English power point

1. Sigmund Freud
(1856-1939)
Created a structural model of the psyche
3 parts
ID EGO SUPER EGO
Is the set of
instinctual
impulses lacking
organisation
Realistic
part
Includes the
constraints imposed
on the individual by
society, education
and moral laws
=>
Distort
man’s
behaviour

2. consequences
change of the
relationship between
sexes
Freud’s theories
contributes
Modern psycho analysis with
the concept of free
association and the analysis of
dreams
The most importante of the three essays on the theory of sexuality is the second
one that deals with the team of sexuality in childhood and infacy.
Freud thinks that the abnormal events happened during childhood have
consequences on adults life .

4. Virginia Woolf’s life
➣ Born in 1882
➣ Her father was a man of letters so she
grew in an intellectual atmosphere
and with free access to her father’s
library
➣ Her mother died in 1895 when
Virginia was thirteen. This led
Virginia to a mental breakdown
➣ When her father died in 1904 she
started her literary career and moved
to Bloomsbury
➣ 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf

5. Virginia Woolf’s life
➣ In 1915 she published The Voyage Out
➣ Attempted suicide in a nursing home
➣ Mrs Dalloway (1925)
➣ The Common Reader (1925)
➣ To The Lighthouse (1927) and
Orlando (1928)
Her first novel,
traditional pattern
New narrative
techniques
Volume of literary
essays
Devoted to Vita
Sackville-West

6. Virginia Woolf’s life
➣ A Room of One’s Own (1929)
➣ She drowned herself in 1941 when she was fifty-nine
Written about issues
connected with woman and
writing and on the
inseparable link between
economic and artistic
indipendence
She recognised that
there was a link
between her creativity
and her illness
➣ The Waves (1931)

7. A modern novelist
Aim : to give voice to the complex inner world of feeling and memory.
Narrator : disappearance of the omniscient narrator.
The point of view was shifted inside the characters’ minds through flashbacks,
associations of ideas, momentary impressions presented as a continuous flux.
The human personality was seen a continuous shift of impressions and emotions.

8. Joyce VS Woolf
Stream of Consciousness
never lets her characters’
thoughts flow without
control, maintains logical
and grammatical
organisation
characters show their thoughts directly
through interior monologue, sometimes
in an incoherent and syntactically
unorthodox way
Joyce Woolf

9. Joyce VS Woolf
Language
Words used were
almost poetic, allusive
and emotional
Detailed and
researched language
Joyce Woolf

10. Joyce VS Woolf
Joyce’s “epiphanies”
Rare moments of insight
during the characters’ daily
life when they can see reality
behind appearances
the moment when a
simple object or fact, an
ordinary situation flash
out with meaning and
make a person realize his/
her condition
Woolf’s “moments of
being”

12. The setting
Takes place on a single ordinary day in June 1923.
It follows the protagonist through a very small area of London.
Through what Woolf defined as the ‘tunnelling technique’, she allows
the reader to experience the characters’recollection of their past and
thus providing a sense of their background and personal history
Clarissa Dalloway’s party is the climax of the novel and unifies the
narrative by gathering all the people Clarissa thinks about during the
day

13. A changing society
A motif the striking of Big Ben and of clocks in general represent a
structural connection and a symbol that reminds the reader of the
temporal grid which organises the narrative and of the passing of the
time of life and of its flowing into death
Significant changes in the social life of the time represented in the
novel:
→ the spread of newspapers
→ the increasing use of cars and planes
→ the new standards in the marital relationship

14. The characters
Mrs Dalloway
Fifty-one years old lady, married with
a Conservative MP, Richard Dalloway
who has conventional view on politics and
women’s rights.
the influence of a
possessive father and
the frustration of a
genuine love
Split her in two
Opposing feeling
Her need for freedom
and independence
and her class
consciousness.

15. The characters
Septimus Warren Smith
An extremely sensitive
man
He can suddenly fall prey to
panic and fear, or feelings of guilt
for the death of his best friend,
Evans
He is a “shell-shock” case,
a victim of industrialised war
He is haunted by the spectre
of Evans, he suffers from
headaches and insomniaHe is
sexually impotent

16. The characters
Septimus Warren
Smith
He is not always
able to distinguish
between his personal
response and the
nature of external
reality.
They both respond to
experience in physical terms.
They both depend upon
their partners for stability
and protection.
Mrs Dalloway
She never loses her
awareness of the
outside world as
something external
to herself.
She recognises her
deceptions, accepts
the idea of death,
and is prepared to go
on.
He
commit
suicide