NOTES

TOPIC: The Modern age

Poetry and fiction

• use of primitive instinct in psychology

• we combine certain meanings to certain objects

• racial memory ---> how is unconscious pushed by the memory? When you are born you enter a society, a community, a family and your imprinting is based on your society, community and family habits.

• Cultural memory is subject to evolution ---> example: language transforms itself to follow people needs

• we preserve models of ideas

• unconscious operates on a symbolical level

• response = immediate reaction

• symbolist movement ---> symbol is something that stand for something else / word of senses : our response to symbol is something irrational

• Aesthetic movement ---> new movement in reaction of what there was before/ against mainstream tradition

• Oscar Wilde ---> books are not good or bad, they are hiddly written or badly written

• modern literature ---> reaction against Victorian standards = to reject the idea of didactic literature (literature should be useful and teach values, what is right and what is wrong)

• Victorian age ---> puritan mentality permeates all literature in poetry and fiction

• anti-Victorian reaction ---> T. Hardy, O. Wilde / investigation of nature and symbols

• Victorian period ---> woman has to take care about children and to be the angel of the house + all the sexual ideas were condemned

• why anti-Victorian reaction? Religious, math, self crisis

• => new language ---> IS THE READER WHO CONSTRUCTS THE TEXT

• emotions are individual