the impact of modernity on culture lecture 2 magritte, the human condition (1933)
TRANSCRIPT
The Impact of Modernity on Culture
Lecture 2
Magritte, The Human Condition (1933)
The Age of Reason
Newspapers
• New forms of expression– Political Commentary & Satire
– The Rise of the Novel
• Break with ‘The Great Chain of Being’
From Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man (1733)
Say first, of God above, or man below,
What can we reason, but from what we know?
Of man what see we, but his station here,
From which to reason, or to which refer?
Through worlds unnumber'd though the God be known,
'Tis ours to trace him only in our own.
He, <who ….(i. e. God)>,
May tell why Heav'n has made us as we are.
<…>
Is the great chain <….> upheld by God, or thee (i.e. Man)?
The Rise of the Novel
• Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1726)
• Daniel Defoe,
• Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759-67)
Robinson Crusoe (1719)Moll Flanders (1722)
• Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews (1742)Tom Jones (1749)
• Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748)The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751)Humphry Clinker (1771)
The Rise of the Novel
Frontispiece for
The Life and Opinions
of
Tristram Shandy,
Gentleman
Third ed., 1760.
The Romantics
• (Wordsworth and Coleridge)• (Keats)
• Blake
• Byron and Shelley
• Walter Scott
William Blake (1757-1827)
NewtonThe Ancient of Days
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
• The Revolt of Islam• Prometheus Unbound• Ode to the West Wind• Ode to Liberty• Song to the Men of
England• The Masque of Anarchy• The Triumph of Life
The Victorians (1)
• Thackeray
• Dickens
• Trollope
• The Brontë Sisters
• George EliotCharles Dickens
The Victorians (2)
• Butler – Erewhon– The Way of all Flesh
• Meredith– The Tragic Comedians
• Hardy– Tess of the d’Urbervilles– Jude the Obscure
Thomas Hardy
• Robert Tressel, - The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
Modernism
• George Bernard Shaw, Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant
• James Joyce, Ulysses
• T. S. Eliot Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock
Some characteristics
…in Art
Gertrude Stein
Magritte, The Treachery of Images (1931)
The War Poets
• Siegfried Sassoon
• Wilfred Owen
• Robert Graves
• Rupert Brooke If I should die, think only this of meThat there’s some corner of a foreign fieldThat is for ever England
Lost poets
• Isaac Rosenberg
Dystopians
• H. G. Wells, War of the Worlds
• Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
• George Orwell, 1984; Animal Farm
• Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
• John Le Carré [Collected works]
The Angry Young Men
• John Osborne
• Arnold Wesker
• Stan Barstow
• John Wain
• John Braine
• Shelagh Delaney
• Alan Sillitoe
• Kingsley Amis
Feminism
• Germaine Greer (Australian)
• Erica Jong (American)
• Margaret Drabble
• Fay Weldon • Doris Lessing
• Margaret Forster
• Mary Wollstonecraft