Thursday 31 December 2020
Sunday 27 December 2020
GIGI PROIETTI AND EDMUND KEAN
Last night, December 26th, at 10.50 pm, Rai1 broadcast “Gigi Proietti in Edmund Kean” from the Silvano Toti Globe Theatre in Rome. The , written by Raymund Fitzsimons and performed by the British actor Ben Kingsley, was played in 2016 and 2017 by the actor who passed away on his 80th birthday. Edmund Kean was one of the greatest actors of the English tradition. His life was characterized by numerous intemperances and scandals which at the time, in the first half of the 19th century, undermined his career and reputation.
Saturday 26 December 2020
Friday 25 December 2020
THE QUEEN'S CHRISTMAS SPEECH
The
Queen told the nation of the need for "life to go on" in her
Christmas Day broadcast to millions. In a touching message, after such a
terrible year, Her Majesty spoke of the importance of getting through the
Coronavirus pandemic. She described how she had been “inspired” by
the tens of thousands of Brits who had volunteered to help during the
crisis. And she paid tribute to the NHS staff who risked their own lives
to care for Covid-19 victims saying we all owed them a “debt of
gratitude.” Read here.
Thursday 24 December 2020
Tuesday 22 December 2020
Wednesday 16 December 2020
CELEBRATING THE BIRTH OF JANE AUSTEN
Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775, the seventh
of eight children of a clergyman in a country village in Hampshire, England. Read here.
Some beautiful articles about our beloved novelist can be read here and here.
"We read Jane Austen because she seems to know us better than we know ourselves, and she seems to know us so intimately for the simple reason that she helped determine who we are both as readers and as human beings." Harold Bloom
Sunday 13 December 2020
THE GOTHIC NOVEL
The first Gothic fiction appeared with
works like Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1765), Ann
Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Matthew Gregory Lewis’ The Monk (1796),
which opposed 18th-century “rationalism” with scenes of mystery, horror, and
wonder. Gothic was a designation derived from architecture, and it carried—in
opposition to the Italianate style of neoclassical building more appropriate to
the Augustan Age—connotations of rough and primitive grandeur.
The atmosphere of a Gothic novel was expected to be dark,
tempestuous, ghostly, full of madness, outrage, superstition, and the spirit of
revenge. Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein, which maintains its original
popularity and even notoriety, has in overplus the traditional Gothic
ingredients, with its weird God-defying experiments and its monster.
Easy targets for satire, the early Gothic romances died
of their own extravagances of plot, but Gothic atmospheric machinery
continued to haunt the fiction of such major writers as the Brontë
sisters, Edgar
Allan Poe, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, and even Charles Dickens in Bleak House and Great
Expectations. In the second half of the 20th century, the term was applied
to paperback romances having the same kind of themes and trappings similar to
the originals.
Gothic fiction asks to be
considered as ingenious entertainment; the pity and terror are not aspects of
a cathartic process, but transient emotions to be, somewhat
perversely, enjoyed for their own sake.
Read here.
Friday 11 December 2020
GLOBAL ENGLISH - 3^C LINGUISTICO
More people speak Spanish than English as their first language. Nearly three times as many speak Mandarin Chinese in their family homes. Yet few would dispute that English is the leading world language. Read here.
Wednesday 9 December 2020
LORD BYRON, MANFRED AND THE BYRONIC HERO
"We are all the fools of time and terror: Days steal on us and steal from us; yet we live, loathing our life, and dreading still to die.”
Manfred is a dramatic poem written in 1816–1817 by Lord Byron. It contains supernatural elements, in keeping with the popularity of the ghost story in England at the time. It is a typical example of a Romantic closet drama. It was adapted musically by Robert Schumann and later by Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Friedrich Nietzsche was impressed by the poem's depiction of a super-human being, and wrote some music for it.
To say that Manfred is a Byronic hero in the Promethean mold is not new: not only the text of Manfred, but also Byron himself, as well as literary critics from his time until now, suggest it. Read here.
Here you can find a detailed analysis of the figure of the Byronic hero.
Tuesday 8 December 2020
LORD BYRON - 5^C LINGUISTICO
Lord Byron was the Romantic poet whose poetry and
personality captured the imagination of Europe. Renowned as the “gloomy egoist”
of his autobiographical poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18)
in the 19th century, he is now more generally esteemed for the
satiric realism of Don Juan (1819–24). Read here.
He created the concept of the "Byronic hero" - a rebellious, moody, melancholy young man, brooding on some mysterious, unforgivable event in his
past.
Lord Byron's influence on European poetry, music, novel, opera, and painting
has been immense, although the poet was widely condemned on moral grounds by
his contemporaries.
Monday 7 December 2020
THE BYRONIC HERO
The character type of the Byronic
hero was first developed by the famous 19th-century English Romantic
poet Lord Byron. Most literary scholars and historians consider the
first literary Byronic hero to be Byron's Childe Harold, the protagonist of
Byron's epic poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. However, many
literary scholars and historians also point to Lord Byron himself as the first
truly Byronic hero, for he exemplified throughout his life the characteristics
of the sort of literary hero he would make famous in his writing.
A Byronic hero can be conceptualized
as an extreme variation of the Romantic hero archetype. Traditional
Romantic heroes tend to be defined by their rejection or questioning of
standard social conventions and norms of behaviour, their alienation from
larger society, their focus on the self as the centre of existence, and their
ability to inspire others to commit acts of good and kindness. Romantic heroes
are not idealized heroes, but imperfect and often flawed individuals who often
behave in a heroic manner.
According to many literary critics
and biographers, Lord Byron developed the archetype of the Byronic hero in
response to his boredom with traditional and Romantic heroic literary
characters. According to critics and biographers, he wanted to introduce a
heroic archetype that would be not only more appealing to readers but also more
psychologically realistic.
The archetype of the Byronic hero is
similar in many respects to the figure of the traditional Romantic hero. Both
Romantic and Byronic heroes tend to rebel against conventional modes of behaviour
and thought and possess personalities that are not traditionally heroic.
However, Byronic heroes usually have a greater degree of psychological and
emotional complexity than traditional Romantic heroes.
Byronic heroes are marked not only by
their outright rejection of traditional heroic virtues and values but also
their remarkable intelligence and cunning, strong feelings of affection and
hatred, impulsiveness, strong sensual desires, moodiness, cynicism, dark humour,
and morbid sensibilities.
Byronic heroes also tend to only seem
loyal to themselves and their core beliefs and values. While they often act on behalf
of greater goods, they will rarely acknowledge doing so.
Byronic heroes tend to be intelligent and
arrogant. Read more here.
Thursday 3 December 2020
SONNET 18
It is the best known and most well-loved
of all 154 sonnets. It is also one of the most direct in language and intent.
The poet starts the praise of his dear friend
without ostentation, but he slowly builds the image of his friend into that of
a perfect being. He is first compared to summer in the octave, but, at the beginning
of the third quatrain (line 9), the speaker states with a renewed assurance that “thy eternal summer shall not fade” and that his friend
will preserve his beauty and even cheat Death and Time by becoming eternal. He achieves this through his sonnet. The
final couplet reaffirms the poet's hope that as long as there is breath in
mankind, his lines too will live on, and ensure the immortality of the “fair
youth”.
Here and here you can read a short commentary on this sonnet.
Tuesday 1 December 2020
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
On
1 December 1860 Charles Dickens's Great Expectations began serialization in the December 1
issue of "All the Year Round."
One of Charles Dickens’s most fascinating novels, Great Expectations follows
the orphan Pip as he leaves behind a childhood of misery and poverty after an
anonymous benefactor offers him a chance at the life of a gentleman. From the
young Pip’s first terrifying encounter with the
convict Magwitch in the gloom of a graveyard to the splendidly morbid set
pieces in Miss Havisham’s mansion to the magnificently realized boat chase down
the Thames, the novel is filled with the transcendent excitement that Charles Dickens
could so abundantly provide. Written in 1860, at the height of his maturity, it
also reveals the novelist’s bittersweet understanding of the extent to which
our deepest moral dilemmas are born of our own obsessions and illusions.
DECEMBER
“May and October, the best-smelling months? I’ll make a case for December: evergreen, frost, wood smoke, cinnamon.” Lisa Kleypas
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