‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
Banha University
Faculty of Arts
English Department
A Guiding Model Answer for
Modern Culture
Second Level
January 2011
Open Education
Prepared by
Mohammad Al-Hussini Mansour Arab, Ph.D.
University of Nevada, Reno (USA)
1
‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
Banha University
Free Education
Department of English
Second Level
First Term (January 2011)
Time Allowed: 3 hours
Culture
‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
Respond to the following question:
1. Define modernism and state its major characteristics?
Respond to only two of the following questions:
1. Analyze W. H. Auden's poem "Musée des Beaux Arts"?
2. Analyze Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken"?
3. Discuss James Joyce's short story "Eveline" from a psychological perspective?
Good Luck
Mohammad Al-Hussini AbuArab
2
‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
Answers
Part I
Question # 1:
Define modernism and state its major characteristics?
Answer:
Modernism, as a term, is often used to identify what is considered to be most
distinctive in concepts, sensibility, form, and style in literature and art since the First World
War. Most critics agree that it involves a radical break with the traditional bases of
Western culture and art. The modernist revolt against literary forms and subjects
manifested itself strongly after the catastrophe of World War I shook men's faith in the
foundations and continuity of Western civilization and culture.
The early years of the twentieth century produced three separate groups of poetic
innovators: the Georgian poets, the Sitwell group, and the Imagists. The first group
represents a break with the Imperial poetry of the same period, for it loosened the reins on
traditional verse, and introduced the conversational diction and the simplicity of poetry.
The work of the second group foreshadows the spiritual despair, the often-forced gaiety, the
combination of wit and bleakness that show up in many other writers' work in the century.
But their poetry had much surface but lacked substance.
Of the three, Imagism is by far the most important school for modern verse at large.
The goal of the movement was to bring to poetry a new emphasis on the image as a
structural, rather than an ornamental, element. In "A Retrospect," the three cardinal rules of
the movement are mentioned: direct treatment of the thing discussed; absolute economy of
diction; and composition "in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the
metronome." But the goals and techniques of the movement were antithetical to sustaining
even a poem of any considerable duration. The tiny Imagist poem is much too limiting to
allow its creator much variety from one poem to the next. The chance to explore themes,
ideas, and beliefs simply does not exist. Though too restrictive to endure long, it proved to
be the beginning of modern poetry. Almost every major poet up to this day has felt
strongly the influence of the Imagist experiments with precise, clear images, juxtaposed
without expressed connection.
Perhaps, the single most important influence has been nineteenth century French
symbolism. What was fresh and unique was the insistence of the symbolists on the symbol
as the structural raison d’être of the poem. In fact, they were reacting against the loose,
discursive verse as well as, the allegorical and didactic verse. They also mistrusted
language and placed heavy emphasis on the poetic moment, the symbol. Although there
were three sources of importation, the outstanding importer of symbolism was Eliot, whose,
The Waste Land, demonstrates its creator's overwhelming debt to the symbolists, which is
3
‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
apparent in the use of urban landscape, the feverish, nightmarish quality of the imagery, the
darkness of the vision, the layering of symbols and images within symbols and images.
Another example of Eliot's importance is the resurrection of the English
Metaphysical poets as models for modern verse. Long ignored by English critics, the
Metaphysical poets offer the modern poet another use of a controlling metaphor. The
conceit of the Metaphysical poem, like the symbol of the symbolist poem, is an example of
figurative language used as structural principle. Since the conceit of a Donne poem is used
as a way of integrating metaphor with argument, the model served to overcome the limiting
element of Imagism and, to a lesser extent, of symbolism itself. Both the latter movements,
since they eschewed argument as a poetic method, shut themselves off from the possibility
of sustained use. The Metaphysical conceit, also, allows Eliot to adapt Imagist and
symbolist techniques to a long, elaborately structured poem. Another, very different model
for long poems was found in Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. His great contribution is in
the area of open form, which has done more than anything else to show the path away from
iambic verse.
By the end of World War II, the poetics of impersonality and detachment as
sponsored by Eliot suddenly seemed outmoded, and the movement in much of modern
poetry since that time has been toward a renewed involvement with the self with its flaws,
hungers, and hidden violence. This led to what is to be called "confessional poetry" which
appears in the poems by Emily Dickinson. The interest in Dickinson leads to a new
involvement with the darker side of Romanticism, as well as the buoyant optimism as
shown in the poems of Lawrence and Whitman.
Another branch of postwar American and English poetry has been heavily
influenced by surrealism, which has been imported into American poetry through the work
of Bly, and Wright, whose "deep image" poetry often reads like a symbolist rendering of
deep consciousness.
Another distinctive characteristic of modern poetry is its preoccupation with myth
and archetype. Among the fruits of this trend were the two most important works produced
in English in this century, James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land.
Joyce's work recounts the story of a single day in Dublin in 1904, during which the
ramblings of an Irish Jew parallel the wanderings chronicled in the Odyssey (c. 800 B.C.). In
his essay "Ulysses, Order, and Myth," Eliot announced that in place of the traditional
narrative method, the modern artist could henceforth use the mythic method, that fiction
and poetry would gain power not from their isolated stories, but through the connection of
the stories to a universal pattern. This is exemplified in James Frazer's book The Golden
Bough and the works of Sigmund Freud and Carl G. Jung.
A final defining characteristic of modern poetry is its ambivalence. Yeats provides
an elaborate image of that ambivalence with his "whirling gyres." In Yeats, one idea is
never whole; it must have its opposite idea. The most famous example of Yeatsian
4
‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
ambivalence, mirroring the pair of gyres, is a pair of interlocking poems about Byzantium.
In "Sailing to Byzantium," the old speaker seeks the tranquility of the artificial world
represented by Byzantium. In "Byzantium" he looks back to the world of flesh and mire.
The Byzantium poems embody a fundamental feature of modern poetry: the chaos of the
modern world which leads the poet's desire retreat into the sheltered world of aesthetics.
His desire to retreat and not to retreat forms ambivalence.
In general, modern poetry may be characterized fairly as the poetry of ambivalence.
In turn, much of the attitudinal bias of the New Criticism can be explained on the basis of
ambivalence: the emphasis on irony, tension, ambiguity, as keys to poetry; the elevation of
the Metaphysical poets and the concomitant devaluation of Romantic and Victorian verse;
the blindness to poetry that is open or single-minded. Despite its shortcomings, the New
Criticism's great contribution was that it taught readers, and still teaches them, how to read
modern poetry.
Part II
Question # One:
Analyze W. H. Auden's poem "Musée des Beaux Arts"?
Answer:
W. H. Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts" is a poem about the universal indifference
to human misfortune. Following a series of reflections on how inattentive most people are
to the sufferings of others, the poet focuses on a particular interpretation of his theme: a
sixteenth century painting by the Flemish master Pieter Brueghel, the Elder, called The Fall
of Icarus. It contemplates the nature of suffering and transcendence through reference to
Pieter Breughel's painting The Fall of Icarus, which the poet had perhaps seen on a trip to
Brussels. In Greek mythology, Icarus and his father Daedalus had escaped from the
labyrinth by crafting wings made of wax. Icarus in his sense of exhilaration at his escape
dared to climb higher and higher in the sky until the sun melted his wings and he plunged to
his death. Breughel's painting shows the moment when the youth hits the water, his legs
barely visible in the remote distance in the right hand corner of the painting. In the center
of the canvas is the ploughman who either does not hear the splash of Icarus' fall over the
snort of his plough horse or ignores the event, too involved in his daily affairs to bother
about such a miraculous event.
Auden's poem begins by contemplating the nature of suffering, recalling the "Old
Masters," presumably those Dutch religious painters who portrayed sacred events in the
garb of contemporary Antwerp or Brussels. Many such canvases represented miraculous
events from Scripture occurring amidst the hustle and bustle of city streets, a fact which
sparks Auden's imagination. Suffering, he speculates, "takes place / While someone else is
eating or opening a window or just walking dully along." He elaborates upon this truth and
5
‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
attempts to mildly shock his readers by his use of vulgar language: "even the dreadful
martyrdom must run its course / Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot / Where the dogs go
on with their doggy life."
Naturally Auden was keenly aware that the central events in Christ's life were
surrounded by the banal and the everyday—he was born in a stable, surrounded by tax
collectors and fishermen, and died with Roman soldiers marching underneath the Cross.
Part of Auden's intention is to satirize the bourgeois smugness of a Europe on the brink of
war—the poem dates from 1938, months before Hitler's troops invaded Poland—but the
poem would not capture one's imagination if it had remained simply an attack upon middleclass thick-headedness and insensitivity. Ultimately, the crude language is abandoned in
favor of an elegant simplicity, as if affirming paradoxically the simple faith of common
folk and the pathos of everyday suffering: "the ploughman may / Have heard the splash, the
forsaken cry, / But for him it was not an important failure." Auden's image remains
ambiguous, caught between his own revulsion at humanity's blindness to suffering, and his
admiration for their strong, stoic endurance of suffering itself.
The poem is an example of ekphrasis, the embedding of one kind of art form inside
another, because it summarizes a famous painting. Brueghel's The Fall of Icarus captures
the final moment of an elaborate and portentous Greek myth. In his interpretation, the
disappearance of the imprudent boy is not the center of the viewer's attention, just as it
passes unnoticed by everyone else within the frame. Like Brueghel, Auden would force one
to take notice of universal disregard. Thus, the poem questions the ability of art to matter
in a world of intractable apathy. Not only is Daedalus rendered powerless, but the
horrendous death of his son Icarus passes unheeded and unmourned. Even the sun, which,
by melting the wax wings, is most directly responsible for the catastrophe, shines without
pause or compunction.
Question # Two:
Analyze Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken"?
Answer:
By Frost's own account, he wrote "The Road Not Taken" as ironic commentary on
his friend Edward Thomas's Romantic nature. Biographical studies have held that Frost and
the British poet often went walking in the English countryside and, on more than one
occasion, Thomas expressed regret that they must choose one road over another.
The poem begins with a sense of division and fragmentation—the speaker betrays a
sense of being alienated from himself, and a feeling that the choice he is faced with will
divide him further: "sorry I could not travel both / And be one traveler, long I stood / And
looked down one as far as I could / To where it bent in the undergrowth." From his wordchoices, Frost appears to gaze into the woods, perhaps symbolic of his own unconscious,
for knowledge, only to abandon himself to chance when no knowledge is forthcoming,
6
‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
when nothing appears to make one path more attractive than the other. The two paths to his
mind's eye become equals—"both that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden
black."
In these woods the poet seems to imagine an Edenic paradise, not yet blackened by
sin, but that evocation seems mainly ironic, as the final lines of the third stanza indicate that
the narrator is aware of humanity's fall from grace, and of his own exile from the paradise
he sees before him: "Yet knowing how way leads on to way, / I doubted if I should ever
come back." The choice is final and irreversible, as "way leads on to way," yet the reason
to choose one path over the other remains undisclosed. The woods do not yield their
secrets, and the narrator, left prey to his own irrational whim, must choose one path over
the other without any useful knowledge of what lies ahead on either.
The final stanza, while often read as a tribute to self-reliance, suggesting a break
with social conventions, also seems to dramatize a self-deception in the speaker. The first
two lines are sentimental and self-congratulatory, a fantasy of bragging to one's offspring of
virtue and self-mastery, of striking out on one's own to be a trailblazer—"I shall be telling
this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence." The break in the third line, the "Two
roads diverged in a wood, and I—," seems to have the speaker poised at the edge of
authentic self-revelation, of truly understanding why he will choose one path. Ultimately it
does not come, however, and he reverts to the comfortable fiction of self-reliance,
suggesting that his choice, though made essentially at random, has a profound significance:
"I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference." So, this poem
which has been read over the decades as a validation of self-reliance and individuality, is
also, or is perhaps primarily, a portrayal of humanity's self deception in the face of cosmic
abandonment and difficult choices, the true significance of which is forever beyond our
grasp.
The prevailing theme of Frost's "The Road Not Taken" is individualism. The
traveler is alone and must face this difficult choice alone. Both roads seem very similar,
and their differences may only be subjective. The traveler cannot go in both directions
because he is but one person. The tension in the poem is provided by the individual's
interaction with nature, which combines a sense of wonder at the beauty of the natural
world with a sense of frustration as the individual tries to find a place for himself within
nature's complexity.
Romanticism is another theme of "The Road Not Taken." Frost has made it clear in
his essays and letters as to the origins of this poem and its inherent ironic nature as it pokes
fun at the Romantic character of his close friend Thomas. Many critics still maintain that
"The Road Not Taken" does not just describe another man's Romantic nature but also bears
traces of Frost's own Romantic influences. Frost's debt to Romanticism is readily apparent
in this poem, but is mitigated by his own ironic interpretation of the work.
7
‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
Question # Three:
Discuss James Joyce's short story "Eveline" from a psychological perspective?
Answer:
On either side of Eveline's major life decision about whether to leave her home is a
suspect and potentially abusive man. Because of the manner in which Joyce has set up the
story, however, she must choose one of them; and due in large part to what is probably the
result of years of psychological and physical abuse, Eveline pictures both of these men as
her potential protector. She seems to be searching for a tender father figure; somewhat
illogically, she tries to balance her father's increasing capacity for violence by remembering
three random acts of gentleness. And she pictures Frank in a similar way, as a savior and
protector to "take her in his arms, fold her in his arms," repeating as if to convince herself
that "he would save her."
According to Freud, attraction to a parent of the opposite sex and rivalry with the
parent of the same sex represents an extremely important developmental stage for children.
Psychoanalysis attributes much abnormal psychology in later life to a failure to successfully
emerge from this role, highlights its prevalence in dreams and in primitive societies, and
ultimately concludes that it is a central conflict for all of human psychology. Freud began
with some ambiguity about the distinction between boys and girls in their enactment of the
Oedipal drama, but as his 1916 "Development of the Libido and Sexual Organizations"
lecture clarifies, he considered that
things proceed in just the same way, with the necessary reversal, in little girls.
The loving devotion to the father, the need to do away with the superfluous
mother and to take her place, the early display of coquetry and the arts of later
womanhood, make up a particularly charming picture in a little girl, and may
cause us to forget its seriousness and the grave consequences which may later
result from this situation.
Grave consequences indeed follow for Eveline, in whom the reader notices the key
symptoms of an Oedipal complex: major problems in adult sexuality that relate to her
parents. Joyce seems to be implying that Eveline has failed to emerge from a childhood
attraction to her father, which is a vital element in Freud's analysis of the complex, in a
number of ways. First, Joyce makes it clear that Eveline has a rather ungrounded attraction
to her father when she says, "Sometimes he could be very nice," and remembers three
instances of his tenderness. In fact, it is particularly interesting that Mr. Hill puts on his
wife's bonnet because it was an important belief of Freud's that pre-pubescent girls are first
attracted to their mothers before they begin their more prolonged attraction to their fathers.
Secondly, there is Eveline's fondness for her brothers, although they have
disappeared as possible incestuous partners (consider Freud's remarks later in
"Development of the Libido and Sexual Organizations" that incestuous partners are a
8
‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
detriment to emergence from the Oedipal complex: "A little girl takes an older brother as a
substitute for the father who no longer treats her with the same tenderness as in her earliest
years.") The fact that Harry and Ernest have departed from Eveline's life would imply, in
Freudian terms, that she is now freer to find a non-incestuous, although father-like, sexual
partner. For Freud, the only possibility of successful escape from the Oedipal drama is with
a father-like lover that will eventually lead the female child to what Freud would consider
"normality," or what Eveline might mean by "life." Of course, this lover is Frank; as has
already been established, Eveline treats her lover as another version of her father, a new
father that will protect her and "perhaps love" her but, more importantly, "give her life."
Perhaps the most convincing evidence that "Eveline" can be read as a Freudian
Oedipal drama, however, is the influence of Mrs. Hill on the story. Eveline has taken her
mother's place in exact parallel to Freud's theory. She acts as her father's housewife to the
point where even Mr. Hill associates her with his late wife when he becomes abusive
toward her: "latterly he had begun to threaten her and say what he would do to her only for
her dead mother's sake." There is a perverse sense in this phrase, and throughout the story,
that sex is always related to a violent exchange of property, that intercourse itself is implied
in what he would "do to her." Confrontational with her mother's ghost but unable to
disregard the promise to fulfill her duty, "keep the home together," and inhabit Mrs. Hill's
own doomed role (including her nervous breakdown), Eveline is condemning herself to a
life of Oedipal inhibition.
Joyce supports this idea, which many critics have termed Eveline's "paralysis," with
sophisticated symbolism. The author is by no means straightforward in his implication that
Eveline has failed to successfully emerge from her Freudian conflict via its only solution,
her lover. Many suspicions about Frank's character are implied in the text, including his
symbolic association with exile and questionable morality, since Buenos Aires was
associated with prostitution and the "Patagonians" he describes were notorious for their
barbarity. Also, the night boat journey from the "North wall" may be a reference to the
mythological voyage through the river Styx to the Underworld and therefore Eveline's
death (as opposed to the "life" of psychological normality she seems to desire).
But the main force of the symbolism in the story, including the sea as spiritual
regeneration and baptismal font, is Ireland as Eveline's mother finally sees it: "Derevaun
Seraun" (which probably means something like "worms are the only end" and certainly
connotes terrifying oppression). Take the climax of Eveline's psychosexual development:
--Come!
All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He was drawing her into
them: he would drown her. She gripped with both hands at the iron railing.
--Come!
No! No! No! It was impossible. Her hands clutched the iron in frenzy.
9
‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
Examined from the Freudian lens it is clear that this orgasm is Frank's, and that Eveline's is
denied; instead of "Yes! Yes! Yes!" she experiences "No! No! No!" The orgasmic seas of
the world, she feels, will drown her, so she grips the phallic alternative to Frank, the iron
railing that echoes the first image of her father's "blackthorn stick." It is no surprise that,
like her mother, gripping this iron railing representing Mr. Hill sends Eveline into a
"frenzy" that reminds us of her palpitations and her mother's nervous breakdown.
Eveline has, in Freudian terms, become entirely frigid and failed to escape from the
prison of her own psychology. The only method of emergence from the Oedipal complex,
despite his suspect intentions and his own orgasm seeming to drown Eveline, is Frank, so it
is no surprise that the final imagery of the story is one of suppression and regression to
extreme infancy: "She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal." Joyce is at
one of his bleakest moments here, envisioning almost hopeless psychological oppression as
Eveline is unable to break free of her abusive father.
10