Tous les articles sur la thématique "literature"

Une peinture vibrante représente un village médiéval utopique et animé sous un grand arbre, avec des citadins se livrant à diverses activités. Les gens dînent, conversent et travaillent près des maisons en briques et des sentiers sinueux. L’arrière plan présente des collines, une rivière sinueuse et un ciel nuageux et lumineux.

Utopia: A Socialist Epoch of Rest

by · Lecture: 6 minutes
  1. A Definition of Utopia in Literature
  2. Introduction to News From Nowhere
  3. Utopia: A Socialist Epoch of Rest

Utopia is based on the concept of rest, linked up with dreams. In Rip Van Winkle (1819) by Washington Irving, the character falls asleep for 20 years and wakes up in the middle of nowhere, in the theme of “suspended animation”. When Rip wakes up, he has missed the American Revolution: he is a stranger in his own land because of the lapse of time due to an irrational event.

To rip is to tear. He rips the curtains of time. RIP also means “rest in peace”. It symbolises death and resurrection. Rest is therefore the framework of the novel, along with the importance of Marxism. The author cannot help infusing his own beliefs into his programmatic vision. William Morris is “moved by compassion for the working class”.

William Morris’s socialism, inspired by scientific Marxism, emphasises fellowship, happiness, personal fulfilment through work and art, and the role of education in the socialist process. The future of revolution depends on the success of education. His socialism respects individuality and no repression of the varieties of human nature.

It clouds the issues: it is more a matter of time than a place. Nowhere is England and the reporter is addressing an imaginary audience. “Rest” has several meanings. An epoch is a period, a parenthesis in history, just a time-lapse in the future.”Some chapters’ are a few fragments from future history, limited.

Rest and Unrest

Unrest represents social unrest, in the capitalist society. Contrariwise, rest breaks from capitalism, it is a necessary death resulting in resurrection and regeneration, a vital revival after a long period of social turmoil. Rest suggests a historical ordeal, relief and respite after a long struggle. It qualifies Marxist influences.

The first leitmotiv is pleasure. Then it gives way to rest and peace. Words are related to each other. Page 44 shows rest on happiness, peace and dreams. The notion of dream permeates the narrative. The guest is transported to the world of 2103.

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Une scène de campagne pittoresque aux couleurs vives présente un village idyllique avec des chalets le long d’une rivière sinueuse. Les gens participent à diverses activités comme la navigation de plaisance, la lessive, le jardinage et la conversation. Des champs luxuriants, des collines et une volée d'oiseaux remplissent l'arrière plan un aperçu de News From Nowhere.

Introduction to News From Nowhere

by · Lecture: 15 minutes
  1. A Definition of Utopia in Literature
  2. Introduction to News From Nowhere
  3. Utopia: A Socialist Epoch of Rest

Utopia did not inspire William Morris as no references exist. he might have read Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1871), whose title is an inversion or reversal of “nowhere”. In this book, the world is enslaved by machines that become so powerful and intelligent.

Morris’s utopia is suspicious about machines. It is hard to make a clear distinction between political manifestos and utopias. Socialist books can sound like utopias. Owen, Fourié anticipated Karl Marx. Is News From Nowhere a manifesto or a deliberate romance? If you read the subtitle you get the answer though it is not clear-cut.

William Morris: Life and Works

In the article “How I Became a Socialist”, published in 1819, Morris said, “Apart from a desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life is hatred of modern civilisation”.  The central concept of beauty is opposed to the notion of hatred: this is Morris’s struggle for socialism. Gradually, we discover some anticipations of our world.

In 1834, Morris was born in the countryside. His dad was a businessman in the city (“well-to-do”). There were lots of personal contradictions. He was from a family of nine children, number three and the eldest son. His father died in 1847. They had moved to a place called Woodford Hall, in a beautiful villa.

In his case, the autobiography is essential. News From Nowhere is packed with different elements of his biography: personal background and architecture. It is always a beautiful house with green and beautiful natural surroundings. His childhood was connected with beauty and nature. He had a passion with his dad for the Middle Ages; they visited churches and mediaeval architecture. A critic called this “childhood medievalism”.

Walter Scott was instrumental in shaping memories of the past. After the death of his dad, he went to Marlborough College. he did not like it and called it “a really rough school”. Fascinated by the past, he visited many monuments (“monumenta” in Latin). He had a fascination for history. “I don’t remember having been taught to read”;  in News From Nowhere, children learn by themselves.

In 1853, Morris went to Oxford, the ideal place for its gothic architecture and literary productions. There, he met John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle and he met his best friend Edward Burne-Jones (later to become a famous painter). They became close friends till the end.

Morris went to the continent, to Belgium and Northern France where he visited cathedrals (Amiens, Beauvais and Chartres). At Oxford, he started mediaeval history. He was an intellectual and active at the same time – this is the greatest originality about Morris. They visited Le Louvre. He and his friends were mystical and had a taste for religious commitment.

This was the time when Morris and Jones decided to become artists: an architect and a painter. Maurice didn’t have to work as he was getting an income from his father. There was a gothic revival at the time, with a new taste for mediaeval architecture. It was trendy to be into mediaeval ideals and chivalry. There was a general aspiration to the simple life of the mediaeval monasteries.

Carlyle and Ruskin were very influential at the time. Nostalgia was very trendy. These people were progressive (involved in social movements) and at the same time regressive (with mediaeval ideals): it was a strange conciliation between progress and regress. What was meant by art was a resolve to defend a new sort of art coming from the past and to be defended in the future. You must go backwards to progress. Novelty lies only in the past.

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Une peinture vibrante et détaillée représente un village utopique situé dans une vallée luxuriante avec un grand bâtiment néoclassique au centre. Les gens se livrent à diverses activités comme l’agriculture, les jeux et la socialisation, sur fond de montagnes, de champs et d’un soleil radieux se levant dans le ciel – une véritable définition de l’utopie.

A Definition of Utopia in Literature

by · Lecture: 12 minutes
  1. A Definition of Utopia in Literature
  2. Introduction to News From Nowhere
  3. Utopia: A Socialist Epoch of Rest

To define utopia, we must look for the etymology given by Thomas More. “U-topos” means “no place, nowhere”. “Eu-topos” means “the good place”, it is therefore ambiguous.

Utopia has no real location, it is a vision, impossible to find. It is good, the world is perfect, and it represents a quest for perfection. Thus, how can we reach such perfection? More’s Utopia tries to answer this: in Book I, he describes the English system and institutions he wants to eliminate. Book II describes Utopia, the materialisation of the perfect world in the future. 

Utopias are always prospective. It suggests that present-day institutions are dangerous and that we need to create a new system in the future. The characteristics of utopia are:

  • Isolated
  • Self-centred
  • An island

It is a world that cannot be contaminated by the outside world, far away from corruption. The Protestant Reformation was fighting against the corruption of the Catholic Church. Andreae, a Protestant leader wrote Christianopolis. The second reason for the emergence of Utopia is America, for it was a world of perfection, uncontaminated by civilisation.

Utopia’s subgenre is dystopia. “Dys” means “bad place”. It is a counter model, the place we must avoid at all costs. Counter-utopia and anti-utopia are confusing. A counter-utopia is a model that tries to abandon an austere model.

Perfection is dangerous. Most 19th and 20th ideologies were inspired by utopias: communism, and fascism. They aimed at creating a perfect world. In the 1960s there was a strong response to the tyranny of utopians, with the libertarians and the hippies: they refused bureaucracy and forged an individualistic response to a utopian future – the community. Utopia is interested in a group, a mass of people but not individuals. 

In the 16th century, there was a lot of interest in Thomas More’s Utopia because people were fed up with the regime, yet they did not see the problems.

The first utopia, Plato’s Republic, is a search for justice with a strong emphasis on community and property, and the abolition of money, gold and silver. Gold is used for chamber pots. The emphasis is on education and equality between men and women. We find the same features in Thomas More’s Utopia. Some ideas are acceptable, and some are not (like eugenics). Utopia endowed an implicit tyranny: while it means to make people happy, it contributes to their fall.

The concept of utopia

There have been many utopias, especially now that the definition is more precise. The definition depends on the ideological context. We can try to point out several concepts through centuries.

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Mme Dalloway, une femme en costume, naviguant dans le temps avec une horloge et des fleurs.

The fictive experience of time through Mrs. Dalloway

by · Lecture: 7 minutes
  1. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf: A Modernist Novel
  2. Time on the surface level of Mrs. Dalloway
  3. Time and Virginia Woolf’s novel technique
  4. The fictive experience of time through Mrs. Dalloway

Now the reader’s experience must be studied because, when all is said and done, it is the way in which the complexity of time is felt that constitutes part of the interest (part of the pleasure) we derive from reading “Mrs. Dalloway”.

‘Monumental’ time versus private time

Virginia Woolf suggests that time is not uniform, time is not the same for everyone at the same moment. The experience of time is filtered through the characters’ consciousness.

We may distinguish between two forms of time: ‘monumental time’ and ‘private time’. Monumental time is the time of the clocks: Big Ben striking the ‘irrevocable hour’, but it is also the time of the power, of the authorities, of the institutions that fix working hours and regulate the lives of ‘well-balanced people’. Private time is subjective; it is torn apart (asunder) between memory (the past) and expectation: looking forward to future events.

What Virginia Woolf subtly shows is that ‘monumental time’, for example, the chiming of Big Ben, arouses different responses and touches off different echoes according to the characters. Of course, the chiming of Big Ben is objectively the same for everyone at the same instant, however, Virginia Woolf sets out to show that they affect characters differently according to the state of mind and disposition they find themselves in, on the spur of the moment.

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Une pile de papiers, de livres et de puzzles sur une table présentant la nouvelle technique de Virginia Woolf à travers le concept de temps.

Time and Virginia Woolf’s novel technique

by · Lecture: 5 minutes
  1. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf: A Modernist Novel
  2. Time on the surface level of Mrs. Dalloway
  3. Time and Virginia Woolf’s novel technique
  4. The fictive experience of time through Mrs. Dalloway

Showing the various strata of time by taking one single day is a starting point. It is a paradox since at the end, Woolf suggests that taking one single day is an illusion: huge portions of the past are to be found behind every moment in the present. each moment of the present contains within itself different temporal layers.

Time and story-telling

How can a novelist investigate and analyse the depths of different individual minds while keeping a sense of unity? Or, put differently, how can a novelist create a coherent, well-structured novel from various disconnected subjectivities?

Woolf chose a peculiar narrative voice that could dwell and stay successively in the minds of the different protagonists, and that could register/record what goes on in the character’s consciousness. The narrative presence keeps moving from one character to the next and remembers everything. It has the power to resurrect the past in the narration, i.e. the power of bringing back the past into the present or the fiction.

This narrative voice is like a state of mind outside the characters and of which the characters themselves are not conscious. The state of mind surrounds/encloses the characters and glides/insinuates into the recesses of their minds. This narrative presence violates their inner thoughts and steals their most intimate secrets.

Thus, the form of narration of “Mrs. Dalloway” is the indirect discourse, that we will analyse.

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Une peinture de personnages du Vicaire de Wakefield rassemblés dans une pièce.

Characters and characterization in The Vicar of Wakefield

by · Lecture: 6 minutes
  1. Characters and characterization in The Vicar of Wakefield
  2. Structure and Plot in The Vicar of Wakefield

Characters are a finished product. Characterization is the technique of production of the characters, it reflects the way of thinking.

Goldsmith was not only a novelist but also a playwright: he wrote “The Good Natur’d Man” (1768) and “She Stoops to Conquer” (1773). When he wrote “The Vicar of Wakefield”, Goldsmith was testing through fiction characters who were to become perfectible on stage. Full-fledged characters are fleshed-out characters. Fiction writing was for him a draft for theatre, that’s the reason why there are so many references to theatre in the text.

“All the same flesh and blood” (p. 10)

All of the characters are connected through the family.

The family circle

Being a vicar, Primrose reminds his reader that all mankind makes up a large family. Characters are defined through kinship (family relationships). For instance, the Primroses form the typical family structure of the 18th century:

  • the father is at the centre (patriarchal model)
  • the eldest son is favoured (primogeniture)
  • gender roles are well-differentiated (p. 45)

The patronym is Primrose: it is a forerunner of the end of the story. To be “prim” is to behave well and to be easily shocked. The “rose” is a flower, the symbol of England. “Rose” is also the preterit from “to rise”, indicating social elevation.

Throughout the novel, the reader comes across characters who are connected by family ties. Yet, in the denouement, the already existing family bonds are strengthened: In the end, the Primrose family find themselves united to the Wilmots (through George’s wedding) and to the Thornhills (through Sophia’s wedding, and through Olivia’s wedding that proves to have been genuine after all).

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Une peinture représentant un groupe de personnes dans une pièce, dont un vicaire de Wakefield.

Structure and Plot in The Vicar of Wakefield

by · Lecture: 11 minutes
  1. Characters and characterization in The Vicar of Wakefield
  2. Structure and Plot in The Vicar of Wakefield

“The Vicar of Wakefield” is a classic novel by Oliver Goldsmith, first published in 1766. It’s often celebrated for its charming portrayal of rural English life, its exploration of virtue and resilience in the face of adversity, and its satirical take on the social and moral issues of its time. The narrative centres around Dr Primrose, the vicar of the title, and his family as they navigate a series of misfortunes that test their faith, virtue, and familial bonds.

Dr. Primrose, a man of modest wealth and virtue, lives contentedly with his wife and six children in a small parish. Their tranquil life is upended when the vicar’s financial stability is destroyed, leading the family to move to a more humble residence in another village. The family’s trials and tribulations include financial ruin, seduction, abduction, and imprisonment. Yet, throughout these hardships, Dr. Primrose’s steadfast faith, optimism, and paternal love remain unshaken, serving as a moral compass for his family and the novel’s readers.

Goldsmith employs a mix of satire, sentimentality, and moral reflection, making “The Vicar of Wakefield” a richly layered text. It satirizes the social and moral pretensions of the time, while also presenting a heartfelt exploration of human resilience and the importance of family. The novel’s enduring appeal lies in its complex characterizations, its humour, and its compassionate insight into human nature and societal flaws.

The story is meant to educate and teach a moral lesson to the reader. Yet, the vicar is a model of good behaviour, a paragon of virtue and he is presented comically. He has shortcomings, defects, and very visible weaknesses. The vicar adores showing off and teaching lessons. He displays his knowledge foolishly. He also has a pet theme: monogamy.

The narrative structure of “The Vicar of Wakefield” is notable for its use of a first-person perspective, allowing readers an intimate glimpse into Dr. Primrose’s thoughts and feelings. This approach lends the story an air of authenticity and emotional depth, as the vicar’s virtues and flaws are laid bare.

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Un collage de femmes et d'hommes côte à côte, représentant le progrès et la diversité de la civilisation britannique aux XIXe et XXe siècles.

British Civilisation and Literature: 19th and 20th centuries

by · Lecture: 8 minutes
  1. The 18th Century: the Age of Enlightenment
  2. The Gothic and the Fantastic
  3. The 19th Century : Romanticism in Art and Literature
  4. English Romanticism (1798-1832)
  5. 19th Century Literary Movements : Realism and Naturalism
  6. British Civilisation and Literature: 19th and 20th centuries

The Victorian Period: 1832-1900

The Victorian Period took place during the long reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901). Great Britain was then the first industrial, cultural and economic nation, with a thriving economy. It was a time of social and political stability and the colonies were a huge market for British products. The British population rose from 2 million people to 6.5 million people. The Great Exhibition of 1851 was a demonstration of British power.

Yet, some social problems arose: trade unions were forbidden and this led to riots. The “Corn Laws” were used to keep the price of bread high. There was pauperism too: in 1864, the Poor Law Amendment Act was introduced to solve the problem of poverty with workhouses.

The Victorian Period was the age of two extremes: the poor working class and the middle classes, rich and comfortable. It was a 2-standard society. It was also an age marked by scientific and economic confidence and social and spiritual pessimism. Some great debates took place: intellectual activity and questioning on varied themes such as justice, liberty and progress. In 1859, Charles Darwin published “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection”.

The Mid-Victorian society is still held together by Christian moral teachings. The stress was on the virtues of family life. Some saw the family as an agent of oppression, as an efficient means to maintain uniformity in society. It was also the time of the first real moves of the modern women’s movement. Yet, at the same time, there was a great respect for the matronly model provided by Queen Victoria herself: the stereotype of virtuous womanhood.

The 19th Century: the Great Age of the English novel and Gothic novel

With Charles Dickens, a new concern of the society emerged:

  • he was a clock (a huge worker)
  • his father was imprisoned for debt
  • he started working at the factory at 12

Dickens’ life inspired his novels: David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, The Pickwick Papers, and Hard Times. They all revolve around the problems of society and the suffering of children.

He is never pathetic but sometimes humourous and ironic. Dickens’s depiction of the Victorian change of feelings from optimism and confidence at the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign in 1837 to uncertainty and melancholy thirty years later.

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Un dessin animé parodique mettant en scène deux hommes jouant au croquet dans le style de Tristram Shandy.

To what extent is Tristram Shandy a parody?

by · Lecture: 5 minutes

At the beginning of a novel, a writer has to call up a world of his. It’s the “willing suspension of disbelief’ (Samuel Coleridge), which only happens if the situation is credible. It means that the reader accepts the story without always questioning the facts related, but he’s expected to take things seriously.

The opening chapter is likely to puzzle the reader who has some good reasons to feel disoriented. He suspects Sterne of playing a trick on him.

The novelist presents this text as a fictitious autobiography. “Opinions” means a documented essay, and “gent” (a short for gentlemen) specifies that the character occupies a high level in society. The quotation in Greek is erudite, it’s an epigraph (part of the paratext).

Playing with the rules of the realist novel

The story is presented as a jest.

A lack of chronological progression

The first-person narrator does not follow the linear, chronological progression of an autobiography. The story is “ab ovo” as Tristram is not born yet. He tells a story he cannot have witnessed: “My Tristram’s misfortunes began 9 months before he came to this world”.

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Un dessin animé inspiré du roman Tristram Shandy mettant en scène un homme chevauchant un cheval et un chien, créant un visuel anti roman amusant.

Is Tristram Shandy a novel or an anti-novel?

by · Lecture: 5 minutes

A general presentation of Tristram Shandy

The title shows that novelists played with the rules of the New Novel genre. Tristram Shandy is a unique literary experience. It is a long and intricate text that does not even tell a story, or at least in an unusual way. It cannot be read from cover to cover: there is no unique plot but digressions, essays, and experiments with typography.

We can find blank pages, drawings, dashes, italics and chapters which have gone missing. It is much more complicated than a joke, it is a book that is highly interesting in its artistic form. It is a reflexive text, which is also commenting on the meaning of fiction writing.

The influences of other writings

Sterne was a cultivated vicar and a well-read man, influenced by Shakespeare, Rabelais, and Cervantes but also by philosophers such as Descartes or Locke.

Tristram Shandy was published in several instalments. Volumes 1-6 were published in 1760-1761, and volumes 7-9 were published between 1765 and 1767. Tristram Shandy was immediately successful and made Laurence Stern rich. However, Sterne contracted tuberculosis and had to go to France (the description of Paris is in vol. 7). Several authors influenced Laurence Sterne.

Don Quijote

Sterne likes Cervantes’ comic method which consists of telling simple insignificant events by using epic style. There’s a distortion, a gap between the event or action and how the event is described. This gap is what is called “mock-heroic”: it is not serious enough to be epic, and it creates a comic effect.

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An English Romanticism painting of a landscape with trees and hills. William Turner, Dawn in the Valleys of Devon.

English Romanticism (1798-1832)

by · Lecture: 21 minutes
  1. The 18th Century: the Age of Enlightenment
  2. The Gothic and the Fantastic
  3. The 19th Century : Romanticism in Art and Literature
  4. English Romanticism (1798-1832)
  5. 19th Century Literary Movements : Realism and Naturalism
  6. British Civilisation and Literature: 19th and 20th centuries

English Romanticism began in 1798 with the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s The Lyrical Ballads and ended in 1832 with Walter Scott’s death. William Blake and Robert Burns also belong to this literary genre, though they lived before the Romantic period.

Romanticism took place during a period of wars and revolutions, of considerable shifts and changes. It was a time of profound political and social reorganisation.

Romantic texts were varied and dealt with the Industrial Revolution and its consequences: a new class system, and a new type of economy. It’s important to emphasize the fact that this is the time when numerous kinds of problems appeared. Famous writers include William Blake, William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge.

Besides the Industrial Revolution, it is impossible to ignore the two major political upheavals that took place at that time, namely the American War of Independence (1776-1783) and the French Revolution (1789), which challenged old systems of social and political organizations.

Eugene Delacroix Le 28 Juillet. La Liberte guidant le peuple
Eugene Delacroix – Le 28 Juillet. La Liberté guidant le peuple.

The French Revolution struck British consciousness at first very favourably. Samuel Coleridge celebrated and praised it in a poem entitled “Destruction of the Bastille”.

Enthusiasm melted away as the war between France and Britain broke out four years later (1793), about the same time as the Reign of Terror started (1793-1794).

Romanticism was a period of constant tensions, observable in some of the poems we will study.

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Family in Death for a Salesman photo

Family in Death of a Salesman

by · Lecture: 5 minutes
  1. Death of a Salesman : an extended introduction
  2. Family in Death of a Salesman
  3. Death of a Salesman: Tragedy versus Social Drama
  4. Death of a Salesman: the play’s structure, a memory play

In an article entitled The Family in Modern Drama, Arthur Miller insisted that all “great plays” finally grapple with one central issue: “How may a man make of the outside world a home?”.

Making the outside world a home would imply being “well-liked”: managing to turn anonymous, business relations into close family ties – that is to say being able, like Dave Singleman, “to go… into twenty or thirty different cities, and pick up a phone, and be remembered and loved and helped by so many different people?” (p.63).

In Death of a Salesman, the dream of social success cannot be disentangled from the idyllic vision of society as a large, tightly-knit family.

Yet, there is every reason to believe that Dave Singleman, as his patronymic shows, is a bachelor, when the foundation of the much-vaunted American ideal remains the nuclear family: the nuclear family as an agent of socialization and as a stabilizing influence.

Precisely in Death of a Salesman spectators are given privileged access into the private sphere of a family and occasionally turned into voyeurs. It seems that far from offering a secure, reassuring nest the family also reverberates the tensions of society at large in the 1950s.

1. The Green World patriarchal clan

Willy, through his conversation with Ben (38-41) harks back to his infancy. The image of the father is mythologized by both sons – the elder Ben and the younger Willy – even if Father Loman deserted his wife and children to lead an adventurous life.

The mother is hardly ever referred to. She must nevertheless have had a hard life providing sustenance and comfort for her two sons. When Ben followed in his father’s footsteps by running off for adventure, Mother Loman still had Willy to look after.

Willy, who recalls sitting on “Mamma’s lap” (38), suffered from his father’s absence. The lack of paternal care resulted in his feeling “kind of temporary about (himself)” (40).

Mother Loman’s caring presence is trivialized: “fine specimen of a Lady, Mother” (35) and the “old girl” when reunion with the vanished father is Ben and Willy’s single purpose. Ben starts for Alaska hoping to find his father (37) and Willy elects a father figure through his total devotion to Dave Singleman, another salesman.

Willy has remained so obsessed with the myth of his Father that he entreats Ben to tell Biff and Happy about their grandfather, so they can learn “the kind of stock they spring from” (38). So, in a way, it is as if all the Loman men sprang directly from their father’s side and as if their mother had had no part to play in their birth.

An Edenic myth is implied which seems to preclude, or at least downplay woman’s role in the procreation process.

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