with women: complex, often abortive
Postgraduate studies: in Paris (dissertation on Proust)
influenced by Joyce
After death of father: settled in Paris, active in French resistance
Earlier work: fiercely difficult
1930: Whoroscope, a verse monologue in the voice of Ren Descartes
1938: first novel: Murphy
7
After 1940: write about impotence and ignorance, essential experience of
human life
abandon rhetoric and virtuosity
clean and analytical French, three novels:
Molly, Malone Dies and The Unnameable (1946-50)
Waiting for Godot:
French premier: 1953, English: 1955
growing artistic asceticism
antecedents.
Extension of the symbolist line in British poetic drama (from Yeats to E)
Minimalism of his work: derive from Yeats Noh plays
French existentialism (Sartre and Camus) and surrealism (Andr Breton)
"You ask me for my ideas on Waiting for Godot and my ideas on the theatre,"
he wrote to Michel Polac on Godot's publication a year before it was
produced. "I have no ideas on the theatre. I know nothing about it. I never go.
That's reasonable. What is rather less so," he added, "is . . . to write a play,
and then to have no ideas on that either."
"I know no more about this play than anyone who just reads it attentively,"
Beckett wrote. "I don't know what spirit I wrote it in. I know no more about
the characters than what they say, what they do and what happens to them . . .
everything I have been able to learn, I have shown. It's not a great deal. But
it's enough for me, quite enough. I'd go so far as to say that I would have been
content with less . . . Estragon, Vladimir, Pozzo, Lucky, I have only been able
to know them a little, from far off, out of a need to understand them. They
owe you some explanations, perhaps. Let them unravel. Without me. Them
and Me, we're quits."
"If by Godot I had meant God I would have said God, and not Godot."
[godillot = boot]
theme: meaninglessness of human existence
What is the purpose of life: To grow old!!!! To pass the time
experience of time: circular, repetitive
represented by the structure: symmetrical
Christian hope is parodied by the waiting in the play
Was I sleeping while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow when I wake, or think I
do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon, my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I
waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably. But in
all that what truth will there be? (ESTRAGON, having struggled with his boots in vain, is dozing
 8
off again. VLADIMIR looks at him.) Hell know nothing. Hell tell me about the blows he a crime or misdeed in the past comes to haunt the present
received and Ill give him a carrot. (Pause.) Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the
hole, lingeringly, the grave-digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full
of our cries. (He listens.) But habit is a great deadener. (He looks again at Estragon.) At me too figure of Stanley: ambivalent, multpile layers of interpretation are possible:
someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep
on. (Pause.) I cant go on! (Pause.) What have I said? the persecuted victim of modern literature (Kafka: The Trial)
the individual (typical of the 20th century) alienated from the centres of
HAROLD PINTER (1930)
born in a lower middle class Jewish family in London power, authority
he offended against Holy Authority: individual is crushed below the
compared to Beckett his dramatic world is firmly grounded in contemporary weight of social expectations
society
or simply: his crime is his being born at all
Pinters plays: interested in the nature of power, of power structures or: ust an undefined, existential angst (feeling of terror)
* dominance, control, exploitation, victimization
the underlying fear a sensitive individual has of the outside world
* number of his figures: related to the arts (Stanley: a
concert pianist, victimized by society)
9. James Joyce (1882-1941)
* the psychology of power
Irish novelist, short story writer and poet
undisputed influence
expressed by means of pinteresque dialogue:
everyday conversation, BUT a darker sense of a mans
Life:
insecurity, aggressiveness
mostly outside Ireland: still Dublin provides the setting for all his works
born in middle class family in Dublin,
Birthday Party 1957
first comfortable, well to do, but father squandered their money
Catholic family of strong nationalist outlook
genre: tragicomedy? comedy of menace
Jesuit boarding school, but had to leave it
conventional structure of Greek tragedy
Jesuit Belvedere College, Dublin (join the order)
but: comic stock characters
University of Dublin, studying modern languages.
When mother was dying of cancer, he refused to kneel and pray
theme: how a helpless individual, a one time artist is depressed, brainwashed
and subdued: by what / whom? (Question: What may the two intruders
In 1904 he met Nora Barnacle and on June the 16th (!): first date
symbolize?)
From 1904-1920 he and Nora lived in Trieste Zrich
from 1920-1941: in Paris and Zrich
plot: unsociable boarding-house resident (Stanley) is terrorized by two sinister
two children: Giorgio and Lucia
men (Goldberg and McCann) who have come in search of him,
difficulties with making money; Joyce teaching English in schools and also
reduced to blind violence at a birthday party thrown for him by his landlady
privately
and taken away by them the next morning, incapable of speech or resistance
financial difficulties ceased by the last 25 years of his life: Harriet Shaw
but reorientated and integrated in a respectable suit and white collar
(English feminist and publisher) his patron
fear hugely pervasive in Western culture:
after undergoing surgery for a perforated ulcer, he died
somebody will come at get you: the bogeyman story

the Irish government denied Nora permission to repatriate his remains
Dubliners (1914)
short stories: about Dublin with clinical dispassion and realism
influenced by Ibsen
meanness, poverty, abuse, paralysis
It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories. I
seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish
people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass.
(letter to Grant Richards, 23 June 1906, SL 89-90)
9
I fear more than that the chemical action which would be set up in
my soul by a false homage to a symbol behind which are massed twenty
centuries of authority and veneration
ultimate value: freedom, liberation; isolated, lonely individual
the enemy of Bright Young Rebels for more than a century had been
other people (Wayne Booth)
representative modern moment: Stephen seeks to learn in my own life and
away from home and friends what the heart is and how it feels

attention on lower middle class Theory of art: epiphany

the ruling elite: the Protestant minority, Catholics low-paid jobs
especially women (Ireland = image as wronged woman) to seek the spiritual in the invisible world but in the ordinary world
the source of most misery: English domination, the Protestants and analogue with the Eucharist:
the Holy Roman, Catholic and Apostolic Church:
exercising an even more disabling, because the artist: a priest of the eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread
unopposed authority of experience into the radiant body of everliving life (Portrait)

fairly conventional in technique epiphany: a sudden spiritual transformation in the course of which everyday
but also: uncertainties of human consciousness realities become radiant and signficiant
free indirect discourse
to individualize a fictional portrait (Maria and the use of the word nice)
fragments of human experience: ambiguities, uncertainties Ulysses 1922

The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) * Set in Dublin, events unfold over 24 hours, beginning on the morning of
a biographical novel: the story of the personal development of the artist Thursday 16th June 1904. The work has 18 chapters which correspond to
interior monologue, interest in psychic reality episodes in The Odyssey of Homer.
focus on a single mind: Stephen Dedalus
It is the epic of two races (Israel-Ireland) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well
as a little story of a day (life)... It is also a kind of encyclopaedia. My intention is not only to
elevation of art as the supreme value: prototypical tale of the modernist artist render the myth sub specie temporis nostri but also to allow each adventure (that is, every hour,
relying on the supreme principle of individualism: every organ, every art being interconnected and interrelated in the somatic scheme of the whole)
to condition and even to create its own technique. (James Joyce, Letters, 21st September 1920)

aim: to find his private vision never before known or imagined * greatest totalizing effort of modernist literature:
absolute, total honesty the individual = microcosm
And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong Three protagonists = story of the complete man
mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too (Stephen in Portrait) Stephen Dedalus: the artist = Ireland
Leopold Bloom: everyman = Israel (also outsider, alien)
Molly Bloom: the woman and wife and whore

one day = a whole lifetime
different organs = total man
different arts = sum total of human activity
each event is related to typical events in human history, literature and
myth: orchestration!
* Two myths of Western culture (symbolic, esoteric level and realistic level):
Odyssey
The Father and the Son (Christian)
archetypal story of wondering and homecoming
In the climactic Circe chapter Bloom meets the drunken Stephen in a brothel,
they leave together, but Stephen finds himself in a street fight from which
Bloom saves him and takes him home. As Bloom gazes on the unconscious
Stephen, he experiences a vision about his dead son, Rudy.
My head is full of pebbles and rubbish and broken matches and bits of glass picked up
'most everywhere. The task I set myself technically in writing a book from eighteen different
points of view and in as many styles, all apparently unknown or undiscovered by my fellow
tradesmen, that and the nature of the legend chosen would be enough to upset anyone's
mental balance.
(Letters, 24 June 1921)
* Literary cubism
Eighteen different perspectives: there are different ways of seeing
chapter 17 (Ithaca): Bloom and Stephens heading for
home: apparently a narrative of severe objectivity
in reality a parody of scientific objectivity
What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning?
Starting united both at normal walking pace from Beresford place they followed in the order named
Lower and Middle Gardiner streets and Mountjoy square, west: then, at reduced pace, each bearing
left, Gardiner's place by an inadvertence as far as the farther corner of Temple street: then, at
reduced pace with interruptions of halt, bearing right, Temple street, north, as far as Hardwicke
place. Approaching, disparate, at relaxed walking pace they crossed both the circus before George's
church diametrically, the chord in any circle being less than the arc which it subtends.
([they were talking during the walk]
Did Bloom discover common factors of similarity between their respective like and unlike reactions
to experience?
Both were sensitive to artistic impressions, musical in preference to plastic or pictorial. Both
preferred a continental to an insular manner of life, a cisatlantic to a transatlantic place of
residence. Both indurated by early domestic training and an inherited tenacity of heterodox
10
resistance professed their disbelief in many orthodox religious, national, social and ethical
doctrines. Both admitted the alternately stimulating and obtunding influence of heterosexual
magnetism. (beginning of chapter 17, Ithaca)
* language draws attention to itself: not a transparent medium
style is all: style takes the place of moral attitude, of any normative view
Structure:
first 3 chapters: Stephen Dedalus - story of Telemachus longing for his
father)
second 3 chapters: Leopold Bloom, his wonderings in Dublin; the story of
Odysseus deprived of his wife and son, longing for home
chapter 7 (Aeolus): newspaper-office scene: we see both protagonists
following episodes: unconsciously chase each other; sometimes appearing
together for a moment
chapter 14 (Oxen of the Sun) (the parody of 9 different prose styles): takes
place in a hospital where both Bloom and Stephens et al. go visiting: Bloom is
invited to their party
chapter 15: (Circe), night town scene: their association reaches a climax (see
above)
chapter 1617: joint journey home
chapter 18: Molly Bloom wakes up at dawn stream of consciousness
CYCLOPS and its antecedents
Bloom is going to a pub named Barney Kiernan's to meet a lawyer, Martin
Cunningham and to discuss the affairs of the Dignam family. There was a
funeral earlier in the day, and Bloom wants to help the widow arrange affairs of
inheritance.
Homeric parallel: Odysseuss adventures with the one-eyed giant
Story: At the pub Bloom is provoked, insulted and chased out by an obnoxious
Irish nationalist, the Citizen
study of the development of racial (anti-semitic) prejudice

one-eyed = narrow minded
The memory of the dead, says the citizen taking up his pintglass and glaring at Bloom.
-- Ay, ay, says Joe.
-- You don't grasp my point, says Bloom. What I mean is...
-- Sinn Fein! says the citizen. Sinn fein amhain! The friends we love are by our side and the foes we
hate before us.
Narrative techniqe: two thoroughly unharmonious voices
1) a debt-collector, socially low: malevolent, satirical: keeping equal
distance
[366] So we turned into Barney Kiernan's and there sure enough was the citizen up in the
corner having a great confab with himself and that bloody mangy mongrel, Garryowen,
and he waiting for what the sky would drop in the way of drink.
There he is, says I, in his gloryhole, with his cruiskeen lawn and his load of papers,
working for the cause.
The bloody mongrel let a grouse out of him would give you the creeps. Be a corporal
work of mercy if someone would take the life of that bloody dog. I'm told for a fact he ate
a good part of the breeches off a constabulary man in Santry that came round one time
with a blue paper about a licence.
[412]-- But do you know what a nation means? says John Wyse.
-- Yes, says Bloom.
-- What is it? says John Wyse.
-- A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same place.
-- By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if that's so I'm a nation for I'm living in the same
place for the past five years.
So of course everyone had a laugh at Bloom and says he, trying to muck out of it:
-- Or also living in different places.
-- That covers my case, says Joe.
-- What is your nation if I may ask, says the citizen.
-- Ireland, says Bloom. I was born here. Ireland.
The citizen said nothing only cleared the spit out of his gullet and, gob, he spat a Red
bank oyster out of him right in the corner.
-- After you with the push, Joe, says he, taking out his handkerchief to swab himself dry.
question: What effect does such a narrative viewpoint possibly have on readers?
2) other voice: the first narration is interrupted by passages in
vastly different styles (interpolations, asides)
caricatures of vastly different styles: the legal, the journalistic,
the scientific, the biblical etc.
The figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round tower was that of a
broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired freely freckled
shaggybearded wide-mouthed largenosed longheaded deepvoiced barekneed
11
brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced sinewyarmed hero. From shoulder to
shoulder he measured several ells and his rocklike mountainous knees were covered, as
was likewise the rest of his body wherever visible, with a strong growth of tawny prickly
hair in hue and toughness similar to the mountain gorse (Ulex Europeus). The widewinged
nostrils, from which bristles of the same tawny hue projected, were of such capaciousness
that within their cavernous obscurity the field-lark might easily have lodged her nest. The
eyes in which a tear and a smile strove ever for the mastery were of the dimensions of a
goodsized cauliflower. A powerful current of warm breath issued at regular intervals from
the profound cavity of his mouth while in rhythmic resonance the loud strong hale
reverberations of his formidable heart thundered rumblingly causing the ground, the
summit of the lofty tower and the still loftier walls of the cave to vibrate and tremble. .
From his girdle hung a row of seastones which dangled at every movement of his
portentous frame and on these were graven with rude yet striking art the tribal images of
many Irish heroes and heroines of antiquity, Cuchulin, Conn of hundred battles, Niall of
nine hostages, Brian of Kincora, the Ardri Malachi, Art MacMurragh, Shane O'Neill,
Father John Murphy, Owen Roe, Patrick Sarsfield, Red Hugh O'Donnell
Chapter 18 (Penelope)
authorial presence apparently disappears: we enter into Mollys mind which is
like a flowing river (no punctuation marks, no selection, no comment)
Molly is lying in bed thinking about her past and present, Bloom and her other
lovers
8 gigantic, incomplete sentences (lurid pornographic details as well)
flow = flow of nature
flow of urine (water and blood)
Joyces presentation of the eternal feminine (8: laid on its side, the sign of
infinity),
Woman = great cycle of nature, a home to return to
last sentence: she is planning to give Bloom one more chance to reestablish full
sexual relations with her
chapter begins and ends with YES (a female word according to Joyce)
the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth
head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I
gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago
my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain
yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and
 12
the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or working-class novel: more committed and value-centred:
felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the Allan Sillitoe The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner: a
pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only sense of them and us: haves and have-nots, the powerful
looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of and the powerless
Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors
interest in moral issues
playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and
the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil Christian doctrine of human depravity :
half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the William Golding: Lord of the Flies (1954): the fragility of
auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows human civilization
whoelse from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking Anthony Burgess: Clockwork Orange (1962): men do evil
outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in because the choose to, and enjoy doing it
the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and Kingsley Amis moral issues: a matter for debate and
the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and speculation
turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old
windows of the posadas 2 glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the Kingsley Amis: Lucky Jim
wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at
Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown
torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the Amis: admittedly anti-modern, anti-experimental, anti-cosmopolitan (The
figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue Movement)
and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and
Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my traditionally English social comedy, 18th c. tradition, Fielding
hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under university in a country town
the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my James/Jim Dixon, a young lecturer at the history department under Professor
eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would Iyes to say yes my mountain flower and Welch
first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts exposure of the hypocrisy of academic life, seen through the eyes of Dixon
all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. Dixon: a double life, a double perspective symbolized by his public face and
his private faces
10 British fiction after the War; postmodernism Chinese mandarin face
Martian invader face
British fiction in the 50s: return to realism and Englishness
traditional 19th themes: interest in social relations huge gap between private and public faces:
violent reaction against modernist technical innovations: in public hypocritical, also insincere in his love life,
Writing is not a private game to be played at a private party.
fiction becomes parochial: no traumatic experiences of totalitarianism or defeat Whatever passably decent treatment Margaret had had from him
in war, continuities undisturbed was the result of a temporary victory of fear over irritation, and
conscious derivation from major novelist of the past borrowings and allusions pity over boredom.
rebellion against the establishment and the traditional class system: anger
examples: one possible interpretation:
Osborne: Look back in anger: class antagonism as major conflict Dixons advance to his own true self and his true feelings
(a play) comic climax: his
Kingsley Amis: Lucky Jim: anger manifest in the relentless but paradoxically: his boldness is rewarded by winning Christine and a
exposure of hypocrisy, better job
 13
institutions, organisations exercies control over language games,
Philosophy of the novel? you simply need luck in life? closed systems of knowledge = fascism in the head
Nice things are nicer than nasty things. concern with otherness (based on pluralism):
all groups have a right to speak for themselves (colonized people, blacks and
comic effects: gays, women, religious groups etc.)
mostly linguistic: the collapse of time horizons, of historical continuity:
heroes: imitating various styles no centred self but fragmented self (modernism: alienation)
experience = a series of pure and unrelated presents, preoccupation with
POSTMODERN FICTION instantaneity
history plundered
1. postmodernism in general: the structure of feeling has changed (the superficiality, loss of depth (no continuity of values and beliefs), images,
80s) appearance, attachment to surfaces

rise of postmodern architecture in the seventies VERSUS high modernist

buildings 2. Postmodern literary theory, postmodern literature and fiction
instead of the inhuman, mathematically precise high modernist buildings
ornamented tower blocks (Ihab Hassans table, 1985)
imitation medieval squares and fishing villages,
renovated factories and warehouses and rehabilitated landscapes modernism postmodernism
pluralistic and organic strategies
urban development as a collage of highly differentiated spaces: metaphysics, transcendence irony, immanence
collage city, urban revitalization
creation/totalization/synthesis creation/deconstruction/antithesis
widespread doubt in and questioning of the Enlightenment legacy:

end of modernity = end of scientific positivism (end of Enlightenment centring dispersal

certitudes)
pure reason, objectivity is impossible, knowledge is human and mediated genre/boundary text/intertext
(see Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1964)
reason (intellectual know-how and its resultant technology) has failed to interpretation/reading against interpretation/misreading
deliver the good life
the belief in progress shattered (Western culture no longer privileged) art object/finished work process/performance/happening
questioning of metanarratives: deep aversion to universal emancipation
(metanarratives: broad interpretative schemas) 11. Poetry before and after the II. World War; Philip Larkin and
the political promise of the Enlightenment has failed Seamus Heaney
instead: there has to be a plurality of language games
link between power and truth/knowledge (Michel Foucault):
Introduction to mid 20th century literature and art
there is no objectivity: no neutral reason: reason often becomes the instrument
for power,
central event: second world war

fascism and communism
social, economic and political turmoil
reaction against high modernism
the 1930s and 40s: artists sensitive to the problems of the time:
Great Depression (1929)
the rise of Fascism
the Spanish Civil War
necessity of commitment:
Virginia Woolf The Leaning Tower
EITHER left wing sympathies (V. Woolf, W. H. Auden, C. D. Lewis)
OR: authoritarianism, conservativism (Roman Catholicism)
Wystan Hugh Auden [with Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis and
Louis MacNeice] New Country Poets)
interested in history, politics
I am your choice, your decision (Spain, 1937):
says history to people
belief in the ethical nature of poetry: to hold up human
values in the midst of inhumanity (paradox: poetry makes
nothing happens YET: the poet should persuade us to
rejoice and In the desert of the heart / let the healing
fountains start (In Memory of W. B. Yeats)
after the war in the 40s: a movement of new romantic poetry
main representative: Dylan Thomas (of Welsh origin)
interested in spirituality, religion, nature (not in politics
and society)
the 1950s: Ted Hughes (19301998) and Philip Larkin (19281985)
Ted Hughes: neo-Romantic (poet = shaman)
friend and translator of Jnos Pilinszky. See his article on Pilinszky:
http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=6300
husband of Sylvia Plath
14
problem/plight of modern man is that his rational and cognitive powers are
cultivated too exclusively;
How to turn instinctive, natural energies creative?
ANIMALS: manifestation of a life force, non-human, non-rational
Hawk Roosting
I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.
Inaction, no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.
The convenience of the high trees!
The air's buoyancy and the sun's ray
Are of advantage to me;
And the earth's face upward for my inspection.
My feet are locked upon the rough bark.
It took the whole of Creation
To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot
Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly -
I kill where I please because it is all mine.
There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads -
The allotment of death.
For the one path of my flight is direct
Through the bones of the living.
No arguments assert my right:
The sun is behind me.
Nothing has changed since I began.
My eye has permitted no change.
I am going to keep things like this.
PHILIP LARKIN (19281985)
They fuck you up, your mum and dad. But they were fucked up in their turn
They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another's throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.
 15
Study Questions
Life: graduated at Oxford (English literature) 1. Who is the speaker? What do we learn about him from the first stanza?
a librarian, writer of novels, reviewer of poetry 2. Characterize his attitude towards the church and what it represents as it is expressed in
third volume of poetry (The Less Deceived, 1955): the preeminent poet of his the first two stanzas. How does the style express the attitude (note the syntax of the
generation sentences in stanza 1)
3. How many structural units can we divide this poem into?
The Movement: a loose grouping of the 50s, based on key friendships (Larkin and Amis) 4. What cultural process is described in stanzas 3-5? What are its steps? What is
* concerned with the Englishness of their work symbolized by the invasion of the church by nature?
* respect for clarity, intelligibility: hostile to modernist literature, doubt about Eliot 5. What are some of the ambivalences and ironies of the last two stanzas? How does irony
* bored by the political preoccupations of the forties, even more by the dispair of the question even the positive statements?
forties, not interested in suffering
* nine writers: Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, Donald Davie, John Holloway, Elizabeth
Jennings, Philip Larkin, John Wain, Thom Gunn, Iris Murdoch
High Windows
When I see a couple of kids
Church Going (in the volume: The Less Deceived 1955) And guess he's fucking her and she's
* Movement identity characterized by an oscillation between agnosticism and a sensitivity Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
to the Christian tradition: I know this is paradise
* CG: articulates this tension in three steps! Composite tension made up of layers of
contrast (modern sporty cyclist VERSUS tradition; past and present, secularism and Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives--
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
religious belief, nature and culture Like an outdated combine harvester,
Once I am sure there's nothing going on
And everyone young going down the long slide
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
And thought, That'll be the life;
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
About hell and that, or having to hide
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence,
What you think of the priest. He
(first stanza)
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately
* initial personal experience broadened into sg. universal: the need for transcendence and
the loss of an organized framework of connection with it Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
A serious house on serious earth it is, The sun-comprehending glass,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet, And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Are recognised, and robed as destinies. Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
And that much never can be obsolete
(last stanza)
Study Questions
1. How old is the speaker?
* irony: each move towards a positive statement is cancelled
2. The basis of the poem is a comparison: a very common contrast or tension in human life
(society). What is it?
* Movement: not antiChristian: still a sense of their parents tradition
3. The poem is structured by two movements. Can you identify them? How does this affect
* all negatives in poetry, once stated, become a special kind of poetic positive
the meaning of the poem?
(Barbara Everett)
4. How is the speakers ambivalent attitude to modern emancipation expressed?

5. What can the windows symbolize?
* young lovers and older speaker: modernity, the break with religion and with tradition
described ambivalently (symbolic directions, down and up, indicate this)
* four letter word modernity VERSUS the exaltation of the close!
* window in French symbolism (Baudelaire, Mallarm): necessity and absence of the
ideal, an ideal we imprint on the void sky by the intensity of our longing
Seamus Heaney 1939-213
Irish, Nobel Prize in 1995.
Irish and not British: "Be advised, my passport's green / No glass of ours was ever raised /
To toast the Queen."
Only the very stupid or the very deprived can any longer help knowing that the documents of
civilization have been written in blood and tears, blood and tears no less real for being very
remote. And when this intellectual predisposition co-exists with the actualities of Ulster and
Israel and Bosnia and Rwanda and a host of other wounded spots on the face of the earth, the
inclination is not only not to credit human nature with much constructive potential but not to
credit anything too positive in the work of art. (from Nobel Lecture, 1995)
but also: poetry "the ship and the anchor" of our spirit within an ocean of violent, divisive
world politics
Life:
born near Castledawson, County Derry (orthern Ireland)
grew up on his father's cattle farm..
eldest in a Catholic family of nine children.
graduating from Queen's University, Belfast,
secondary school teacher, university lecturer (second place: Queen Univ. Belfast)
guest professor at American universities,
Living in Dublin he divides his time between America and Ireland
popular public readings (pop-music fanaticism)
a researcher of Old English: retranslated Beowulf;
2004 EU Enlargement (a poem)
Main themes:
1) exploration of the deep (based on personal memories and the Irish heritage)
2) violence and social injustice
3) individualistic and meditative (his own poetry)
1.) first volumes: Death of a Naturalist, Door into the dark
16
personal memories combined with images of Irish heritage and the landscape of
Northern Ireland (Digging, Bogland)
Digging: explores the poets relationship with his family and national heritage
digging up potatoes (fathers and grandfathers work) is paralleled with
the poets digging with his pen into the national heritage
drawing on myth and unique aspects of Irish experience
fascination for the darkness and the depths (Door into the Dark)
communion with the mystery:
the dark, violent aspect of nature
a feared, maternal darkness
expressed through
peering down wells
Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
(Personal Helicon)
digging (Digging)
fishing (The Casualty)
exhumation
rescuing from oblivion
probing of secrecy and inwardness
concern with the subaqueous and subterranean (Bogland, Punishment)
the bog: central symbol
the starting point for the exploration of the past
in several works Heaney has returned to the "bog people", bodies
preserved in the soil of Denmark and Ireland
(because of its chemical composition, peat has a preserving effect,
mummifying corpses and ancient objects
I had been vaguely wishing to write a poem about bogland, chiefly
because it is a landscape that has strange assuaging effect on me,
one with associations reaching back into early childhood. We used
to hear about bog-butter, butter kept fresh for a great number of
years under the peat. Then when I was at school the skeleton of an
elk had been taken out of a bog nearb and a few of our neighbours
had got ther photographs in the paper, peering out across its
antlers. So I began to get an idea of bog as the memory of the
landscape, or as a landscape that remembered everything that
happened in and to it. In fact, if you go round the National Museum
in Dublin, you will realize that a great proportion of th most
 17
cherished material heritage of Ireland was found in a bog (from The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.
Feeling into Words) The wet centre is bottomless.4

bog = memory of the landscape 2) violence (e. g. North, 1975)

congruence between bogland a repository of the past and the internal world of the poets social injustice and violent history of his country
preserving, shaping imagination, and, the national consciousness violence: also a permanent, mythic quality, as a constant of human history
bog = significant Irish myth (equivalent to the frontier and the West in American
consciousness) historical background: 1968-69: 'The Troubles'.

Bogland * sectarian violence in Ireland, addressing specific revenge killings

'Casualty': about Louis ONeill, fisherman
We have no prairies 'The Strand at Lough Beg': Heaneys cousin
To slice a big sun at evening-- * the Bog poems: based on the bodies recovered in the peat of Jutland
Everywhere the eye concedes to
Encrouching horizon,
'Punishment'
'The Tollund Man'
Is wooed into the cyclops' eye * religious prohibitions on sex that are the cause of children being killed or hidden away
Of a tarn.1 Our unfenced country 'Limbo' 'Bye Child'
Is bog that keeps crusting
Between the sights of the sun. public events, the statistics, intersect with the personal life of the poet
in Punishment:
They've taken the skeleton depicts a tribal revenge of adultery, but confesses his own powerlessness in front of
Of the Great Irish Elk ancient, violent forces.
Out of the peat2, set it up
An astounding crate full of air.
3) later works (Station Island, Sweeney Astray)
Butter sunk under strong individualistic, meditative mood
More than a hundred years At one minute you are drawn towards the old vortex of racial or religious instinct, at another
Was recovered salty and white. time you seek the mean of human love and reason
The ground itself is kind, black butter
(encore)
Melting and opening underfoot,
Missing its last definition Death of a Naturalist BY SEAMUS HEANEY
By millions of years.
They'll never dig coal here,3 All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Only the waterlogged trunks Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Of great firs, soft as pulp. Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
Our pioneers keep striking Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Inwards and downwards, Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
There were dragonflies, spotted butterflies,
Every layer they strip But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Seems camped on before. Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring
I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied

1 4
Mountain lake or pool; the mythical cyclops had only one eye. Older people were afraid we might fall into the pools in the old workings (excavations for mining or quarrying)
2
Carbonized vegetable tissue in the ground so they put it about (and we believed them) that there was no bottom in the bog-holes. Little did they or I
3
Because the ground is too wet for it to form. know that I would filch it for the last line of a book (Heaney, Feeling into Words)
 18
Specks to range on window sills at home,
On shelves at school, and wait and watch until
The fattening dots burst, into nimble
Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how
The daddy frog was called a bullfrog
And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too
For they were yellow in the sun and brown
In rain.

Then one hot day when fields were rank

With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.
 19
12. POSTMODERN LITERARY THEORY, POSTMODERN FICTION a large number of fragmentary possible worlds coexist
SALMAN RUSHDIE, KAZUO ISHIGURO in an impossible space (McHale)
poliphony (Mihail Bakhtin)
postmodern turn: in France and the United States rather than in England
detective story: modernism
1. Theory science fiction: postmodernism

(Ihab Hassans table, 1985) if reality is constructed (humanly, socially constructed):

there is any number of possible worlds
modernism postmodernism John Fowles: The French Lieutenants Woman:
metaphysics, transcendence irony, immanence three alternative endings
self-consuming text, self-erasure (Derrida),
to impose order no centre, no totality, fragments
artist: dead serious self-irony and play Magic realism: the fantastic (= coined by German art critic Franz Roh in
elitism democratization of taste 1925)
aesthetic craftsmanship television, internet, pop culture* ontological landscapes: double (sacred-profane)
single (hardscore positivism)
creation/totalization/synthesis creation/deconstruction/antithesis plural (postmodern: anarchic landscape of worlds)
(centring dispersal)
reality between fact (or history) and fiction: blurred
genre/boundary text/intertext the real is combined with the inexplicable and the fantastic (and sometimes
interpretation/reading against interpretation/misreading with the Gothic)
art object/finished work process/performance/happening postmodernists fictionalize history: is history itself a form of fiction?

* Television is the first cultural medium in the whole of history to present the artistic Salman Rushdie: Midnight Children (1981)
achievements of the past as a stitched together collage of equi-important and simultaneously Gabriel Garca Mrquez: Cien aos de soledad (1967)
existing phenomena, largely divorced from geography and material history and transported to the Mihail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita (1966)
living rooms and studios of the West in a more or less uninterrupted flow. It posits a viewer,
furthermore, who shares the mediums own perception of history as an endless reserve of equal
events. It is hardly surprising that the artists relation to history (the peculiar historicism we have rhetoric of contrastive banality:
already noted) has shifted, that in the era of mass television there has emerged an attachment to
surfaces rather than roots, to collage rather than in-depth work, to super-imposed quoted images Midnights Children: historical fantasy: integrating the historical and the
rather than worked surfaces, to a collapsed sense of time and space rather than solidly achieved fantastic
cultural artefact. And these are all vital aspects of artistic practice in the post-modern condition.
(From David Harvey: Condition of Postmodernity)
official version of history VERSUS alternative, secret history

2. Postmodernist fiction (Brian McHale, 1987) Indian history linked to the fates of children born at the same time (midnight,
August 15, 1947: the day of Indian independence)
i. Real, compared to what?
narrator: Saleem Sinai
modernism: multiple perspectives on the same reality the children: microcosms of the Indian macrocosm, paralleling or mirroring
postmodern novels: a plurality of worlds (is there a single reality?) public history in their private histories

ii. Literature in English
cosmopolitan concept of literature written in English)
the dominant role of the West, esp. orientalism questioned
(Colin MacCabe, 1981): the multiplication of Englishes
throughout the world and their attendant literatures;
English literature is dead long live writing in English
examples for literature in English:
Salman Rushdie: Midnights Children
Kazuo Ishiguro: Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro (1954)
born in Nagasaki, Japan, family moved to England in 1960.
lives in London, British wife
neither English, nor Japanese: an outsider
Novels:
studies of character, of human failings
great empathy, subtle depiction of the inner world of the protagonists
combined with subtle irony
first person narratives which recollect emotional extremes and traumatic events
ending on a note of melancholy resignation: characters facing and accepting
their past
Remains of the Day 1989
the first person narration of Stevens, Lord Darlingtons butler
social, cultural changes
disappearance of old, aristocratic values: civility, dignity, professional
perfection
commercialization of the values of the past: the head servant is part of the
package
(new owner, Farraday): You are the real thing arent you? Thats what I
wanted, isnt that what I have?
postimperial transformations: the leveling of social hierarchy, the loss of
imperial identity, movement from Empire to globalized web)
20
the inward look: journey into the past:
Stevens motoring trip = symbol for a trip into his (and the national) past
first person narration: combination of reminiscences, flashbacks,
straightforward narrative
the impossibility of reconciling professional duties with private (emotional)
life
two irrevocable choices: rejected his housekeepers (Miss Kentons) approach
uncritical support to Lord Darlingtons sentimental attempt to
appease the Nazis
contradictions: both proud and ashamed of LD
makes much of the fact that by serving
Darlington he participated in the making of
history
postmodern perspective: tension between the grand narratives of the war and
the minor subjective narrative of Stevens (macronarratives and the
micronarrative)
(the butlers) style: again subtle ambiguity
dignified, aesthetic, civil and fluent or is it the parody of that?
But I see I am becoming preoccupied with these memories and this is
perhaps a little foolish. This present trip represents, after all, a rare
opportunity for me to savour to the full the many splendours of the
English contryside, and I know I shall greatly regret it later if I allow
myself to be unduly diverted.
Ishiguro: to examine the extent to which such a style is indeed dignified and to
what an extent it is a form of cowardice

EXAMINATION TOPICS (only British)
1. Transition to modernism: Thomas Hardys poetry
2. Modernist Poetry: Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot
3. The Modernist Novel: Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce
4. Absurd Drama: Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter
5. Poetry after the II. World War: Philip Larkin and Seamus Heaney
6. The postmodern novel: Kazuo Ishiguro or Salman Rushdie
21
Required Reading
Poetry:
Thomas Hardy: Hap, Neutral Tones, Convergence of the Twain
W. B. Yeats: Easter 1916; The Second Coming; Sailing to Byzantium OR Among
Schoolchildren
T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land: The Burial of the Dead; Game of Chess
Philip Larkin: Church Going, High Windows
Seamus Heaney: Bogland, Digging
Drama:
Harold Pinter: The Birthday Party OR Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot
Prose fiction:
Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness OR Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway
(http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91md/)
Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day OR Salman Rushdie: Midnight Children
RECOMMENDED READING:
Randall Stevenson: Modernist Fiction: an Introduction. Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992.
Brian McHale: Postmodernist Fiction. Routhledge, London and NY, 1987.
Malcolm Bradbury: The Modern British Novel, 1993.
Innes, Christopher, Modern British Drama, 1890-1990. Cambridge, 1992.
Esslin, Martin, The Theatre of the Absurd. Harmondsworth, 1968 (1961).
Perkins, David, A History of Modern Poetry. 2 vols. Cambridge MA, 1976 and 1987.