12 lezione - professor Gregori PDF

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professor Gregori...

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question 1: What is a charivari? it’s an en event in popular culture, with a mock parade with loud music and the crowd make noise. it’s a form of celebration with a noisy crowd. it’s an instance of parody in the poem.. when context and form clash, similar to carnivalesque. it becomes typically in London literature: the gathering of people who support the goddess dullness, and moves from the City to Westminster, singing and playing > parodistic style, heroic and mock elements. question 2: how the Fleet-ditch is a metaphor to urban excess? the Fleet-ditch (river perpendicular to the Thames), gather all the pollution and garbage of North London, in particular, the factories’ leftovers. it became the symbol of the dirt of the City, of the waste. it was like a moving waste. it became important in the dances, where people meet to play games > these games become the parody of the typical games in the epic (Illiad), when they celebrate the bravery of the soldiers. but here people are celebrating the stupidity. question 3: where is the reference about Edipus myth in Trivia? it’s in book 3 line 115-116, there’s a direct reference here, but also an illusion in the title. Trivia shows and hights at the same time those barbarous aspects of our civilization: a city is erected n order to celebrate the godly behaviour of men and at the same time to remind the original sin. Enok (prototypical city) is a reminder of a crime. the civilization goes against barbarity and crimes, and so it’s the city. BUT those marks leading back to the more tragic killings of the civilization and in some ways, this repression returns > some foundations of cities are made thanks to uncivilized episodes such as murders. in John Gay’s poems, they return in Cloacina episode, for example. Question 4: why people feel in danger when they enter the city? It’s part of the contradiction in the metropolitan environment. in a metropolis you find yourself and at the same time you feel far from home > it’s what happens to the walker: he knows where to go but at the same time, he reminds you that you could be the victim or something bad could happen. it’s a place of many possibilities or no possibilities, of bad experiences. Freud’s principle of pleasure, which is destructive, is also present in the city. → Bernard Mandeville’s “The Fable of the Bees”: a society of bees and they ask Jove to come back to a previous state of no pleasures but harmony and purity. after a while they become apathetic because of no pleasure. The preface of this book is about the idea of the city: (...) If you want to have opportunities and avoid poverty, you have to go to the city and consider the fact/risk to have problems... otherwise, you can come back to the countryside. *** look at Blake’s “London” The beautiful side of London and the aspect of abomination went together. in Voltaire’s scripts, you can find these; Adam Smith saw the city as a centre of freedom but also of work. Politeness + darker side of the City //contrast between the poverty-mob-villains-wick people + richness-wealth. London was a place of contradictions + epic references (Heaven, Jerusalem, Babilon): growth of population and the centre had may changes. political power became much bigger than the past. the community was not only for trade person but also for the countryside person who wanted a better life. London was being transformed into a giant (or a monster for someone). the industrial revolution first came in the area around London, but it never became an industrial city, but a financial city, with pollution and crowds. William Blake’s “LONDON”: W. B. was a Londoner and he was highly critical of his city. he speaks about the necessity to find another Jerusalem and the industrial side is seen as a satanic thing. it’s a place of charted streets (specific charter) as a constitution and also of flow (mercantile agreement). there are cries of despair and lament (different form happy cries in J.G.). he heard the chains which make men a slave: rich people who had factories and are rich but they are dependent from it. they don’t even realize it. in the midnight streets, he listens to the curse of the young harlots (bitches-prostitutes), and men go with them before coming back to their wives > contradiction /discontent of civilization. London here is a continuation of the Augustan tradition of the city poem. the presence of charted is understood by Raimond William: the connection of the new capitalism and the city. his criticism is more general, of the new industrial society and of capitalism. the commercial aspect of London and the privilege of charter > up-privilege people go against the wellbeing of

everybody else. the waste and the dirt of the city was the majority of the human being....