19th c, Drama, German, Poetry, Romantic

Goethe’s Faust

Goethe’s Faust is a complex work of literature that is concerned with the place of humanity in the cosmos.

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19th c, British, Poetry, Romantic

Preface to the Lyrical Ballads

What is a poet? To whom does he address himself? And what language is to be expected from him?

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17th c, 18th c, British, French, German, Poetry, Prose, Romantic

Romantic Literature

No simple label can describe the Romantic Age, for if anything the artists of this era were individualists.

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18th c, German, Prose, Romantic

The Sorrows of Young Werther

Unhappy man! Aren't you a fool? Aren't you deceiving yourself? What sense is there in this raging endless passion?

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19th c, French, Prose, Romantic

René

Nevertheless, I set forth all alone and tall of, spirit on the stormy ocean of the world, though I knew neither its safe ports nor its perilous reefs.

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16th c, 17th c, British, Renaissance, Tragedy, Vocabulary

Revenge Tragedy

Posted on 19 March 2009

For the purpose of judging and examining plays, understanding genre enables clarity. In the Poetics, Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) defines tragedy as an imitation of a single, unified, action that is serious, complete, and has a certain magnitude. Tragedy deals with the fall of someone whose character is good, believable, and consistent; importantly, the fall is caused by an error or frailty (hamartia – tragic flaw) rather than a vice or depravity. Philosophies about fate, fortune, and circumstances may intersect with the misfortunes of the hero, but the ups and downs of life are related to the issue of free will (not destiny) in the settling of plot.  It is at the point of free will that revenge tragedy takes a distinct generic turn.

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17th c, 18th c, British, Drama, Neoclassical, Poetry, Prose

Neoclassicism: Major Ideas

Posted on 26 January 2009

The following are major ideas held by conservative writers and thinkers of Neoclassicism, e.g. Dryden, Pope, Swift, Johnson, Gay, Butler, Rochester, Gibbon, Mandeville, Burlte, Reynolds, and Smollet.

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16th c, 17th c, 18th c, British, Comedy, Enlightenment, French, Renaissance, Vocabulary

Some Views on Comedy

Posted on 21 January 2009

This is the difference that marks tragedy from comedy: comedy is inclined to imitate persons below the level of our world, tragedy persons above it. . . . Comedy is, as I have said, an imitation of lower types; though it does not include the full range of badness, nevertheless to be ridiculous is a kind of deformity. The causes of laughter are errors and deformities that do not pain or injure us; the comic mask, for instance, is deformed and distorted but not painfully so. . . . The next best plot, which is said by some people to be the best, is the tragedy with a double plot like the Odyssey, ending in one way for the better people and in the opposite way for the worse. But it is the weakness of theatrical performances that gives priority to this kind, when poets write what the audience would like to happen, they are in leading strings. This is not the pleasure proper to tragedy, but rather to comedy, where the greatest enemies in the fable make friends and go off at the end, and nobody is killed by anyone. –Aristotle, The Poetics

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Medieval, Vocabulary

Allegory

Posted on 23 December 2008

An allegory is a narrative in which the agents and action, and sometimes the setting as well, are contrived not only to make sense in themselves, but also to signify a second, correlated order of persons, things, concepts, or events.

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19th c, Gothic, Vocabulary

The Gothic

Posted on 22 December 2008

“Gothic signifies a writing of excess. It appears in the awful obscurity that haunted eighteenth-century rationality and morality. It shadows the despairing ecstasies of Romantic idealism and individualism and the uncanny dualities of Victorian realism and decadence. Gothic atmospheres—gloomy and mysterious—have repeatedly signaled the disturbing return of pasts upon presents and evoked emotions of terror and laughter.” (Fred Botting 1) from Gothic (1996)

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20th c, Czech, Modernist, Novel

Frames in Kafka’s Metamorphosis

Posted on 17 November 2008

In reading Kafka’s Metamorphosis for class last week, I noticed that the novella is framed in a way that highlights one of its central — if not the central — thematic concerns of the text. Figuratively, frames are a way to organize and structure reality. If you consider a photograph, it is framed or composed in such a way as to present the real world in an organized and predictable fashion. It’s frame includes certain elements while it excludes others. All of the components of the text (novel, photograph, poem, film, etc.), then, tell a unified story which is often an expression of the values of the framer (artist, writer, photographer, etc.).

Kafka presents Gregor’s metamorphosis in such a way, and he gives textual clues to this rhetorical function based around how women are framed in the narrative.

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