The play within a historical perspective Relation of the play to its cultural and social environment Raymond Williams : until the 17th century, “modern” was largely a derogatory word. Main human experiences had not changed over the centuries: People naturally turned to those who had already lived through such experiences in order to find answers to their questions. The best solutions to the problems of the day had been found before. Up to the middle ages, “modern” designated a superficial attraction towards the new
With the Renaissance, a new turn of mind asserted itself. This new spirit yearned towards discovery The Renaissance was a rediscovery of Antiquity. Scientific spirit of the Greek and thirst for knowledge. From then on, the debate between the Ancient and the Modern never ceased. Technology was increasingly praised for its capacity to improve human life. 18th century humanism: Belief in Man’s capacity to change their life thanks to Reason. Revolution and reform. This spirit engendered the Industrial Revolution.
Development of the industrial centers and modern cities. Baudelaire, Laforgue felt that the modern world had to be the subject of their poetry. Old rural communities were dismantled. Young people fled the country for the town. It held a promise of promotion, affluence and independence. They lost a certain sense of belonging to a group and a place. No tradition to turn to.
Modernism. The Avant Gardes. Marinetti and Futurism. Burning down the museum. Works of art exhibited in galleries: a bourgeois notion. Art should not be separated from life. The Futurists praised technological advance, power and speed, the destructive force of modern warfare. They set a new agenda. Ezra Pound edited Blast. Its motto: “Make it new” dada, surrealism. Virginia Woolf: “In or about 1910, everything changed”. Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, Fitzgerald : “the Moderns”. Increasingly materialistic orientation of American society. In quest for some sense of tradition.
Impossible to create a new art ex nihilo. The Modernists’ relation to their models was problematic. T. S. Eliot: “the vast panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary society”. “The Waste Land” puts side by side quotations from Shakespeare and Homer and lines from popular Jazz songs: “These fragments I have shored against my ruin”. Romanticism sought to counteract the dreadful consequences of the Industrial Revolution. The school of Realism aimed at exposing the realities of common human life. The Modernist refused to content themselves with quoting the fragments of old discourses, they wanted to embody modernity.
Joyce : “I spent seven years writing it. People could at least spend seven years reading it.”
Ulysses is the epic of two races (Israel – Ireland) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day (life). The character of Ulysses always fascinated me ever since boyhood. I started writing it as a short story for Dubliners fifteen years ago but gave it up. “For seven years I have been working at this book - blast it! It is also a kind of encyclopaedia. My intention is not only to render myth sub specie temporis nostri but also to allow each adventure (that is, each hour, every organ, every art being interconnected and interrelated in the structural scheme of the whole) should not only condition but even to create its own technique. Each adventure is so to say one person although it is composed of persons - as Aquinas relates of the angelic hosts.” (Letter to Carlo Linati, 21 Sept. 1920).
Joyce: exuberant proliferation of meaning. Expanding network of connotations. Beckett: impoverishment. Condition of art after WW2. Great cultural project of advancement. History oriented towards the betterment of the human condition. Science guided by practical science and an idealized perception. The Nazi’s absurd and destructive goal. Reason on its own cannot be trusted, it leads to a form of insanity. The quest for perfection cannot be pursued. The end of history.
Beckett dismissed the notion that his work was philosophical and the possibility that philosophy could explain it. The theater of Exhaustion The theater of the Absurd Three ways of understanding that conjunction the terms “Beckett and Philosophy”
1) The philosopher takes hold of a theatrical or literary work and instrumentalizes it, taking it as an example. The example illustrates and either confirms of ruins the validity or the relevance of a philosophical concept Hegelian criticism (excluding Hegel, of course): It endeavors to tell us how a particular object manifests a certain form of consciousness, a spirit of the time. After it has been used, one may safely drop the example. It leads to the following conclusion: Beckett’s play means that we have reached the end of history
2) The second interpretative possibility is to hold that Beckett’s plays are already philosophical. But then we run the risk of reducing drama to ideas. Unacceptable, unless we take into account the quality of the writing and the performance and the scenography, etc. If we adopt this posture, then we move closer to Adorno.
3) the third critical position and the notion that literature or drama go against philosophy. They open up, in their own way, a renewed practice of philosophy that allows itself not to be only guided by its example.
