PROGETTO DOCENTE







LAVORO DI GRUPPO DI
ATTILIO CARRELLA
E
SAVINO CARRELLA
LICEO CLASSICO ROSMINI
PALMA CAMPANIA – NA
WWW.LICEOROSMINI.IT
HENRY JAMES
(1843 - 1916)
PERSONAL INFORMATION


Henry James was born
in New York in 1843.
He belonged to a rich
family who could afford
the private tutors and
governesses
that
educated him, but he
was
above
all
a
“devourer of books”.
PERSONAL INFORMATION



He was the brother of
philosopher
and
psychologist
William
James.
At the age of twenty-five
he was recognized as
the best short story
writer in America.
He never married.
PERSONAL INFORMATION


For
many
years
he
alternated
visits
to
England, France and Italy
to stays in the USA.
In 1875 he decided that
Europe was his ideal home
and settled in Paris, where
he met Flaubert and
Maupassant.
PERSONAL INFORMATION

Then he went to England
where the most wellknown writers of the
period, such as Conrad
and Kipling, accepted
him as a friend and
appreciated his books.
PERSONAL INFORMATION


In 1915 he became
British subject. He died
in London in 1916 and
was
buried
in
Massachusetts.
In 1976 his ashes were
removed to Poets’ corner
in Westminster Abbey.
The author and his time

He never took part in
public affairs or showed
much interest in the
economic and social
changes of the period.
The author and his time

He was deeply interested in
the contrast between the old
world and the new one,
between the European way of
life,
which he considered
fascinating, sophisticated, rich
in culture and tradition but
corrupting, and the American
one which he considered too
rigid, Puritan but innocent.
Psychological novel

James changed the
method of presentation
in a novel, shifting the
centre of gravity from
action to its intellectual
and fantastic aspects:
external circumstances
lose significance before
the inward events that
take place in a soul.
A new concept of the author


James
eliminates
the
author and gives the reader
the illusion of being present
at the scene of action.
He presents events and the
minds of the characters
directly, without comments
or explanations: Dramatize,
only dramatize, is his
lesson.
THE TURN OF THE SCREW

It is a novelette, that is a
short novel, a literary
type in which James
excelled.
The Turn of the Screw as a gothic
romance


Gothic romances deal
with
an
intense
experience in a setting
isolated
from
the
conditions of everyday
life.
Moreover, opposed to
the novel, romances
deal with those things
we can never fully know,
that we can never be
sure of.
The Turn of the Screw as a gothic
romance


The tale is pervaded by an air
of mysterious and of horror
and terror, that doesn’t
depend on what will happen
but on what is happening.
Finally, as in the Gothic
romance, there is a strong
undercurrent of sexuality and
sadism, as well as a strange
and nightmarish quality.
The Turn of the Screw as a folk tale

For its motif, that of
children
bewitched,
enchanted by creature
from another world-- or
by the dead-- we can
say that the TOTS is a
folktale.
The Turn of the Screw as a psychological
study


It deals not so much with
ghosts but with their
effects on those who see
them.
In many of James’s tales
of the supernatural, the
ghosts represent the
past of the people that
see them.