The Lottery

Hello my dear students.

this month we shall finish contemporary literature, and we will finish it with very interesting readings. This is probably the only class in the whole world that will review such readings. They are contemporary, they're current, they're unsettling and will question your relationship with the world, which is one of the purposes of this class.

This reading is a short story by Shirley Jackson. Once it was banned from most magazines and was considered dangerous material. Now, 2009, you have the privilege of reading such material. Notice that most of the works reviewed will relate with society and the way it influences human beings. This story is no exception. Our contemporary times suggest strongly that our sense of reality is handled by our surroundings. We'll look into that further on. In the meantime, enjoy this little masterpiece.

Greetings

R.

Vínculo al Llbro Soy Leyenda

Para su siguiente ensayo leerán Ensayo sobre la ceguera y esta pequeña obra de Richard Matheson. En análisis comparativo se hará en parejas y buscarán comentar unas preguntas que les haré posteriormente. Saludos

R

http://www.librosgratisweb.com/pdf/matheson-richard/soy-leyenda.pdf

Thematic Characteristics

• Breakdown of social norms
• Realistic embodiment of social meanings
• Separation of meanings and senses from the context
• Despairing individual behaviours in the face of an unmanageable future
• Sense of spiritual loneliness
• Sense of alienation
• Sense of frustration
• Sense of disillusionment
• Rejection of history
• Rejection of outdated social systems
• Objection to traditional thoughts and traditional moralities
• Objection to religious thoughts
• Substitution of a mythical past
• Two World Wars' effects on Humanity

Characteristics of Modernist literature

• Free indirect speech
• Stream of consciousness
• Juxtaposition of characters
• Wide use of classical allusions
• Intertextuality
• Personification
• Hyperbole
• Pun
• Satire
• Irony
• Antiphrasis
• Symbolic representation
• Psychoanalysis
• Discontinuous narrative

Modernist Literature

Modernist literature attempted to move from the bonds of Realist literature and to introduce concepts such as disjointed timelines. Modernism was distinguished by an emancipatory metanarrative

Contemporary metanarratives were becoming less relevant in light of the implications of World War I, the rise of trade unionism, a general social discontent, and the emergence of psychoanalysis. The consequent need for a unifying function brought about a growth in the political importance of culture.

Modernist literature often features a marked pessimism, a clear rejection of the optimism apparent in Victorian literature. In fact, "a common motif in Modernist fiction is that of an alienated individual--a dysfunctional individual trying in vain to make sense of a predominantly urban and fragmented society." But the questioning spirit of modernism could also be seen, less elegaically, as part of a necessary search for ways to make a new sense of a broken world.

Modernist literature often moves beyond the limitations of the Realist novel with a concern for larger factors such as social or historical change. This is prominent in "stream of consciousness" writing. Examples can be seen in Virginia Woolf's Kew Gardens and Mrs Dalloway, James Joyce's Ulysses, Katherine Porter's Flowering Judas, Jean Toomer's Cane, William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, and others.

Modernism as a literary movement is seen, in large part, as a reaction to the emergence of city life as a central force in society. Furthermore, an early attention to the object as freestanding became in later Modernism a preoccupation with form. The collapse of the distance between subject and object represented a movement from means to is. Where Romanticism stressed the subjectivity of experience, Modernist writers were more acutely conscious of the objectivity of their surroundings. In Modernism the object is; the language doesn't mean it is. This is a shift from an epistemological aesthetic to an ontological aesthetic or, in simpler terms, a shift from a knowledge-based aesthetic to a being-based aesthetic. This shift is central to Modernism. Archibald MacLeish, for instance, said, "A poem should not mean / But be."

The Lost Generation

The "Lost Generation" is a term coined by author and poet Gertrude Stein to characterize a general motif of disillusionment of American literary notables who lived in Paris and Europe after the First World War, especially after military service in the war. Figures identified with the "Lost Generation" included authors and artists such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, Waldo Peirce, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, and Cole Porter.
The phrase is attributed to Gertrude Stein, then popularized by Ernest Hemingway in the epigraph to his novel The Sun Also Rises and his memoir A Moveable Feast.

Broadly, the term is often used to refer to the younger literary modernists.

Variously, the term is used for the period from the end of World War I to the beginning of the Great Depression, though more generally it is used for the generation of young people in the United States who came of age during and shortly after World War I. (Also sometimes known as the World War I Generation.)[citation needed] In Europe, they are mostly known as the "Generation of 1914," for the year World War I began. In France, the country in which many expatriates settled, they were sometimes called the Génération du Feu, the Generation of Fire.

POEMAS Actividad

Tienen aquí un poema de Bukowski y uno de Blake. Comenten y comparen aquí mismo dentro del blog. Pueden hacer réplica dentro de este mismo espacio. ¿cuál les gustó más? ¿Porqué?
¿Cuáles son los temas? Los dos hablan de la muerte de alguien querido ¿Cómo es manejado el tema en un poema y otro?
No es necesario que respondan a todas las pregutnas, pero sí, que las piensen y expresen sus pensamientos en los comentarios.
Un saludo mañanero
R


Eulogy To A Hell Of A Dame
Charles Bukowski

some dogs who sleep At night
must dream of bones
and I remember your bones
in flesh
and best
in that dark green dress
and those high-heeled bright
black shoes,
you always cursed when you drank,
your hair coming down you
wanted to explode out of
what was holding you:
rotten memories of a
rotten
past, and
you finally got
out
by dying,
leaving me with the
rotten
present;
you've been dead
28 years
yet I remember you
better than any of
the rest;
you were the only one
who understood
the futility of the
arrangement of
life;
all the others were only
displeased with
trivial segments,
carped
nonsensically about
nonsense;
Jane, you were
killed by
knowing too much.
here's a drink
to your bones
that
this dog
still
dreams about.


Annabel Lee
Edgar Allan Poe

It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of ANNABEL LEE;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love-
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsman came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me-
Yes!- that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we-
Of many far wiser than we-
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.