VirginiaWoolf

U.K.b.1882d.1941

Virginia Woolf (U.K. 1882-1941)A Room of One’s Own (1929)

• Mental instability, abuse

• 1905: Bloomsbury Group; 1912: m. Leonard Woolf

• Brilliant innovative Modernist writer

• Hogarth Press• “Angel in the House”

• 1928 Lectures on Women & Creativity, Newnham College

• Shakespeare’s Sister: Essay genre; Anglo-American Feminist Literary Criticism

• Rec. Films: The Hours, Orlando, Mrs. Dalloway

World War I: 1914-1918See 20th Cent. Timeline (Davis et al. 1346-1351)

• 1917-1922: Bolshevik Revolution, Civil War in Russia

• 1920: Women’s Suffrage in U.S.; Irish independence; Gandhi leads Indian independence

• 1922: Soviet Union

• 1924: Lenin dies, Stalin comes to power

• 1925: Hitler, Mein Kampf; U.S. Scopes “monkey” Trial

• Late 1920s: German “Black Friday”; U.S. Stock Market crash;1930s: Depression

1924: Lenin dies; Joseph Stalin gains power.Stalin perfects Lenin’s tactics of terror.Communist rule becomestotalitarian dictatorship fueled by paranoia.1930's: Stalinist Terror peaks;Purges claim millions of victims:Akhmatova’s friends, fellow writers, & her only son, Lev Gumilev.1933, 1935: Lev Gumilev arrested, imprisoned, threatened with death

Anna Ahkmatova [b. Anya Gorenko]Russia, 1889-1966

Akhmatova’s Requiem(wr. 1935-1940; banned in USSR)

• Alienated by sick dehumanized society

• Realist protest: death of individual freedom, negation of family ties

• Realist subject: social realities, misery of ordinary people’s lives

• Art’s critical function

• Romantic individ-ualism of visionary (confessional) poet as national conscience: “I” & (controlled)

emotion to remember & bear witness for silenced community.

Requiem, cont.

• Organicism: poetic expression creates its own poetic forms; Mixed points of view, style, form - varies among poems in cycle

• Modernist fragments comprise the cohesive whole

• Readers co-create meaning, but Akhmatova not distainful of general audience

• Powerful simplicity, directness, concrete imagery (rejects obscure symbolism):

World War II (1939-1945)

• WWI not “war to end all wars”: tensions brew 1920s-1930s

• economic conflicts & competition among colonial powers

• rise of dictators & ultra-nationalism

• world-wide depression

• Fascism (Hitler, Mussolini, Franco): reverse decline of West, preserve “pure” European culture; “Axis” incl. Japan

• Democracies “Allies”• Communism: Stalin,

totalitarianism

“Where Are the War Poets?”

• 1939:Appeasement fails, war begins

• TLS chastises U.K. poets for failing to “do their duty,” calling upon them to sound “trumpet call” to fight this “monstrous threat to belief & freedom”

• Cecil Day Lewis responds for many writers in: “Where Are the War Poets?”. . . .

“Where Are the War Poets?” cont.

“They who in folly & mere greed

Enslaved religion, markets, laws,

Borrow our language now & bid

Us to speak up in freedom’s cause.”

“It is the logic of our times,

No subject for immortal verse—

That we who lived by honest dreams

Defend the bad against the worst.”

WW II, cont.

• Unprecedented scale of world conflict & devastation (aerial bombing)

• Science, technology, industrialism used for mass murder

• Genocide in the Death Camps

• Atomic bomb (Hiroshima, Nagasaki): power to bring on apocalypse

• Civilian casualties, nightmare of suffering & devastation

• United Nations: re-build hope for future?

WW II: The Aftermath

• Politically defines world powers for next 40 years

• Raises profound moral. spiritual & political questions re: religious faith, human capacity for evil - triumph of the “dark side”

• Global guilt: passive immorality of people, nations who stood by & did nothing

• Challenges Enlighten-ment faith in progress, human reason, science, education

Post-WWII: Existentialism

• Existentialism (e.g.

Sartre, Camus): human condition =absurd, alienated & angst-ridden: --cast alone into a senseless alien universe (without meaning or value);--death our only certainty; --radical responsibility for creating meaning, value of our existence: Existence precedes essence

• 20th-Century Literature of the Absurd (Kafka & his heirs) depicts surreal, radically meaningless, randomly violent modern world, where ethical justice & spiritual values seem to have no place or power.

• “The Metamorphosis” (wr 1912; pub. 1915, 1948)

The books we needare the kind

that act upon uslike a nightmare,

that make us sufferlike the death

of someone we lovemore than ourselves.

. . . . A book should serve

as an axfor the frozen sea

inside us.”

Franz Kafka (1883-1924)

Post-WWII Art/Literature in Crisis

• Survivor guilt, betrayal, withdrawal: “inner emigration” (Hannah Arendt)

• Failure of the imagination before the unthinkable, loss of reasons to go on living, make sense of senseless horrors

Heated debate: • What kind of art, literature

is viable, equal to profound issues raised by WWII?

• Can art/lit help restore human values in post-WWII global society?

• Sartre (and others) call for Post-WWII artists and writers to meet these challenges.

Holocaust Literature

• Jean-Paul Sartre: post- WWII “arte engage” authenticity of form and feeling paramount (vs. Romantic sublime egotism & art for art’s sake = frivolous & irresponsible)

• New Global consciousness

• Wiesel’s “vow of silence” (1945), then silence broken (Night, 1960)

• Eye witness - Bear witness: testify to the unthinkable horrors

• Obligation to the dead: Do not forget!

1986 Nobel Peace Prize:“one of the most important spiritual

leaders and guides in an age when violence, repression and racism

continue to characterise the world.”Wiesel’s “hard-won belief” that evil

can be overcome originated in personal experience of Hitler’s death

camps and soul-wrenching testimonies that Wiesel has widened

to embrace the sufferings of “all repressed peoples and races.”

Elie Wiesel (b. 1928, Romania)

Wiesel’s “message is one of peace, atonement and human dignity.”

Wiesel’s “Death of My Father”(From Legends of Our Time, 1968; rpt. 1982)

• Rejects fiction for confessional memoir, autobiography -acts of memory with truth value, authentic

• Confront the past• Survivor guilt &

Healing power of storytelling

• Pose tough, probing questions: Where was God? What happened to ethics, justice? What meaning can religious rites confer?

• Modernist search for meaning w/new urgency - will human imagination fail again?

Takenishi’s “The Rite” (1963)

• Japanese children of 1945 begin to tell their stories of sorrow, loss, grief in 1950s-60s. Shares Wiesel’s themes: death rites, acts of remembering

• Fictionalizes to distance? Survivors’ guilt, incomprehension

• Semi-autobiographical retelling of Hiroshima: Aug. 1945, Takenishi 16-yr-old schoolgirl; large no. of Japanese school kids killed; 140,000 dead by end 1945; 60,000+ die of longer term effects

• Long silence, denial

“The Rite,” cont.

• Setting: one long night 10 yrs. later when Aki can’t sleep, & suppressed memories flood back

• Adapts Modernist narrative techniques to create authentic representation of psychological reality

• Modernist rendering of Aki’s past memories & present consciousness: free-associational, stream of consciousness

• achronological, fragmented, disjointed flashbacks/forwards = broken pieces of film

“The Rite,” cont.

• Modernist search of meaning - look back & look within at what has been repressed

• Remembering frees her of the past, by confronting its horrors, & performing the death rites left undone

• Readers too must experience Aki’s dislocation, confusion, alienation, etc. in search for meaning

• “World” Literature(e.g. TFA, 1958)

Garcia Marquez

Kundera