Interpretari de texte - modul

Interpretari de texte - modul

CUPRINSUL MODULULUI:

1. TEMA NR. 1 TEXTS AND CONTEXTS. ANALYSISNG A TEXT IN ITS CONTEXT. SOME LITERARY TERMS AND TECHNIQUES

Unitați de invațare

1.1. Eighteenth Century England. An Introduction.

1.2. Introduction into the Victorian Age

1.3. Focus on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literary Writings

1.4. Literary Terms and Techniques

2. TEMA NR. 2: EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PROSE FICTION. DANIEL DEFOE (1659-1731). 'THE LIFE AND STRANGE SURPRISING ADVENTURES OF ROBINSON CRUSOE, MARINER' (1719)

Unitați de invațare

1.1. The Novel in Eighteenth-Century England

1.2. Daniel Defoe. His Life and Works.

1.3. Introduction into 'The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson             Crusoe.'

1.4. Text interpretation. Points to consider and analysis.

3. TEMA NR. 3: EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PROSE FICTION SATIRE. JONATHAN SWIFT (1667-1745). 'A MODEST PROPOSAL' (1729)

Unitați de invațare

1.1. Jonathan Swift. His Life and Pamphlets.

1.2. Satire. Definition.

1.3. Swift: A Master of Style and of Satire in 'A Modest Proposal'

4. TEMA NR. 4: EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PROSE FICTION. THE ANTI-NOVEL: LAURENCE STERNE (1713-1768). 'THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF TRISTRAM SHANDY, GENTLEMAN' (1759)

Unitați de invațare

1.1. Laurence Sterne. His Life and Works.

1.2. The Anti-Novel: 'The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman'

1.3 Text Interpretation

5. TEMA NR. 5: EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETRY. THE MOCK-HEROIC POEM. ALEXANDER POPE (1688-1744). 'THE RAPE OF THE LOCK' (1712)

Unitați de invațare

1.1. Alexander Pope. His Life and Works.

1.2. The mock-heroic poem. Pope's 'The Rape of the Lock'

6. TEMA NR. 6: THE ROMANTIC GOTHIC NOVEL. NARRATIVE VOICE AND SETTING. MARY SHELLEY (1797-1851) 'FRANKENSTEIN'

Unitați de invațare

1.1. The Romantic Gothic Novel

1.2. Narrative Voice and Setting

1.3. Excerpt from and Analysis of Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein'

7. TEMA NR. 7: NINETEENTH CENTURY BRITISH POETRY. METAPHOR AND MONOLOGUE. MATTHEW ARNOLD (1822-1888). 'DOVER BEACH'

Unitați de invațare

1.1. Nineteenth Century British Poetry. Matthew Arnold. His Life and his Works.

1.2. Metaphor and Monologue. Definitions.

1.3. Matthew Arnold. Dover Beach. Analysis.

OBIECTIVE:

• Cursul practic de interpretari de texte are rolul de a veni in sprijinul cursului de literatura engleza pe care studenții il studiaza in cel de-al II-lea an de facultate.
• De asemenea, cursul iși propune sa ii familiarizeze pe studenți atat cu scrierile literare din literatura engleza a secolelor XVIII (perioada Iluminista si Romantica) și XIX (perioada Victoriana), cat și cu abordarea critica acordata acestor texte. De aceea, textele sunt alese din scriitorii reprezentativi ai secolelor XVIII și XIX, iar pe baza acestor texte studenților li se va cere sa aplice terminologia inclusa in acest curs: tehnici literare, termeni literari, teorie literara, etc.
• Studenților li se va prezenta suportul critic ce susține construcția solida a textelor literare din epocile studiate. Studenții vor analiza nu numai textele din epoca studiata, dar și contextul socio-politic, economic și cultural in care acestea au luat naștere. In urma textelor studiate și a materialului critic prezentat, studenții vor fi capabili ca la sfarșitul cursului sa redacteze eseuri literare, putand astfel sa-și exprime in scris propriile puncte de vedere critice asupra operelor studiate.

METODE ȘI INSTRUMENTE DE EVALUARE:

• La finalul fiecarei unitați de invațare, studenții beneficiaza de cate un test de evaluare, care conține doua sau trei teste, dintre care primul ofera și o varianta posibila de rezolvare.
• La sfarșitul modulului, exista atașat un test recapitulative, care verifica modul in care studenții au asimilat unitațile de invațare.

Modalitați de evaluare:

Evaluare continua: testare 25%, autoevaluare 25%

Evaluare finala: examen 50%

BIBLIOGRAFIE RECOMANDATA:

Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 7th edition. Massachusetts: Heinle and Heinle             Thomson Learning, 1999.

Anchor, Robert. The Enlightenment Tradition. New York, Evanston, and London: Harper

& Row Publishers, 1967

Birkerts, Sven P. 1993. Literature - The Evolving Canon, Massachusetts: Allyn and Bacon

Bloom, Harold. Canonul Occidental. Bucuresti: Univers, 1998

Briggs, Asa - The Age of Improvement-1783-1867, Longman, London & New York,

Delaney, Denis, Ward Ciaran, and Carla Rho Fiorina. 2005. Fields of Vision. Literature in the      English Language. 2 vols. Pearson Education Ltd., Longman

Clingham, Greg (ed.). Making History: Textuality and the Forms of Eighteenth-Century

Culture. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses. 1998

Conor, Steven. The English Novel in History 1950-1995, London & New York: Routledge,             1996.

Cuddon, J. A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. London:             Penguin Books, 1999.

Gower, Roger. 1999. Past into Present, London: Longman

McDowall, David. 1997. An Illustrated History of Britain, London & New York: Longman

Marsden, Gordon. 1990. Victorian Values-Personalities and Perspectives in Nineteenth             Century Society. London and New York: Longman

TEMA NR. 1

TEXTS AND CONTEXTS. ANALYSISNG A TEXT IN ITS CONTEXT. SOME LITERARY TERMS AND TECHNIQUES

Unitați de invațare

1.1. Eighteenth Century England. An Introduction.

1.2. Introduction into the Victorian Age

1.3. Focus on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literary Writings

1.4. Literary Terms and Techniques

Obiectivele temei:

• Cursul practic de interpretari de texte are rolul de a veni in sprijinul cursului de literatura engleza pe care studenții il studiaza in cel de-al II-lea an de facultate.
• De asemenea, cursul iși propune sa ii familiarizeze pe studenți atat cu scrierile literare din literatura engleza a secolelor XVIII (perioada Iluminista si Romantica) și XIX (perioada Victoriana), cat și cu abordarea critica acordata acestor texte. De aceea, textele sunt alese din scriitorii reprezentativi ai secolelor XVIII și XIX, iar pe baza acestor texte studenților li se va cere sa aplice terminologia inclusa in acest curs: tehnici literare, termeni literari, teorie literara, etc.
• Studenților li se va prezenta suportul critic ce susține construcția solida a textelor literare din epocile studiate. Studenții vor analiza nu numai textele din epoca studiata, dar și contextul socio-politic, economic și cultural in care acestea au luat naștere. In urma textelor studiate și a materialului critic prezentat, studenții vor fi capabili ca la sfarșitul cursului sa redacteze eseuri literare, putand astfel sa-și exprime in scris propriile puncte de vedere critice asupra operelor studiate.

Timpul alocat temei: 6 ore

Bibliografie recomandata:

Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 7th edition. Massachusetts: Heinle and Heinle             Thomson Learning, 1999.

Anchor, Robert. The Enlightenment Tradition. New York, Evanston, and London: Harper

& Row Publishers, 1967

Birkerts, Sven P. 1993. Literature - The Evolving Canon, Massachusetts: Allyn and Bacon

Bloom, Harold. Canonul Occidental. Bucuresti: Univers, 1998

Briggs, Asa - The Age of Improvement-1783-1867, Longman, London & New York,

Delaney, Denis, Ward Ciaran, and Carla Rho Fiorina. 2005. Fields of Vision. Literature in the      English Language. 2 vols. Pearson Education Ltd., Longman

Clingham, Greg (ed.). Making History: Textuality and the Forms of Eighteenth-Century

Culture. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses. 1998

Conor, Steven. The English Novel in History 1950-1995, London & New York: Routledge,             1996.

Cuddon, J. A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. London:             Penguin Books, 1999.

Gower, Roger. 1999. Past into Present, London: Longman

McDowall, David. 1997. An Illustrated History of Britain, London & New York: Longman

Marsden, Gordon. 1990. Victorian Values-Personalities and Perspectives in Nineteenth             Century Society. London and New York: Longman

1.1. Eighteenth Century England. An Introduction.

Around 1700, religious controversies and political factions dominated England under the rule of Queen Anne: the power of the ministers was on the increase, the influence of the Crown lessened, and there were frictions between the Tories and the Whigs. In spite of all these crises in the religious and political realms, cultural life was flourishing. The emergence of the printing press and commercial publishing made possible not only an increase in quantity of prose fiction, but also a certain disregard for its quality, as more books were demanded and editors and publishers were less vigilant when it came to carefully correcting and revising the text. There was a permanent conflict between economic interests and quality knowledge production. As a consequence, prose fiction of the period grew in sophistication, which most of the time meant a less accurate description of reality, writers, as well as publishers being more concerned with the financial aspect and the publishing amount, rather than authorship attribution or genuine accounts. The eighteenth century saw an abundance of travel writings, and the periodicals and newspapers that came out in an ever-increasing number were much concerned with voyages and travels. Later in the century, when Defoe's Preface to his Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner revealed the fact that "the editor believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is their any Appearance of Fiction in it" (The Preface, 1719), the confusion between imaginary voyages and factual accounts was almost total, although it seemed to have mattered little.

The periodicals and newspapers that came out in an ever increasing number were much concerned with voyages and travels, and one of the roles the Royal Society assumed was to be the patron of travellers, publishing information about what were believed as the most fascinating travel experiences in its Philosophical Transactions. Other periodicals, such as The Gentleman's Magazine, or the London Magazine, both founded in the 1730s, contained depictions of remote and exotic regions.

Being offered a large array of stories and fictional historical accounts that passed off as true and accurate, the readers, who have just discovered what pleasure and enchantment the fictional narratives could cast upon their minds found it hard to make the distinction between what to regard as factual report, and what to read as mere invention. The border line that should have drawn up the boundaries between travellers' accurate reports and fictional voyages was barely visible, for the reason that, as Campbell would put it, "there are, of course facts in every fiction" (1988:147). Klein even states that "There seems to have been no limit to British credulity in the early years of Queen Anne" (Klein 1956: 161), but gullibility was to last for the rest of the century, even later than 1712.

The eighteenth century is sometimes called England's Augustan Age. The reference is to that period of Roman history when the Emperor Augustus ruled, and when the Roman Empire enjoyed great power, prosperity, and stability. Eighteenth-century England had all these things too: trade flourished, an empire was growing and there was no more trouble between King and Parliament. The middle-class was firmly established and the Whig party dominated the century, but the middle-class, through marriages into the aristocracy, was drawing in something of aristocratic culture. It was not an age of conflict, but of balance. The rule of reason seemed possible, progress seemed no empty myth, and with some satisfaction men looked back to that prosperous Roman age where order and taste ruled. The eighteenth century can be called the age of the enlightenment because it was both a culmination and a new beginning. Fresh currents of thought were wearing down institutionalized traditions. New ideas and new approaches to old institutions were setting the stage for great revolutions to come. Certain thinkers and writers, primarily in London and Paris, believed that human reason could be used to combat ignorance, superstition, and tyranny and they wanted to build a better world. Their principal targets were religion (embodied in France in the Catholic Church) and the domination of society by a hereditary aristocracy. Although the intellectual movement called The Enlightenment is usually associated with the eighteenth century, its roots in fact go back much further. In the fourteenth and fifteenth century there emerged in Italy and France a group of thinkers known as the "humanists." Almost all of them were practicing Catholics. They argued that the proper worship of God involved admiration of his creation, and in particular of that crown of creation: humanity. By celebrating the human race and its capacities they argued they were worshipping God more appropriately than gloomy priests and monks who brought the original sin into discussion and continuously called upon people to confess and humble themselves before God. Indeed, some of them claimed that humans were like God, created not only in his image, but with a share of his creative power. The painter, the architect, the musician, and the scholar, by exercising their intellectual powers, were fulfilling divine purposes.

This celebration of human capacity, though it was mixed in the Renaissance with elements of gloom and superstition (witchcraft trials flourished in this period as they never had during the Middle Ages), was to bestow a powerful legacy on Europeans. The goal of Renaissance humanists was to recapture some of the pride, breadth of spirit, and creativity of the ancient Greeks and Romans, to replicate their successes and go beyond them. Europeans developed the belief that tradition could and should be used to promote change. By cleaning and sharpening the tools of antiquity, they could reshape their own time.

There was also a shift toward cultural relativism, though it was based on little understanding of the newly discovered peoples. Yet, this continued to have a profound effect on European thought to the present day. Indeed, it is one of the hallmarks of the Enlightenment. Just as their predecessors had used the tools of antiquity to gain unprecedented freedom of inquiry, the Enlightenment thinkers used the examples of other cultures to gain the freedom to reshape not only their philosophies, but their societies. It was becoming clear that there was nothing inevitable about the European patterns of thought and living: there were many possible ways of being human, and doubtless new ones could be invented.

In the 17th century, René Descartes tried to begin with a blank slate, with the bare minimum of knowledge: the knowledge of his own existence ("I think, therefore I am"). From there he attempted to reason his way to a complete defense of Christianity, but to do so he committed so many logical faults that his successors over the centuries were to slowly disintegrate his gains, even finally challenging the notion of selfhood with which he had begun. The 17th century was torn by witch-hunts and wars of religion and imperial conquest. Protestants and Catholics denounced each other as followers of Satan, and people could be imprisoned for attending the wrong church, or for not attending any. All publications, whether pamphlets or scholarly volumes, were subject to prior censorship by both church and state, often working hand in hand. Slavery was widely practiced, especially in the colonial plantations of the West, and its cruelties frequently defended by leading religious figures. The despotism of monarchs exercising far greater powers than any medieval king was supported by the doctrine of the "divine right of kings," and scripture quoted to show that God detested revolution. Speakers of sedition or blasphemy quickly found themselves imprisoned, or even executed. Organizations, which tried to challenge the twin authorities of church and state, were banned. There had been plenty of intolerance and dogma to go around in the Middle Ages, but the emergence of the modern state made its tyranny much more efficient and powerful.

In art, the spirit of the period was "classical." This is not an easy term to define, but its implications are clear: social conventions are more important than individual convictions, reason is more important than emotion, form is more important than content. Despite the calm surface that ruled the eighteenth century, the opposite of the "classical" was slowly being prepared, to burst out at the time of the French Revolution. This opposite is called "romantic", and it is associated with the individual rebelling against society - against accepted good taste and good manners - and with unwillingness to accept conventional artistic forms. The Romantic is much concerned with himself, highly emotional, and generally impatient of the restrictions that a stable society demands.      

The eighteenth century saw the emergence of the professional writer: the man or woman who wrote, did so not as a past time or to flatter some generous patron, but directly for money. In recent years, critical interpretation had increasingly questioned the traditional image of the period as "an age of reason", stressing on the commercial realities that stood behind the classical appearance of the eighteenth century. Martinus Scliberus wrote that "paper was so cheap and printers so numerous, that a deluge of authors covered the land." The rise of the novel and the development of periodical journalism are only the two most obvious features of this expansion of the literary market. There were published fabulous adventures, travellers' tales, secret histories, spiritual lives, satires, sermons or pastorals.

The novels tended to be moral or social lessons taught by their authors to their readers, their declared aim being to instruct and moralise, while entertainment was merely a justification. The protagonists were humble people, whose lives were traced among a great deal of incidents, to their final salvation, which was a sort of reward for their sufferings and restored values.

But the chief obstacles to the reshaping of Europe by the merchant class were the same as those faced by the rationalist philosophers: absolutist kings and dogmatic churches. The struggle was complex and many-sided, with each participant absorbing many of the others' values; but the general trend is clear: individualism, freedom and change replaced community, authority, and tradition as core European values. Religion survived, but weakened and often transformed almost beyond recognition; the monarchy was to dwindle over the course of the hundred years beginning in the mid-18th century to a pale shadow of its former self.

This is the background of the 18th-century Enlightenment. Europeans were changing, but Europe's institutions were not keeping pace with that change. The Church insisted that it was the only source of truth, that all who lived outside its bounds were damned, while it was apparent to any reasonably sophisticated person that most human beings on earth were not and had never been Christians - yet they had built great and inspiring civilizations. Writers and speakers grew restive at the omnipresent censorship and sought whatever means they could to evade or even denounce it.

Most important, the middle classes - the bourgeoisie - were painfully aware that they were paying taxes to support a fabulously expensive aristocracy which contributed nothing of value to society (beyond, perhaps, its patronage of the arts, which the burghers of Holland had shown could be equally well exercised by themselves), and that those useless aristocrats were unwilling to share power with those who actually managed and - to their way of thinking - created the national wealth. They were to find ready allies in France among the impoverished masses who may have lived and thought much like their ancestors, but who were all too aware that with each passing year they were paying higher and higher taxes to support a few thousand at Versailles in idle dissipation.

Today the Enlightenment is often viewed as a historical anomaly, a brief moment when a number of thinkers infatuated with reason vainly supposed that the perfect society could be built on common sense and tolerance, a fantasy, which collapsed amid the Terror of the French Revolution and the triumphal sweep of Romanticism. Religious thinkers repeatedly proclaim the Enlightenment dead, Marxists denounce it for promoting the ideals and power of the bourgeoisie at the expense of the working classes, postcolonial critics reject its idealization of specifically European notions as universal truths, and postructuralists reject its entire concept of rational thought.

Yet in many ways, the Enlightenment has never been more alive. The notions of human rights it developed are powerfully attractive to oppressed peoples everywhere, who appeal to the same notion of natural law that so inspired Voltaire and Jefferson. Wherever religious conflicts erupt, mutual religious tolerance is viewed as a solution. Rousseau's notions of self-rule are ideals so universal that the worst tyrant has to disguise his tyrannies by claiming to be acting on their behalf. European these ideas may be, but they have also become global. Whatever their limits, they have formed the consensus of international ideals by which modern states are judged.

TEST DE EVALUARE:

1. Which charactersistics did the first part of the eighteenth-century supposedly share with the era of the Roman emperor Augustus?

Answer: The eighteenth century is sometimes called England's Augustan Age. The reference is to that period of Roman history when the Emperor Augustus ruled, and when the Roman Empire enjoyed great power, prosperity, and stability. Eighteenth-century England had all these things too: trade flourished, an empire was growing and there was no more trouble between King and Parliament. The middle-class was firmly established and the Whig party dominated the century, but the middle-class, through marriages into the aristocracy, was drawing in something of aristocratic culture. It was not an age of conflict, but of balance. The rule of reason seemed possible, progress seemed no empty myth, and with some satisfaction men looked back to that prosperous Roman age where order and taste ruled.

2. Why did reading increase during the eighteenth-century?

Answer:

1.2. Introduction into the Victorian Age

The past is a foreign country,'' remarks a character in L.P.Hartley's novel The Go Between, 'they do things differently there.' But did they? No period from the British past has been more enthusiastically plundered recently to promote the present than the Victorian era. The supposed values and principles that underpinned its society have been rediscovered and recommended by academics, journalists and politicians. There has been underlined the propagation of Victorian values - self-help, self-reliance, entrepreneurship, individual charity, law and order, family discipline and a stricter sexual morality were the principles that enabled the Victorians to make progress. These principles were also responsible in Britain's case for a 'golden age' of power and influence. It is, nevertheless, difficult to generalise about Victorian values or to coin the whole 19^th century as Victorian.

The age took its name from Victoria, the daughter of the duke of Kent and Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg. She was born in 1819 and she inherited the throne of Great Britain at the age of eighteen, upon the death of her uncle William IV in 1837. She reigned until 1901, bestowing her name upon her age. She married her mother's nephew, Albert (1819-1861), prince of Saxe-Coburg Gotha, in 1840, and until his death he remained the focal point of her life (she bore him nine children). Albert replaced Lord Melbourne, the Whig Prime Minister who had served her as her first personal and political tutor and instructor, as Victoria's chief advisor. After Albert's death in 1861 a desolate Victoria remained in self-imposed seclusion for ten years. Her genuine but obsessive mourning, which would occupy her for the rest of her life, played an important role in the evolution of what would become the Victorian mentality. Thereafter she lived at Windsor or Balmoral, travelling abroad once a year, but making few public appearances in Britain itself.

Victoria maintained a careful policy of official political neutrality. Yet, she did not get on at all well with Gladstone. Eventually, she enjoyed being flattered by Disraeli and permitted him (in an act that was both symbolic and theatrical) to have her crowned Empress of India in 1876. According to the principle 'one good turn deserves another,' Victoria reciprocated by making Disraeli Earl of Beaconsfield. By 1870 her popularity was at its lowest ebb (at the time the monarchy cost the nation 400,000 pounds per year, and many wondered whether the largely symbolic institution was worth the expense), but it increased steadily thereafter until her death. Her golden jubilee in 1887 was a Grand National celebration, as was her diamond jubilee in 1897. She died, a venerable old lady, at Osborne on January 22, 1901, having reigned for sixty-four years.

The adjective 'Victorian' was apparently coined exactly half way through the nineteenth century by an almost forgotten writer, Edwin Paxton Hood, who set out in his The Age and its Architects (1851) to relate the conditions of his own time to the whole 'development of the ages.' In an England relatively undisturbed by violent class conflicts or political upheavals, there was room for the free exchange of ideas, the cultivation of enjoyment, the quest for personal fulfilment, even for personal rebellion. There was room also for humour, good nature, making allowances, and reaching compromises. There was above all room for a sense of peace which usually associated with familiar faces, scenes and experiences.

The Victorian Age was a paradoxical one in that it both conveyed connotations of 'prudish,' 'repressed' or 'old fashioned' and it also saw, like Elisabethan England, great expansion of wealth, power, and culture.

Popular ideas about the Victorians and attitudes toward their age change as it recedes into the past. Modern writers who were trying to free themselves from the massive embrace of their predecessors often saw the Victorians chiefly as repressed, over-confident, and thoroughly philistine. The fact is that Victorian society was essentially a Janus-faced one. It looked forward to the triumph of science and technology and a better and brighter future, but it also looked back to an idealised medieval world with imagined harmony between church and state, to a time when the arts conspired ad majorem Dei gloriam, and when there was a general acceptance of a noblesse oblige order of society. Victorian society craved novelty and innovation, but it also took comfort from tradition. Where necessary, it also invented it, not least in the ceremonies and symbols that surrounded the royal person and family, as Tom Nairn has recently reminded us in his iconoclastic study of the British monarchy's historical role, The Enchanted Glass.

In science and technology, the Victorians invented the modern idea of invention -- the notion that one can create solutions to problems, that man can create new means of bettering himself and his environment.

In religion, the Victorians experienced a great age of doubt, the first that called into question institutional Christianity on such a large scale. In literature and the other arts, the Victorians attempted to combine Romantic emphases upon self, emotion, and imagination with Neoclassical ones upon the public role of art and a corollary responsibility of the artist.

In ideology, politics, and society, the Victorians created astonishing innovation and change: democracy, feminism, unionization of workers, socialism, Marxism, and other modern movements took form. In fact, this age of Darwin, Marx, and Freud appears to be not only the first that experienced modern problems but also the first that attempted modern solutions. Victorian, in other words, can be taken to mean parent of the modern -- and like most powerful parents, it provoked a powerful reaction against itself.

The Victorian age was not one, not single, simple, or unified, only in part because Victoria's reign lasted so long that it comprised several periods. Above all, it was an age of paradox and power. The Catholicism of the Oxford Movement, the Evangelical movement, the spread of the Broad Church, and the rise of Utilitarianism, socialism, Darwinism, and scientific Agnosticism, were all in their own ways characteristically Victorian; as were the prophetic writings of Carlyle and Ruskin, the criticism of Arnold, and the empirical prose of Darwin and Huxley; as were the fantasy of George MacDonald and the realism of George Eliot and George Bernard Shaw.

TEST DE EVALUARE

1. Name some of the Victorian values.

Answer: There has been underlined the propagation of Victorian values - self-help, self-reliance, entrepreneurship, individual charity, law and order, family discipline and a stricter sexual morality were the principles that enabled the Victorians to make progress. These principles were also responsible in Britain's case for a 'golden age' of power and influence. It is, nevertheless, difficult to generalise about Victorian values or to coin the whole 19^th century as Victorian.

2. How can you characterize Victorian religion?

Answer:

Focus on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literary Writings

The texts we shall focus on in this first semester are as follows:

• Eighteenth century prose fiction. The Novel in Eighteenth-Century England. Daniel Defoe - The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

• Eighteenth century prose fiction. The Anti-novel: Laurence Sterne - Tristram Shandy
• Eighteenth century prose fiction. Satire: Jonathan Swift - A Modest Proposal
• Eighteenth century poetry. The mock-heroic poem. Alexander Pope - The Rape of the Lock
• The Romantic Gothic Novel. Narrative voice and Setting: Mary Shelley - Frankenstein
• Nineteenth century British Poetry. Metaphor and Monologue. Matthew Arnold - Dover Beach

1.4. Literary Terms and Techniques

The anti-novel: A fictional work characterized by the absence of traditional elements of the novel, such as:

coherent plot structure

consistent point of view

realistic character portrayal

The term is associated with the new novel, the modern novel and the postmodern novel. In a traditional novel, the narrator is omniscient and the illusion of order is given by the adherence to the unities of time and place. The anti-novel opposes, parodies, or subverts the form and content of the traditional novel.

Satire: 'Satire is the art of ridiculing a subject through laughter or scorn. Satire may be directed at an individual, or a type of person, a social class, an institution, a political ideology, a nation, or even the entire human race. Satirists try to diminish their subject by evoking amusement, contempt, or indignation towards it [ . ] Satire has been written in every period since the Middle Ages but the golden age of satire is generally considered the century and a half after the Restoration (1660) when Swift, Pope, Addison, Fielding and Goldsmith produced some of the finest satirical work in the English language.' (Fields of Vision XII).

The mock-heroic poem: A work in verse which employs the lofty manner, the high and serious tone and the supernatural machinery of epic to treat of a trivial subject and theme in such a way as to make both subject and theme ridiculous. Almost a case of breaking a butterfly upon a wheel. By extension the epic mode is also mocked but this is a secondary consideration. The acknowledged masterpiece in this genre is Pope's The Rape of the Lock, which he himself describes as an Heroicomical poem. His subject is the estrangement between two families resulting from Lord Petre's snipping off a lock of Miss Arabella Fermor's hair. With faultless skill Pope minifies the epic scale in proportion to the triviality of his theme.'

(From The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, p. 514)

'A mock epic or mock-heroic poem is distinguished as that type of parody which imitates, in a sustained way, both the elaborate form and the ceremonious style of the epic genre, but applies it to narrate at length a commonplace or trivial subject matter. In a masterpiece of this type, The Rape of the Lock (1714), Alexander Pope views through the grandiose epic perspective a quarrel between the belles and elegants of his day over the theft of a lady's curl. The story includes such elements of traditional epic protocol as supernatural machinery, a voyage on board ship, a visit to the underworld, and a heroically scaled battle between the sexes-although with metaphors, hatpins, and snuff for weapons. The term mock-heroic is often applied to other dignified poetic forms which are purposely mismatched to a lowly subject; for example, to Thomas Gray's comic 'Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat' (1748).

(From M. H. Abrams (ed.) A Glossary of Literary Terms, 1999, p. 27)

Narrative voice: The voice of the narrator telling the story

Setting: Setting, quite simply, is the time and place in which the action of a poem, play, or story takes place. While setting includes simple attributes such as climate or wall décor, it can also include complex dimensions such as the historical moment the story occupies or its social context. Setting is often developed with narrative description, but it may also be shown with action, dialogue, or a character's thoughts.

Gothic novel: It was a popular form in the late 18^th and early 19^th century. About the turn of the eighteenth century there appeared the novels of 'mystery and imagination,' also called Gothic Novels. The term Gothic is primarily an architectural one, denoting that kind of European building which flourished in the Middle Ages and showed the influence of neither the Greeks nor the Romans. Gothic architecture, with its pointed arches, began to come back to England in the middle of the 18th century. This kind of building suggested mystery, romance, revolt against classical order, wildness, through its associations with mediaeval ruins - ivy-covered, haunted by owls, washed by moonlight, shadowy, and mysterious.

'Gothic' is a word which has a wide variety of meanings, and which has had in the past even more. It is used in a number of different fields: as a literary term, as a historical term, as an architectural term, or as an artistic term. And as a literary term in contemporary usage, it has a range of different applications.

When thinking of the Gothic novel, a set of characteristics springs readily to mind: an emphasis on portraying the terrifying, a common insistence on archaic settings, a prominent use of the supernatural, the presence of highly stereotyped characters and the perfect techniques of literary suspense are the most significant. Used in this sense, 'Gothic' fiction is the fiction of the haunted castle, of heroines preyed on by unspeakable terrors, of ghosts, vampires, monsters and werewolves, of spectres, demons, corpses, skeletons, evil aristocrats, monks and nuns. These figures populate the 18th century Gothic landscapes. This list grew, in the 18th century, with the addition of scientists, fathers, husbands, madmen, criminals and the monstrous double signifying duplicity and evil nature.

TEST DE EVALUARE

1. What is a mock-heroic poem? Give examples from literary writings.

Answer: A mock heroic (or mock epic) poem imitates the elevated style and conventions of the epic genre in dealing with a frivolous or minor subject. The mock heroic has been widely used to satirise social vices such as pretentiousness, hypocrisy, superficiality, etc. An example of a mock epic is Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock.

2. Define satire and exemplify it with some eighteenth-century literary writings.

Answer:

TEMA NR. 2

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PROSE FICTION

DANIEL DEFOE (1659-1731)

'THE LIFE AND STRANGE SURPRISING ADVENTURES

OF ROBINSON CRUSOE, MARINER' (1719)

Unitați de invațare

1.1. The Novel in Eighteenth-Century England

1.2. Daniel Defoe. His Life and Works.

1.3. Introduction into 'The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.'

1.4. Text interpretation. Points to consider and analysis.

Obiectivele temei:

• Studenții trebuie sa asimileze cateva noțiuni esențiale despre viața și opera lui Daniel Defoe in contextul istoric, social și cultural al secolului XVIII britanic.
• Studenții vor analiza conceptul de roman pornind de la romanul lui Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
• In același timp, studenților li se vor expune principalele caracteristici ale romanului clasic, pentru a putea observa cum și din ce motive s-a nascut romanul realist englez.
• Studenții vor fi indrumați in ceea ce privește analiza si interpretarea de text la prima vedere: abordarea critica a personajului, identificarea persoanei narative, stilul literar al autorului, etc.

Timpul alocat temei: 6 ore

Bibliografie recomandata:

Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 7th edition. Massachusetts: Heinle and Heinle             Thomson Learning, 1999.

Anchor, Robert. The Enlightenment Tradition. New York, Evanston, and London: Harper

& Row Publishers, 1967.

Davis, Lennard J. "Daniel Defoe: Lies as Truth" in Factual Fictions: The Origins of the             English Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.

Delaney, Denis, Ward Ciaran, and Carla Rho Fiorina. 2005. Fields of Vision. Literature in the      English Language. 2 vols. Pearson Education Ltd., Longman

Clingham, Greg (ed.). Making History: Textuality and the Forms of Eighteenth-Century

Culture. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses. 1998

Cuddon, J. A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. London:             Penguin Books, 1999.

Hunter, J. Paul. Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth Century English Fiction.             New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990.

McKeon, Michael (ed.). Theory of the Novel. A Historical Approach. Baltimore: The Johns             Hopkins University Press, 2000.

Ward, A. W. and A. R. Waller. The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in             18 Volumes (1907-21).Volume X. The Age of Johnson. Ch. III, Sterne and the Novel of His Times. New York: Putnam, 1907-21.

The Novel in Eighteenth-Century England

A.    The English Distinction between the ROMANCE and the NOVEL. The Origins of the Novel.

ROMANCE < enromancier and romancar  to translate into the vernacular" the long, chivalric tale called a historia, or corónica. Samuel Johnson. The Rambler. No.4, March, 31, 1750: the modern "comedy of romance" the "heroic romance" of the past (27)

Referat: Proiect didactic - jocurile copiilor primavara Referat: Modalitati de educatie interculturala in gradinita

NOVEL < Italian novella = a "piece of news" concerned with the perishable, the consumable; rumours; stories of now; the genre of the bourgeoisie (middle-class).

"Novellas typically involve a smaller range of characters than novels (focusing on a small group or, more likely, an individual), snatches of an existence rather than a full survey, and a swift and indirect revelation of character rather than full and detailed development." (from Encyclopedia of the Novel

Late C17, early C18 - "novel" was often applied to narratives much like romances.

1742, Henry Fielding, "The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and of His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams, Written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes, Author of Don Quixote" = the first realistic novel in literature; he uses "life" or "history" rather than "novel" to describe his works; he claims to be the father of the novel = a major place in literary tradition (Michael McKeon rejects this claim)

The Preface: "a comic romance is a comic epic poem in prose" = the low-mode story.

• 1755, Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language the novel = "a small tale, generally of love." Johnson's novel resembles more closely the novella in dimension and the romance in substance.

"Novel connotes a newness in form, a deviation into more colloquial prose from epic and lyric meters; romance suggests a newness in idiom, a rejection of the Latin of antiquity for the common speech of Europe." (from Encyclopedia of the Novel

B. Eighteenth Century Novels Posing as Historical Documents (journals, memoirs, letters).

THE NOVEL = "a factual fiction which denied its fictionality" (Davis 36)

Arguments:

• The origins of the novel = the history of the division of fact and fiction.
• 18^th century writings did not make a proper distinction between history and fiction, historiography and literature: "history told an exciting story" (Haywood 17).
• story and history usually overlapped: "The History of . " = "the life and adventures of" = the leading role of the character: Tobias Smollett, The Orientalist: A Volume of Tales after the Eastern Taste, 1764 (The History of Omrah, The Son of Abulfaid, The History of Hindbad, the Merchant); Samuel Johnson's The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, 1759; Frances Sheridan's The History of Nourjahad, 1767; Beckford's The History of the Caliph Vathek, 1786 English version.
• Daniel Defoe's Preface to Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner: "The editor believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is their any Appearance of Fiction in it" (1719).
• Defoe's Preface to The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Being the Second and Last Part of his Life and Strange Surprising Accounts of his Travels Round Three Parts of the Globe, Written by Himself:  "All the Endeavours of envious People to reproach it of being a Romance, to search it for Errors in Geography, Inconsistency in the Relation, and Contradictions in the Fact, have proved abortive, and as impotent as malicious" (1719).
• Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year (1722): Defoe intended it a first-hand historical piece "written by a Citizen who continued all the while in London", forgetting that he was only a child in 1665, the year of the plague. The narrator was a historian who authenticated his sources with footnotes, "citing statistics and documents such as bills of mortality" (67).

Conclusions:

• Different kinds of experimentation in the novel
• The novel = a genre born out of rupture and transfomation, not evolvement from romance; it is focused on what is recent and factual;
• The novel = a genre which "historically has answered the needs of the lower class to be informed about public events." (Davis 37).

C18 = Intimacy was shared by means of exposing both private and public affairs through the medium of letters.

• The novel       rejection of traditional plots

innovation and novelty = originality

individualisation of its characters = realistic rather than allegorical

pretense to authenticity = complete confusion between fact and      fiction

TEST DE EVALUARE

1. Make the distinction between romance and novel.

Answer: The main difference between the novel and the romance is in the way in which they view reality. The novel renders reality closely and in comprehensive detail. It takes a group of people and set them going about the business of life. We come to see these people in their real complexity of temperament and motive. They are in close relation to nature, to each other, to their social class, to their own past. Character is more important than action and plot, and probably the tragic or comic actions of the narrative will have the primary purpose of enhancing our knowledge of and feeling for an important character, a group of characters, or a way of life. Historically, as it has often been said, the novel has served the interests and aspirations of an insurgent middle class.

2. Give some features of the novel and exemplify with some eighteenth-century literary writings.

Answer:

1.2. Daniel Defoe. His Life and Works.

Life: 'Defoe is usually said to have been born in London in 1661, the date being derived from a reference to his age made in the preface to one of his tracts. That this is an error seems clear from his marriage license allegation. He must have been born in London, the son of James Foe, a butcher of the parish of St. Giles, Cripplegate, at the end of 1659 or early in 1660. His father came of Northamptonshire stock; but the name of his mother's family has not been ascertained. Beyond the fact that his parents were presbyterians, who early set him apart for the ministry, we know little concerning his childhood. When he was about fourteen, he entered a dissenters' school kept at Stoke Newington by Charles Morton, a somewhat distinguished scholar and minister, and he probably remained there three or four years, by which time he had given up the idea of becoming a preacher. He has left some account of his education, which appears to have been practical and well adapted to the needs of his journalistic career, since emphasis was laid on history, geography and politics, the modern languages and proficiency in the vernacular. Scarcely anything is known of his life between 1677 or 1678, when he may be presumed to have left school, and January, 1683-4, the date of his marriage, when he was a merchant in Cornhill, probably a wholesale dealer in hosiery. There is evidence from his writings that, at one time, he held some commercial position in Spain, and it is clear that his biographers have not collected all the passages that tend to show his acquaintance with Italy, southern Germany and France. As it is difficult to place any long continued absence from England after his marriage, it seems plausible to hold that he may have been sent to Spain as an apprentice in the commission business and have taken the opportunity, when returning, to see more of Europe. His "wander-years," if he had them, must be placed between 1678, the year of the popish plot and the murder of Godfrey, and 1683, the year of the repulse of the Turks from Vienna, since it is practically certain that he was in London at each of these periods.

Not much more is known of his early life as a married man. His wife, Mary Tuffley, who survived him, was of a well-to-do family, bore him seven children and, from all we can gather, proved a good helpmeet. That he soon left her to take some share in Monmouth's rebellion seems highly probable; but that, between 1684 and 1688, he became an embryo sociologist and was engaged in the systematic travelling about England that has been attributed to him is very doubtful. How he escaped Jeffreys, whether he ever was a presbyterian minister at Tooting, what precisely he wrote and published against James II-these and other similar matters are still mysteries. It seems plain that he joined William's army late in 1688; that he took great interest in the establishment of the new government; that his standing in the city among his fellow dissenters was outwardly high; and that he cherished literary aspirations. His first definitely ascertained publication is a satire in verse of 1691. In the following year he became a bankrupt, with a deficit of about Ł17,000.

It is usual to attribute his failure to unbusinesslike habits, and to pay little attention to the charges of fraud brought against him later. As a matter of fact, this period of his life is so dark that positive conclusions of any kind are rash. It would seem, however, that he suffered unavoidable losses through the war with France, that he was involved in too many kinds of enterprises, some of them speculative, and that his partial success in paying off his creditors warrants leniency toward him. Some friends appear to have stood by him to the extent of offering him a situation in Spain, which he could afford to reject because of better opportunities at home. Within four years, he was doing well as secretary and manager of a tile factory near Tilbury. He also served as accountant to the commissioners of the glass duty, and there is no good reason to dispute his claim that he remained in fairly prosperous circumstances until he was ruined, in 1703, by his imprisonment for writing The Shortest Way with the Dissenters.(The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907-21).

Works:

Daniel Defoe was a journalist and we can consider him, in many ways, the father of the modern periodical. The most interesting of Defoe's 'documentary' works is The Journal of the Plague Year (1722), where one gets the impression that Defoe was actually present in London during that devastating time, seriously taking notes, but a glance at his dates will show that this was impossible. In this journal, the writer is certain that the disease is the visible hand of God, which, to him, is a fact like any others, which he records with the same chilling simplicity. The description of Crusoe landing on his island may serve as an example of one kind of imaginative vision in Defoe. Defoe's prose is dominated by the personal pronoun. He keeps our eyes fixed on the man. This kind of imagination is the one concerned essentially with the successful struggle of the individual to dominate his environment. Action is by far the most important mood. This imaginative vision sees the world as one of objects for humans to act on.

In Robinson Crusoe the fascination lies in the bald statement of facts which are quite convincing - even though Defoe never had the experience of being cast away on a desert island and having to fend for himself. The story is told in the first person narrative, things are seen from Robinson's point of view, from the point of view of the civilized human being.

Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe has been engaged in an intertextual dialogue ever since its inception, in April 1719, when the first part of the trilogy, The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, was published. This volume was shortly followed by The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, which came out on 20 August 1719 and is concerned with the events that happened after Crusoe had returned to England. In this part, Defoe gives an account of Crusoe's marriage, the death of his wife, and his travel back to the island with his nephew (Novak 2001, p. 555). The sequel to these two parts, Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe appeared on 6 August 1920 and consisted of various reflexive essays on how Crusoe turned into a mature person after all the experiences he went through. This third part has been a neglected volume by the literary critics and apart from the opening text presented by Crusoe as a realist allegory, it has never challenged literary criticism into a heated debate (Novak 2001, p. 562).

Clearly, Defoe's texts engaged in a dialogue, the two sequels responding to and enlarging upon the first part. Also, it is widely believed that Defoe based his novel on the real story of the Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk, who was shipwrecked on an island in the Pacific in 1704 and spent four years alone on the uninhabited island.

Defoe's vision is highly selective; his imagination is taken up with what he sees as the basic human condition. Crusoe is every man isolated on his desert island to reveal man as he really is to Defoe's imagination: alone, faced by a hostile environment, forced to make his way against it, shape it to his will or be destroyed. Robinson Crusoe is a realist novel: for dreamers, deserted islands are idylls, which are linked to the heart's desire, while for Crusoe, the island is reduced to economic relationships between man and his environment. Friday provides additional manpower, but in a master-servant bond. Crusoe gives him a master's affection in return for submission, loyalty, and labour. He gives him a name and teaches him enough English for what Crusoe thinks he needs to know.

Crusoe is alone, but not naked, he is provided with a complete collection of tools and supplies and his island becomes an estate crying out for development. We get a synoptic economic history of man imaginatively concentrated in the 28 years of Crusoe's life on the island. The island is his absolute property; he becomes first the governor, then the landlord of an absentee colony. The struggle for survival concludes with magnificent profit.

First, there is the caveman stage, where the basic necessities are shelter, fortification and hunting. Then he learns how to make his environment serve him in the agricultural and herding stage. He learns to grow food, manufacture utensils and cultivate the land, acquire and domesticate livestock.

Defoe is not concerned with the intricacies of character. The world of the senses is missing. The novel is crammed with objects and we are compelled to see their utility. They never compose a landscape. The world of consciousness is attenuated to a point that it is psychologically unrealistic. Crusoe never voices any longing for companionship or for women and when companions arrive, human relationship is reduced to economic relationship. Crusoe is the "city's mythic celebration of economic man".

Defoe was not interested in character. He was keen on action, but he always saw action in terms of situation. When Crusoe finds the coins on the wreck, he proceeds to take it before a storm breaks. If we are to look through Defoe's eyes, the money is useless on the island, but useful if Crusoe ever gets back to civilization. It all depends on the situation.

In Moll Flanders we seem to be reading the real life-story of a "bad woman", written in the style appropriate to her. She begins her life in a state of isolation, being dependent on the economic nature of society itself. A moneyless female may survive only by selling herself into servitude. She rebels against it and that is what makes her heroic. Her main hope is marriage, but this is an economic institution in which the cards are in the hands of the male. Outside marriage, there is the choice of poverty, or prostitution, or crime. After her first two marriages, a succession of economic-sexual contracts called "marriages", a crime and imprisonment, where she experiences, like Defoe himself, Hell, Moll is saved by her repentance. She starts a new life in Virginia on a sound economic footing.

The intention of these works is that the reader should regard them as true, not as fictions, and so Defoe deliberately avoids all art, all fine writing, so that the reader should concentrate only on a series of plausible events, thinking: "This isn't a story-book, this is autobiography".

TEST DE EVALUARE:

1. How can Daniel Defoe be best characterised as an author/novelist?

Answer: Daniel Defoe was a journalist and we can consider him, in many ways, the father of the modern periodical. The most interesting of Defoe's 'documentary' works is The Journal of the Plague Year (1722), where one gets the impression that Defoe was actually present in London during that devastating time, seriously taking notes, but a glance at his dates will show that this was impossible. Defoe is not concerned with the intricacies of character. The world of the senses is missing in Robinson Crusoe.

2. Compare Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders. Can you make up a typology of Defoe's characters based on these novels?

Answer:

1.3. Introduction into 'The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.'

'Our reference to Robinson Crusoe brings us to 25 April, 1719, the date of the publication of the first part of that immortal story. Defoe was nearly sixty years old, but he had hitherto written almost nothing that would have preserved his name for the general public. During the next five years, most of his fiction was to be composed, and, during the ensuing six, he was to become perhaps the most extraordinarily prolific old man in the history of English literature.      Although he never ceased to be a journalist and pamphleteer, he became, for the last eleven years of his life, primarily a writer of books, and especially of fiction. The change has surprised many, and a word or two must be given to an attempt to describe in outline his evolution. Although there is evidence that Defoe was rather widely read in English belles lettres, particularly in Rochester and other authors of the restoration, there is little or no direct evidence that he was a wide reader of fiction. It would be rash, however, to assume that he had not dipped into some of the reprinted Elizabethan romances; that he had not tried to read one or more of the interminable heroic romances, whether in the original French or in English versions or imitations; that he was ignorant of the comic and the satiric anti-romances, or that he had not read with some enjoyment the novels of his own time-the stories of intrigue by Aphra Behn, the highly coloured pictures of the court and of the aristocracy by Mrs. Manley, and the attempts at domestic fiction by Mrs. Eliza Haywood and other more or less forgotten women. If some bibliographers are right, we must hold that he wrote more than one tract which shows the influence of Mrs. Manley's New Atalantis, and that he translated at least one picaresque story, abbé Olivier's Life and Adventures of Signior Rozelli (1709, 1713). It is much more certain, however, that he must have been familiar with lives of criminals, with chapbooks and compilations such as those of Nathaniel Crouch ("R. Burton"), with the work of Bunyan and with The Tatler and The Spectator.

In other words, it is chiefly to the popular narratives of his day and to contributory forms like the essay and biography that Defoe owes whatever in his fiction is not due to his own genius and experience as a writer. As a matter of fact-setting aside the possibility that he translated the story of Rozelli and even added a somewhat questionable appendix to the edition of 1713 and a Continuation in 1724-one can find in Defoe's writings, prior to 1719, grounds for believing that he may have evolved into a novelist of adventure and of low life with comparatively little indebtedness to previous writers of fiction. He had had great practice in writing straightforward prose since 1697; and, by 1706-witness Mrs. Veal-he had learned how to make his reporting vivid and credible by a skilful use of circumstantial detail. In his political allegory The Consolidator, he had begun, though crudely, to use his imagination on an extended scale, and he had already, in The Shortest Way, displayed only too well his gifts as an impersonator. In some of the tracts written between 1710 and 1714, notably in the two parts of The Secret History of the October Club, he had shown great ability in satiric portraiture and considerable skill in reporting speeches and dialogue.

[ . ]

The immediate and permanent popularity of Robinson Crusoe is a commonplace of literary history. Defoe, who had a keen eye for his market, produced, in about four months, The Farther Adventures of his hero, which had some, though less, vogue, and, a year later, Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, a volume of essays which had no vogue at all. The original part, The Strange and Surprizing Adventures, at once stirred up acrimonious critics, but, also, attracted many imitators and, in the course of years, became the occasion of legends and fantastic theories. All these-for example, the story that Harley was the real author of the book-may be dismissed without hesitation. Almost equally without foundation, despite his own statements, is the notion that Robinson Crusoe is an allegory of Defoe's life. It may even be doubted whether he ever hawked his manuscript about in order to secure a publisher.

Some things, however, may be considered certain with regard to this classic. Defoe wrote it primarily for the edification, rather than for the delectation, of his readers, although he did not evade giving them pleasure and although, assuredly, he took pleasure himself in his own creation. It is equally clear that, in many of its pages, Defoe the writer of pious manuals is to be discovered; in others, Defoe the student of geography and of volumes of voyages; in others, Defoe the minute observer and reporter. The book is a product that might have been expected from the journalist we know, save only for the central portion of the story, the part that makes it a world classic, the account of Crusoe alone on his island. Here, to use a phrase applied by Brunetičre to Balzac, Defoe displays a power of which he had given but few indications, the power to make alive. This power to make alive is not to be explained by emphasis upon Defoe's command of convincing details or by any other stock phrase of criticism. It is a gift of genius, denied to preceding English writers of prose fiction, displayed by Defoe himself for a few years in a small number of books, and rarely equalled since, although after him the secret of writing an interesting and well-constructed tale of adventure was more or less an open one. The form of his story could be imitated, but not its soul. The universal appeal implied in the realistic account of the successful struggle of one man against the pitiless forces of nature was something no one else could impart to a book of adventure, something Defoe himself never caught again. It is this that links Robinson Crusoe with the great poems of the world and makes it perhaps the most indisputable English classic of modern times, however little of a poet, in a true sense, its author may have been' (The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907-21).

TEST DE EVALUARE:

1. Why is Defoe's Robinson Crusoe considered 'a world classic'?

Answer: Defoe's book is a product that might have been expected from the journalist we know, save only for the central portion of the story, the part that makes it a world classic, the account of Crusoe alone on his island. Here, to use a phrase applied by Brunetičre to Balzac, Defoe displays a power of which he had given but few indications, the power to make alive. This power to make alive is not to be explained by emphasis upon Defoe's command of convincing details or by any other stock phrase of criticism. It is a gift of genius, denied to preceding English writers of prose fiction, displayed by Defoe himself for a few years in a small number of books, and rarely equalled since, although after him the secret of writing an interesting and well-constructed tale of adventure was more or less an open one. The form of his story could be imitated, but not its soul. The universal appeal implied in the realistic account of the successful struggle of one man against the pitiless forces of nature was something no one else could impart to a book of adventure, something Defoe himself never caught again. It is this that links Robinson Crusoe with the great poems of the world and makes it perhaps the most indisputable English classic of modern times, however little of a poet, in a true sense, its author may have been.

2. What are the main critical interpretations that have been attributed to Defoe's novel?

Answer:

1.4. Text interpretation. Points to consider and analysis.

Excerpt from Chapter I

'I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull. He got a good estate by merchandise, and leaving off his trade, lived afterwards at York, from whence he had married my mother, whose relations were named Robinson, a very good family in that country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but, by the usual corruption of words in England, we are now called - nay we call ourselves and write our name - Crusoe; and so my companions always called me.

I had two elder brothers, one of whom was lieutenant-colonel to an English regiment of foot in Flanders, formerly commanded by the famous Colonel Lockhart, and was killed at the battle near Dunkirk against the Spaniards. What became of my second brother I never knew, any more than my father or mother knew what became of me.

Being the third son of the family and not bred to any trade, my head began to be filled very early with rambling thoughts. My father, who was very ancient, had given me a competent share of learning, as far as house-education and a country free school generally go, and designed me for the law; but I would be satisfied with nothing but going to sea; and my inclination to this led me so strongly against the will, nay, the commands of my father, and against all the entreaties and persuasions of my mother and other friends, that there seemed to be something fatal in that propensity of nature, tending directly to the life of misery which was to befall me.

My father, a wise and grave man, gave me serious and excellent counsel against what he foresaw was my design. He called me one morning into his chamber, where he was confined by the gout, and expostulated very warmly with me upon this subject. He asked me what reasons, more than a mere wandering inclination, I had for leaving father's house and my native country, where I might be well introduced, and had a prospect of raising my fortune by application and industry, with a life of ease and pleasure. He told me it was men of desperate fortunes on one hand, or of aspiring, superior fortunes on the other, who went abroad upon adventures, to rise by enterprise, and make themselves famous in undertakings of a nature out of the common road; that these things were all either too far above me or too far below me; that mine was the middle state, or what might be called the upper station of low life, which he had found, by long experience, was the best state in the world, the most suited to human happiness, not exposed to the miseries and hardships, the labour and sufferings of the mechanic part of mankind, and not embarrassed with the pride, luxury, ambition, and envy of the upper part of mankind. He told me I might judge of the happiness of this state by this one thing - viz. that this was the state of life which all other people envied; that kings have frequently lamented the miserable consequence of being born to great things, and wished they had been placed in the middle of the two extremes, between the mean and the great; that the wise man gave his testimony to this, as the standard of felicity, when he prayed to have neither poverty nor riches.

He bade me observe it, and I should always find that the calamities of life were shared among the upper and lower part of mankind, but that the middle station had the fewest disasters, and was not exposed to so many vicissitudes as the higher or lower part of mankind; nay, they were not subjected to so many distempers and uneasinesses, either of body or mind, as those were who, by vicious living, luxury, and extravagances on the one hand, or by hard labour, want of necessaries, and mean or insufficient diet on the other hand, bring distemper upon themselves by the natural consequences of their way of living; that the middle station of life was calculated for all kind of virtue and all kind of enjoyments; that peace and plenty were the handmaids of a middle fortune; that temperance, moderation, quietness, health, society, all agreeable diversions, and all desirable pleasures, were the blessings attending the middle station of life; that this way men went silently and smoothly through the world, and comfortably out of it, not embarrassed with the labours of the hands or of the head, not sold to a life of slavery for daily bread, nor harassed with perplexed circumstances, which rob the soul of peace and the body of rest, nor enraged with the passion of envy, or the secret burning lust of ambition for great things; but, in easy circumstances, sliding gently through the world, and sensibly tasting the sweets of living, without the bitter; feeling that they are happy, and learning by every day's experience to know it more sensibly.

After this he pressed me earnestly, and in the most affectionate manner, not to play the young man, nor to precipitate myself into miseries which nature, and the station of life I was born in, seemed to have provided against; that I was under no necessity of seeking my bread; that he would do well for me, and endeavour to enter me fairly into the station of life which he had just been recommending to me; and that if I was not very easy and happy in the world, it must be my mere fate or fault that must hinder it; and that he should have nothing to answer for, having thus discharged his duty in warning me against measures which he knew would be to my hurt; in a word, that as he would do very kind things for me if I would stay and settle at home as he directed, so he would not have so much hand in my misfortunes as to give me any encouragement to go away; and to close all, he told me I had my elder brother for an example, to whom he had used the same earnest persuasions to keep him from going into the Low Country wars, but could not prevail, his young desires prompting him to run into the army, where he was killed; and though he said he would not cease to pray for me, yet he would venture to say to me, that if I did take this foolish step, God would not bless me, and I should have leisure hereafter to reflect upon having neglected his counsel when there might be none to assist in my recovery' (The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

TEST DE EVALUARE:

1. The fact that this is a first-person narration obviously has implications for the reader: what are they?

Answer: Regarding the narrator point of view, Robinson Crusoe is written in the first person singular. As a consequence, we constantly have Robinson's point of view and opinion about the events happening. We have to wonder whether the protagonist, through which the story is described, may be reliable or not, and if we can trust him. If we had Friday's point of view instead, it is clear that we would have a complete different opinion about Robinson. The tone and point of view in which Defoe uses enables the reader to experience first-hand the changes that take place within Crusoe while he is on the island. This gives validity to every word and quote in the novel because it is actually the narrator's words. This point of view clearly shows criticism and feeling without being altered by interpretation. It also has the effect of "making the narrative itself seem to claim possession of qualities that we associate with concrete matter rather than with fiction, or the abstract effect in our minds of a certain arrangement of words.

2. What do you learn about Crusoe's father from the third paragraph?

Answer:

3. How would you describe Defoe's language? Choose from the following: matter-of-fact/rhetorical/figurative/straightforward/

structurally elaborate/repetitive/idiomatic/denotative/connotative?

Answer:

TEMA NR. 3

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PROSE FICTION

SATIRE. JONATHAN SWIFT (1667-1745)

'A MODEST PROPOSAL' (1729)

Unitați de invațare

1.1. Jonathan Swift. His Life and Pamphlets.

1.2. Satire. Definition.

Swift: A Master of Style and of Satire in 'A Modest Proposal'

Obiectivele temei:

• Studenții trebuie sa asimileze cateva noțiuni esențiale despre viața și opera lui Jonathan Swift in contextul istoric, social și cultural al secolului XVIII britanic.
• Se vor prezenta caracteristicile semnificative ale satirei, folosind exemple din texte literare britanice, dar și europene
• Studenții vor analiza satira pornind de la pamfletul lui Jonathan Swift, 'A Modest Proposal'

Timpul alocat temei: 6 ore

Bibliografie recomandata:

Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 7th edition. Massachusetts: Heinle and Heinle             Thomson Learning, 1999.

Delaney, Denis, Ward Ciaran, and Carla Rho Fiorina. 2005. Fields of Vision. Literature in the      English Language. 2 vols. Pearson Education Ltd., Longman

Clingham, Greg (ed.). Making History: Textuality and the Forms of Eighteenth-Century

Culture. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses. 1998

Cuddon, J. A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. London:             Penguin Books, 1999.

Ward, A. W. and A. R. Waller. The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in             18 Volumes (1907-21).Volume X. The Age of Johnson. Ch. III, Sterne and the Novel of His Times. New York: Putnam, 1907-21.

1.1. Jonathan Swift. His Life and Pamphlets.

'Various interpretations have been placed on Swift's life and work. Much has been written in his defence since the unsympathetic studies of Macaulay, Jeffrey and Thackeray appeared; but he remains somewhat of a mystery. It is not easy to reconcile his contempt for mankind with his affection for his friends and their affection for him; or his attacks on woman with his love for one, and the love which two women felt for him. It is, again, difficult, in view of the decorum of his own life and his real, if formal, religion, to explain the offensiveness of some of his writings. Probably, this was due to a distorted imagination, the result of physical or mental defect; and it must be remembered that it is only here and there that coarseness appears. Sterne remarked, "Swift has said a thousand things I durst not say." But there is no lewdness in Swift's work, and no persistent strain of indecency, as in Sterne.

 Some have suggested that Swift's avoidance of the common ties of human life was due to fears of approaching madness; others have supposed that the explanation was physical infirmity; others, again, have found the key in his coldness of temperament or in his strong desire for independence. He appears to have hungered for human sympathy, but to have wanted nothing more. From the passion of love, he seems to have turned with disgust. The early years of poverty and dependence left an indelible mark on him, and he became a disappointed and embittered man. His mind, possessed by a spirit of scorn, turned in upon itself, and his egotism grew with advancing years. Cursed with inordinate pride and arrogance, he became like a suppressed volcano. His keenness of vision caused him to see with painful clearness all that was contemptible and degrading in his fellow men; but he had little appreciation for what was good and great in them. The pains and giddiness to which Swift was subject left their impression upon his work; "at best," he said, "I have an ill head, and an aching heart." His misanthropy was really a disease, and his life of loneliness and disappointment was a tragedy, calling for pity and awe, rather than for blame.'

The pamphlets relating to Ireland form a very important part of Swift's works. His feeling of the intolerable wrongs of the country in which he was compelled to live grew from year to year. He saw around him poverty and vice, due, as he held, partly to the apathy of the people, but mainly to the selfishness of the English government, which took whatever it could get from Ireland and gave little in return. Swift's concern was mainly with the English in Ireland; he had little sympathy for the "savage old Irish" or with the Scottish presbyterians in the north. But his pity for cottagers increased as he understood the situation more clearly and saw that they were so oppressed by charges which they had to bear that hardly any, even farmers, could afford to provide shoes or stockings for their children or to eat flesh or to drink anything better than sour milk and water. The manufactures and commerce of the country were ruined by the laws, and agriculture was crippled by prohibition of exportation of cattle or wool to foreign countries. No doubt, Swift was influenced by a feeling of hatred towards the whig government; but he was certainly sincere in the long series of pamphlets in which he denounced the treatment of Ireland by the English. This series began in 1720 with A proposal for the universal use of Irish manufacture, in which Swift puts forth a scheme for rejecting everything wearable that came from England. Someone had said that Ireland would never be happy till a law was made for burning everything received from England, except their people and their coals: "Nor am I even yet for lessening the number of those exceptions." Swift quoted the fable of Arachne and Pallas. Pallas, jealous of a rival who excelled in the art of spinning and weaving, turned Arachne into a spider, ordering her to spin and weave for ever out of her own bowels in a very narrow compass.

The series reached its climax in A Modest Proposal for preventing the children of poor people from being a burden to their parents or the country, and for making them beneficial to the public (1729), in which, with terrible irony and bitterness, Swift suggested, in a spirit of despair at the helplessness of Ireland, that the poverty of the people should be relieved by the sale of their children as food for the rich. With the utmost gravity, he sets out statistics to show the revenue that would accrue if this idea were adopted. It would give the people something valuable of their own, and thus help to pay their landlord's rent; it would save the cost of maintaining very many children; it would lead to a lessening of the number of papists; it would be a great inducement to marriage. The remedy, Swift took care to point out, was only for the kingdom of Ireland, "and for no other that ever was, is, or, I think, ever can be upon earth." (The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907-21).

TEST DE EVALUARE:

1. How can Jonathan Swift be best characterised as an author/novelist?

Answer: It is not easy to reconcile Swift's contempt for mankind with his affection for his friends and their affection for him; or his attacks on woman with his love for one, and the love which two women felt for him. It is, again, difficult, in view of the decorum of his own life and his real, if formal, religion, to explain the offensiveness of some of his writings. Probably, this was due to a distorted imagination, the result of physical or mental defect; and it must be remembered that it is only here and there that coarseness appears.

2. Focus on some features of Swift's pamphlets and point out some main characteristics.

Answer:

1.2. Satire. Definition. Swift: A Master of Style and of Satire 

Satire: 'Satire is the art of ridiculing a subject through laughter or scorn. Satire may be directed at an individual, or a type of person, a social class, an institution, a political ideology, a nation, or even the entire human race. Satirists try to diminish their subject by evoking amusement, contempt, or indignation towards it [ . ] Satire has been written in every period since the Middle Ages but the golden age of satire is generally considered the century and a half after the Restoration (1660) when Swift, Pope, Addison, Fielding and Goldsmith produced some of the finest satirical work in the English language.' (Fields of Vision XII).

Satire is an artistic form, chiefly literary and dramatic, in which human or individual vices, follies, abuses, or shortcomings are held up to censure by means of ridicule, derision, burlesque, irony, parody, caricature, or other methods, sometimes with an intent to inspire social reform. The terminological difficulty is pointed up by a phrase of the Roman rhetorician Quintilian: "satire is wholly our own" ("satura tota nostra est"). Quintilian seems to be claiming satire as a Roman phenomenon, although he had read the Greek dramatist Aristophanes and was familiar with a number of Greek forms that one would call satiric. But the Greeks had no specific word for satire; and by satura (which meant originally something like "medley" or "miscellany" and from which comes the English satire) Quintilian intended to specify that kind of poem "invented" by Lucilius, written in hexameters on certain appropriate themes, and characterized by a Lucilian-Horatian tone. Satura referred, in short, to a poetic form, established and fixed by Roman practice. (Quintilian mentions also an even older kind of satire written in prose by Marcus Terentius Varro and, one might add, by Menippus and his followers Lucian and Petronius.) After Quintilian's day, satura began to be used metaphorically to designate works that were satirical in tone but not in form. As soon as a noun enters the domain of metaphor, as one modern scholar has pointed out, it clamours for extension; and satura (which had no verbal, adverbial, or adjectival forms) was immediately broadened by appropriation from the Greek satyros and its derivatives. The odd result is that the English satire comes from the Latin satura; but satirize, satiric, etc., are of Greek origin. By about the 4th century ad the writer of satires came to be known as satyricus; St. Jerome, for example, was called by one of his enemies "a satirist in prose" ("satyricus scriptor in prosa"). Subsequent orthographic modifications obscured the Latin origin of the word satire: satura becomes satyra, and in England by the 16th century it was written satyre. Elizabethan writers, anxious to follow Classical models but misled by a false etymology, believed that satyre derived from the Greek satyr play: satyrs being notoriously rude, unmannerly creatures, it seemed to follow that the word satyre should indicate something harsh, coarse, rough. The false etymology that derives satire from satyrs was finally exposed in the 17th century by the Classical scholar Isaac Casaubon; but the old tradition has aesthetic if not etymological appropriateness and has remained strong.' (Encyclopaedia Britannica).

TEST DE EVALUARE

1. Define satire by giving some of its well-known features.

Satire is an artistic form, chiefly literary and dramatic, in which human or individual vices, follies, abuses, or shortcomings are held up to censure by means of ridicule, derision, burlesque, irony, parody, caricature, or other methods, sometimes with an intent to inspire social reform.

2. What are the main historical definitions of satire?

Answer:

Swift: A Master of Style and of Satire in 'A Modest Proposal'

'Swift's style is very near perfection. Clear, pointed, precise, he seems to have no difficulty in finding words to express exactly the impression which he wishes to convey. The sentences are not always grammatically correct, but they come home to the reader, like the words of a great orator or advocate, with convincing force. He realises so clearly what he is describing that the reader is, of necessity, interested and impressed. There are no tricks of style, no recurring phrases; no ornaments, no studied effects; the object is attained without apparent effort, with an outward gravity marking the underlying satire or cynicism, and an apparent calmness concealing bitter invective. There is never any doubt of his earnestness, whatever may be the mockery on the surface. For the metaphysical and the speculative, he had no sympathy.

Swift was a master satirist, and his irony was deadly. He was the greatest among the writers of his time, if we judge them by the standard of sheer power of mind; yet, with some few exceptions, his works are now little read. Order, rule, sobriety-these are the principles he set before him when he wrote, and they form the basis of his views on life, politics and religion. Sincerity is never wanting, however much it is cloaked with humour; but we look in vain for lofty ideals or for the prophetic touch which has marked the bearers of the greatest names in our literature. That which is spiritual was strangely absent in Swift. He inveighs against folly and evil; but he seems to have no hope for the world. He is too often found scorning the pettiness of his fellow-creatures, as in Lilliput, or describing with loathing the coarseness of human nature, as in Brobdingnag. Satire and denunciation alone are unsatisfying, and the satirist must, in the end, take a lower place than the creative writer.' (The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907-21).

The Complete Text of the Pamphlet

A Modest Proposal, For Preventing The Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being Aburden to Their Parents or Country, and For Making Them Beneficial to The Public

By Jonathan Swift (1729)

 It is a melancholy object to those who walk through this great town or travel in the country, when they see the streets, the roads, and cabin doors, crowded with beggars of the female sex, followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags and importuning every passenger for an alms. These mothers, instead of being able to work for their honest livelihood, are forced to employ all their time in strolling to beg sustenance for their helpless infants: who as they grow up either turn thieves for want of work, or leave their dear native country to fight for the Pretender in Spain, or sell themselves to the Barbadoes.

I think it is agreed by all parties that this prodigious number of children in the arms, or on the backs, or at the heels of their mothers, and frequently of their fathers, is in the present deplorable state of the kingdom a very great additional grievance; and, therefore, whoever could find out a fair, cheap, and easy method of making these children sound, useful members of the commonwealth, would deserve so well of the public as to have his statue set up for a preserver of the nation.

But my intention is very far from being confined to provide only for the children of professed beggars; it is of a much greater extent, and shall take in the whole number of infants at a certain age who are born of parents in effect as little able to support them as those who demand our charity in the streets.

As to my own part, having turned my thoughts for many years upon this important subject, and maturely weighed the several schemes of other projectors, I have always found them grossly mistaken in the computation. It is true, a child just dropped from its dam may be supported by her milk for a solar year, with little other nourishment; at most not above the value of 2s., which the mother may certainly get, or the value in scraps, by her lawful occupation of begging; and it is exactly at one year old that I propose to provide for them in such a manner as instead of being a charge upon their parents or the parish, or wanting food and raiment for the rest of their lives, they shall on the contrary contribute to the feeding, and partly to the clothing, of many thousands.

There is likewise another great advantage in my scheme, that it will prevent those voluntary abortions, and that horrid practice of women murdering their bastard children, alas! too frequent among us! sacrificing the poor innocent babes I doubt more to avoid the expense than the shame, which would move tears and pity in the most savage and inhuman breast.

The number of souls in this kingdom being usually reckoned one million and a half, of these I calculate there may be about two hundred thousand couple whose wives are breeders; from which number I subtract thirty thousand couples who are able to maintain their own children, although I apprehend there cannot be so many, under the present distresses of the kingdom; but this being granted, there will remain an hundred and seventy thousand breeders. I again subtract fifty thousand for those women who miscarry, or whose children die by accident or disease within the year. There only remains one hundred and twenty thousand children of poor parents annually born. The question therefore is, how this number shall be reared and provided for, which, as I have already said, under the present situation of affairs, is utterly impossible by all the methods hitherto proposed. For we can neither employ them in handicraft or agriculture; we neither build houses (I mean in the country) nor cultivate land: they can very seldom pick up a livelihood by stealing, till they arrive at six years old, except where they are of towardly parts, although I confess they learn the rudiments much earlier, during which time, they can however be properly looked upon only as probationers, as I have been informed by a principal gentleman in the county of Cavan, who protested to me that he never knew above one or two instances under the age of six, even in a part of the kingdom so renowned for the quickest proficiency in that art.

I am assured by our merchants, that a boy or a girl before twelve years old is no salable commodity; and even when they come to this age they will not yield above three pounds, or three pounds and half-a-crown at most on the exchange; which cannot turn to account either to the parents or kingdom, the charge of nutriment and rags having been at least four times that value.

I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection.

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.

I do therefore humbly offer it to public consideration that of the hundred and twenty thousand children already computed, twenty thousand may be reserved for breed, whereof only one-fourth part to be males; which is more than we allow to sheep, black cattle or swine; and my reason is, that these children are seldom the fruits of marriage, a circumstance not much regarded by our savages, therefore one male will be sufficient to serve four females. That the remaining hundred thousand may, at a year old, be offered in the sale to the persons of quality and fortune through the kingdom; always advising the mother to let them suck plentifully in the last month, so as to render them plump and fat for a good table. A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends; and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter.

I have reckoned upon a medium that a child just born will weigh 12 pounds, and in a solar year, if tolerably nursed, increaseth to 28 pounds.

I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children.

Infant's flesh will be in season throughout the year, but more plentiful in March, and a little before and after; for we are told by a grave author, an eminent French physician, that fish being a prolific diet, there are more children born in Roman Catholic countries about nine months after Lent than at any other season; therefore, reckoning a year after Lent, the markets will be more glutted than usual, because the number of popish infants is at least three to one in this kingdom: and therefore it will have one other collateral advantage, by lessening the number of papists among us.

I have already computed the charge of nursing a beggar's child (in which list I reckon all cottagers, laborers, and four-fifths of the farmers) to be about two shillings per annum, rags included; and I believe no gentleman would repine to give ten shillings for the carcass of a good fat child, which, as I have said, will make four dishes of excellent nutritive meat, when he hath only some particular friend or his own family to dine with him. Thus the squire will learn to be a good landlord, and grow popular among his tenants; the mother will have eight shillings net profit, and be fit for work till she produces another child.

Those who are more thrifty (as I must confess the times require) may flay the carcass; the skin of which artificially dressed will make admirable gloves for ladies, and summer boots for fine gentlemen.

As to our city of Dublin, shambles may be appointed for this purpose in the most convenient parts of it, and butchers we may be assured will not be wanting; although I rather recommend buying the children alive, and dressing them hot from the knife, as we do roasting pigs.

A very worthy person, a true lover of his country, and whose virtues I highly esteem, was lately pleased in discoursing on this matter to offer a refinement upon my scheme. He said that many gentlemen of this kingdom, having of late destroyed their deer, he conceived that the want of venison might be well supplied by the bodies of young lads and maidens, not exceeding fourteen years of age nor under twelve; so great a number of both sexes in every country being now ready to starve for want of work and service; and these to be disposed of by their parents, if alive, or otherwise by their nearest relations. But with due deference to so excellent a friend and so deserving a patriot, I cannot be altogether in his sentiments; for as to the males, my American acquaintance assured me, from frequent experience, that their flesh was generally tough and lean, like that of our schoolboys by continual exercise, and their taste disagreeable; and to fatten them would not answer the charge. Then as to the females, it would, I think, with humble submission be a loss to the public, because they soon would become breeders themselves; and besides, it is not improbable that some scrupulous people might be apt to censure such a practice (although indeed very unjustly), as a little bordering upon cruelty; which, I confess, hath always been with me the strongest objection against any project, however so well intended.

But in order to justify my friend, he confessed that this expedient was put into his head by the famous Psalmanazar, a native of the island Formosa, who came from thence to London above twenty years ago, and in conversation told my friend, that in his country when any young person happened to be put to death, the executioner sold the carcass to persons of quality as a prime dainty; and that in his time the body of a plump girl of fifteen, who was crucified for an attempt to poison the emperor, was sold to his imperial majesty's prime minister of state, and other great mandarins of the court, in joints from the gibbet, at four hundred crowns. Neither indeed can I deny, that if the same use were made of several plump young girls in this town, who without one single groat to their fortunes cannot stir abroad without a chair, and appear at playhouse and assemblies in foreign fineries which they never will pay for, the kingdom would not be the worse.

Some persons of a desponding spirit are in great concern about that vast number of poor people, who are aged, diseased, or maimed, and I have been desired to employ my thoughts what course may be taken to ease the nation of so grievous an encumbrance. But I am not in the least pain upon that matter, because it is very well known that they are every day dying and rotting by cold and famine, and filth and vermin, as fast as can be reasonably expected. And as to the young laborers, they are now in as hopeful a condition; they cannot get work, and consequently pine away for want of nourishment, to a degree that if at any time they are accidentally hired to common labor, they have not strength to perform it; and thus the country and themselves are happily delivered from the evils to come.

I have too long digressed, and therefore shall return to my subject. I think the advantages by the proposal which I have made are obvious and many, as well as of the highest importance. For first, as I have already observed, it would greatly lessen the number of papists, with whom we are yearly overrun, being the principal breeders of the nation as well as our most dangerous enemies; and who stay at home on purpose with a design to deliver the kingdom to the Pretender, hoping to take their advantage by the absence of so many good protestants, who have chosen rather to leave their country than stay at home and pay tithes against their conscience to an episcopal curate.

Secondly, The poorer tenants will have something valuable of their own, which by law may be made liable to distress and help to pay their landlord's rent, their corn and cattle being already seized, and money a thing unknown.

Thirdly, Whereas the maintenance of an hundred thousand children, from two years old and upward, cannot be computed at less than ten shillings a-piece per annum, the nation's stock will be thereby increased fifty thousand pounds per annum, beside the profit of a new dish introduced to the tables of all gentlemen of fortune in the kingdom who have any refinement in taste. And the money will circulate among ourselves, the goods being entirely of our own growth and manufacture.

Fourthly, The constant breeders, beside the gain of eight shillings sterling per annum by the sale of their children, will be rid of the charge of maintaining them after the first year.

Fifthly, This food would likewise bring great custom to taverns; where the vintners will certainly be so prudent as to procure the best receipts for dressing it to perfection, and consequently have their houses frequented by all the fine gentlemen, who justly value themselves upon their knowledge in good eating: and a skilful cook, who understands how to oblige his guests, will contrive to make it as expensive as they please.

Sixthly, This would be a great inducement to marriage, which all wise nations have either encouraged by rewards or enforced by laws and penalties. It would increase the care and tenderness of mothers toward their children, when they were sure of a settlement for life to the poor babes, provided in some sort by the public, to their annual profit instead of expense. We should see an honest emulation among the married women, which of them could bring the fattest child to the market. Men would become as fond of their wives during the time of their pregnancy as they are now of their mares in foal, their cows in calf, their sows when they are ready to farrow; nor offer to beat or kick them (as is too frequent a practice) for fear of a miscarriage.

Many other advantages might be enumerated. For instance, the addition of some thousand carcasses in our exportation of barreled beef, the propagation of swine's flesh, and improvement in the art of making good bacon, so much wanted among us by the great destruction of pigs, too frequent at our tables; which are no way comparable in taste or magnificence to a well-grown, fat, yearling child, which roasted whole will make a considerable figure at a lord mayor's feast or any other public entertainment. But this and many others I omit, being studious of brevity.

Supposing that one thousand families in this city, would be constant customers for Infant's Flesh, besides others who might have it at merry meetings, particularly at weddings and christenings, I compute that Dublin would take off annually about twenty thousand carcasses, and the rest of the Kingdom (where probably they will be sold somewhat cheaper) the remaining eighty thousand.

I can think of no one objection, that will possibly be raised against this proposal, unless it should be urged, that the number of people will be thereby much lessened in the Kingdom. This I freely own, and 'twas indeed one principal design in offering it to the world. I desire the reader will observe, that I calculate my remedy for this one individual kingdom of Ireland, and for no other that ever was, is, or I think, ever can be upon Earth. Therefore let no man talk to me of other expedients: of taxing our absentees at five shillings a pound: of using neither clothes, nor household furniture, except what is of our own growth and manufacture: of utterly rejecting the materials and instruments that promote foreign luxury: of curing the expensiveness of pride, vanity, idleness, and gaming in our women: of introducing a vein of parsimony, prudence and temerance: of learning to love our country, wherein we differ even from Laplanders, and the inhabitants of Topinamboo: of quitting our animosities, and factions, nor act any longer like the Jews, who were murdering one another at the very moment their city was taken: of being a little cautious not to sell our country and consciences for nothing: of teaching our landlords to have at least one degree of mercy towards their tenants. Lastly, of putting a spirit of honesty, industry, and skill into our shop-keepers, who, if a resolution could now be taken to buy only our native goods, would immediately unite to cheat and exact upon us in the price, the measure and the goodness, nor could ever yet be brought to make one fair proposal of just dealing, though often and earnestly invited to it.

Therefore I repeat, let no man talk to me of these and the like expedients, till he hath at least some glimpse of hope, that there will ever be some hearty and sincere attempt to put them into practice.

But as to my self, having been wearied out for many years with offering vain, idle, visionary thoughts, and at length despairing of success, I fortunately fell upon this proposal, which as it is wholly new, so it hath something solid and real, of no expense and little trouble, full in our own power, and whereby we can incur no danger in disobliging England. For this kind of commodity will not bear exportation, the flesh being of too tender a consistence, to admit a long continuance in salt, although perhaps I could name a country, which would be glad to eat up our whole nation without it.

After all, I am not so violently bent upon my own opinion as to reject any offer proposed by wise men, which shall be found equally innocent, cheap, easy, and effectual. But before something of that kind shall be advanced in contradiction to my scheme, and offering a better, I desire the author or authors will be pleased maturely to consider two points. First, as things now stand, how they will be able to find food and raiment for an hundred thousand useless mouths and backs. And secondly, there being a round million of creatures in human figure throughout this kingdom, whose whole subsistence put into a common stock would leave them in debt two millions of pounds sterling, adding those who are beggars by profession to the bulk of farmers, cottagers, and laborers, with their wives and children who are beggars in effect: I desire those politicians who dislike my overture, and may perhaps be so bold as to attempt an answer, that they will first ask the parents of these mortals, whether they would not at this day think it a great happiness to have been sold for food, at a year old in the manner I prescribe, and thereby have avoided such a perpetual scene of misfortunes as they have since gone through by the oppression of landlords, the impossibility of paying rent without money or trade, the want of common sustenance, with neither house nor clothes to cover them from the inclemencies of the weather, and the most inevitable prospect of entailing the like or greater miseries upon their breed for ever.

I profess, in the sincerity of my heart, that I have not the least personal interest in endeavoring to promote this necessary work, having no other motive than the public good of my country, by advancing our trade, providing for infants, relieving the poor, and giving some pleasure to the rich. I have no children by which I can propose to get a single penny; the youngest being nine years old, and my wife past child-bearing."

TEST DE EVALUARE

1. Characterise Jonathan Swift as a satirist of his age.

Answer: Swift was a master satirist, and his irony was deadly. He was the greatest among the writers of his time, if we judge them by the standard of sheer power of mind; yet, with some few exceptions, his works are now little read. Order, rule, sobriety-these are the principles he set before him when he wrote, and they form the basis of his views on life, politics and religion.

2. What, according to the writer, saddens people who walk through Dublin or travel in Ireland?

Answer:

3. What social injustices are satirized in Swift's narrative? How would you explain the title?

Answer:

4. Find references in the text where the writer describes his proposal as 'modest' or 'humble.' Does the writer's insistence on the modest nature of his proposal make it seem even more outrageous?

Answer:

TEMA NR. 4

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PROSE FICTION.

THE ANTI-NOVEL: LAURENCE STERNE (1713-1768)

'THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF TRISTRAM SHANDY, GENTLEMAN' (1759)

Unitați de invațare

1.1. Laurence Sterne. His Life and Works.

. The Anti-Novel: 'The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman'

1.3 Text Interpretation

Obiectivele temei:

• Studenții trebuie sa asimileze cateva noțiuni esențiale despre viața și opera lui Laurence Sterne in contextul istoric, social și cultural al secolului XVIII britanic.
• Studenții vor analiza conceptul de anti-roman pornind de la romanul lui Laurence Sterne, 'The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.'
• In același timp, studenților li se vor expune principalele caracteristici ale romanului clasic, pentru a putea observa cum s-a ajuns la conceptul de anti-roman.

Timpul alocat temei: 4 ore

Bibliografie recomandata:

Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 7th edition. Massachusetts: Heinle and Heinle             Thomson Learning, 1999.

Anchor, Robert. The Enlightenment Tradition. New York, Evanston, and London: Harper

& Row Publishers, 1967

Delaney, Denis, Ward Ciaran, and Carla Rho Fiorina. 2005. Fields of Vision. Literature in the      English Language. 2 vols. Pearson Education Ltd., Longman

Clingham, Greg (ed.). Making History: Textuality and the Forms of Eighteenth-Century

Culture. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses. 1998

Cuddon, J. A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. London:             Penguin Books, 1999.

Howes, Alan B. Sterne The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974.

McKeon, Michael (ed.). Theory of the Novel. A Historical Approach. Baltimore: The Johns             Hopkins University Press, 2000.

Ward, A. W. and A. R. Waller. The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in             18 Volumes (1907-21).Volume X. The Age of Johnson. Ch. III, Sterne and the Novel of His Times. New York: Putnam, 1907-21.

Laurence Sterne. His Life and Works.

Life: 'The main facts of Laurence Sterne's life (1713-1768) are sufficiently well known. After a struggling boyhood, he went to Cambridge, where he made the friendship of Hall-Stevenson, the Eugenius of his great novel. In 1738 he became vicar of Sutton, the first of his Yorkshire livings, and a few years later prebendary of York, of which his great-grandfather had been archbishop. In 1741 he married Eliza Lumley, for whom he soon ceased to feel any affection and from whom he was formally separated shortly before his death. By her he had one daughter, Lydia, subsequently Mme. Medalle, whom he seems to have genuinely loved. The greater part of his life was passed in a succession of love affairs, mainly of the sentimental kind, with various women of whom Mrs.Draper is the best known. The publication of Tristram Shandy was begun in 1760 (vols. I and II), and continued at intervals until the year before his death. In 1762 his health, which had always been frail, broke down and he started on travels in France and Italy which lasted, with an interval, till 1766 and of which the literary result was A Sentimental Journey (1768). He died, of pleurisy, in March, 1768.   Few writers have thrown down so many challenges as Sterne; and, if to win disciples be the test of success, few have paid so heavily for their hardihood. He revolutionised the whole scope and purpose of the novel; but, in his own country, at any rate, years passed before advantage was taken of the liberty he asserted. He opened new and fruitful fields of humour; and one of the greatest of his successors has denied him the name of humourist. He created a style more subtle and flexible than any had found before him; and all that Goldsmith could see in it was a tissue of tricks and affectations. But, if the men of letters hesitated, the public had no doubt. The success of Tristram Shandy swept everything before it. And here, as is often the case, the popular verdict has worn better than the craftsman's or the critic's.' (The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907-21).

Works: 'Sterne was nothing if not an innovator. And in no innovation was he more daring than in that which widened the scope and loosened the structure of the novel. This was the first of his services to his brethren of the craft. It is, perhaps, the only one which has left a deep mark upon the subsequent history of a form which, when he wrote, was still in the early stages of its growth. When Tristram Shandy began to appear (1760), there was real danger that the English novel would remain little more than a mirror of contemporary life: a reproduction, often photographically accurate, of the social conditions of the time. Defoe, Fielding, Smollett, each in his own way and according to the measure of his genius, had yielded to the impulse; Richardson alone, by striking into tragedy, had partially escaped. Sterne defiantly throws himself athwart the tradition of the elders. He delivers one blow after another at the fashion they had set. Tale of manners, picaresque adventure, types of contemporary humanity, plot itself, all go by the board. His very title is a resounding challenge to all accepted notions of what the novelist should attempt. And even the title falls very far short of what the novel actually provides. The Life and Opinions of the hero is the subject we are bidden to expect. The opinions, the character, the caprices of his father, his uncle, his uncle's servant-above all, of the author himself-is what we actually find. In other words, the novel has ceased to be a mirror of life and manners. It has ceased to be what Johnson, himself a heretic against his own theory, thought it must naturally be, "a smooth tale, mostly of love." It has become a channel for the outpouring of the author's own personality and idiosyncrasy; a stage from which, under the thinnest of disguises or with no disguise at all, he lays bare the workings of his heart, his intellect, his most fleeting imaginations, before any audience he can gather round him. If we compare Tristram with Tom Jones, with Roderick Random, with Moll Flanders-if we compare it even with Pamela or Clarissa-we shall see that the wheel has come full circle. Every known landmark has been torn up. And, in asserting his own liberty, Sterne, little as he may have cared about it, has won unbounded liberty for all novelists who might follow. Whatever innovations the future might have in store, it was hardly possible that they should go beyond the freedom triumphantly vindicated by Sterne. For whatever purposes future writers might wish to use the novel, it was hardly conceivable that they would not be covered by the principle which he had victoriously, though, it may be, unconsciously, laid down. The purpose for which Sterne used the novel was to give free utterance to his own way of looking at life, his own moral and intellectual individuality. So much granted, it was impossible to quarrel with those who used it for a more limited purpose; for embodying in a narrative form the passions stirred by any burning problem of the day; for giving utterance to their own views on any specific question, political, social or religious. The perils of such a task might be great. They could hardly, however, be greater, they would almost certainly be less great, than those which Sterne had already faced and conquered. And, with the success of Tristram before him, no critic could maintain that, given sufficient genius, the venture was impossible. The challenge of Sterne was wide enough to include all the other challenges that have followed. The Fool of Quality, Nature and Art, Oliver Twist, Wilhelm Meister, Les Misérables-all are covered by the unformulated formula of Tristram.

 Not, of course, that the whole credit of the widening process should be given to Sterne. Rasselas in England, if Rasselas is, indeed, to be counted as a novel, much more Candide in France, had already pointed the way in the same direction. Both appeared in the year 1759, before the publication of the first volume of Tristram. Neither of them, however, attempts more than a fragment of the task which Sterne attempted and performed. In neither case does the author stake his whole personality upon the throw; he lets his mind work, or play, round a single question, or group of questions, and that is all. It was an easier venture, a smaller venture and one far less rich in promise, than that which, a few weeks later, launched the Shandy family upon their voyage round the world.' (The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907-21).

TEST DE EVALUARE:

1. How can Laurence Sterne be best characterised as an author/novelist?

Answer: Sterne was nothing if not an innovator. And in no innovation was he more daring than in that which widened the scope and loosened the structure of the novel. This was the first of his services to his brethren of the craft. It is, perhaps, the only one which has left a deep mark upon the subsequent history of a form which, when he wrote, was still in the early stages of its growth.

2. Focus on some features of Sterne's novel, Tristram Shandy and compare it to some other eighteenth-century novels. What are the main differences?

Answer:

1.2. The Anti-Novel: 'The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman'

The anti-novel: A fictional work characterized by the absence of traditional elements of the novel, such as:

coherent plot structure

consistent point of view

realistic character portrayal

The term is associated with the new novel, the modern novel and the postmodern novel. In a traditional novel, the narrator is omniscient and the illusion of order is given by the adherence to the unities of time and place. The anti-novel opposes, parodies, or subverts the form and content of the traditional novel.

'Tristram Shandy' as an Anti-Novel

In 'Tristram Shandy' Sterne broke all the rules that had been established for novel writing. Instead, he proposed:

- a non-conventional plot in which the hero of the story is born in the third volume of the book

- an eccentric narrator who tells the reader to turn back several pages and read a passage a second time

- syntactical, layout, and typographical innovations such as unfinished sentences, blank pages, and asterisks which the reader must interpret.

TEST DE EVALUARE

1. Which of the features of the anti-novel can you identify in Sterne's novel?

Answer: Some of the anti-novel features of his novel Tristram Shandy include a non-conventional plot in which the hero of the story is born in the third volume of the book, an eccentric narrator who tells the reader to turn back several pages and read a passage a second time, and some syntactical, layout, and typographical innovations such as unfinished sentences, blank pages, and asterisks which the reader must interpret.

2. Name some of the features of the anti-novel.

Answer:

1.3 Text Interpretation

Read the following excerpt from Laurence Sterne's novel 'The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman' (Chapter I) .

"I WISH either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider'd how much depended upon what they were then doing; -- that not only the
production of a rational Being was con-cern'd in it, but that possibly the happy
formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind ; -- and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost : ---- Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly, ---- I am verily
persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that,
in which the reader is likely to see me. -- Believe me, good folks, this is not so
inconsiderable a thing as many of you may think it; -- you have all, I dare say, heard of the animal spirits, as how they are transfused from father to son, &c. &c.-- and a great deal to that purpose: -- Well, you may take my word, that nine parts in ten of a man's sense or his nonsense, his successes and miscarriages in this world depend upon their motions and activity, and the different tracks and trains you put them into ; so that when they are once set a-going, whether right or wrong, 'tis not a halfpenny matter, -- away
they go cluttering like hey-go-mad; and by treading the same steps over and over
again, they presently make a road of it, as plain and as smooth as a garden-walk,
which, when they are once used to, the Devil himself sometimes shall not be able
to drive them off it.

Pray, my dear, quoth my mother, have you not forgot to wind up the clock ? ----Good G -- ! cried my father, making an exclamation, but taking care to moderate
his voice at the same time, ---- Did ever woman, since the creation of the world, in- terrupt a man with such a silly question? Pray, what was your father saying ? ---- Nothing."

TEST DE EVALUARE:

1. Read the passage and identify some unconventional features that are characteristic for the anti-novel.

Answer: The 18th century novel Tristram Shandy written by Laurence Sterne could be described as an anti- novel since it moves away from the conventional realist novel which used to be the only predominant style in novel writing at that time. Sterne rejects the traditional narrative technique of presenting a chronological plot with beginning, middle and end and instead offers the reader a non-chronological story rather built around digressions than following a straight forward narration. In order to reveal the way in which Sterne achieves this contemporary uncommon style one has to take a closer look at the role and function of language and non-verbal elements in Tristram Shandy. In the text above, we can notice syntactical, layout, and typographical innovations such as unfinished sentences, blank pages, and asterisks which the reader must interpret

2. How would you define the tone in which the narrator address the reader?

Answer:

TEMA NR. 5

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETRY.

THE MOCK-HEROIC POEM. ALEXANDER POPE (1688-1744)

'THE RAPE OF THE LOCK' (1712)

Unitați de invațare

1.1. Alexander Pope. His Life and Works.

1.2. The mock-heroic poem. Pope's 'The Rape of the Lock'

Obiectivele temei:

• Studenții trebuie sa asimileze cateva noțiuni esențiale despre viața și opera lui Alexander Pope in contextul istoric, social și cultural al secolului XVIII britanic.
• Studenții vor analiza conceptul de 'mock-heroic poem' (poem satiric) pornind de la poemul lui Pope, 'The Rape of the Lock.'
• In urma textului studiat și a materialului critic prezentat, studenții vor fi capabili ca la sfarșitul cursului sa redacteze eseuri literare, putand astfel sa-și exprime in scris propriile puncte de vedere critice asupra textului studiat.

Timpul alocat temei: 2 ore

Bibliografie recomandata:

Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 7th edition. Massachusetts: Heinle and Heinle             Thomson Learning, 1999.

Anchor, Robert. The Enlightenment Tradition. New York, Evanston, and London: Harper

& Row Publishers, 1967

Delaney, Denis, Ward Ciaran, and Carla Rho Fiorina. 2005. Fields of Vision. Literature in the      English Language. 2 vols. Pearson Education Ltd., Longman

Clingham, Greg (ed.). Making History: Textuality and the Forms of Eighteenth-Century

Culture. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses. 1998

Cuddon, J. A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. London:             Penguin Books, 1999.

Hunter, J. Paul. Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth Century English Fiction.             New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990.

Ward, A. W. and A. R. Waller. The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in             18 Volumes (1907-21).Volume X. The Age of Johnson. Ch. III, Sterne and the Novel of His Times. New York: Putnam, 1907-21.

1.1. Alexander Pope. His Life and Works.

Alexander Pope was born a Roman Catholic in 1688, the year that an alliance of political, military and church leaders drove the last Catholic monarch from the English throne. His father, a retired London merchant already well into middle age, had to move his family out of the city because of harsh new measures directed against the papist community under the new monarchs, William III and Mary II. An invalid from his early years, the boy grew up in Windsor Forest, about thirty miles from the centre of the capital. There he developed a taste for poetry, communed with nature in what was then a wholly rural environment, and acquired some elderly mentors, including the retired diplomat Sir William Trumbull, the dramatist William Wycherley, and the actor Thomas Betterton. They encouraged his first literary efforts, culminating in a precociously brilliant set of Pastorals organized around the four seasons. Pope may have started on these as early as the age of sixteen, but they did not appear in print until 1709, just before his twenty-first birthday, in a volume of miscellanies put out by the greatest publisher of the age, Jacob Tonson. Having gained attention and started to make a mark in the London literary world, Pope soon followed up with the dazzling epigrammatic wit of An Essay on Criticism (1711). These works brought him to the notice of two Whig authors who now dominated the scene, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, then at the height of their popularity through two innovative journals, The Tatler and The Spectator.

In 1712 came the first version of The Rape of the Lock; then Windsor-Forest, a work on the longawaited Peace in 1713 which blends descriptive, historical, and political elements; and finally in 1714 the expanded Rape, a mock-heroic poem utilizing all of the young man's accumulated poetic skills. It exhibits wit in language, poise in tone, elegance in its simulation of heroic diction, ingenious parody of epic structure, and devastating powers of social observation.

In 1728, The Dunciad was published, Pope's most celebrated satire, written in the mock-heroic style, an attack on the author's literary rivals, critics and enemies, described as the group of 'Dulness.' Dulness refers to the lack of innovation and creativity that characterises the cultural world of the early eighteenth-century England.

One of the most representative satire in the history of the genre is The Rape of the Lock. The first version of the mock-epic was written in the late summer or early autumn of 1711. Pope wrote the poem in order to resolve with a jest the quarrel which had sprung up between the Petres and the Fermors, two Roman Catholic families, after Robert, Lord Petre had cut off a lock of Arabella Fermor's hair. The poem, which the dedication modestly claims was 'intended only to divert a few young ladies,' was copied and circulated in manuscript and Pope professed a fear that it might be pirated.

TEST DE EVALUARE:

1. What is the reason behind Alexander Pope s writing of The Rape of the Lock?

Answer: Pope wrote the poem in order to resolve with a jest the quarrel which had sprung up between the Petres and the Fermors, two Roman Catholic families, after Robert, Lord Petre had cut off a lock of Arabella Fermor's hair.

2. How can you characterize Pope's writings?

Answer:

1.2. The mock-heroic poem. Pope's 'The Rape of the Lock'

Mock-epic A work in verse which employs the lofty manner, the high and serious tone and the supernatural machinery of epic to treat of a trivial subject and theme in such a way as to make both subject and theme ridiculous. Almost a case of breaking a butterfly upon a wheel. By extension the epic mode is also mocked but this is a secondary consideration. The acknowledged masterpiece in this genre is Pope's The Rape of the Lock, which he himself describes as an Heroicomical poem. His subject is the estrangement between two families resulting from Lord Petre's snipping off a lock of Miss Arabella Fermor's hair. With faultless skill Pope minifies the epic scale in proportion to the triviality of his theme.

(From The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, p. 514)

A mock epic or mock-heroic poem is distinguished as that type of parody which imitates, in a sustained way, both the elaborate form and the ceremonious style of the epic genre, but applies it to narrate at length a commonplace or trivial subject matter. In a masterpiece of this type, The Rape of the Lock (1714), Alexander Pope views through the grandiose epic perspective a quarrel between the belles and elegants of his day over the theft of a lady's curl. The story includes such elements of traditional epic protocol as supernatural machinery, a voyage on board ship, a visit to the underworld, and a heroically scaled battle between the sexes-although with metaphors, hatpins, and snuff for weapons. The term mock-heroic is often applied to other dignified poetic forms which are purposely mismatched to a lowly subject; for example, to Thomas Gray's comic 'Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat' (1748).

(From M. H. Abrams (ed.) A Glossary of Literary Terms, 1999, p. 27)

'Young Lord Petre, by snipping a lock of Miss Fermor's hair, had caused ill-feeling between the families. Pope was invited by his friend Caryll to allay this by taking the theme for a playful poem. The Rape of the Lock, in its first form, was written within a fortnight and published anonymously in Lintot's Miscellany, 1712. For the genre, Pope was indebted to Boileau's Lutrin, as Boileau had been to Tassoni's Secchia Rapita; but, in its blending of mock-heroic, satire and delicate fancy, this exquisite specimen of filigree work, as Hazlitt called it, remains unmatched. Pope's hand was never happier than in adding to the original sketch his machinery of sylphs and gnomes. But his genius for touching appears throughout. Nothing could better illustrate Pope's methods of working than to turn to the earlier version of the six lines beginning canto 1, 13, and to watch how vastly each one has been improved. The parody of Sarpedon's speech in the fifth canto was not introduced till the edition of 1717. In Germany, The Rape gave rise to a long series of imitations.' (The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in             18 Volumes (1907-21).

Excerpt from Pope's Rape of the Lock, Canto II

"Not with more Glories, in th' Ethereal Plain,
The Sun first rises o'er the purpled Main,
Than issuing forth, the Rival of his Beams
Launch'd on the Bosom of the Silver Thames.
Fair Nymphs, and well-drest Youths around her shone,
But ev'ry Eye was fix'd on her alone.
On her white Breast a sparkling Cross she wore,
Which Jews might kiss, and Infidels adore.
Her lively Looks a sprightly Mind disclose,
Quick as her Eyes, and as unfix'd as those:
Favours to none, to all she Smiles extends,
Oft she rejects, but never once offends.
Bright as the Sun, her Eyes the Gazers strike,
And, like the Sun, they shine on all alike.
Yet graceful Ease, and Sweetness void of Pride,
Might hide her Faults, if Belles had Faults to hide:
If to her share some Female Errors fall,
Look on her Face, and you'll forget 'em all."

TEST DE EVALUARE

1. What is a mock-heroic poem?

Answer: A mock epic or mock-heroic poem is distinguished as that type of parody which imitates, in a sustained way, both the elaborate form and the ceremonious style of the epic genre, but applies it to narrate at length a commonplace or trivial subject matter.

Analyse the text above from a literary and stylistic point of view.

Answer:

How would you describe the tone of the poem? Motivate your choice.

-solemn                -mocking -ironic -playful

- elevated             - religious - other

Answer:

4. Find examples of mock-heroic elements in the text.

Answer:

TEMA NR. 6

THE ROMANTIC GOTHIC NOVEL.

NARRATIVE VOICE AND SETTING

MARY SHELLEY (1797-1851)

'FRANKENSTEIN'

Unitați de invațare

1.1. The Romantic Gothic Novel

1.2. Narrative Voice and Setting

1.3. Excerpt from and Analysis of Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein'

Obiectivele temei:

• Studenții vor invața noțiuni legate de perioada romantica gotica
• Studenții trebuie sa asimileze cateva noțiuni esențiale despre viața și opera lui Mary Shelley in contextul istoric, social și cultural al secolului al XIX-lea britanic.
• In urma textului studiat și a materialului critic prezentat, studenții vor fi capabili ca la sfarșitul cursului sa redacteze eseuri literare, putand astfel sa-și exprime in scris propriile puncte de vedere critice asupra textelor studiate.

Timpul alocat temei: 2 ore

Bibliografie recomandata:

Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 7th edition. Massachusetts: Heinle and Heinle             Thomson Learning, 1999.

Botting, Fred. Gothic. London: Routledge, 1996.

Cuddon, J. A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. London:             Penguin Books, 1999.

Delaney, Denis, Ward Ciaran, and Carla Rho Fiorina. Fields of Vision. Literature in the             English Language. 2 vols. Pearson Education Ltd., Longman, 2005.

Dunn, Richard J. 'Narrative Distance in Frankenstein'. Studies in the Novel 6 (1974): 408-            17.

Genette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay on Method. trans. Jane E. Lewin, foreword             Jonathan Culler. Ithaca, NY, 1980.

Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press,             1994.

Schor, Esther. (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley. Cambridge: Cambridge             University Press, 2003.

1.1. The Romantic Gothic Novel

About the turn of the eighteenth century there appeared the novels of "mystery and imagination", also called Gothic Novels. The term Gothic is primarily an architectural one, denoting that kind of European building which flourished in the Middle Ages and showed the influence of neither the Greeks nor the Romans. Gothic architecture, with its pointed arches, began to come back to England in the middle of the 18th century. This kind of building suggested mystery, romance, revolt against classical order, wildness, through its associations with mediaeval ruins - ivy-covered, haunted by owls, washed by moonlight, shadowy, and mysterious.

"Gothic" is a word which has a wide variety of meanings, and which has had in the past even more. It is used in a number of different fields: as a literary term, as a historical term, as an architectural term, or as an artistic term. And as a literary term in contemporary usage, it has a range of different applications.

When thinking of the Gothic novel, a set of characteristics springs readily to mind: an emphasis on portraying the terrifying, a common insistence on archaic settings, a prominent use of the supernatural, the presence of highly stereotyped characters and the perfect techniques of literary suspense are the most significant. Used in this sense, "Gothic" fiction is the fiction of the haunted castle, of heroines preyed on by unspeakable terrors, of ghosts, vampires, monsters and werewolves, of spectres, demons, corpses, skeletons, evil aristocrats, monks and nuns. These figures populate the 18th century Gothic landscapes. This list grew, in the 18th century, with the addition of scientists, fathers, husbands, madmen, criminals and the monstrous double signifying duplicity and evil nature.

Gothic novels were usually set in the past and in foreign countries, particularly the Catholic countries of southern Europe. In the 18th century, the major locus of Gothic plots was the castle, which was linked to other medieval edifices - monasteries, churches, and graveyards. They symbolized a feudal past associated with barbarity, superstition and fear. In the 19th century, the city became the site of nocturnal corruption, violence, and decadence, a locus of real horror.

The original meaning of the word "Gothic" was literally "to do with the Goths" or with the barbarian northern tribes who played a part in the collapse of the Roman Empire. The 17th and early 18th century writers who used the term in this sense had very little idea of who the Goths were or what they were like. One thing that was known was that they came from northern Europe, and thus the term had a tendency to broaden out, to become virtually a synonym for "Teutonic" or "Germanic", while retaining its connotations of barbarity. "Gothic" became descriptive of things medieval; if "Gothic" meant to do with the medieval world, it followed that it was a term which could be used in opposition to "classical", as it can be seen in Fred Botting's "Gothic, the new critical idiom". The classical was well-ordered while the Gothic was chaotic; the classical was simple and pure while Gothic was ornated and convoluted. Where the classics offered a set of cultural models to be followed, Gothic represented excess and exaggeration, the product of the wild and the uncivilised.

We ought to mention in this context a work produced later in the century - Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1797-1851). This was written during a wet summer in Switzerland, when her husband (the poet P.B. Shelley) and Lord Byron were amusing themselves by writing ghost-stories and she herself was asked to compose one. She could never have guessed that her story of the scientist who makes an artificial man - by which he is eventually destroyed - would give a new word to the language and that its subject would rise from humble fiction to universal myth. Frankenstein is a morally probing exploration of responsibility and of the body of knowledge which we now call "science". The tendency amongst Byron's associates to push ideas to extremes, and to test sensation and experience, is here developed as a study of the consequences of experiment and of moving into the unknown. Like the legendary Prometheus, Frankenstein's enterprise is punished, but not by heaven; his suffering is brought upon him by a challenge to his authority on the part of the creature that he has made. This artificial man, like the ruined, questioning Adam, turns to accuse his creator with an acute and trained intelligence. The novel ends where it began in a wild and frozen polar landscape, a wasteland which both purges and purifies the human aberrations represented by Frankenstein and his flawed experiment.

Gothic literature was seen as a challenge to rationality. Gothic deals with passion. Reason has nothing to do with passion. Good depends on evil, light on darkness, reason on irrationality, in order to define limits. Gothic literature also deals with a very relevant element, which is fear. Fear is not merely a theme or an attitude, it also has consequences in terms of form, style and the social relations of the texts; and exploring Gothic is also exploring fear and seeing the various ways in which terror breaks through the surfaces of literature, differently in every case, but also establishing for itself certain distinct continuities of language and symbol. Gothic fiction was popular with a new reading public which was itself predominantly bourgeois - popular, in fact, with a middle class who had only twenty years earlier been reading a vastly different kind of novel.

Horace Walpole (1717-1797) set the example of a Gothic novel in 1764 by The Castle of Otranto, which is a melodramatic curiosity. He was followed by Ann Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest, The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian. They are skilfully written and Radcliffe's mysteries always have a rational explanation at the end. Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775-1818) wrote The Monk, which is full of devils, horror, torture, perversions, magic, and murder. He owes much of his control of atmosphere and exploitation of suspense to Ann Radcliffe. But his attitude to the preternatural is different. He takes quite seriously magic mirrors, charmed herbs and conjurations of evil spirits. Such novels enjoyed a short-lived popularity but one cannot deny their power of expression. They both paved the way to the Romantic Movement.

TEST DE EVALUARE:

1. What are the main features of the Gothic novel?

Answer: When thinking of the Gothic novel, a set of characteristics springs readily to mind: an emphasis on portraying the terrifying, a common insistence on archaic settings, a prominent use of the supernatural, the presence of highly stereotyped characters and the perfect techniques of literary suspense are the most significant. Used in this sense, "Gothic" fiction is the fiction of the haunted castle, of heroines preyed on by unspeakable terrors, of ghosts, vampires, monsters and werewolves, of spectres, demons, corpses, skeletons, evil aristocrats, monks and nuns. These figures populate the 18th century Gothic landscapes. This list grew, in the 18th century, with the addition of scientists, fathers, husbands, madmen, criminals and the monstrous double signifying duplicity and evil nature. Gothic novels were usually set in the past and in foreign countries, particularly the Catholic countries of southern Europe. In the 18th century, the major locus of Gothic plots was the castle, which was linked to other medieval edifices - monasteries, churches, and graveyards. They symbolized a feudal past associated with barbarity, superstition and fear. In the 19th century, the city became the site of nocturnal corruption, violence, and decadence, a locus of real horror.

2. Name some of the most significant Gothic novels and briefly characterize each of them.

Answer:

1.2. Narrative Voice and Setting

Narrative voice: The voice of the narrator telling the story.

'At its most fundamental, a narrative is an account of events, whether real or fictional. However, narrative differs from the idea of a simple unordered account or report of events (supposing such a thing to be possible). Gerard Genette offers a sustained account of narrative structure and form in his Narrative Discourse, which addresses five principal aspects of narrative: (a) order of events; (b) duration of events and the time it takes to tell incidents; (c) frequency or repetition of events and how such recurrences shape the narrative form from the basic diegesis; (d) mood, by which Genette indicates the narrator's point of view, perspective, distance or proximity to the events narrated; (e) narrative voice. For Genette, the analysis of narrative concerns itself and implies the study of a series of relationships which make up narrative, these being (a) the relationship between a particular discourse and the events which are retold through that discourse, and (b) the relationship between the discourse and the act of narration. Thus there is for Genette a tripartite structure at its most basic to any narrative: discourse, narration, event, or, as he formulates it, analysis of narrative is `a study of the relationships between narrative and story, between narrative and narrating, and . . . story and narrating'. Studying narrative is therefore not simply comprehending it as an account but also an analytical understanding of how a narrative is given the shape it has, why certain events have greater significance than others in relation to the totality of the narrative, and how events retold are shaped by the act of narration or the role of the narrator' (Genette, Narrative Discourse).

Setting: Setting is the time and place in which the action of a poem, play, or story takes place. While setting includes simple attributes such as climate or wall décor, it can also include complex dimensions such as the historical moment the story occupies or its social context. Setting is often developed with narrative description, but it may also be shown with action, dialogue, or a character's thoughts.

TEST DE EVALUARE

1. What is narrative voice? Name the five principal aspects of narrative, according to Gerard Genette.

Answer: Narrative voice is the voice of the narrator telling the story. According to Gerard Genette, there are five principal aspects of narrative: (a) order of events; (b) duration of events and the time it takes to tell incidents; (c) frequency or repetition of events and how such recurrences shape the narrative form from the basic diegesis; (d) mood, by which Genette indicates the narrator's point of view, perspective, distance or proximity to the events narrated; (e) narrative voice.

2. What is setting?

1.3. Excerpt from and Analysis of Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein'

An excerpt from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or, the Modern Prometheus (published in 1818), Ch. 10

"[ . ] his stature also, as he approached, seemed to exceed that of man. I was troubled: a mist came over my eyes, and I felt a faintness seize me; but I was quickly restored by the cold gale of the mountains. I perceived, as the shape came nearer (sight tremendous and abhorred!) that it was the wretch whom I had created. I trembled with rage and horror, resolving to wait his approach, and then close with him in mortal combat. He approached; his countenance bespoke bitter anguish, combined with disdain and malignity, while its unearthly ugliness rendered it almost too horrible for human eyes. But I scarcely observed this; rage and hatred had at first deprived me of utterance, and I recovered only to overwhelm him with words expressive of furious detestation and contempt.

'Devil,' I exclaimed, 'do you dare approach me? and do not you fear the fierce vengeance of my arm wreaked on your miserable head? Begone, vile insect! or rather, stay, that I may trample you to dust! and, oh! that I could, with the extinction of your miserable existence, restore those victims whom you have so diabolically murdered!'

'I expected this reception,' said the dćmon. 'All men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us. You purpose to kill me. How dare you sport thus with life? Do your duty towards me, and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind. If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends.'

'Abhorred monster! fiend that thou art! the tortures of hell are too mild a vengeance for thy crimes. Wretched devil! you reproach me with your creation; come on, then, that I may extinguish the spark which I so negligently bestowed.'

My rage was without bounds; I sprang on him, impelled by all the feelings which can arm one being against the existence of another.

He easily eluded me, and said-

'Be calm! I entreat you to hear me, before you give vent to your hatred on my devoted head. Have I not suffered enough that you seek to increase my misery? Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it. Remember, thou hast made me more powerful than thyself; mine height is superior to thine; my joints more supple. But I will not be tempted to set myself in opposition to thee. I am thy creature, and I will be even mild and docile to my natural lord and king, if thou wilt also perform thy part, the which thou owest me. Oh, Frankenstein, be not equitable to every other, and trample upon me alone, to whom thy justice, and even thy clemency and affection, is most due. Remember, that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.'

[ . ] Ch. 20

'You have destroyed the work which you began; what is it that you intend? Do you dare to break your promise? I have endured toil and misery: I left Switzerland with you; I crept along the shores of the Rhine, among its willow islands, and over the summits of its hills. I have dwelt many months in the heaths of England, and among the deserts of Scotland. I have endured incalculable fatigue, and cold, and hunger; do you dare destroy my hopes?'

'Begone! I do break my promise; never will I create another like yourself, equal in deformity and wickedness.'"

TEST DE EVALUARE:

1. What kind of atmosphere does the description of the setting create?

Answer: The setting is important because it helps to emphasize many themes already present in the novel. For example, the fact that Victor is going beyond the limits of science by creating the creature is one part of the theme of going beyond limits and their negative effects. The setting goes beyond normal limits since it goes through the arctic, etc. Also, places like the mountains and the island emphasize the theme of isolation from society.

2. The passages you have read are examples of first person narrative. Find references in the narrative to Victor Frankenstein's character, passionate nature, and unconventional education.

Answer:

3. Describe the dialogue between Victor Frankenstein and the monster. Compare their states of mind.

Answer:

TEMA NR. 7

NINETEENTH CENTURY BRITISH POETRY.

METAPHOR AND MONOLOGUE.

MATTHEW ARNOLD (1822-1888), 'DOVER BEACH'

Unitați de invațare

1.1. Nineteenth Century British Poetry. Matthew Arnold. His Life and his Works.

1.2. Metaphor and Monologue. Definitions.

Matthew Arnold. Dover Beach. Analysis.

Obiectivele temei:

• Studenții trebuie sa asimileze cateva noțiuni esențiale despre viața și opera lui Matthew Arnold in contextul istoric, social și cultural al secolului al XIX-lea britanic.
• Se vor prezenta caracteristicile semnificative ale metaforei si monologului, folosind exemple din texte literare britanice, dar și europene, cu aplicare la poezia lui Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach.

Timpul alocat temei: 2 ore

Bibliografie recomandata:

Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 7th edition. Massachusetts: Heinle and Heinle             Thomson Learning, 1999.

Cuddon, J. A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. London:             Penguin Books, 1999.

Delaney, Denis, Ward Ciaran, and Carla Rho Fiorina. Fields of Vision. Literature in the             English Language. 2 vols. Pearson Education Ltd., Longman, 2005.

Hayward, John. The Penguin Book of English Verse. Penguin Books, 1973 (c. 1956).

Marsden, Gordon. Victorian Values-Personalities and Perspectives in Nineteenth Century            Society, London and New York: Longman, 1990.

Pratt, Linda Ray. Matthew Arnold Revisited. New York: Twayne Publishers, 2000.

Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press,             1994.

1.1. Nineteenth Century British Poetry. Matthew Arnold. His Life and his Works.

During the Victorian Age (1830-1900) in England, the reading audience became much larger because of widening public education and the increased social and political power of the middle class. The Victorian writers produced poetry in a variety of forms and styles and with a great diversity of content. This diversity is the main characteristic of the poetry of the period, along with intellectual energy and vigor.

The nineteenth century in England was the age of industrialization. Science and technology were rapidly advancing and had become the dominant forces in society. Poetry, not being of practical value, had a secondary place in society, and although the poet was considered a 'prophet', his or her role was ambiguous. Victorian poets, consequently, devoted much of their writing to discussing definitions of poetry and the duty of the poet.

Another aspect of the Victorian period was its moralism. There was a deep concern with correct moral values. Therefore, poets were expected to instruct, enlighten, and guide society and lead it in the right ethical direction through their poetry and critical writings. Poems were to be lessons in morality rather than merely creations for aesthetic pleasure.

The Victorian Age was both a continuation of the Romantic period and the beginning of the modern age in literature. While many of the common themes of Victorian poetry are those found in Romantic poetry, such as nature and the individual personality, the poems often have a tone of melancholy despair characteristic of twentieth-century poetry. The Victorians also wrote about mythology, history, modern industrialization, and science. The three major Victorian poets are Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Matthew Arnold. Other well-known poets include Gerard Manley Hopkins and The Pre-Raphaelites (Elizabeth Browning, the wife of Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Morris).

Matthew Arnold. Life and Works.

Matthew Arnold, poet and critic, was born at Laleham on the Thames, the eldest son of Thomas Arnold, historian and great headmaster of Rugby, and of Mary (Penrose) Arnold. He was educated at Winchester; Rugby, where he won a prize for a poem on 'Alaric at Rome'; and Oxford, to which he went as a Scholar of Balliol College in 1841, and where he won the Newdigate Prize for 'Cromwell, A Prize Poem,' and received a Second Class in litterae humaniores, to the regret though hardly to the surprise of his friends. Always outwardly a worldling, he had not yet revealed the 'hidden ground of thought and of austerity within' which was to appear in his poetry. 'During these years,' writes Thomas Arnold the younger in Passages in a Wandering Life, 'my brother was cultivating his poetic gift carefully, but his exuberant, versatile nature claimed other satisfactions. His keen bantering talk made him something of a social lion among Oxford men, he even began to dress fashionably.'

Although remembered now for his elegantly argued critical essays, Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) began his career as a poet, winning early recognition as a student at the Rugby School where his father, Thomas Arnold, had earned national acclaim as a strict and innovative headmaster. Arnold also studied at Balliol College, Oxford University. In 1844, after completing his undergraduate degree at Oxford, he returned to Rugby as a teacher of classics. After marrying in 1851, Arnold began work as a government school inspector, a grueling position which nonetheless afforded him the opportunity to travel throughout England and the Continent. Throughout his thirty-five years in this position Arnold developed an interest in education, an interest which fed into both his critical works and his poetry. Empedocles on Etna (1852) and Poems (1853) established Arnold's reputation as a poet and in 1857 he was offered a position, which he accepted and held until 1867, as Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Arnold became the first professor to lecture in English rather than Latin. During this time Arnold wrote the bulk of his most famous critical works, Essays in Criticism (1865) and Culture and Anarchy (1869), in which he sets forth ideas that greatly reflect the predominant values of the Victorian era. Meditative and rhetorical, Arnold's poetry often wrestles with problems of psychological isolation. In 'To Marguerite-Continued,' for example, Arnold revises Donne's assertion that 'No man is an island,' suggesting that we 'mortals' are indeed 'in the sea of life enisled.' Other well-known poems, such as 'Dover Beach,' link the problem of isolation with what Arnold saw as the dwindling faith of his time. Despite his own religious doubts, a source of great anxiety for him, in several essays Arnold sought to establish the essential truth of Christianity.

TEST DE EVALUARE:

1. How can Matthew Arnold be best characterised as a poet?

Answer: Although remembered now for his elegantly argued critical essays, Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) began his career as a poet, winning early recognition as a student at the Rugby School where his father, Thomas Arnold, had earned national acclaim as a strict and innovative headmaster. Meditative and rhetorical, Arnold's poetry often wrestles with problems of psychological isolation. In 'To Marguerite-Continued,' for example, Arnold revises Donne's assertion that 'No man is an island,' suggesting that we 'mortals' are indeed 'in the sea of life enisled.' Other well-known poems, such as 'Dover Beach,' link the problem of isolation with what Arnold saw as the dwindling faith of his time. Despite his own religious doubts, a source of great anxiety for him, in several essays Arnold sought to establish the essential truth of Christianity.

2. Name some significant features of nineteenth century British poetry.

Answer:

1.2. Metaphor and Monologue. Definitions.

Metaphor: (Gk 'carrying from one place to another') A figure of speech in which one thing is described in terms of another. The basic figure in poetry. A comparison is usually implicit; whereas in simile (q.a.) it is explicit. There are several metaphors in these lines from the beginning of R. S. Thomas's Sozg at tbe Year's Tarning:

'Shelley dreamed it. Now the dream decays.

The props crumble. The familiar ways

Are stale with tears trodden underfoot.

The heart's flower withers at the root.

Brry it, then, in history's sterile dust.

The slow years shall tame your tawny lust.'

Monologue: A term used in a number of senses, with the basic meaning of a single person speaking alone with or without an audience. Most prayers, much lyric verse and all laments are monologues, but, apart from these, four main kinds can be distinguished: (a) monodrama (q.o.), as in Strindberg's The Stronger; (b) soliloquy (q.o.), for instance, the Moor's self-revelations in Othello; (c) solo addresses to an audience in a play; for instance, Iagot explanations to the audience (in Othello) of what he is going to do; (d) dramatic monologue (q.o.) - a poem in which there is one imaginary speaker addressing an imaginary audience, as in Browning's My Last Duchess.

TEST DE EVALUARE

1. Define metaphor by giving some of its well-known features.

Answer: (Gk 'carrying from one place to another') It is a figure of speech in which one thing is described in terms of another. The basic figure in poetry. A comparison is usually implicit; whereas in simile (q.a.) it is explicit.

2. What is a monologue?

Answer:

Matthew Arnold. Dover Beach. Analysis.

Dover Beach consists of four stanzas, each containing a variable number of verses. The first stanza has 14 lines, the second 6, the third 8 and the fourth 9. As for the metrical scheme, there is no apparent rhyme scheme, but rather a free handling of the basic iambic pattern. In stanza 3 there is a series of open vowels ('Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.' A generally falling syntactical rhythm can be detected and continues into stanza 4. In this last stanza one can find seven lines of iambic pentameter, with the rhyme scheme of abbacddcc. Dover Beach is a melancholic poem. Matthew Arnold uses the means of 'pathetic fallacy', when he attributes or rather projects the human feeling of sadness onto an inanimate object like the sea. At the same time he creates a feeling of 'pathos'. The reader can feel sympathy for the suffering lyrical self, who suffers under the existing conditions.

The text:

'The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; -on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.'

TEST DE EVALUARE

1. Discuss the metrical scheme in the poem.

Answer: Dover Beach consists of four stanzas, each containing a variable number of verses. The first stanza has 14 lines, the second 6, the third 8 and the fourth 9. As for the metrical scheme, there is no apparent rhyme scheme, but rather a free handling of the basic iambic pattern.

2. Discuss metaphors and the role of the monologue in the text.

Answer:

TEST RECAPITULATIV

1. Consider the following literary text:

"I do therefore humbly offer it to public consideration that of the hundred and twenty thousand children already computed, twenty thousand may be reserved for breed, whereof only one-fourth part to be males; which is more than we allow to sheep, black cattle or swine; and my reason is, that these children are seldom the fruits of marriage, a circumstance not much regarded by our savages, therefore one male will be sufficient to serve four females. That the remaining hundred thousand may, at a year old, be offered in the sale to the persons of quality and fortune through the kingdom; always advising the mother to let them suck plentifully in the last month, so as to render them plump and fat for a good table. A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends; and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter. [ . ] I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children. Infant's flesh will be in season throughout the year, but more plentiful in March, and a little before and after; for we are told by a grave author, an eminent French physician, that fish being a prolific diet, there are more children born in Roman Catholic countries about nine months after Lent than at any other season; therefore, reckoning a year after Lent, the markets will be more glutted than usual, because the number of popish infants is at least three to one in this kingdom: and therefore it will have one other collateral advantage, by lessening the number of papists among us." (J. Swift A Modest Proposal)

Tasks:

Identify the objects of Swift's satire in A Modest Proposal and explain the effect created by the pseudo-scientific style of the text and the attention to detail.

If Swift does not actually think the Irish people should eat their children, what does he think they should do?

2. Consider the following text:

ALEXANDER POPE - THE RAPE OF THE LOCK

For lo! the Board with Cups and Spoons is crown'd,
The Berries[1] crackle, and the Mill turns round;
On shining Altars of Japan they raise
The silver Lamp, and fiery Spirits blaze:
From silver Spouts the grateful Liquors glide,
And China's earth receives the smoking Tyde.
At once they gratify their Scent and Taste,
While frequent Cups prolong the rich Repast .
Strait hover round the Fair her Airy Band;
Some, as she sipp'd, the fuming Liquor fann'd,
Some o'er her Lap their careful Plumes display'd,
Trembling, and conscious of the rich Brocade.