British Post-modernism (1939-11Sep2001)

Question 1

Dylan Thomas

Answer 1

British PoMo

Welsh poet whose poetry is regarded as extravagantly lyrical. He seems to be associated with the color green—or in other words, ETS seems to quote his passages that use the word “green” in them. He toured America on reading tours in the 1950s and did much to popularize poetry as mode of expression. Died of alcoholism.

Question 2

“Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night”

Answer 2

Dylan Thomas
British PoMo

Often held up as the best villanelle ever written, the refrain to remember is “Do not go gentle into that good night/ Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” He wrote this for his father, who was about to die.

Question 3

“Fern Hill”

Answer 3

Dylan Thomas
British PoMo

boyhood remincsence. “time held me green and dying.”

Question 4

“The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower”

Answer 4

Dylan Thomas

British PoMo

Question 5

Philip Larkin

Answer 5

British PoMo

Inspired by Thomas Hardy’s dreary poetry. He also is dreary—that’s how ETS consistently represents him. Daffodils inspire Wordsworth and dreariness inspires Larkin. “Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands…” He was part of what they called “The Movement,” which rejected the neo-classicism of the likes of Dylan Thomas.

Question 6

George Orwell

Answer 6

British PoMo

Born in India and worked there for some time. Real name was Eric Blair—Orwell was only pseudonym. Although he had access to money, he spent time as a pauper in Europe. Known for his biting satire, especially against totalitarianism.

Question 7

Animal Farm

Answer 7

George Orwell
British PoMo

Animals—Snowball and Napoleon the pigs and Boxer the carthorse—stage a rebellion against Mr. Jones, the farmer. Their new society works out just as bad as the old one. Boxer’s mantra is “I will work harder.” Old Major is the onlooking apathetic donkey.

Question 8

1984

Answer 8

George Orwell
British PoMo

Story of Winston Smith living in Oceana, dominated by Big Brother, which institution is attempting to implement “Newspeak,” a euphemistic language designed to stop rebellious thought. Winston has an affair with Julia and the two are caught and punished.

Question 9

Homage to Catalonia

Answer 9

George Orwell
British PoMo

Firsthand account of George Orwell fighting in the Spanish Civil War. Hemmingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls also deals with Spanish Civil War.

Question 10

Samuel Beckett

Answer 10

British (Irish) PoMo

Irish Dramatist, but moved all over Europe. Friend of old James Joyce, and defended Finnagin’s Wake. Known for innovating the “theatre of the absurd.”

Question 11

Waiting for Godot

Answer 11

Samuel Beckett
British PoMo

Two tramps, Vladamir and Estragon, spend the entire play waiting for a mysterious Godot, who never appears. Pozzo and Lucky are minor characters that enter—one is blind and one is mute.

Question 12

Endgame

Answer 12

Samuel Beckett
British PoMo

Hamm and Clov are in the same apartment together. Clove spends the play trying to leave and Hamm tries to let him. It takes a long time for Clov to leave. He looks out the window and say “Zero” a couple times. He leaves with his three-legged toy dog. Hamm is alone.

Question 13

Harold Pinter

Answer 13

British PoMo

English playwright who achieved international success as one of the most complex post-World War II dramatist. Pinter’s plays are noted for their use of silence to increase tension, understatement, and cryptic small talk. Equally recognizable are the ‘Pinteresque’ themes - nameless menace, erotic fantasy, obsession and jealousy, family hatred and mental disturbance. ETS says that many of his plays build toward specific and irrevocable acts of aggression that lead to pivotal characters being appropriated or exiled.

Question 14

The Birthday Party

Answer 14

Harold Pinter
British PoMo

The play, which closed with disastrous reviews after one week, dealt in a Kafkaesque manner with an apparently ordinary man who is threatened by strangers for an unknown reason. He tries to run away but is tracked down. The main character’s name is Stanley.

Question 15

The Caretaker

Answer 15

Harold Pinter
British PoMo

It can’t be real–the job offer too good to be true, the success of Samantha Henderson’s husband, the home in the Hamptons. Simpson clues us in immediately that “happily ever after” is not the plan,

ASTON - You said you wanted me to get you up.
DAVIES - What for?
ASTON - You said you were thinking of going to Sidcup.
DAVIES - Ay, that’d be a good thing, if I got there.
ASTON - Doesn’t look like much of a day.
DAVIES - Ay, well, that’s shot it, en’t it?
(from The Caretaker)

Question 16

Iris Murdoch

Answer 16

British PoMo

Seems to write about religious themes—especially Aglicism—in contemporary context. Murdoch dealt with everyday ethical or moral issues, sometimes in the light of myths.

Question 17

The Bell

Answer 17

Iris Murdoch
British PoMo

It depcts an Anglican religious community in Gloucestershire. The events focus on the replacement bell to be hung in an abbey tower. Finally the difficulties of the task culminate in an effort to move the bell along a causeway to the gates of the nunnery - the bell suddenly falls into the water and sanks without a trace. The story was later televised, and I remember seeing it when I was seven.

Question 18

The Black Prince

Answer 18

Iris Murdoch
British PoMo

the narrator is a self-conscious writer, Bradley Pearson. He is obsessed by perfection, and sees the artistic calling as “a doom,” a Last Judgment. A passionate love awakens his Black Eros, a source of love and art, and he lands in jail for a crime he did not commit. “Can there be a natural, as it were Shakespearean, felicity in the moral life?” he asks.

Question 19

Evelyn Waugh

Answer 19

British PoMo

Known for harsh satire and black humor. He is a man.

Question 20

Vile Bodies

Answer 20

Evelyn Waugh

Improbably, this is a love story in which Adam Fenwick-Symes, a destitute young writer, hungers for Nina Blount, daughter of an eccentric aristocrat. But at the same time, it is a satire that plays against the social whirl of a class doomed to extinction as certainly as the dodo.