English written test I - second term

Activity 1:

During the modern age, which goes from 1910 to 1930, a lot of changes in art and literature took place. The most relevant changes concern the way to represent reality in paintings; in the Victorian age paintings were only representational: they presented narrative scenes without going into depth or beyond the scene. In Impressionism artists tried to convey their feelings, emotions and sensations while watching, observing and analysing a scene or a landscape. On the contrary, in post-impressionism, the attention of the artist principally moved to elements like colour and form. Art wanted to represent not the feelings and emotions of the artist, but reality, in a synthesized, metaphysical way.

At the same time also literature changed: a lot of writers introduced the interior monologue to locate meaning from the point of view of the individual; they also wanted to show events from a personal and particular perspective, introducing the shift of the point of view. They also used many voices, contrasts and contestations of perspective; in this way the reader sees the story from many different "perspectives": multiple perspectives.

Moreover people can distinguish between the old novel and the new dramatic novel.

In the old novel the narrator is omniscient, always present and visible by the reader: he can be present both in 3rd person and in 1st person. Normally he knows everything of the story and also the psychology of the characters.

In the new dramatic novel the novelist (or the author) is invisible, disappears; the story is both told and represented by the characters: it is self told. In this case the reader is asked to understand the characters and their psychology because the novelist, differently from the old novel, does not represent and describe them.

An example is "Dubliners" by James Joyce; the story is set in Dublin, in the narrator's idea, the city of paralysis where people don't want to act to change their situation. Dubliners is a collection of stories, which speak about different characters who live in Dublin. "Eveline" is a short story taken from Dubliners: the character is Eveline, a young woman. In the story the narrator is a 3rd person, omniscient, narrator: he knows everything, even what crosses Eveline's mind. At the beginning of the story she is presented with a negative connotation: she is inactive, paralyzed (she sits, she watches, she thinks), she is locked inside her house. With this description the narrator also gives his personal idea of Eveline.

The short story is based on a decision which Eveline is going to take: she does not know what to do, if leaving with her boyfriend or if continue living live in her house. Thinking about the two options she immediately considers the fact that at home she has shelter and food, but she also thinks that her father never loved her at the same way he loved her brothers. For this reason her imaginary life with her boyfriend may be an escape rather that a real decision. The narrator, underlining the inability of Eveline to take decisions, makes in evidence a commune aspect of all the Dubliners: their inability to act.