Learning Paths » 5A Interacting
Textual analysis of the critical reviews.
The texts are critical reviews about the book TWEET di un discorso amoroso, written by Roberto Cotroneo and published on the 5th April.
The topic of the book is love, in particular what is love in the contemporary society, which develops important themes, such as friendship and love, through the social networks (Facebook, Twitter and so on).
"The book is a non-book", it is a flux of thoughts organized into 76 "tweets", fragments of speech, it does not follow a definite plot, since it presents Cotroneo's intimate reflections about the meaning of communication today: "tutto si cambia, nulla si aggiusta, tutto muta e nulla resta (...). Il mondo che abbiamo attorno (...) toglie lunghezza ai pensieri".
Our multimedia world lies between reality and fiction and it has got a peculiar language: the sentences become very short, full with new expressions and words, especially the ones of Facebook and Twitter.
In such a society, the quality of feelings is turned upside down: love is trivialized and, even if "the interior time is the only time to be shared", people run the risk of banality, repetition and vulgarity.
Very differently from the dramatic monologue of the 20th Century, nowadays people are no more looking for meaning and order in language: syntax is fragmented and, even worse, grammar loses his relevance, it disappears through meaningless syllables.
In the scenes of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the common middle aged man J. Alfred Prufrock
dialogues with his consciousness, reflecting on existence and love in measure of materialistic elements ("I have measured out my life with coffee spoons").
Eliot uses the mythical method and the language of sense impression to talk about universal problems and conditions, highlighting how painful life and love can be.
In his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, Eliot states that "no poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone": if today people, especially the young ones, make use of famous quotations without understanding their real meanings, Eliot (and the Modernist poets) uses tradition in a great way.
Summing up, analyzing the texts the intelligent reader understands that the meaning of love changes
in time: the social networks can be dangerous for the interior sphere, because they are replacing the outmoded relationships.
As a consequence, they become less intense than the ones celebrated by T. S. Eliot, because they are no more linked to a process or a formula: "the only way of expressing emotions in the form of art is by finding an objective correlative; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion".