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Textual Analysis and Textual Theory. Session Seven Søren Hattesen Balle English Department of Culture and Identity. Agenda. Introduction : the summary assignment for today and next time Introduction : today’s session Presentation :
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TextualAnalysis and TextualTheory Session Seven Søren Hattesen Balle English Department of Culture and Identity
Agenda • Introduction: the summary assignment for today and next time • Introduction: today’s session • Presentation: • the dramatic genre and reading and analyzing drama • postmodernism and the postmodern • Classroomdiscussion: • Kenneth Koch, ”George Washington Crossing the Delaware” (1962) • the thematicfunction of pastiche in Koch’splay
The Specificity of DramaticTexts: A Summary of KeyConcepts • Staging and stage directions: characters, setting, placement of actors, historicalsetting, props, visualappearance, audio-visualappearance • Plot: rising action, climax, falling action. (exposition, complication, climax, crisis, resolution – reversal, recognition, turning point). • Sub-plot • Story and Plot ??? • Characters and characterisation • Speech/dialogue • Action
The Specificity of DramaticTexts: G. B. Shaw, Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1893) [Summer afternoon in a cottage garden on the eastern slope of a hill a little south of Haslemere in Surrey. Looking up the hill, the cottage is seen in the left hand corner of the garden, with its thatched roof and porch, and a large latticed window to the left of the porch. A paling completely shuts in the garden, except for a gate on the right. The common rises uphill beyond the paling to the sky line. Some folded canvas garden chairs are leaning against the side bench in the porch. A lady's bicycle is propped against the wall, under the window. A little to the right of the porch a hammock is slung from two posts. A big canvas umbrella, stuck in the ground, keeps the sun off the hammock, in which a young lady is reading and making notes, her head towards the cottage and her feet towards the gate. In front of the hammock, and within reach of her hand, is a common kitchen chair, with a pile of serious-looking books and a supply of writing paper on it.] [A gentleman walking on the common comes into sight from behind the cottage. He is hardly past middle age, with something of the artist about him, unconventionally but carefully dressed, and clean-shaven except for a moustache, with an eager susceptible face and very amiable and considerate manners. He has silky black hair, with waves of grey and white in it. His eyebrows are white, his moustache black. He seems not certain of his way. He looks over the palings; takes stock of the place; and sees the young lady.]
Bernard Shaw, MrsWarren’s Profession • Plot Turning Point: Vivie learnsabout her mother’s past: Climax: Harmony Turning point: Vivielearns abouther mother’s present: Crisis: Conflict Resolution: Goodbyemother (and Frank) Complication Conflict: Vivievs her mother Act One Act Two Act Three Act Four
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 1 • SCENE I. Elsinore. A platform before the castle. FRANCISCO at his post. Enter to him BERNARDO BERNARDO Who's there? FRANCISCO Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself. BERNARDO Long live the king! FRANCISCO Bernardo? BERNARDO He. FRANCISCO You come most carefully upon your hour. • BERNARDO 'Tis now struck twelve; get thee to bed, Francisco. FRANCISCO For this relief much thanks: 'tis bitter cold, And I am sick at heart. BERNARDO Have you had quiet guard? FRANCISCO Not a mouse stirring. BERNARDO Well, good night. If you do meet Horatio and Marcellus, The rivals of my watch, bid them make haste. FRANCISCO I think I hear them. Stand, ho! Who's there?
American literaryprojects in the 19th and 20th centuries • Pre-1960: Desire for national unity and culturalhomogeneity: the essence of America – the American way of life: • Ernest Hemmingway: • John Steinbeck: • The great American novel
American literaryprojects in the 19th and 20th centuries • Post-1960: Against national conformity - conflictsalong the lines of ethnicity (and gender). Traditions ratherthan tradition: plurality and culturalcomplexity • Jewish, African, Asian, Native, Latino, Italian, Irish Americans • Sexualidentity, gender, disability, region, religion, class • Crisis of representation: the (social, cultural, linguistic) construction of reality, New Journalism, metafiction,
Postmodernism and the postmodern • J.-F. Lyotard: grand vslittle narratives; totalisingvslocalstories; naturalisingvspragmaticexplanations • J. Baudrillard: simulacra; copy – the ’real’; the hyperreal/simulation • J. Derrida: the deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence; logocentrism (the inward rational principle of man, texts, … the universe) • Depthlessness, the unrepresentable, decentring
Postmodern art and literature • Intertextuality • Pastiche • Eclecticism
Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, George Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851
Kenneth Koch, ”George Washington Crossing the Delaware” (1962) • Title: • why is the play called “George Washington Crossing the Delaware”? • Setting: time and place: • where and when does the play take place? Is the setting realistic? • Characters and characterization: • motivation. What does the play tell us about why the characters act and speak in the way they do? How? • what does the play tell us about the relations between the characters, for instance, the relations of age, race, gender, class, nation, ethnicity, and power? How? • how does Koch characterize the characters in the play? Are they flat or round characters? • how does Koch control our response to the characters? Describe you response to them? Are we made to sympathize with them? Why/why not? • Action and dialogue: • what is signified by the actions and speech of the characters? What is signified by Corniwallis’s speech (22) at the beginning of the play? Is its language realistic? • Plot: • identify significant events, reversals, shifts in the action • do we find a five-fold pattern of exposition, complication, reversal, recognition, and resolution? • are we dealing with a comedy or tragedy? • what is the significance of the ending of the play? • Themes, thematics, and arguments: • what are the thematics and theme(s) of the play? • does the play have a point? Does it try to convince us about something?
“Even if Britain were the mother country of America, that made her actions all the more horrendous, for no mother would harm her children so brutally” (Thomas Paine, “Common Sense” (1776) • “The object is too important, the spirit of the British nation too high, the resources with which God hath blessed her too numerous, to give up so many colonies which she has planted with great industry, nursed with great tenderness, encouraged with many commercial advantages, and protected and defended at much expence of blood and treasure.” King George III’s Address to Parliament, October 27, 1775
Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old. (Winston Churchill to the House of Commons in the British Parliament, June 4, 1940
