LITTERATURE Anglaise C.M.[Mineure Anglais L1 S1]

Dernière édition par le Mer 11 Oct 2006 - 21:07, édité 4 fois

CM 1 :

Preliminary : How to find your way into a text.

See
F. Grellet’s A Handbook of Literary Terms

I. Literary genres

Genres are not always clearly separates

1. (Prose) Fiction

- a form of narrative; a story and a story-teller
- way of seeing the world (so many ways to vision it)

Citation :: ‘The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million – a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; everyone of which has been piercable, in its vast front, by the need for individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will.’ (Henry James, in preface to The Portrait of a Lady)

-setting /characters / plot

settings : physical places, historical time and social background

characters : types, caricatures, stereotypes

plot (intrigue): action, incident, interaction between characters and with the settings

Citation :: ‘Let us define a plot. We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. ‘The king died, and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The King died, and then the queen died of a grief’ is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.’ (E.M. Forster, in Aspects of the Novel, italics added)

- the plot may include : exposition / rising action or complication / climax or turning point / falling action / catastrophe or denouement.
- focus of interest of a story
- some techniques of fiction :

Style : formal / informal ; ordinary / unusual ; ...

Point of view :
- third-person point of view : omniscient, limited, dramatic
- first-person point of view : a protagonist, an observer. Often unreliable.

Characterization : narrator ≠ author

Sequencing : chronologically, rearranged

2. Drama (théâtre)

plot (same plot as fiction), setting, characterization (character may be talking to the audience; monologue) and dialogue

main genres : tragedy / comedy

3.Poetry (=verse)

Poetical language : patterned (incorporate features of phonology, grammar, semantics,..), allusive (refered to something who evocate something else)

aspects of patterning : versification
-phonological patterning (rythm expression, articulaion, metrical feets, patterns of sound, rime, asonance, disonance, onomatopia, chiasm)
-syntactical (or grammatical) patterning
-verse forms : the sonnet (the Petrarchan sonnet [8-8-6-6], the Shakespearean sonnet[4-4-4-2]), the elegy, free verse
aspects of allusion
-external allusions (outside the poem) / internal allusions (grammatic, phonetic,.. within the poem) / puns (play on words) / word-creation / metaphors)

II. Ways into a text :

tone : humorous / humour ; stirical / satire ; ironical / irony ; parodic / parody ; bathetic / bathos
style : precious, bombastic (grandiloquant), archaic, hackneyes (stéréotype, cliché)...
varieties of language : colloquial (familier)/ register (spécifique des classes sociales)/ jargon (spécifique des classes professionelles)/ dialect (spécifique des régions)...
imagery and figurative language : literal imagery ; figurative imagery (figure de style). Simile (comparaison)/ metaphor (analogy between 2 objects or ideas) / symbol (object that has first a special meaning but beyond, one another)

Sujet: CM 2 Dim 8 Oct 2006 - 21:54

[Hm, je sais que j'ai sûrement oublié des choses pour ce cours, alors si certains ont des choses à ajouter, envoyez moi un mp pour que je le complète]

CM 2 :

The Age of Shakespeare "All the world's a stage"

William Shakespeare, 1564-1616
the English Renaissance, a period of fundamental social changes
Elizabethan period / Elizabeth I (1533-1603), reigned 1558-1603
the Jacobean period / James I (1566-1625), reigned 1603-1625

Reference to Shakespeare in everyday life => a crucial key to english culture

I.The Age of Shakespeare

1.The Elizabethan Age = Elizabeth's reign (1558-1603)
Elizabeth I's perdiod was one of change, transformation
the Church of Rome > the Crown (la couronne)
Henry VIII (1529-1539): Reformation of the Church in England

2.1580s: The English language and Elizabethan poetry
Old English / Middle English / Modern English
Language of Shakespeare's place marked the
Renaissance (germanique invasion, then french and latin influence and
then influences from the Renaissance)
Elizabethan English : transition from Middle to Modern English
1580's : poets at Court like Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586), or Edmund Spenser (c. 1552-1599)
the sonnet, after Petrarch (1304-1374)

3.1590s: Elizabethan drama as a synthesis between:
- the aristocracy & Renaissance culture in England; allegorical and comic plays Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) & the ''University Wits'', Doctor Faustus (1592) [Booklet p.5]
C. Marlowe was one of the first palywrite later join by Shakespeare

4.Political and intellectual unrest in the Jacobean period (after 1600/1603)
-the Puritans / didn't accept the other religions
-the gentry (petite noblesse) / divide in society
-the Jacobeans
Tudor aristocratie (Elizabeth I's familly)
Rising influence of capitalism
Drama => All social class
Satire (important genre) and tragedy
> Ben Jonson (1572-1637), Volpone (1606) [Booklet p.14]

II. William Shakespeare (1546-1616)

1.Biography
-born in Stratford-upon-Avon / 'the Sweet Swan of Avon' ; his father was a glover ; married Anne Hathaway (William, pas son père ^^)
-the Globe Theatre from 1599, the Blackfriars as a winter house from 1608

2.Poetry
-'Venus and Adonis' (1593), 'The Rape of Lucrecia' (1594), 154 sonnets
-Shakespearean sonnet = 3 quatrains + 1 couplet / abab cdcd efef gg > see booklet p.13 & p.7

3.Drama
-Mr William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories and Tragedies = 'the first folio', published posthumously in 1623.

the histories (1590-1599): Richard III (1591-1592)[Booklet p.6]
Tudor (Henri VIII and Elizabeth I) political thought
two tetralogies (=series of four plays)
1. Henri VI part 1, Henri VI part 2, Henri VI part 3 (1591-1592) and Richard III (1593)
2. Richard II (1595), Henry IV part 1 (1597), Henry IV part 2 (1598), and Henry V (1599)
  + Henry VIII (1613)

The comedies : A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595) [Booklet p.8]
-farce (eg. The Taming of the Shrew, 1594),
-fairy comedy (eg. A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1596),
-romantic comedy (eg. Twelfth Night, 1602)
The tragedies (1600-1608): Julius Cesar (1599) [Booklet p.9, Macbeth (1605) [Booklet p.10-11]
Tragedy : clivage between society and personnal ... (je n'avais pas compris le mot et je ne vois pas ce que c'est..)
the last plays - romantic tragi-comedies (1608-1616): The Tempest (1611) [Booklet p.12)
Tomantic tragi-comedies use elements of fantasy, love, adventure
also : Pericles (1607-1609?), Cymbeline (1609), The Winter's Tale (1610 / 1611?)

Playwrites (tragedy) of Shakespeare reconciliate humanity with power/theater.
Mixed genres.

Sujet: CM 3 + CM 4 Dim 8 Oct 2006 - 21:58

CM 3:

The Self and Nature :
English Romanticism, American Trancendentalists, and the American Renaissance

I. The Romantic Age in England

1.Historical Context
- an age of revolutions:

the American war of independence (1775-1783), ''life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness''; 1783 : America is an independant country (freedom)
the French revolution (1789-1795);
the industrial revolution in Britain (from mid-18th c.)

- reaction to 18th century Augustan or Classical Age / being close to Nature, ''in state of greater simplicity'' (William Wordsworth) / inner version & self-knowledge
- William Blake, a precursor to the romanticism (a gravor as well as a poet) / 1800 - preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1798), by Wordsworth = Romantic manifesto / enduring influence of Romanticism: Emily Brontë (1818 - 1848), Wuthering Heights (1947 - Les Hauts de Hurlevent) [Booklet p.28]

2.Romantic Poets
Desillusion by revolution
-William Blake (1757-1827) / an engraver / England's 'dark Satanic mills'
>the 'Tiger', Songs of Experience [Booklet p.20]
- 'First-generation' Romantic poets : 'Lake poets" / the Lake district
>William Wordsworth (1770-1850), 'The Last of the Flock' [Booklet p.21-22]
>Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), 'Kubla Khan' (1816) [Booklet p.23]
-'Second-generation' Romantic poets
> Lord Byron (1788-1824) [George Noel Gordon], Percy Shelley (1795-1821), and John Keats (1795-1821) Keats: 'A thing of beauty is a joy forever'.
Byron, Shelley and Keats shared social characteristic (focus on Mediteranean culture). Rejected conformism (especially Byron & Shelley), interest in beauty and imagination.

3.The Gothic Novel
Typical of the Romantism
wild nature / castles or convents / the mysterious and the supernatural / emotions
> Mary Shelley (1797 - 1851), Frankenstein (1818) => early gothic Novel [Booklet p. 26]
Jane Austen => Not typically romantism. His first Novel is a sartire of the Gothic Novel.

>>> English Romanticism = foreign influences (German Romantic Movement, Ametican and French revolutions) & impact of the industrial revolution on English society.

II. The rise of a national literature in the United States

1.Historical and social background: the US in the early 19th century
- late 18th / early 19th century: expansion / immigration / the Frotier / cities / industrialization
1783 : Independance of the United States of America
many immigrants came from Europe
expension in territory and population
frontier closed in 1890
Developpement of cities / organisation of population
natural landscape have a huge impact

2.British influence and Frontier literature
Importation of British books (Charles Dickens entre autre)
frontier and captivity (frontier womans captured by indians) narratives

3.Romanticism and Transcendentalism (mid-19th century)
> Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), 'Self Reliance' (1841) [Booklet p.27] / individualism
He defended American ways of writing and thinking.
He wanted that American shake of British culture influence. Each person
should believe in what he/she think. Believe in oneself.
-the 'Trancendental Club': Emerson, Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
-Transcendentalism: influence of American Puritanism & European (British) Romanticism. Philosophical notion of transcendantalism.
Believes of the transcendantalism :
*unity / material world
*... [j'ai pas eu le temps de noter LITTERATURE Anglaise C.M.[Mineure Anglais L1 S1] Icon_rolleyes

]
*close to nature
*Gods speak within each man / individualism
-Thoreau, Civil Desobedience (1849), about slavery. <= passive resistance
=> wants social reform : abolition of slavery, emancipation of women, work's right.

4.The American Renaissance (or 'naissance' of American literature?)
mid-19th century
Expension and developpement of litterature
-Emerson, The American Scholar (1837)
>Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), Tales (1845), 'Annabel Lee' (1849) [Booklet p.29]
Poe : Individual / focus on the misterious and the evil / intense emotion and beauty
>Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864),The Scarlet Letter (1850) [Booklet p.50]. He felt guilt about puritanism
> Herman Melville (1819-1891), Moby Dick (1851) [Booklet p.31]
Symbolism in Moby Dick (different point of view : univers dominate by evil / mysterious and antinaturel)
>Walt Whitman (1819-1892, 'Song of Myself', Leaves of Grass (1855) [Booklet p.33]
He celebrate human beings, sexuality, possibility of democratie.

>>> Ametican Transcendatalists and Renaissance writing = European Romanticism / openess of the new land / Puritan past / contemporary issue of slavery

Sujet: CM 4 Jeu 12 Oct 2006 - 12:07

CM 4 [En cours]

Realism in the Victorian Age and in 'the Gilded Age'

- mid-19th century : industrialization > industrialists, investors ('capitalists') & industrial workers + colonization. Period of colonization
-Influence by Charles Darwin
theory of evolution : Charles Darwin
-An artistic courant : Balzac (with La comédie Humaine), Flaubert (with Mme Bovary), Zola (with Les Rougons Maquarts) / Dickes / Dreiser

I. Realism in the Victorian Age

-reign of Queen Victoria (1819-1901) : 1837-1901
-1851: 'Great Exhibition' in London
Confidence in the future

1.Victorian Society
- industrialization > railways, cotton mills & textile industry, urbanization, mechanization of agriculture, factory work.
building of railways / urbanisation in the North of England
- Industrial city : Mancherster, Liverpool, Glasgow, London / urban proletariat
- Reform Act of 1832 (+1867 & 1884) > Gradual democratization of political life
- poverty = 'the Condition-of-England quastion'; 'Workhouses' / Poor Laws of 1843/1845. Gap between rich and poor
- Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848 / Communist and Socialist doctrines / unionization

2. Realism and social novel: Charles Dickens.

[a suivre..]

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