56. O'Casey Joyce

Topic 56: Historical relationships between Ireland and Britain.

OPOS 2010 Andradas, Badia, Garcia, Herrera.

56. HISTORICAL RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN IRELAND AND BRITAIN. IRISH AUTHORS: S. O’CASEY AND JAMES JOYCE

1. 2.

Introduction Historical relationships between Ireland and Britain 2.1. The Act of Union 2.2. The Irish war of Independence 2.3. Ireland since the split

3.

Literary background 3.1. Main features of the Inter-War period 3.2. Literary forms and their main characteristics

4.

Sean O’Casey (1880-1964) 4.1. The Shadow of a Gunman (1923) 4.2. Juno and the Paycock (1924) 4.3. The Plough and the Stars (1926)

5.

James Joyce (1882- 1941) 5.1. Dubliners (1914) 5.2. A Portrait of the Artists as a Young Man (1916) 5.3. Ulysses (1922) 5.4. Finnegan’s Wake (1939)

6. Conclusion: appliance to the ESL classroom 7. Bibliography

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Topic 56: Historical relationships between Ireland and Britain.

OPOS 2010 Andradas, Badia, Garcia, Herrera.

1. Introduction The present unit aims to provide an account of the historical relationships between Ireland and Great Britain. In order to do so, two Irish authors will be analyzed: Sean O’Casey and James Joyce. Since they were both born in the late Victorian period and they produced their main works in the first half of the twentieth century, it is also important to know the historical background and the main events of both periods. This is reflected in the organization of the unit, which is divided into four chapters which correspond to its main tenets. These three chapters are: the historical relationships between Ireland and Britain, the literary background of the Inter-war period, the life and works of Sean O’Casey and the life and works of James Joyce. 2. Historical relationships between Ireland and Britain In order to frame the historical background of Sean O’Casey and James Joyce in an appropriate context it is important to focus on the main events related to the late Victorian period and the first half of the twentieth century, approximately from 1880 to 1950. However, it is important to mention that the English involvement with Ireland began in 1169, when the Cambro-Norman1 mercenaries were led into the lands of the Irish Islands. Although the English Crown did not begin to exert full control of the island until after the English Restoration (1660), it is relevant to notice that between 1534 and 1691 campaigns against Ireland were held with the excuse of lack of loyalty on the hand of Irish vassals. However, here will be mentioned the most relevant events regarding the most recent history of Ireland. 2.1. The Act of Union Ireland was in personal union with England since 1541, when the Irish Parliament had passed the Crown of Ireland Act 15422, proclaiming King Henry VIII of England to be King of Ireland. Both Ireland and England had been in personal union with Scotland since the Union of Crowns in 1603. Nevertheless, in 1707, England and Scotland were united into a single kingdom: the Kingdom of Great Britain. The Kingdom of Ireland was left out. However, in July 1707, each House of the Parliament of Ireland passed a congratulatory address to Queen Anne, praying to be included in the Kingdom. The British government did not respond to this, and an equal union between Great Britain and Ireland was not considered until the 1790s, when England saw the great advantages that the union with Ireland may give to their own Kingdom. When the colonial parliament was abolished an Act of Union was signed. The Acts of Union 1800 (sometimes called the Acts of Union 1801) describe two complementary Acts, namely, the Union with Ireland Act 1800, an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain, and the Act of Union (Ireland) 1800, an Act of the Parliament of Ireland. The twin Acts united the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland to create the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The union came into effect on 1 st January 1801. Despite this act, Catholics were still banned from sitting in that new parliament, until Catholic Emancipation 1

Cambro-Norman is a term used for Norman knights who settled in southern Wales after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. Some historians suggest that the term is to be preferred to Anglo-Norman for the Normans who invaded Ireland after 1170 — many of whom originated in Wales. 2

The Crown of Ireland Act 1542 is an Act of the Parliament of Ireland (33 Hen 8 c. 1), declaring that King Henry VIII of England and his successors would also be Kings of Ireland. Since 1171 the monarch of England had held the title Lord of Ireland. As the Act was passed after Henry VIII was excommunicated, the title "King of Ireland" was not recognised by Catholic monarchs.

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Topic 56: Historical relationships between Ireland and Britain.

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was attained in 1829, the principal condition of which was the removal of the poorer, and thus more radical, Irish freeholders from the establishment. 2.2. The Irish War of Independence The Easter Rising took place on April 24th, 1916 in Dublin, Ireland. The Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) successfully turned 1,600 people into rebellion, provoking a rising which was quickly crushed by Crown forces. This rising led into the Irish War of Independence¸ also called Anglo-Irish War, which was a guerrilla war mounted by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) against the British government and its forces in Ireland. It began in January 1919, following the Irish Republic’s declaration of independence. After three years of war, both sides agreed to a truce in July 1921. Even though, violence continued in the northeast (mostly between republicans and loyalists). The post-ceasefire talks led to the Anglo-Irish Treaty in October, 1921, which ended British rule in most of Ireland and established the Irish Free State. However, six northern counties would remain within the United Kingdom as Northern Ireland. The treaty included the following terms: an Irish Free State of 26 counties, which was a Dominion and still part of the Commonwealth. Moreover, the British Monarch would remain as head of state and would be represented by the GovernorGeneral, the Royal Navy retained control of the ports of Cobh, Berehaven and Lough Swilly and the border between the Free State and Northern Ireland would be drawn up by a Boundary Commission. This treaty resulted in the division of Irish people, because some of them were clearly in favor and some others against it. This led to a civil war in Ireland between those who supported the treaty and those who did not. It was a ten-month fight between Irish people and it marked a period of shadow in the country. However, a ceasefire was declared on May 24 th, 1923, bringing the civil war to an end. 2.3. Ireland since The split The Irish Free State became an independent republic in 1948. Since this time, the newly born Republic of Ireland (Éire) has moved slowly from an inward-looking, church-dominated, impoverished state to an outward looking, open, prosperous, democracy. Éire joined the ECC (now the European Union) in 1973, and over the past few years it has integrated further into the European Union. On the other hand, Northern Ireland has remained a territory within the United Kingdom. A large Catholic community lived side by side with a larger, dominant, Protestant community and they had little representation and almost no political power in this state. During 1960s Catholics began to organize themselves to agitate for civil rights, a fact which led to rioting and civil violence between Catholics and Protestants, and soldiers from Britain were brought to keep peace. However, it was not the end of the conflict; for instance, it was the time of Bloody Sunday (the 30th of January, 1972), when fourteen people died in the hands of British troops. This event ensured a period of 25 years of low-intensity warfare, between the IRA and British security forces. In total, over 3,000 people died. Diplomats made attempts to stop these killings and an Anglo-Irish Agreement was signed in 1985 between the United Kingdom and Ireland, which aimed to bring an end to the troubles in this region. The treaty gave the Irish Government an advisory role in Northern Ireland’s government while confirming that there would be no change in constitutional position of Northern Ireland unless a majority of its people agreed to join the Republic. Finally, it is important to mention that the agreement that brought peace back to Ireland did not come until 1998, known as The Good Friday Agreement which was signed in Belfast and eventually broke the cycle of killings, bombings and violence. Since then, normal life in Northern Ireland has improved and it has now developed a government where Nationalist and Unionist ministers share power.

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Topic 56: Historical relationships between Ireland and Britain.

OPOS 2010 Andradas, Badia, Garcia, Herrera.

3. Literary background Similarly to the literary features of the late Victorian period, the literature of the age (up to 1920) and even further (up to the 1950s) saw a spread of literacy and there was also an enormous output of books and the awakening of the national conscience to the evils resulting from the Industrial Revolution. It is important, then, after knowing the historical background and the main events of the period, to analyse the main features of the literature of the time. 3.1. Main features of the Inter-War period The main features of the inter-war period can be summed up in five main concepts, following Albert (1990): o o o

o

o

A breakdown of established values. Many different reactions regarding spiritual values were equalled by a great variety of literary work. The resurgence of poetry. Poetry again became a vital literary form closely in touch with life, and if it did not oust the novel from its primacy it certainly outstripped the drama. The desire for new forms and methods of presentation, and in all the major literary genres the age produced revolutionary developments thanks to two important inventions of the twentieth century: the radio and the cinema. The radio and the cinema had an enormous impact on the rapid development of the media and also, had important effects on the literature of the time. This novelty reduced the time devoted to reading (prose) and going to the theatre (drama) since the radio brought literature at home and the cinema brought a new form of leisure activity. In the form of broadcast stories, plays, films, or literary discussion, a new field was opened for authors who applied film techniques to a number of experiments in the novel. Finally the demand for more and faster action, stronger and more violent stimulus, since people lived in a new atmosphere of fear and restlessness. 3.2. Literary forms and their main characteristics

Regarding the literary forms of the period, as it has been stated before, it is important to notice that poetry was the one that changed more considerably. The overall impression of these inter-war years coincides with a new awareness of sociological factors which affect poetry such as the development in poetic techniques to show a more realistic way to face up to those difficult years. Therefore, there was a change in the verses, rhythms and verbal patterns. Moreover, the emphasis on the evolution of new forms gave way to a great difficulty of modern poetry, thus the dominance of form on content and the use of eccentric themes. Poetry reflected the situation of those inter-war years: complexity, a refined sensitivity and the use of allusive and indirect language. There were also other sciences, more concretely, psychology and politics which tried to come together under the figures of Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx, respectively, so as to find a solution to the world problems. Furthermore, the rise of surrealism and new traditionalism also contributed to poetry writing. And finally, the quest for stability increased as there was still no strongly established poetic tradition to compare in stability with that of the Victorian Age. In the case of drama, the situation of this period was deeply felt in the English theatre and therefore, in Ireland within the Irish Literary Revival Drama. After the war, the sociological aspects the sociological factors which affected this literary form were, broadly speaking, the conditions in the theatre, the decline of realism, the development of comedy, the popularity of the history play, the revival of poetic drama and the experiments abroad and at home.

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Topic 56: Historical relationships between Ireland and Britain.

OPOS 2010 Andradas, Badia, Garcia, Herrera.

On the other hand, regarding the prose there is no doubt that the Victorian Age was the era of the English novel. However, the 20th Century witnessed the development of the novel into new revolutionary techniques. Thus, the novel shall be analysed in relation to the new approach as an interpreter of life, experiments in the evolution of a new technique, the influence of psychology, the lack of popularity of the new novelists writers in established tradition, war books, satire, escapist novels, the autobiographicalnovel-sketch comedies, and the growth of the American novel under the influence of the lost generation. In order to exemplify and to clearly see these main features of the literature of the time, it is essential to provide a general account of the most outstanding Irish authors, that is, Sean O’Casey (1880-1964) and James Joyce (1882- 1941), in terms of life, works, main themes and style. 4. Sean O’Casey (1880-1964) Sean O’Casey was born in Dublin in 1880 and died in Torquay in 1964, according to Britannica.com. He was mainly a playwright, but his hobby for politics made him move to England, where several of his plays were first performed. After his early stage successes he made literature his career, and in 1926 received the Hawthornden Prize. He became very famous with his Dublin Trilogy which included the plays The shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926), which will be analysed later on. Some other important works by O’Casey are The Silver Tassie (1929), which gives an impassioned and bitter picture of the football hero returning paralysed from the trenches of the 1916-1918 War, and The Star Turns Red (1940), which does not have the intense life of his best three, though the magic of his language remains. 4.1. The Shadow of a Gunman (1923) This play was O’Casey’s first play and it was produced at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in 1923. Its setting is the slum tenements of Dublin, in their crowded squalor, and it is an unflinching study of the Anglo-Irish War of 1920, since it captures well all the bloodiness and violence of the struggle and the dangerous intensity of the lives of the participants, that is to say, the main characters of the play. The Shadow of a Gunman tells the story of Donal Darovan, a poet who shares a house with Seumas Shields in a poor, Dublin tenement slum. Donal is mistaken for an IRA gunman but he does not refute his notoriety, especially when it wins him the affection of Minnie Powell, an attractive young woman in the tenement. Meanwhile, Shield’s business partner, Mr. Maguire hides a bag full of Mills Bombs in Seumas’ apartment before participating in an ambush in which he is killed. The city is put under curfew as a result of the ambush and Donal and Seumas do not discover the grenades until the Auxies, the Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary, are raiding the tenement. Minnie Powell takes the bag and hides it in her own room. The Auxies find nothing of note in Seumas’ room, but take off Minnie, who is later killed trying to escape. The play was a success and it began a close relationship between the playwright and the Abbey theatre. As it can be extracted from the plot, O’Casey uses the device of a mouthpiece character, a woman in this case, who gives an ironical commentary on the events. 4.2. Juno and the Paycock (1924) This play can be regarded as O’Casey’s masterpiece. Again, the setting is the Dublin slums, although the time now is the civil disturbances of 1922. It is a vivid and intensely powerful play, in which rich, almost grotesque humour covers yet emphasizes the underlying bitter tragedy. In this play, there appear three of

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Topic 56: Historical relationships between Ireland and Britain.

OPOS 2010 Andradas, Badia, Garcia, Herrera.

O’Casey’s finest creations: the deeply pitying Juno, her worthless husband, the “Paycock”, and his boon companion, Joxer Daly. Juno and the Paycock tells the story of the Boyle family, who live in the Dublin tenements. The father, Captain Jack Boyle, constantly pretends he has pains in his legs because he refuses to work. Moreover, he spends all his money in pubs. Juno, the mother, is the only character in the family with a job, since the daughter Mary is on strike and their son Johnny lost his arm in the Irish War of Independence. Johnny betrayed Tancred, a neighbour and fellow comrade in the IRA, and he is afraid that he will be executed as punishment. On the other hand, the family inherits a huge amount of money and they start buying goods on credit and borrowing money from neighbours with the intent of paying them back. However, in the third act tragedy befalls the Boyle family because it becomes clear that no money will be forthcoming. AS the goods bought with the borrowed money are being taken back, Mr. and Mrs. Boyle learn that Mary has been impregnated by Mr. Bentham. Moreover, Mr. Boyle leaves and spends his last money in a pub, time when Mrs. Boyle is told about her son’s death, presumably killed by the IRA. Mary and Juno leave to live with Juno’s sister, whereas Captain Boyle returns to the stage drunk. 4.3. The Plough and the Stars (1926) The Plough and the Stars is a tragic chronicle play dealing with the Easter Rising of 1916 and it is equally realistic in its exposure of the futility and horror of war. There is the same blend of grotesque humour and deep tragedy and the author uses again the mouthpiece character. This play is divided in four acts. The first two acts take place in November 1915, looking forward to the liberation of Ireland. The last two acts are set during the Easter Rising, in April 1916. The first act is a cameo of normal working-class Dublin life. The characters gossip and argue, and talk about the coming nationalist revolt. Mrs. Gogan's son is fighting in the First World War; "the Covey" is an ardent communist; Jack is a former member of the Irish Citizen Army. It emerges that Jack was promoted to commandant, but his wife Nora burned the letter. He leaves to rejoin the ICA. The second act was originally a single-act play, called The Cooing of Doves. The characters listen to rabble-rousing speeches by Patrick Pearse, an Irish nationalist and political activist who was one of the leaders of the Easter Rising, and drink in a pub. The third act occurs during the Easter Rising when Bessie gloats about the Rebels' imminent defeat. The characters loot the shops of Dublin. Brennan and Jack appear with a wounded rebel, but Jack ignores Nora's pleas to leave the fighting. She then goes into labour. In the fourth and last act, Mollser, a local girl, has died of tuberculosis, while Nora has had a stillbirth. She is delirious, imagining herself walking in the woods with Jack. Brennan arrives and tells the others that Jack has been shot dead. Two British soldiers arrive and escort the men away — civilians are suspected of aiding a rebel sniper. Nora goes to a window, calling for Jack; when Bessie pulls her away, Bessie is shot in the back, mistaken for a sniper. 5. James Joyce (1882- 1941) According to Britannica.com, James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882 and died in Zurich in 1941. He was the son of middle-class Irish parents. He was educated in Jesuit colleges and at the Royal University, but shortly after he left Ireland for France. In Paris he studied medicine and thought of becoming a professional singer. During the 1914-1918 War he taught languages in Switzerland, and afterwards he returned to Paris, where he settled down to a literary life, struggling continually against ill-health and public opposition to his work. One of Joyce’s main themes is his natal city, Dublin. All his novels and his only play take place in it, and this must be taken as a symptom of something. He certainly loved his city and his land, but being an educated and rational man he could not help treating it in a very critical way.

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Topic 56: Historical relationships between Ireland and Britain.

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In order to better understand his work, it is important to determine and examine his subjects, his techniques and his style. Regarding his subjects, Joyce is considered a serious novelist whose concern is chiefly with human relationships, that is to say, man in relation to himself, to society and to the whole race. Moreover, he is a keen and subtle analyst of man’s inner consciousness. In the case of his technique, Joyce is said to be a pioneer in the quest of a new technique to present the contemporary human dilemma. With the use of the “stream of consciousness”, which will be deeply explained below, and the internal monologue, he went further and deeper than any other writer. His depth of penetration into human consciousness gives to his character-study a subtlety unparalleled in his day and he sometimes become incomprehensible. Finally, his style has been defined as a change from an early straightforward and simple writing to a more complex, allusive and original one in his last years. Joyce uses a broken narrative, with abrupt transitions and the omission of logical sentence links and a new vocabulary. Therefore, he liked to mix the root of words from different languages. Furthermore, regarding time and space, it is important to notice that Joyce in Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake the use of time is incredibly innovating, since Ulysses happens in just twenty-four hours. However, the novel is quite longer than that. The same happens in Finnegan’s Wake, in which a short fictional time is presented in a long real time. Therefore, Joyce’s treatment of time tends to describe short situations in fictional time in a long real time. And one of the important achievements of Joyce is that he could arrive to write in ten pages what a character could develop in ne second of thought. Therefore, it can be said that Joyce can get inside his characters’ minds. In the case of space, it is clear that all the actions of his works happen in Dublin. However, it is also important to notice that the characters make their own space, their internal space. This means that in Ulysses, for instance, there are at least two worlds: one is the Dublin that the characters have created themselves by their speeches and the other one is the internal space that each one of the characters creates. Another thing that is important when talking about James Joyce is the term epiphanies. An epiphany is a moment in which the artist sees an object which is isolated from the rest of the world and is given poetical qualities. It can be said that every single chapter of Dubliners is an epiphany, and even the same Joyce had the habit to keep some moments of splendour in a notebook, a draft which has arrived to the reader nowadays as “The Epiphanies”. Even though Joyce was a man to renounce to his religion it is significant that he chose a religious term for his experiences, a fact that shows his need of having something to believe in. As it has been stated before, it is also important to mention one of the achievements that Joyce got in his works, that is, the stream of consciousness3 or interior monologue. The author gets into his characters’ minds and it gives a complete new point of view to the story and the events that take place in the story. It is important to notice that the reader reaches these thoughts without the narrators’ intervention, which can be analysed as a more realistic point of view. Even though this is not an invention by Joyce, he was the one who best put it into practice and who set his novels as some of the best ever written. 5.1. Dubliners (1914) In his first work Dubliners, Joyce uses a straightforward narrative technique so as to achieve an objective, a short story study of the sordid Dublin slums. This work is a collection of fifteen short stories: The Sisters, An Encounter, Araby, Evelyn, After the Race, Two Gallants, The Boarding House, A Little Cloud, Counterparts, Clay, A Painful Case, Ivy Day in the Committee Room, A Mother, Grace and The Dead. 3

Stream-of-consciousness writing is usually regarded as a special form of interior monologue and is characterized by associative leaps in syntax and punctuation that can make the prose difficult to follow. Stream of consciousness and interior monologue are distinguished from dramatic monologue, where the speaker is addressing an audience or a third person, which is used chiefly in poetry or drama. In stream of consciousness, the speaker's thought processes are more often depicted as overheard in the mind (or addressed to oneself); it is primarily a fictional device. 7/9

Topic 56: Historical relationships between Ireland and Britain.

OPOS 2010 Andradas, Badia, Garcia, Herrera.

In this work, we can contemplate the influence of modernism on Joyce. For instance, the story Two Gallants is an allegory of the woman as Ireland and the man as Great Britain and the relationship between them. For political discussion Ivy Day in the Committee Room must be read in order to understand the Irish situation of the time. Finally, according to many experts’ opinions, some of the best Joyce’s lines are to be found in The Dead, in which the most pathetic view of the city, of its people, and of life in general is presented. 5.2. A Portrait of the Artists as a Young Man (1916) This story must be read as an autobiographical novel because most of the characters that appear in this novel have been identified as real, some of them with different names, and some of the facts that happen in them were confirmed by Joyce himself. This novel can be also be described as a metanovel, because Stephen, the main character, is constantly making references to what he considers a good or bad writer; to what his aesthetic theories are in Art; to what the consideration of language is and how poetical language should be. According to Albert (1990) there are five main issues that Joyce talks about in the voice of Stephen: o subdivision of art in the three genres: lyric, epic and dramatic. o objectivity and impersonality of the work of art o autonomy of art. o the nature of aesthetic emotion o the criteria of beauty. 5.3. Ulysses (1922) In this novel, a clear example of dramatic writing can be found. With this work, Joyce achieved the summit of European literature in the 20th century. The absence of a unique narrator is patent thorough the whole novel and even when there is a narrator it is impossible to identify him/her. The material that Joyce uses for this novel consists of all “stupid” things from common life which he gets into real and good literature. With this novel, James Joyce changed the previous idea of what a novel should be like, because in a single work theatre, poetry and narrative can be found. Joyce based the framework of his novel on the structure of one of the greatest and most influential works in world literature, The Odyssey, by Homer. In this epic poem of ancient Greece, Homer presented the journey of life as a heroic adventure. The protagonist of this epic tale, Odysseus (Roman name, Ulysses), encounters many perils–including giants, angry gods, and monsters–during his voyage home to Ithaca, Greece, after the Trojan War. In Joyce's 20th Century novel, the author also depicts life as a journey, in imitation of Homer. But Joyce presents this journey as humdrum, dreary, and uneventful. Joyce's Ulysses is a Jew of Hungarian origin, Leopold Bloom, who lives in Dublin, Ireland. His adventure consists of getting breakfast, feeding his cat, going to a funeral, doing legwork for his job, visiting pubs or restaurants, and thinking about his unfaithful wife. 5.4. Finnegan’s Wake (1939) Finnegan’s Wake is the story of Tim Finnegan, a man who falls from a ladder and he is believed dead. During the happy funeral that his friends celebrate, a glass of whisky is dropped on him, and he gets up alive and joins the party. Finnegan is said to be the character of reincarnation of every great hero of the past and the entire novel happens in a single night. In this work, Joyce invents a new language of the night and dreams, mixing different tongues, making a lot of witty puns and recreating the real orality of the language.

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Topic 56: Historical relationships between Ireland and Britain.

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6. Conclusion: appliance to the ESL classroom Literature, and therefore, literary language is one of the most salient aspects of educational activity. In classrooms all kinds of literary language either spoken or written, is going on most of the time. Yet, handling literary productions in the past makes relevant the analysis of literature in the twentieth century and in particular, Irish literature for the purposes of this unit. Since literature may be approached in linguistic terms, regarding form and function (morphology, lexis, structure, form) and also from a cross-curricular perspective (Sociology, History, English, French, Spanish Language and Literature), students are expected to know about the history of English-speaking countries and its influence in the world. In addition, one of the objectives of teaching the English language is to provide good models of almost any kind of literary productions for future studies. Learning involves a process of transformation of participation itself which has far reaching implications on the role of the teacher in the teaching-learning relationship. This means that literary productions are an analytic tool and that teachers need to identify the potential contributions and potential limitations of them before we can make good use of the historical events which frame the literary period. So, literature productions may be easily approached by means of the subjects of History, Language and Literature by establishing a parallelism with the students’ mother tongue one (age, literature forms, events). Moreover, nowadays new technologies (the Internet, DVD, video camera) and the media (TV, radio, cinema) may provide a new direction to language teaching as they set more appropriate context for students to experience the target culture. Present-day approaches deal with a communicative competence model in which first, there is an emphasis on significance over form, and secondly, motivation and involvement are enhanced by means of new technologies and the media. Hence literary productions and the history of the period may be approached in terms of films and drama representations in class. The success partly lies in the way literary works become real to the users. Some of this motivational force is brought about by intervening in authentic communicative events. Otherwise, teachers have to recreate as much as possible the whole cultural environment in the classroom by means of novels, short stories, documentaries, history books, or their family’s stories. This is to be achieved within the framework of the European Council (1998) and, in particular, the Catalan Curriculum which establishes a common reference framework for the teaching of foreign languages where students are intended to carry out several communication tasks with specific communicative goals, for instance, how to locate a literary work within a particular historical period. Analytic interpretation of texts in all genres should become part of every literary student’s basic competence (DOGC núm. 4915 and DOGC núm. 5183). There are hidden influences at work beneath the textual surface: these may be sociocultural, inter and intratextual. The literary student has to discover these, and wherever necessary apply them in further examination. The main aims that the currently educational system focuses on are mostly sociocultural, to facilitate the study of cultural themes, as the students must be aware of their current social reality within the European framework. 7. Bibliography Albert, E. (1990) A History of English Literature. Walton-on-Thames. Nelson. 5th edition Britannica Concise Encyclopaedia (www.britannica.com) Last accessed: October, 2010. Council of Europe (1998) Modern Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment. A Common European Framework of reference. DOGC núm. 4915- Decret 143/2007 Currículum Educació Secundària Obligatòria DOGC núm. 5183- Decret 142/2008 Currículum Batxillerat 9/9