Virginia Woolf U K b 1882 d 1941

Virginia Woolf U. K. b. 1882 d. 1941

Virginia Woolf (U. K. 1882 -1941) A Room of One’s Own (1929) • Mental instability, abuse • 1905: Bloomsbury Group; 1912: m. Leonard Woolf • Brilliant innovative Modernist writer • Hogarth Press • “Angel in the House” • 1928 Lectures on Women & Creativity, Newnham College • Shakespeare’s Sister: Essay genre; Anglo. American Feminist Literary Criticism • Rec. Films: The Hours, Orlando, Mrs. Dalloway

World War I: 1914 -1918 See 20 th Cent. Timeline (Davis et al. 1346 -1351) • 1917 -1922: Bolshevik Revolution, Civil War in Russia • 1920: Women’s Suffrage in U. S. ; Irish independence; Gandhi leads Indian independence • 1922: Soviet Union • 1924: Lenin dies, Stalin comes to power • 1925: Hitler, Mein Kampf; U. S. Scopes “monkey” Trial • Late 1920 s: German “Black Friday”; U. S. Stock Market crash; 1930 s: Depression

1924: Lenin dies; Joseph Stalin gains power. Stalin perfects Lenin’s tactics of terror. Communist rule becomes totalitarian dictatorship fueled by paranoia. 1930's: Stalinist Terror peaks; Purges claim millions of victims: Akhmatova’s friends, fellow writers, & her only son, Lev Gumilev. 1933, 1935: Lev Gumilev arrested, imprisoned, threatened with death Anna Ahkmatova [b. Anya Gorenko] Russia, 1889 -1966

Akhmatova’s Requiem (wr. 1935 -1940; banned in USSR) • Alienated by sick dehumanized society • Realist protest: death of individual freedom, negation of family ties • Realist subject: social realities, misery of ordinary people’s lives • Art’s critical function • Romantic individualism of visionary (confessional) poet as national conscience: “I” & (controlled) emotion to remember & bear witness for silenced community.

Requiem, cont. • Organicism: poetic expression creates its own poetic forms; Mixed points of view, style, form - varies among poems in cycle • Modernist fragments comprise the cohesive whole • Readers co-create meaning, but Akhmatova not distainful of general audience • Powerful simplicity, directness, concrete imagery (rejects obscure symbolism):

World War II (1939 -1945) • WWI not “war to end • Fascism (Hitler, all wars”: tensions Mussolini, Franco): brew 1920 s-1930 s reverse decline of West, preserve “pure” • economic conflicts & European culture; competition among “Axis” incl. Japan colonial powers • rise of dictators & ultra • Democracies “Allies” -nationalism • Communism: Stalin, totalitarianism • world-wide depression

“Where Are the War Poets? ” • 1939: Appeasement fails, war begins • TLS chastises U. K. poets for failing to “do their duty, ” calling upon them to sound “trumpet call” to fight this “monstrous threat to belief & freedom” • Cecil Day Lewis responds for many writers in: “Where Are the War Poets? ”. .

“Where Are the War Poets? ” cont. “They who in folly & mere greed Enslaved religion, markets, laws, Borrow our language now & bid Us to speak up in freedom’s cause. ” “It is the logic of our times, No subject for immortal verse— That we who lived by honest dreams Defend the bad against the worst. ”

WW II, cont. • Unprecedented scale of world conflict & devastation (aerial bombing) • Science, technology, industrialism used for mass murder • Genocide in the Death Camps • Atomic bomb (Hiroshima, Nagasaki): power to bring on apocalypse • Civilian casualties, nightmare of suffering & devastation • United Nations: rebuild hope for future?

WW II: The Aftermath • Politically defines • Global guilt: passive world powers for next immorality of people, 40 years nations who stood by & did nothing • Raises profound moral. spiritual & political • Challenges Enlightenquestions re: religious ment faith in progress, faith, human capacity human reason, science, for evil - triumph of education the “dark side”

Post-WWII: Existentialism • Existentialism (e. g. Sartre, • 20 th-Century Literature of the Absurd Camus): human (Kafka & his heirs) condition =absurd, depicts surreal, radically alienated & angst-ridden: --cast alone into a senseless alien universe (without meaning or value); --death our only certainty; --radical responsibility for creating meaning, value of our existence: Existence precedes essence meaningless, randomly violent modern world, where ethical justice & spiritual values seem to have no place or power. • “The Metamorphosis” (wr 1912; pub. 1915, 1948)

The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a nightmare, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves. . . A book should serve as an ax for the frozen sea inside us. ” Franz Kafka (1883 -1924)

Post-WWII Art/Literature in Crisis • Survivor guilt, betrayal, withdrawal: “inner emigration” (Hannah Arendt) • Failure of the imagination before the unthinkable, loss of reasons to go on living, make sense of senseless horrors Heated debate: • What kind of art, literature is viable, equal to profound issues raised by WWII? • Can art/lit help restore human values in post. WWII global society? • Sartre (and others) call for Post-WWII artists and writers to meet these challenges.

Holocaust Literature • Jean-Paul Sartre: post. WWII “arte engage” authenticity of form and feeling paramount (vs. Romantic sublime egotism & art for art’s sake = frivolous & irresponsible) • New Global consciousness • Wiesel’s “vow of silence” (1945), then silence broken (Night, 1960) • Eye witness - Bear witness: testify to the unthinkable horrors • Obligation to the dead: Do not forget!

Elie Wiesel (b. 1928, Romania) 1986 Nobel Peace Prize: “one of the most important spiritual leaders and guides in an age when violence, repression and racism continue to characterise the world. ” Wiesel’s “hard-won belief” that evil can be overcome originated in personal experience of Hitler’s death camps and soul-wrenching testimonies that Wiesel has widened to embrace the sufferings of “all repressed peoples and races. ” Wiesel’s “message is one of peace, atonement and human dignity. ”

Wiesel’s “Death of My Father” (From Legends of Our Time, 1968; rpt. 1982) • Rejects fiction for confessional memoir, autobiography -acts of memory with truth value, authentic • Confront the past • Survivor guilt & Healing power of storytelling • Pose tough, probing questions: Where was God? What happened to ethics, justice? What meaning can religious rites confer? • Modernist search for meaning w/new urgency - will human imagination fail again?

Takenishi’s “The Rite” (1963) • Japanese children of • Semi-autobiographical 1945 begin to tell their retelling of Hiroshima: stories of sorrow, loss, Aug. 1945, Takenishi grief in 1950 s-60 s. 16 -yr-old schoolgirl; Shares Wiesel’s large no. of Japanese themes: death rites, school kids killed; acts of remembering 140, 000 dead by end 1945; 60, 000+ die of • Fictionalizes to longer term effects distance? Survivors’ guilt, incomprehension • Long silence, denial

“The Rite, ” cont. • Setting: one long night 10 yrs. later when Aki can’t sleep, & suppressed memories flood back • Adapts Modernist narrative techniques to create authentic representation of psychological reality • Modernist rendering of Aki’s past memories & present consciousness: free-associational, stream of consciousness • achronological, fragmented, disjointed flashbacks/forwards = broken pieces of film

“The Rite, ” cont. • Modernist search of • Readers too must meaning - look back & experience Aki’s look within at what dislocation, confusion, has been repressed alienation, etc. in search for meaning • Remembering frees her of the past, by • “World” Literature confronting its horrors, (e. g. TFA, 1958) & performing the death rites left undone

Garcia Marquez Kundera