Art and society

En clair. Engaged literature

Ce qu'on te demande au bac (Spé LLCE Anglais) : maîtriser le vocabulaire de « Art and society », savoir refaire les raisonnements du cours et les réutiliser sur un sujet ou un document nouveau.

Conseil de révision. Lis d'abord cet encadré, puis fais le quiz : si tu bloques, reprends la partie du cours correspondante.

Art and society

Axis and problematic

Art and society explores how artistic creation engages with — or escapes from — the social context. Problematic: To what extent does English-speaking art mirror, shape and challenge society?

Three relationships

1. Mirror — realist novels and social photography document society.
Examples: Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854); Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (1890).

2. Hammer — art reshapes ideologies and brings change.
Examples: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) — credited by Lincoln with sparking the Civil War; Spike Lee, Do the Right Thing (1989).

3. Escape — art as refuge or pure aesthetic pleasure.
Examples: Romantic poetry (Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn); Aestheticism (Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890).

Vocabulary

Movements

• Romanticism (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley) — celebration of nature and individual feeling.
• Realism / Naturalism (Dickens, Hardy, Zola translated) — social critique.
• Modernism (Joyce, Woolf, Eliot) — fragmentation of the self.
• Harlem Renaissance (Hughes, Hurston) — Black cultural assertion.
• Postcolonial literature (Achebe, Rushdie, Adichie) — rewriting empire.

Sample analytical paragraph

When Dorian Gray sells his soul for eternal youth, Wilde does not simply tell a Gothic tale — he indicts the Victorian obsession with appearances. The novel's lush descriptions and epigrams precisely embody what they denounce: art that delights and disturbs at once.

Problematics to remember

• Can art change politics, or only reflect it?
• In what ways has English-speaking literature been a battleground for identities?
• Is the canon a tool of inclusion or exclusion?