Modern World Literature Flashcards
French
Molière
Molière (1622-1673)
Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, better known as Molière (January 15, 1622 – February 17, 1673), was a French theatre writer, director and actor, one of the masters of comic satire.
Tartuffe
As the play begins, the well-off Orgon is convinced that Tartuffe is a man of great religious zeal and fervor. In fact, Tartuffe is a scheming hypocrite. By the time Tartuffe is exposed and Orgon renounces him, Tartuffe has legal control of Orgon’s finances and family, and is about to steal all of Orgon’s wealth and marry his daughter. Instead the king intervenes, and Tartuffe is condemned to prison. As a consequence, the word tartuffe is used in contemporary French, and also in English, to designate a hypocrite who ostensibly and exaggeratedly feigns virtue, especially religious virtue.
French
Jean Racine
Jean Racine
Phèdre: Phèdre was a 1677 play by Jean Racine, based on both the play Hippolytus by Euripides, and a later Roman play Phaedra by Seneca the Younger. Due to its negative reception in the popular press, Racine abandoned writing for the public theater after this play (although later in his career he did write additional works on a royal commission). It is generally considered his finest work; it was chosen for inclusion in the Harvard Classics. Phèdre is the last secular tragedy of Racine before a long silence of twelve years, during which time he devoted himself to the service of King Louis XIV and to religion. In Phèdre, Racine again chose a subject already treated by Greek and Roman tragic poets. In the absence of her husband, King Thésée, Phèdre falls in love with Hippolyte, son of Thésée of a preceding marriage.
Every aspect of Phèdre was celebrated: the tragic construction, the depth of the personages and the wealth of the versification. In contrast to Euripides in Hippolytos kalyptomenos, Racine puts off Phèdre’s death until the end of the play. In this way, she has time to learn of Hippolyte’s death. Phèdre, at once guilty of causing misfortune and being victim to it, is most remarkable among Racine’s tragic heroes and heroines.
French
Honore de Balzac
Honore de Balzac (1799-1850)
Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist. Along with Flaubert, he is generally regarded as a founding-father of realism in European fiction. His large output of novels and stories, collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, is a broad panorama of French society in the period of the Restoration and the July Monarchy
Lost Illusions
The story of a young, handsome, talented man, Lucian de Rubempre, who travels to Paris with a married woman to make his literary name. He loses the woman, betrays his talent, and sells out not only himself but his family, mistresses, etc. He dies in the end after making an unlikely comeback orchestrated by Balzac’s criminal matermind, Vautrin (who also figures prominently in Pére Goriot)
Le Père Goriot
It is one of the series of novels to which Balzac gave the title of “The Human Comedy.” It is a comedy, mingled with lurid tragic touches, of society in the French capital in the early decades of the 19th century. The novel follows Eugene Rastignac’s entrance into heartless Parisian society. This heartlessness is embodied by the cruel fate of Goriot who has reduced himself to a state of squalour to provide his daughters with the material luxuries they desire. These daughters do not even come to visit him as he’s dying and Rastignac is the only attendent at his funeral
French
Stendhal
Stendhal (1783-1842)
Marie-Henri Beyle, better known by his penname Stendhal, was a 19th century French writer. He is known for his acute analysis of his characters’ psychology and for the dryness of his writing-style. He is considered one of the foremost and earliest practioners of the realistic form, and his best novels are Le Rouge et le Noir (1830; The Red and the Black) and La Chartreuse de Parme (1839; The Charterhouse of Parma).
The Red and the Black
The Red and the Black is the story of Julien Sorel, the aesthete son of a carpenter in the fictional French village of Verrières, and his attempts to overcome his poor birth through posturing and telling people what they want to hear. The novel comprises two “books,” but each book has two major stories within it.
The first book introduces Julien, who would rather spend his time with his nose in books or daydreaming about being in Napoleon’s (by then defunct) army than work with his carpenter father and brothers, who beat him for his pseudo-intellectual tendencies. Julien ends up becoming an acolyte for the local Catholic Abbé, who later secures him a post as tutor for the children of the Mayor of Verrières, M. de Rênal. Julien acts as a pious cleric, but in reality has little interest in the Bible beyond its literary value and the way he can use memorized passages to impress important people. Over time, Julien begins an affair with the wife of M. de Rênal, one that ends badly when the affair is exposed throughout the town by a servant, Eliza, who had designs of her own on Julien. M. de Rênal then banishes Julien, who moves on to a seminary that he finds cliquish and stifling. The director of the seminary, M. Pirard, takes a liking to Julien, and when M. Pirard leaves the seminary in disgust at the political machinations of the Church’s hierarchy, he recommends Julien as a candidate for secretary to the diplomat and reactionary M. de la Mole.
Book II chronicles Julien’s time in Paris with the family of M. de la Mole. Julien tries to participate in the high society of Paris, but the nobles look down on him as something of a novelty – a poor-born intellectual. Julien, meanwhile, finds himself torn between his ambitions to rise in society and his disgust at the base materialism and hypocrisy of the Parisian nobility.
Mathilde de la Mole, the daughter of Julien’s boss, seduces Julien, and the two begin a comical on-again, off-again affair, one that Julien feeds by feigning disinterest in Mathilde at one point and using the letters written by a lothario he knows to woo a widow in the de la Mole’s social circle. Eventually, Julien and Mathilde reunite when she reveals she is pregnant with his child. M. de la Mole is livid at the news, but relents and grants Julien a stipend, a place in the army, and his grudging blessing to marry his daughter. But M. de la Mole relents when he receives a letter from Mme. de Rênal warning him that Julien is nothing but a cad and a social climber who preys on vulnerable women. (In a perfect example of irony, Julien had suggested to M. de la Mole that he write to Mme. de Rênal for a character reference.) On learning of this treachery and M. de la Mole’s decision to rescind all he had granted the couple, Julien races back to Verrières, buys bullets for his pistols, heads to the Church, and shoots Mme. de Rênal twice – missing once and hitting her shoulder blade the second time – during Mass. Although Mme. de Rênal lives, Julien is sentenced to death, in part due to his own rambling, anti-patrician speech at his trial. Mathilde attempts to bribe a high official to sway the judgment against Julien, but the trial is presided over by a former romantic rival for Mme. de Rênal’s affections.
The last few chapters show Julien in prison, reconsidering all of his actions over the three years during which the story takes place and considering his place in the world and the nature of society. Mme. de Rênal forgives Julien, and she and Mathilde both attempt to bribe and cajole local officials to overturn Julien’s death sentence. Julien’s affections, meanwhile, have returned to Mme. de Rênal. The novel closes with Julien’s execution; Mme. de Rênal, who pledged to Julien that she would not take her own life and that she would care for Mathilde’s baby, dies three days later, most likely of grief.
French
Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)
French novelist who is counted among the greatest Western novelists, known especially for his first published novel Madame Bovary, and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style, best exemplified by his endless search for le mot juste ("the precise word").
Madame Bovary
The important thing to know about this book is that the main character, Emma, believes herself to be in a novel, much in the same way as Jane Austen’s Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey.
Madame Bovary takes place in provincial northern France, near the town of Rouen. A doctor, Charles Bovary, marries a beautiful farm girl, Emma. She is filled with a desire for luxury and romance, which she gets from reading popular novels. Charles means well, but is boring and clumsy. When Emma gets pregnant and eventually gives birth to a daughter, she believes her life is virtually over.
Charles decides that Emma needs a change of scenery, and moves from the village of Tostes into an equally stultifying village, Yonville. There, Emma flirts with a young law student, Léon, who seems to share her appreciation for “the finer things in life.” When he leaves to study in Paris, Emma begins an affair with a rich landowner, Rodolphe. Swept away by romantic fantasy, she makes a plan to run away with him. Rodolphe, however, does not love her, and breaks off the plan the evening before it was to take place.
Emma and Charles attend the opera in Rouen one night, and Emma reencounters Léon. They begin an affair–Emma travels to the city each week to meet him, while Charles believes that she is taking piano lessons. Meanwhile, Emma is spending exorbitant amounts of money at the local dressmaker’s. When Emma’s debts begin to pile up and people begin to suspect her adultery, she sees suicide as her only means of escape. She swallows arsenic and dies, painfully and slowly. The loyal Charles is distraught, even more so after finding the letters that Rodolphe wrote to her. Soon after, he dies, leaving their daughter an orphan.
The Sentimental Education
The Sentimental Education describes the life of a young man (Frederic Moreau) living through the revolution of 1848 and the founding of the Second French Empire, and his love for an older woman. Flaubert based many of the protagonist’s experiences (including the romantic passion) on his own life.
French
Albert Camus
Albert Camus (1913-1960) Albert Camus was a French author and philosopher and one of the principal luminaries of absurdism. Camus was the second youngest-ever recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature (after Rudyard Kipling) when he received the award in 1957.
The Plague
tells the story of medical workers finding solidarity in their labor as the Algerian city of Oran is swept by a plague. It asks a number of questions relating to the nature of destiny and the human condition. The characters in the book, ranging from doctors to vacationers to fugitives, all help to show the effects the plague has on a populace.
Generally taken as a metaphoric treatment of the French resistance to Nazi occupation during World War II, The Plague is interpreted to mean much more. Camus uses extreme hardships (e.g., pain, suffering, and death) to represent our human world. The story is told through the narrative of the main character, Dr. Rieux, whose decidedly existential account of events in the story is not only helpful in exploring the philosophy of existentialism, but also in making this an allegory of the nature of life and suffering. Although his approach in the book is severe, he emphasizes the ideas that we ultimately have no control, irrationality of life is inevitable, and he further illustrates the human reaction towards the ‘absurd’. The Plague represents how the world deals with the philosophical notion of the Absurd, a theory which Camus himself helped to define.
The Fall
Set in Amsterdam, The Fall consists of a series of monologues by a self-proclaimed ‘judge penitent’ Jean-Baptiste Clamence, as he reflects upon his life to a stranger. Clamence tells us of his success, he enjoyed an upstanding role in society, esteem from fellows, and a rich sensuous life, and his ultimate ‘fall’ from grace.
The Stranger
The novel tells the story of an alienated man, who eventually commits a murder and waits to be executed for it. The book uses an Algerian setting, drawn from Camus’ own upbringing.
At the start of the novel, Meursault goes to his mother’s funeral, where he does not express any emotions and is basically unaffected by it. The novel continues to document the next few days of his life through the first person point-of-view. In these days, he befriends one of his neighbors, Raymond Sintes, a notorious local pimp. He aids Raymond in dismissing one of his Arab mistresses. Later, the two confront the woman’s brother (“the Arab”) on a beach and Raymond gets cut in the resulting knife fight. Meursault afterwards goes back to the beach and, in a heat-induced fit of lunacy, shoots the Arab five times.
At the trial, the prosecution focuses on the inability or unwillingness of Meursault to cry at his mother’s funeral, considered suspect by the authorities. The killing of the Arab apparently is less important than whether Meursault is capable of remorse. The argument follows that if Meursault is incapable of remorse, he should be considered a dangerous misanthrope and subsequently executed to prevent him from doing it again, and by executing, make him an example to those considering murder.
French
Jean-Paul Satre
Jean-Paul Satre (1905 – 1980)
Jean-Paul Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, dramatist, novelist and critic.
Nausea
Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre wrote La Nausée in 1938 while he was a college professor. The Kafka-influenced novel concerns a dejected researcher in a town who becomes convinced that inanimate objects and situations encroach on his ability to define himself, on his intellectual and spiritual freedom, evoking in the protagonist a sense of nausea.
Fresh from several years of travel, 30-year-old Antoine Roquentin settles in the French seaport town of Bouville to finish his research on the life of an 18th-century political figure. But during the winter of 1932 a “sweetish sickness” he calls nausea increasingly impinges on almost everything he does or enjoys – his research project, the company of “The Self-Taught Man” who is reading all the books in the library, a pleasant physical relationship with a cafe owner named Francoise, his memories of Anny, an English girl he once loved … even his own hands and the beauty of nature. Antoine is facing the troublesomely provisional and limited nature of existence itself; he embodies Sartre’s theories of existential angst, and he searches anxiously for meaning in all the things that had filled and fulfilled his life up to that point.
No Exit
Originally published in French in 1944 as Huis Clos, the play features only four characters (one of whom appears for only a very limited time), and one set. No Exit is the source of the famous Sartreian maxim, “Hell is other people”.
The play begins with a bellhop leading a man named Garcin into a hotel room (the play portrays Hell as a gigantic hotel, and realization of where the action is taking place dawns on the audience in the opening minutes). The room has no windows and only one door. Eventually Garcin is joined by a woman (Inez), and then another (Estelle). After their entry, the bellhop bolts the door shut. All expect to be tortured, but no torturer arrives. Instead, they realize, they are there to torture each other, which they do effectively, by probing each other’s sins, desires, and unpleasant memories. At first, the three see events concerning them that are happening on earth, though they can only observe and listen, but eventually (as their connection to Earth dwindles and the living move on) they are left with only their own thoughts and the company of the other two.
Russia
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) Fyodor Dostoyevsky is considered one of the greatest of Russian writers, whose works have had a profound and lasting effect on twentieth-century fiction. His works often feature characters living in poor conditions with disparate and extreme states of mind, and exhibit both an uncanny grasp of human psychology as well as penetrating analyses of the political, social and spiritual states of Russia of his time. Many of his best-known works are prophetic precursors to modern-day thoughts.
Notes from Underground
It is considered the world’s first existentialist work. It presents itself as an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator (generally referred to by critics as Underground Man), a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg.
The novel is divided into two rough parts. Part 1 falls into three main sections. The short introduction propounds a number of riddles whose meanings will be further developed. Section two, three and four deal with suffering and the enjoyment of suffering; sections five and six with intellectual and moral vacillation and with conscious “inertia”-inaction; sections seven through nine with theories of reason and advantage; the last two sections are a summary and a transition into Part 2. Part 1 focuses primarily on man’s desire to distinguish himself from nature. The narrator describes this as his spitefulness. It is elaborated into not only a spitefulness for authority and morality, but for causality itself. War is described as people’s rebellion against the assumption that everything needs to happen for a purpose, because humans do things without purpose, and this is what determines human history. Secondly, the narrator’s desire for pain and paranoia (which parallels Raskolnikov’s behavior in Crime and Punishment) is exemplified in a tooth ache, which he says he would love to have, and paranoia which he builds up in his head to the point he is incapable of looking his co-workers in the eye.
Part 2 focuses on three incidents. The first,the incident with the officer on the Nevsky Prospect illustrates the narrator’s theories on insults and suffering; the second, the farewell dinner for Zverkov is clearly connected with vacillation and “inertia”; the third and most crucial episode, that with the prostitute Liza, is the extension and embodiment of the narrator’s theories on reason and advantage, and of his views on the nature of man.
It begins: I AM A SICK MAN…. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don’t consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious).
- Crime and Punishment (1866)
The novel portrays the haphazardly planned murder of a miserly, aged pawnbroker and her younger sister by a destitute Saint Petersburg student named Raskolnikov, and the emotional, mental, and physical effects that follow. - The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
The book is written on two levels: on the surface it is the story of a patricide in which all of the murdered man’s sons share varying degrees of complicity, but on a deeper level, it is a spiritual drama of the moral struggles between faith, doubt, reason, and free will
~ Fyodor Karamazov
~ Dmitri Karamazov (Mitya, Mitka, Mitenka)
~ Ivan Karamazov (Vanya, Vanka, Vanechka)
~ Alexei (Alyosha) Karamazov (Alyoshka, Alyoshenka)
~ Pavel Smerdyakov: Was born from a mute woman of the street and is widely rumored to be the illegitimate son of Fyodor Karamazov. When the novel begins Smerdyakov is Fyodor’s lackey and cook. He is a very morose and sullen man.
~ Agrafena Alexandrovna Svetlova (Grushenka, Grusha, Grushka): Is the local Jezebel and has an uncanny charm among men.
~ Zosima
It begins: ALEXEY Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, a landowner well known in our district in his own day, and still remembered among us owing to his gloomy and tragic death, which happened thirteen years ago, and which I shall describe in its proper place.
Russia
Anton Chekhov
Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) Anton Chekhov was a physician, major Russian short story writer and playwright. Many of his short stories are considered the apotheosis of the form while his playwriting career, though brief, has had a great impact on dramatic literature and performance.
The Seagull (1896) This is the first of what are generally considered to be Anton Chekhov’s four major plays. It centers on the romantic and artistic conflicts between four theatrical characters: the ngénue Nina, the fading leading lady Irina Arkadina, her son the experimental playwright Konstantin Treplyov, and the famous middlebrow story writer Trigorin.
Like the rest of Chekhov’s full-length plays, The Seagull relies upon an ensemble cast of diverse, fully developed characters. In opposition to much of the melodramatic theater of the 19th century, lurid actions (such as Treplyov’s suicide attempts) are kept offstage. Characters tend to speak in ways that skirt around issues rather than addressing them directly, a concept known as subtext.
The play has a strong intertextual relationship with Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Arkadina and Treplyov quote lines from it before the play-within-a-play in the first act (and the play-within-a-play device is itself used in Hamlet). There are many allusions to Shakespearean plot details as well. For instance, Treplyov seeks to win his mother back from the usurping older man Trigorin much as Hamlet tries to win Queen Gertrude back from Uncle Claudius.
The Cherry Orchard (1904)
Although the play is viewed by most as a tragicomedy, Chekhov called it a comedy and even claimed that it had many farcical elements.
Lyubov Ranevskaya returns to her Russian country house with her adopted daughter Varya, her 18-year old daughter Anya, and several other people. They stay there for almost a year. Ranevskaya, Varya, and Anya live there with Ranyevskaya’s brother, Gayev, a maid, Dunyasha and there are several other people that stay and visit throughout the play.
Ranevskaya’s main problem is the lack of money that is very troublesome for her. Throughout the play there are various solutions suggested to her, but she doesn’t do anything. The orchard is consequently sold in an auction to Yermolay Alekseyevich Lopakhin, a man whose ancestors were serfs on the property. In the end, the orchard is chopped down by Lopakhin.
Three Sisters (1901) Four young people - Olga, Masha, Irina and Andrey Prozorov - are left stranded in a provincial backwater after the death of their father, an army general. They focus their dreams on returning to Moscow, a city remembered through the eyes of childhood as a place where happiness is possible.
Olga works as a teacher in a gymnasium, or a school. Masha is married to Fyodor Ilyich Kulygin, a teacher. At the time of their marriage, Masha was enchanted by his cleverness, but seven years later,she considers him to be rather stupid. Irina is the youngest sister, she dreams of going to Moscow and meeting her true love. Andrey is the only boy in the family. He is in love with Natasha Ivanovna.
The play begins on the first anniversary of their father’s death, also Irina’s name-day. It follows with a party. At this Andrey tells his feelings to Natasha.
Act two begins about 21 months later, Andrey and Natasha are married and have a child. Masha begins to have an affair with Aleksandr Ignatyevich Vershinin, a lieutenant commander who is married to a woman who constantly attempts suicide.
Russia
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy is widely regarded as one of the greatest of all novelists, particularly noted for his masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina; in their scope, breadth and realistic depiction of Russian life, the two books stand at the peak of realistic fiction. As a moral philosopher he was notable for his ideas on nonviolent resistance through his work The Kingdom of God is Within You, which in turn influenced such twentieth-century figures as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
What is Art?
What Is Art? (1897) is a nonfictional essay by Leo Tolstoy in which he argues against numerous aesthetic theories which define art in terms of the good, truth, and especially beauty. In Tolstoy’s opinion, art at the time was corrupt and decadent, and artists had been misled.
What is Art? develops the aesthetical theories that bloomed at the end of the eighteenth century and during the nineteenth century, thus criticizing the realistic position (held since Plato that regarded imitative position as the highest value) and the shallow, existing link between art and pleasure. Tolstoy addition to previously existing theories that stressed the emotional importance pivots on the value of communication-as-infection; which leads him to reject bad or counterfeit art since those are harmful to society inasmuch it damages the people’s ability to separate good art from bad art.
Tolstoy detaches art from non-art (or counterfeit art); art must create a specific emotional link between artist and audience, one that “infects” the viewer. Thus, real art requires the capacity to unite people via communication (clearness and genuineness are therefore crucial values). This aesthetic conception led Tolstoy to widen the criteria of what exactly a work of art is; he believed that the concept art embraces any human activity in which one emitter, by means of external signs, transmits previously experienced feelings. Tolstoy exemplifies this: a boy that has experienced fear after an encounter with a wolf and later relates that experience, infecting the hearers and compelling them to feel what he had experienced—that is a perfect example of a work art.
The good art vs. bad art issue unfolds into two directions, one is the conception that the stronger the infection, the better is the art. The other leads Tolstoy to the examination of whether that emotional link corresponds with the religion of the time. Good art, he claims, fosters those feelings that fit with the particular religion, while bad art inhibits such feelings. The problem Tolstoy sees is that the upper class has entirely lost its religion, and thus clings to the art that was good according to another religion. To cite one example, ancient Greek art extolled virtues of strength, masculinity, and heroism according to the values derived from its mythology. However, since Christianity does not embrace these values (and in some sense values the opposite, the meek and humble), Tolstoy believes that it is unfitting for people in his society to continue to embrace the Greek tradition of art.
Among other artists, he specifically condemns Wagner and Beethoven as examples of overly cerebral artists, who lack real emotion. Furthermore, the Symphony No. 9 (Beethoven), cannot claim to be able to “infect” their audience—as it pretends—with the feeling of unity and therefore cannot be considered good art.
War and Peace
The novel tells the story of five aristocratic families (particularly the Bezukhovs, the Bolkonskis, and the Rostovs–the members of which are portrayed against a vivid background of Russian social life during the war against Napoleon (1805-14).) and the entanglement of their personal lives with the history of 1805–1813, specifically Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. As events proceed, Tolstoy systematically denies his subjects any significant free choice: the onward roll of history determines happiness and tragedy alike.
In his 365 chapters (roughly 1500 pages), some only a few pages in length, Tolstoy tells of birth and death, balls and battles, gossip and tragedy, military strategy and political philosophy. While roughly the first two-thirds of the novel concern themselves strictly with the fictional characters, the later parts of the novel, as well as one of the work’s two epilogues, increasingly contain highly controversial, nonfictional essays about the nature of war, political power, history, and historiography. Tolstoy interspersed these essays seamlessly into the story in a way which defies conventional fiction. Certain abridged versions removed these essays entirely, while others (published even during Tolstoy’s life) simply moved these essays into an appendix.
If there is a central character to War and Peace it is Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a wealthy count, who upon receiving an unexpected inheritance is suddenly burdened with the responsibilities and conflicts of a Russian nobleman. His former carefree behavior vanishes and he enters upon a philosophical quest particular to Tolstoy: how should one live a moral life in an imperfect world? He attempts to free his peasants and improve his estate, but ultimately achieves nothing. He enters into marriage with Prince Kuragin’s beautiful and immoral daughter Elena, against his own better judgment.
Anna Karenina
The novel, set among the highest circles of Russian society, is generally thought by the casual reader to be nothing more than the story of a tragic romance. However, Tolstoy was both a moralist and severe critic of the excesses of his aristocratic peers, and Anna Karenina is often interpreted overall as a parable on the difficulty of being honest to oneself when the rest of society accepts falseness.
Anna is the jewel of St. Petersburg society until she leaves her husband for the handsome and charming military officer, Count Vronsky. By falling in love, they go beyond society’s external conditions of trivial adulterous dalliances. But when Vronsky’s love cools, Anna cannot bring herself to return to the husband she detests, even though he will not permit her to see their son until she does. Unable to accept Vronsky’s rebuff, and unable to return to a life she hates, she kills herself.
Germany
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann (1875-1955) Paul Thomas Mann was a German novelist, social critic, philanthropist and essayist, lauded principally for a series of highly symbolic and often ironic epic novels and mid-length stories, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and intellectual and an underlying eroticism informed by Mann's own struggles with his sexuality. He is noted for his analysis and critique of the European and German soul in beginning of the 20th century using modernized German and Biblical myths as well as the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer.
Buddenbrooks
It portrays the downfall of a wealthy mercantile family, the Buddenbrooks, over four generations. The book is generally understood as a portrait of the german bourgeois society from the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century. The book displays Mann’s characteristic ironic and detailed style, and it was mainly this novel which made Mann gain the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929.
“Death in Venice”
Aged Gustav von Aschenbach - a novelist in the novel, a composer in the film - travels to Venice, where he becomes obsessed with the androgynous beauty of an adolescent boy named Tadzio. An epidemic of Asiatic cholera has just broken out and von Aschenbach plans to leave but changes his mind because of Tadzio, even though he never even has the opportunity to talk to the boy. As his vacation continues, von Aschenbach’s entire existence begins to revolve around following this young boy, both a symbol of faded youth and of attractions that von Aschenbach never made reality.
The novel ends on the Lido beach where von Aschenbach is watching Tadzio play with his friends. The boy wanders out to sea but turns and finally shares eye contact with the old man, and von Aschenbach dies.
The Magic Mountain
The protagonist is Hans Castorp, who visits his cousin Joachim Ziemßen in a sanatorium in Davos in the Swiss Alps before World War I. Castorp’s departure is repeatedly delayed by his failing health - what at first looks like a cold develops into the symptoms of tuberculosis. In the end, Castorp remains in the morbid atmosphere of the sanatorium for seven years. At the end of the novel, the war begins, Castorp is drafted into the military, and his imminent death on the battlefield is suggested.
During his stay, Castorp meets and learns from a variety of characters, who are together a microcosm of pre-war Europe. These include the humanist and encyclopedist Lodovico Settembrini (a student of Giosuè Carducci), the totalitarianist jesuit Leo Naphta, the hedonist Heer Peeperkorn, and his romantic interest Madame Chauchat.
Norway
Henrik Ibsen
Henrik Ibsen
an extremely influential Norwegian playwright who was largely responsible for the rise of the modern realistic drama. His plays were considered scandalous in much of society at the time, when Victorian values of family life and propriety were still very much the norm and any challenge to them considered immoral and outrageous. Ibsen’s work examined the realities that lay behind many facades, which the society of the time did not want to see.
A Doll’s House
It is sharply critical of Victorian marriage norms. It is considered a prime example of what is called The Well-Made Play (a genre with a neo-classical flavor, involving a very tight plot and a climax that takes place very close to the end of the story, with most of the story taking place before the action of the play; much of the information regarding such previous action would be revealed through thinly veiled exposition)
A Doll’s House is a scathing criticism of the traditional roles of men and women in Victorian marriage. As Ibsen wrote in his initial notes for the play, “There are two kinds of moral law, two kinds of conscience, one in man and a completely different one in woman. They do not understand each other; but in matters of practical living the woman is judged by man’s law, as if she were not a woman but a man.”
Ibsen has his protagonist, Nora, leave her husband in search of the wider world, after realizing that he is not the noble creature she has supposed him to be. Her role in the marriage is that of a doll, her house a “Doll’s House”, and indeed her husband Torvald refers to her incessantly as his little “starling” and as his “squirrel”. She is not even permitted a key to the mailbox. Ibsen noted, “A woman cannot be herself in contemporary society, it is an exclusively male society with laws drafted by men, and with counsel and judges who judge feminine conduct from the male point of view.” When she is blackmailed because of an improper act that she commits in order to save her husband’s life – forging her father’s name on a note – her husband shows disgust and horror at what she had done upon finding this out. His only concern is his own reputation, despite the love for him that prompts her to do it.
When the blackmailer (Krogstad) recants, it could all be over, and in a traditional Victorian drama all would then be resolved. For Ibsen, however, and for Nora, it is too late to go back to the way things were. Her illusions destroyed, she decides she must leave her husband, her children, and her Doll’s House to discover what is truly real and what is not. As Ibsen described it, “Depressed and confused by her faith in authority, she loses faith in her moral right and ability to bring up her children. A mother in contemporary society, just as certain insects go away and die when she has done her duty in the propagation of the race.”
An Enemy of the People
Amongst other things, it is concerned with the irrational tendencies of the masses, and the hypocritical and corrupt nature of the political system that they support. Dr. Stockmann is the popular citizen of a small coastal town in Norway. The town has recently invested a large amount of public and private money towards the development of baths, a project led by Dr. Stockmann and his brother, the Mayor. The town is expecting a surge in tourism and prosperity from the new baths, said to be of great medicinal value and as such, the baths are the pride of the town. However, as the baths are starting to succeed, Dr. Stockmann discovers that waste products from the town’s tannery are contaminating the baths. He expects this important discovery to be his greatest achievement, and promptly sends a detailed report to the Mayor, with a proposed solution included.
But to his surprise, Stockmann finds it difficult to get through to the authorities. They seem unable to appreciate the seriousness of the issue and unwilling to address the problem. As the conflict ensues, the Mayor warns his brother that he should “acquiesce in subordinating himself to the community”. Stockmann refuses to accept this, and rents a hall in order to hold a town meeting and convince the people to close the baths.
The townspeople - eagerly awaiting the prosperity that the baths are believed will bring - refuse to accept Stockmann’s claims, as his friends and allies, who had explicity given support for his campaign, turn against him en masse. He is taunted and denounced as a lunatic, an “Enemy of the People.” In a scathing rebuke of both the Victorian notion of community and the principles of democracy, Dr. Stockmann proclaims that in matters of right and wrong, the individual is superior to the multitude, who are easily led by self-advancing demagogues. Stockmann sums up Ibsen’s denunciation of the masses, with the memorable quote “…the strongest man in the world is the man who stands most alone.”
With the entire town pitted against him, Stockmann considers leaving with his family; but he decides to stay and set up a school for poor children in the same hall where he was denounced as an enemy of the people. In doing so, he upholds the heroic ideal of defending the principles of truth and refusing to be silenced.
The Wild Duck
The Wild Duck is considered by many to be Ibsen’s finest work, and it is certainly the most complex. It tells the story of Gregers Werle, a young man who returns to his hometown after an extended exile and is reunited with his boyhood friend Hjalmar Ekdal. Over the course of the play the many secrets that lie behind the Ekdals’ apparently happy home are revealed to Gregers, who insists on pursuing the absolute truth, or the “Summons of the Ideal”. Among these truths: Gregers’ father impregnated his servant Gina, then married her off to Hjalmar to legitimize the child. Another man has been disgraced and imprisoned for a crime the elder Werle committed. And while Hjalmar spends his days working on a wholly imaginary “invention”, his wife is earning the household income.
Hedda Gabbler
The action takes place in a villa in Kristiania (present-day Oslo). Hedda Gabler, daughter of an impoverished General, has just returned from her honeymoon with Jørgen Tesman, an aspiring young academic - reliable but uninteresting. It becomes clear in the course of the play that she has never loved him, and she fears she may be pregnant. The reappearance of her former lover, Ejlert Løvborg, throws their lives into disarray. Løvborg, a writer, is also an alcoholic who has wasted his talent until now. Thanks to a relationship with Hedda’s old schoolmate, Thea Elvsted (who has left her husband for him), he shows signs of rehabilitation, and has just completed what he considers to be his masterpiece. This means he now poses a threat to Tesman, as a competitor for the university professorship which Tesman had believed would be his.
Hedda, apparently jealous of Mrs Elvsted’s influence over Ejlert, hopes to come between them. Tesman, on returning home from a party, finds the manuscript of Ejlert Løvborg’s great work, which the latter has lost while drunk. When Hedda next sees him, he confesses to her, despairingly, that he has lost the manuscript. Instead of telling him that the manuscript has been found, Hedda burns it, and encourages him to consider suicide . She tells her husband she has destroyed the manuscript to secure their future, so that he, not Løvborg, will become a professor.
When the news comes that Løvborg has indeed killed himself, Tesman and Mrs Elvsted are determined to try to reconstruct his book from what they already know. Hedda is shocked to discover, from the sinister Judge Brack, that Ejlert’s death, in a brothel, was messy and probably accidental. The judge appears to be blackmailing her. Leaving the others to discuss the situation, she goes into another room and shoots herself.
Africa
Chinua Achebe
Chinua Achebe (b. 1930) Achebe is considered the father of the African novel in English as well as one of the world's most acclaimed writers.
Things Fall Apart (1958)
Things Fall Apart explores the forces that drive the rise and fall of Okonkwo, a leader in the Umuofia clan and the influences of British colonialism and Christian missionaries on his traditional Ibo (also spelled Igbo) community.
Things Fall Apart is considered one of the major works in African postcolonial literature because it presents the life, culture, and complexities of a traditional African people with breathtaking honesty, dignity and humanity. The story of Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart has been compared in western countries to Greek tragedy, as the very characteristics that make Okonkwo a great leader in his clan (strength, inflexibility) lead ultimately to his death.
The title of the book comes from a poem, “The Second Coming,” by William Butler Yeats, and is quoted in the frontpiece of the book:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
Africa
Nadine Gordimer
Nadine Gordimer (b. 1923)
Nadine Gordimer is a South African (Jewish) novelist and writer, winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in literature and 1974 Booker Prize.
Nadine Gordimer’s subject matter in the past has been the effect of apartheid on the lives of South Africans and the moral and psychological tensions of life in a racially-divided country, which she often wrote about by focusing on oppressed non-white characters. She was an ardent opponent of apartheid and refused to accommodate the system, despite growing up in a community in which it was accepted as normal. Her work has therefore served to chart, over a number of years, the changing response to apartheid in South Africa. Her first novel, The Lying Days (1953), was based largely on her own life and set in her home town. Her next three novels, A World of Strangers (1958); Occasion for Loving (1963), which focuses on an illicit love affair between a black man and a white woman; and The Late Bourgeois World (1966) deal with master-servant relations in South African life. In 1974, her novel The Conservationist, was joint winner of the Booker Prize for Fiction.
Latin America
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)
Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentine writer who is considered one of the foremost literary figures of the 20th century. Best-known in the English speaking world for his short stories and fictive essays, Borges was also a poet, critic, and man of letters.
“The Library of Baebel”
The story repeats the theme of Borges’s 1939 essay “The Total Library” (“La biblioteca total”), which in turn acknowledges the earlier development of this theme by Kurd Lasswitz in his 1901 story “The Universal Library” (“Die Universalbibliotek”).
Borges’s narrator describes how his universe consists of an endless expanse of interlocking hexagonal rooms, each of which contains the bare necessities for human survival—and four walls of bookshelves. Though the order and content of the books is random and apparently completely meaningless, the inhabitants believe that the books contain every possible ordering of just a few basic characters (letters and punctuation marks). Though the majority of the books in this universe are pure gibberish, the library also must contain, somewhere, every coherent book ever written, or that might ever be written, and every possible permutation or slightly erroneous version of every one of those books. The narrator notes that the library must contain all useful information, including predictions of the future, biographies of any person, and translations of every book in all languages. Conversely, for any given text some language could be devised that would make it readable with any of an infinite number of different contents.
Despite—indeed, because of—this glut of information, all books are totally useless to the reader, leaving the librarians in a state of suicidal despair. However, Borges speculates on the existence of the “Crimson Hexagon”, containing a book that contains the truth of all the other books; the librarian who reads it is akin to God.
This short story features many of Borges’s signature themes, including infinity, reality, cabalistic reasoning, and labyrinths. The concept of the library is often compared to Borel’s dactylographic monkey theorem; it is also overtly analogous to the view of the universe as a sphere having its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere. The mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal employed this metaphor, and in an earlier essay Borges noted that Pascal’s manuscript called the sphere effroyable, or “frightful”.
Borges would examine a similar idea with his later story, “The Book of Sand”; in the later story, there is an infinite book rather than an infinite library.
