Preguntas Iconos - Apuntes 7 PDF

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Preguntas y respuestas Iconos de Chivite...

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AUGUSTAN AGE QUESTIONS (CHIVITE). 1.The Industrial Revolution in England: effects upon English life. -Development of coal mining by applying Newcomen’s steam pump to extract water from the mines. -Introduction of the use of coke—distilled coal—by the Darbys to melt iron. Coal demand, development of fuel and metal industries. -Increase production in the textile industry fostered by mechanical inventions: jenny mule. -Transport improvement: deepening of rivers and canal building. -Increased importance of the propertied classes (landed gentry & merchants in the cities) in comparison with the nobility. -Improved farming techniques. Increased production: crop rotation, seed selection, enclosure, fodder for animals (turnips). -The growing urban populations could be effectively and better fed. -The enclosures. 2.Enlightened England & Augustan Aesthetics. Enlightenment England. A rationalistic and scientific approach to human condition and reason, in their multifarious manifestations, instead of dogma and tradition. Commitment, tolerance, responsibility, flexibility and utilitarian analysis rather than fanatic intolerance or dismissal. Humanitarian individualism. Cultural spread and engagement (urban middle-classes). Periodicals (The Tatler, the Spectator, the Rambler, The Gentleman’s Magazine) and coffee shops. Clubs (Scriblerous Club—Tory (Johnson, Swift, Arbuthnot); Kit Kat Club—Whig (Addison, Steele, Congreve). AUGUSTAN HUMANISM & AESTHETICS. The term. Neo-classic spirit in all arts and life-faring. Nature and eternal orderliness of things. Aristocratic courtliness (breeding and training). Restraint, dignity, noblesse oblige. Decorum, urbanity, cosmopolitan sophistication, indoors refinement. Conversational, natural ease. Symmetry, proportion, didactic pleasure. Universal significance through particulars. Standardizing. Critical-analytical spirit, self-consciousness, technique and method. Skepticism and tolerance. Rationalism: common sense, naturalness, reasonableness, balance, natural logics, status quo. Reason and nature. From patronage to subscription system, professional writing. Art as commodity, with responsibility. Copyright Act (1709). 3.How does Jonathan Swift respond creatively to the Age of Reason? The Scriblerus Club (with Pope & Arbuthnot) Nature and Reason: Wrong Reason and Commonsense to fight human pride and gross disparity man’s actuality and potentials. Saeva

indignatio. Scatology. Ironic inventive satire: plain language, minutely descriptive and argumentative, clear and simple, free from unnecessary ornament. Comic wit in satire, pushing arguments to absurdity to reveal innermost incongruity and deeper, most deceiving and harsh analysis of mankind. Black humour. Occasionally tender, intimate and friendly (The Journal to Stella (1717-65), epistles to sketch vivid picture of contemporary London. Battle of Books (1697), A Tale of a Tub (1696), Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. By Lemuel Gulliver (1726), A Modest Proposal (1729). 4.The Rise of the English Novel: main characteristics. Make references to some representative novelists from the period.

5. The rise of realism in the 18th-c. English novel. Define realism and comment on its manifestations by drawing on the authors and literary instances commented on in class discussions. The English novel stands apart from the allegory and romance in its vigorous attempt at verisimilitude. At the beginning of the 18th century the ingredients were all available for the true novel. But plots were too often incoherent or improbable, backgrounds were vague or sporadic, and psychological characterization was meagre or spotty. To from the true novel,

writers would have to produce a unified and plausible plot structure, sharply individualized and believable characters, and a pervasive illusion of reality. Daniel Crusoe may be termed the founder of the modern English novel in his establishment of: convincing realism by firstperson narrative carried to the virtual limit of journalistic reporting. The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders. Defoe’s greatest piece of fiction. The gripping authenticity of the account caused contemporaries to identify Moll as Laetitia Atkins of Galway, but the work is probably entirely imaginary. Moll is the most famous female picaroon in English literature. LAST YEAR QUESTIONS. BETTY. 6. Characteristics of Old English verse; p.27-29. All the extant literature of pagan England (anonymous as is usual with early literature) has been transmitted to us through manuscripts of the later Christian period. Pagan elements have frequently been subdued* and Christian elements have been added. The result is a mixture of paganism and Christianity. *Sometidos. The major techniques of Old English verse include the following characteristics: - Four-stress line: each line of Anglo-Saxon verse contained four accented syllables. - A pause or caesura: divided each line into two staves or hemstitches. - Alliteration: the repetition of initial sounds of syllables. The key syllable was the third stress. - Variation: the repeating of a single idea through synonymous words or phrases, with each repetition adding a new level of meaning. - The use of the kenning: a compound word of metaphoric quality. - Specialized poetic vocabulary. - An elevated and aristocratic tone pervaded. - A narrative style: often omitted explanatory details and abruptly turned from one event to another. - Oral, not written, composition. 7. Historical context and characteristics of the medieval romance; p.45, 46 & 57. By the 11th century, England kept on being the object of desire and subsequent cause of strife among Danish, Norwegian and Anglo-Saxon forces. The Anglo-Saxon King Aetherel the Unready was in exile in Normandy while the Dane Canute occupied the English throne. When Aetherel’s son, Edward the Confessor, returned to become king of England, he was more a Norman than an Englishman. He promised William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy, to make him the heir to the English Crown; but when Edward died, the Witan gave the throne to Harold (a nobleman). William defeated Harold at the battle of Hastings (1066). The effects of the Conquest were important:

- The aristocracy was Normanized. - England’s medieval monarchy was closely liked to the Continent: England and Normandy constituted a single state (they shared the same dynasty and aristocracy). - Three languages: the ruling classes spoke French; the upper clergy, French and Latin (official documents were written in Latin); English was relegated to the lower classes. - Evolution of the English language: Old English became Middle English. There were diverse dialects. - Enrichment of the English language. The period following the Norman Conquest corresponds historically to what we know as the High Middle Ages, characterized by: - Urbanization, a wider circulation of money and the new position of women. 8. Chaucer’s age and work; p. 62-65. The Age of Chaucer opens with one of the most dramatic events in the human history: the Black Death, which started in Europe in 1348. The effects of such tragic episode are manifold, and they all point a growing sense individualism. The sense of a common experience and responsibility fostered an English Nationalism, which was reinforced by the hatred for France during the Hundred Year’s war. Moreover, the English Parliament split into the separate House of Lords and House of Commons, both of them denying foreign jurisdiction in English matters, including papal authority. The plague also brought some moral and religious changes. The secularization of English life in this era marks a cultural change. This change propitiate that the writers started to use English and in the 14th century everybody knows and uses it. Chaucer was the first great poet in English Literature because he represents the New Man: a product of the mercantile middle-classes which participle in courtly life and culture. He was not a captive of any special moral or political or social ideas, or of any set manners. His work fall under three periods: French Period (1372): the early writing of Chaucer is from this period. He went a lot of times to France and some classical materials were derived through French intermediaries. Chaucer early absorbed the courtly* love tradition. *Cortés. Italian Period (1372 – 1385): he enters in contact with the Italian Renaissance and the work of some Italian writers. English Period (1385 – 1400): During this period, he wrote the most part of the stories in English. Ones of the greatest poems of English literature are The Canterbury Tales. 9. Elizabethan public drama; 91-95. The first permanent theatre in England was erected in 1567, but it was demolished and reconstructed on the south of the bank in the Thames as The Globe. The Elizabethan playhouse. The theatre derived ultimately from the medieval innyard. It had round or

polygonal from. The elevated stage proper contained most of the drama. Scenery was altogether absent from the stage proper, and the actors had to give descriptions. There were two doors, trough which all entrances and exits took place. Even the pillars upon the stage were employed dramatically. Immediately above the inner stage was a curtained alcove normally occupied by musicians. The audience. The groundings were unruly, but could be impressed by drama that gave it a taste of the court and academic refinement. The playwrights had to start doing whatever the company ordered. Conventions in the dramas: -Plotting: the use of soliloquies and asides derived from medieval practice. - Play construction: the unities of time, place and action were ignored. - Acting: outdoor acoustics emphasized strong voices. Main kinds of drama: - Revenge tragedy → senecan models, gradually psychological. - Fall of princess tragedy → medieval wheel of fortune, hesitation and consequence. - Chronicle play. - Romantic comedy. - Domestic tragedy → middle-class business folk as the subject. - Realistic comedy → love, marriage and material possessions. - Comedy of Humours → Ben Jhonson and medieval theory of humours. University Wits: saw the drama as a way to obtain fame and fortune from other kind of literary writing. 10. Shakespeare as a dramatist; 96-101. He was one of the principal actors in the Lord Chamberlain’s Company, and he was one of the seven partners in the building of the Globe Theatre in 1599. Elizabethan Shakespeare: in this period his activities are efforts to acquire the various skills of his profession. He follows what other men begin: he is going with the crowd, both in choice of materials and in workmanship. He begun as a dramatist by imitating Plautus (The Comedy of Errors), Munday and Greene (Two Gentlemen of Verona), Lyly (Love’s Labour’s Lost) and Marlowe (Henry VI). He seems mainly concerned to turn out a workmanlike product along lines which the public taste had already approved. In his earliest plays he mixes different metres anarchically. His main ambition was to learn how to write, and he adapted himself to any models that were in vogue. His history plays are the most numerous group in his early period, because they were the most popular type of drama in the 1590’s (Henry VI, Richard III, King John, Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V and Henry VIII). By 1598 Shakespeare had attained name and fame. The difficult from Essex’s departure to Ireland till his ill-omened insurrection is, in Shakespeare’s career, a period of suspended activity and indecision. The three great comedies of these years seem in their very titles to express a sort of carelessness: Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, and What You Will (Twelfth Night). Apart from the history plays, Shakespeare wrote four tragedies under Elizabeth, separated each other by

considerable intervals of time and very remarkable differences of manner. All four, however, belong to the revenge or vendetta type of play familiar in Seneca, and they all awe more to Kyd than Marlowe. Jacobean Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s Elizabethan period really ended with the sunny comedies, of which Twelfth Night is the last, and the questioning spirit which we may call Jacobean is strong in the play that most immediately followed Hamlet. The three great tragedies of Othello, Lear, and Macbeth stand very close together, and apart from everything which preceded, in their assertion that the world is full of inscrutable and absorbingly interesting evil. He died at fifty-two. The last plays show his mind returning, as his body returned, to the pastoral and richly storied country out of which it had come. He had four or five years of ease at Stratford, varied only by the minor help he gave his pupil Fletcher in some dramatic spectacles for the Globe: the Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII. CHIVITE 11. Defining features of Neoclassicism found in Augustan literature; 144-146. The strength of the English propertied classes sensed an historical kinship with the rich and powerful nobles who surrounded Caesar August. They called themselves Augustan (NeoClassic spirit in all arts and life-faring. Nature and eternal orderliness of things). It sought to emulate the enlightement refinement, and taste of that distant era. And they manifested itself particularly in literature in the following attitudes: 1.- Aristocratic courtliness. 2.- Restraint and dignity. The gentry sought and elevated poise consonant with their mighty role. 3.- Urbanity, sophistication, cosmopolitanism. Gentlemen sought polish and finish in life. 4.- Conversational ease. The sociable and lively, rather than the dull or tedious, were courted. Solemn and majestic attitudes therefore seldom appear in this age. 5.- Preoccupation with the here and now. 6.- Symmetry and a balance of the useful and the ornamental. The purpose of literature was to instruct through pleasure. 7.- The greatest virtue in art was a universal significance. 8.- Critical and analytical spirit. A self-conscious age, it was deeply interested in technique and method. 9.- Skepticism. Few of the intellectuals were devoutly pious. 10.- Rationalism. By “reason” the 18th century meant many things, but generally it meant the commonsense of gentlemen, “sweet reasonableness”. Its reason was the calm, balanced judgment of an entrenched and secularly oriented class, and the consequent result of this reason was a hardly surprising proof that the status quo in society was exactly right. 12. Qualities of the 18th century novel; 164-165. The social conditions of the 18th century provided the atmosphere, even the compulsion, to achieve these qualities.

1.- the novel provides the literary medium for a bourgeois society. The 18th century saw an increased reading public, chiefly of the middle-class. This practical and down to earth class wanted to read about people it could recognize from its own observations and described in the language it employed. It preferred its stories to end with a financial and domestic rewards, its own clear cut goals in life. 2.- The novel reveals modern social complexity and group relationships. Romances and fairytales still offer escapism, but modern man cannot see in them a picture of the veritable world in which he lives. 3.- The novel is a unified picture of man and society. The 18 th century was the great era of intellectual analysis and synthesis, the great age of systematizing. 4.- The novel is a rationalistic examination of human personality. 5.- The novel is essentially addressed in the second person, to the reader. It has the conversational, personal appeal that the 18th century politely cultivated. 6.- The epic of antiquity and the medieval period recounted essentially collective experience and universally shared concepts. 13. Historical causes accounting for 19th century Romanticism; 201-203. Hostile critics of early 19th century romanticism saw it as an attempt to escape from the realities of the age. The Romantic took refuge in a supposedly glorious past, a utopian future or a distant and exotic present. The enthusiastic supporter of the Romantics sees them in their own self-appointed roles as liberators and creators. Common to all the romantics was an idealism that sought for the individual and for society the fullest of freedom and expression. The Romantics are then the first contemporary men, the first architects of an ideal democratic society. Some of the causes of early 19 th century Romanticism must certainly include the following: Economic → largely a middle-class movement. Religious → from the 18th century on, the English middle-class has been associated with religious nonconformity. Political → during the reigns of the four Georges, the prestige on the English monarchy steadily declined, reaching a low water mark in the first third of the 19 th century. Democracy and French philosophy. Social → period era entering the logical development of an “open” society. Freedom. Psychological → rationalist had suggested the idea of progress. It was a reaction against the scientific dogmatism and the absolute confidence of the 18 th century scientist that lead to poets to explore vast gulf of human experience. Philosophical → the rational mind of the 18th century eventually destroyed Locke’s commonsense, materialistic explanation of the nature of man.

14. Characteristics of the romantic attitude found in literature; 203-205. Romantics seized upon and frequently enlarged to gigantic proportions the tendencies already begun by the pre-Romantics. Although no one Romantic exemplified al the features discussed below, they are all manifestations of the Romantic attitude: Medievalism →fascination with the glamour of the Middle Ages. Orientalism → wisdom assigned to the Orient. Primitivism → medievalism is better understood when one realizes that for the Romantics, medieval society was a primitive society. The idea of progress → entailed belief that man is now progressing ever forward to a more glorious tomorrow. Anti-intellectualism → expressed the basic Anglo-American distrust of the completely logical and rational. Sentimentalism → sentimentalist revels in the sensitivity of his soul, delighting in the moods that sweep over him....