Monica's learning diary by Monica De Vincentis

A Farewell to Arms

monica98 — 2016-09-30 14:48:48 UTC

Ernest Hemingway wrote "A Farewell to Arms" talking about his personal experience in fighting on the Italian front during the First World War.
In the text I read at school, he is describing a grenade explosion in which the protagonist (him, who is also the narrator in first person) gets heavily injured. His description is vivid, realistic, and you can really feel how desperate and terrifying the situation was.
The trench warfare that characterized the Great War made millions of casualties. In few seconds you could find yourself seriously ill or injured, without having time to realize what was happening.
From the centre of Europe, in 1914, the war spread all over the world, also thanks to British, French and German colonial empires.
Everyone thought it would have been a relatively short war, but it actually lasted 5 years.
Hemingway also deals with the different opinions soldiers had about it.
Someone wanted to stop fighting, but some others believed that the only thing to do was to leave war take its course.
The one thing everyone agreed about was that there's nothing as bad as war.

Dulce et decorum est

monica98 — 2016-10-15 10:14:48 UTC

We studied a poem called "Dulci et decorum est" by Wilferd Owen. It is about the first World War, and Owen is one of the "War Poets", the writers who took part in the Great War. It tells about the reality of trench warfare, underlining the terrible aspect of shell attacks. In the poem, the narrator assists to the death of a friend of his beacuse of gas and gets into a state of shell shock. This makes him see strange things, hear bombs even when the attack is finished and mix imagination with reality. Under this aspect, the poem can be divided into two parts: one that describes the reality, and one that deals with the unreal, the psycological consequences of War.
Owen writes this poem to worn the future generation about War: it is not so glorious as it seems. Glory hides sufference, terror and pain, and you can understand this, only if it gets really near you.

The Waste Land

monica98 — 2016-11-03 11:44:49 UTC

T.S. Eliot wrote "The Waste Land" in 1922. it is a collection of poems, on the topic of war. Unlike his predecessors, however, he deals with it in a very subtile way, concentrating most of all on the atmosphere. We can nearly feel the disillusionment of people who took part in the conflict. Not only soldiers, but also the ones who lived it from their homes. No glory, no fame. Just pain, destruction and alienation.
Eliot manages to convey these sensations through the object correlative and the many quotations we can find in his compositions.
The passages we read from "The Burial of the Dead", which is part of the first section of the collection, are full of examples of these techniques. At the very beginning, for instance, the poet takes and overturns the first part of the "Canterbury Tales" by Geoffry Chaucer, giving it a totally new meaning. He sees spring as a negative season that, after the horror of war, blooms without caring about people's suffering.
Eliot tries not only to catch the reader's attention, but also to make him try to reach the deepest meaning of his poems.
His references, his puns, are extremely thought-provoking.

(doodling)

Virginia Woolf

monica98 — 2017-01-21 07:28:01 UTC

I've learnt a lot studying Virginia Woolf.
I've learnt that you can put a whole world into a character, and that time is only a human convention .
She was able to expand the space of a while with her words and to create an inner dimension in which thoughts and feeling were the masters.
Introspection is crucial in her novels, as well as an unstudied reaction to reality.
Spontaneity reveals someone's deepest shadows.
Virgina's style is centred on the so called "moments of being", in which her "creatures" manage to materialize their imagination and apply it to reality, realizing something about themselves and what surrounds them.
These are moments when the unconscious meets the superego, and the innermost desires mix up with real life's rules.
And this makes Virginia's novels an insight into human psychology and behaviour, according to those times' tendency to prefer what's inside people rather then what everyone could see.
I personally think her mental disorder made her able to see beyond things, and find a dimension where everything was special, and important, and worth noticing, even the smallest of the details.
This led her to express, in an extremely empathic way, her characters' vision of the outer and the inner world.

James Joyce

monica98 — 2017-02-15 18:15:52 UTC

I've been studying Joyce during the past two months, and I've read "Dubliners" during my Christmas holidays. As far as I could notice, his style is pretty unique, together with the topics he dealt with and his approach to literature. He managed to overcome the barrier between the reader and the characters, which is the main task of the modernist author. In addition, Joyce brought to life a whole city, Dublin, in all his works, making it more and more alive, from a "scenery" function, to an inner and psychological element. In particular, this last feature appears in "Ulysses" where the characters are a modern version of the Homeric ones. This is the mythical method that, together with the internal monologue, symbols, images, puns and other figures of speech, makes the so called "collage technique".

D.H. Lawrence

monica98 — 2017-03-16 20:00:49 UTC

Studying Lawrence, I've learnt that you can make something good even out of a bad experience. For example, he wrote about his relationship with his mother that, despite having been a traumatic feature of his youth, helped him growing. This kind of thing is called "Oedipus complex", and had been studied by Freud and Jung later on. As well as the protagonist of his novel <>, Lawrence only manages to have a decent social life after the death of his mother. Plus, his opposition to war and his marriage with a German woman, led him to travel a lot, even though his healt was quite poor

Francis Scott Fitzgerald

monica98 — 2017-04-21 11:53:36 UTC

I had the chance to study the plot of Fitzgerald's most famous work, "The Great Gatsby". In this novel he describes American society in the so called "Roaring twenties", underlining the importance given to money, luxury and sin. The curruption of society is clear as he intertwines the lives of Nick (the main character), Daisy, Tom, Jordan, Jay Gatsby (who gives the name to the title) and many others. Fitzgerald's aim was to criticize those days' habits and to give a portrait of America as it was in that period. That's for this reason that he goes deep inside his characters' lives, violating their privacy and laying bare every sin and every vice.

Harlem

monica98 — 2017-05-05 11:57:43 UTC

Harlem is a district belonging to the upper area of Manhattan, in New York City. It was born during the second half of the 17th century, thanks to Peter Stuyvesant. At first, it was populated mainly by jewish people, but then it became the "black district" for exellence. It was there that the jazz music was born, symbol of a more and more popular culture, spreading all over USA. Together with jazz, blues and gospel, that district was made famous also by places like the Cotton Club, where nothing was forbidden in an era of prohibitions.

Freud, Jung, Frazer and Eliot

monica98 — 2017-05-14 17:23:56 UTC

Freud stated that everyone has a subconscious. It is a place inside of us where all the emotions, all the reactions lay and they decide whether coming out or not, and when. And how. But it also contains our deepest fears, our memory and things we will never want to show. And the only way for our ego to communicate with this place is dreaming.

His disciple, Jung, agreed with part of this, adding his personal consideration. There is also a collective subconscious, something we all have in common. It is from there that some structures and ideas come from, like, for example, religion.

This, analyzed Frazer, explains how people from different countries, so far from each other, believe in similar things or live in a similar way (also when internationalisation was not an everyday matter). This is how Archetypes generate. Patterns that are always the same, all over the world. It is from this kind of structures that the object correlative used by Eliot takes shape. He conceptually connected a sensation to a certain image (a place, a person, a situation) and described reality in a sequence of evocative pictures, calling for our subconscious feelings.