Waiting for Godot  is the best example of the play belonged to the theatre of the Absurd and the major work written by Samuel Beckett . It talks about two French tramps, Vladimir and Estragon (or Gogo), who spend their days waiting for a mysterious Mr Godot who is expected to come and save them from their miserable condition. The play is structured into two acts: Act I : Vladimir and Estragon meet another couple of characters. Pozzo is a rich middle-aged man and the master of Lucky, his poor old servant. At Pozzo’s commands Lucky dances, then “thinks” for the entertainment of the two trumps. Act II : Pozzo and Lucky reappear, but they have changed. Pozzo has become blind and Lucky is dumb now. At the end of each day the hopes of Vladimir and Gogo are revived by the visit of a messenger, Boy, sent by Mr Godot, who invariably announces that “Mr Godot won’t come today, but surely tomorrow”. They occasionaly talk about suicide as a solution, and try to commit suicide, but they fail fo...

Samuel Beckett was born near Dublin in 1906 into a middle-class Protestant family. After graduating from Trinity College, he was appointed English lecturer at the École Normal Supérieure in Paris and, consequently, moved to Paris. There he came into contact with the French and foreign avant-garde intellectuals and artists of the 1930s such as James Joyce . He joined the French Resistance during World War II and, in order to escape the Gestapo Police, he worked undercover as a farm labourer in the Avignon area. He worked as translator and wrote some novels like the trilogy Molloy , Malone Dies  and The Unnamable . These works were written in French and translated in English by Beckett due to achieve greater discipline and economy of expression, as dictated by his main goal: an attempt to explore and describe the human condition. He became famous thanks to his major play Waiting for Godot  and spent the rest of his life writing pays, some for the cinema, radio and television unt...

The theatre of the Absurd fluorished in Europe after the Second World War. It was influenced by Existentialism - a philosophical movement which saw man as determined by his own free will - in seeing life as meaningless: the time has no past or future on which to rely but rather a series of repetitions without any purpose. The main dramatists like Samuel Beckett , Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard adopted the disintegration of language, reduction of sentences to minimum, silence and bare movements. This basic language, moreover, was characterized by a few recurrent devices: there is no secondary clauses, but short and mainly principal sentences; there is a common pattern based on question/answer or question/question; there is the repetition of words or whole sentences in consecutive lines; questions are often meaningless and answers are, in their turn, unsatisfactory or incomplete, in order to enhance the inability of language to really communicate; pauses and silence pinpoint the characte...

In the symbolic novel To the lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, the lighthouse occupied a relevant position both as physical element and a metaphorical one. On the one hand, its light marks the passing of time and reassures the sailors, or the people looking at it. According James Ramsay and her mother Mrs. Ramsay, the lighthouse is, moreover, the favorite place for children, where they have the possibility of amusing themselves. On the other hand, the lighthouse represents a safe shelter and a landmark or a guide for people. In a certain sense, it could be argued that Mrs. Ramsay is like a lighthouse, the essential point of reference in her family’s life. In the novel, she is showned as a beautiful, charitable, hospitable, sympathetic woman, who holds several characters, with their own ideas, together through her sympathy and cleverness. From the beginning of the novel, she is structurally and psychologically a cohesive force, whose purpose is the creation of a balance in her family and...

Lo stagno delle ninfee, armonia in rosa è un olio su tela realizzato da Claude Monet nel 1889 ca e conservato al museo d'Orsay a Parigi. Il pittore riprende un suggestivo ponte ad arco che traversa lo stagno delle ninfee, soggetto presente in alcune incisioni dell'artista giapponese Hokusai. Sull'acqua che scorre verso il fronte del dipinto, la vegetazione brilla sotto i raggi del sole che penetrano tra le fronde degli alberi. I fiori delle ninfee sono in tonalità di rosa diverse e spiccano chiaramente tra il verde lussureggiante delle foglie. Sulla riva la vegetazione è alta e si confonde con le chiome dei salici piangenti ed altri arbusti. Il sole, filtrato dalle foglie, crea zone di intensità luminosa differenti; i riflessi, quindi, si alternano alle zone d'ombra creando un interno alternarsi di colori sull'acqua. Le pennellate sono rapide e descrivono, con un andamento diverso, le superfici vegetali. Lo specchio d'acqua dello stagno è suggerito con l'uso...

Impressione, sole nascente (1872) Claude Monet L'Impressionismo è un movimento pittorico francese che nasce intorno al 1860 a Parigi. Questo movimento artistico scaturisce dal Realismo , in quanto si interessa alla rappresentazione della realtà quotidiana e degli usi e costumi della società del tempo senza, tuttavia, condividerne l'impegno ideologico e politico. La vicenda dell'Impressionismo è quasi paragonabile ad una cometa che, così come percorre il cielo notturno, in modo analogo attraversa la storia dell'arte, rivoluzionandola completamente sia nei temi che, soprattutto, nella tecnica pittorica. Nonostante duri meno di vent'anni, l'Impressionismo lascia un'eredità con cui faranno i conti tutte le esperienze pittoriche successive, aprendo la strada all'arte contemporanea. La grande rivoluzione di cui è portatore l'Impressionismo riguarda la tecnica, la quale scaturisce dalla volontà di rappresentare solo e soltanto la realtà sensibile. La corren...

James Joyce (1882-1941) and Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) belonged to the first generation of Modernists and it’s possible to make a comparison between their literary production analyzing their masterpieces: Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway . Ulysses Ulysses is one of the greatest examples of reworking of myth in Modernist literature. Joyce uses the epic model to stress the lack of heroism, ideals, love and trust in the modern world. The plot utterly takes place in Dublin in a single day which involves the life of three characters: Leopold Bloom, an advertising agent, Sthephen Dedalus, a sensitive young man with literary ambitions, and Molly Bloom, Leopold’s wife. Leopold Bloom, compared to Homer’s Ulysses, makes common actions: he wanders throughout the day in the streets of Dublin making errands, stopping at the advertising office and joining a funeral. He is distressed with two deep emotional burdens: the unsolved grief over his baby son’s death and the crumbling relationship with his unfa...

Ciao a tutti! Oggi pubblico in questo post un link che fa riferimento ad una presentazione in PowerPoint su uno dei maggiori pensatori del XIX secolo: Arthur Schopenhauer. La presentazione tratta principalmente l'origine e il significato del pessimismo schopenhaueriano, un elemento cardine del pensiero del filosofo tedesco e al quale trarranno ispirazione i filosofi successivi come Sigmund Freud,  Friedrich Nietzsche e, nel nostro panorama culturale, Giacomo Leopardi. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1RnlgBSms2g4r5U1j6gZQD2KU98ZzDK4R/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=102237714229045158952&rtpof=true&sd=true