Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen
Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen
1) Realist Theatre:
a) Realism’s tenets include:
i) A faithful representation of contemporary life,
ii) A rejection of Romantic idealism and subjectivity,
iii) An inclusiveness that includes the low and the mean
iv) And a critical attitude toward the bourgeoisie.
b) When applied to drama, these tenets suggest:
i) A truthful depiction of the contemporary world
ii) A focus on the middle class
iii) An objectivity that mimics the stance of a scientist in a lab
iv) An emphasis on the shaping influence of environment.
c) In drama it also produced a new set of stage techniques.
i) A proscenium arch stage suggests an actual setting in which the opening is the fourth wall, through which the audience gets to oversee life as it is lived by the characters on stage.
ii) Asides and soliloquies are abandoned as unrealistic.
iii) Exposition has to be done naturally.
iv) Middle-class drawing rooms are meticulously recreated on stage.
2) Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen invented this new kind of realist drama.
a) Initially, no respectable theater would touch his plays because they attacked pillars of middle-class life—marriage, family, church—as oppressive, hypocritical, and life-crushing.
b) In all of his plays, characters struggle to free themselves from the “dead hand of the past”—that is, from tradition, custom, conventionality, and respectability, all of which stifle and kill the present moment.
c) Ibsen created modern drama by changing its content, bringing onto the stage contemporary issues including the oppression of women, corrupt politics and journalism, and even venereal disease.
i) Realism comes to drama in Ibsen’s introduction of contemporary and sometimes sensational material that he got from newspaper stories.
d) He used for his new kind of drama the conventional formula of the well-made play which was current all over Europe in Ibsen’s day.
i) The well-made play begins in media res, just before the crisis, and then fills in the background that explains the crisis, so that we move backwards in knowledge as we move forwards in time; we always receive the last piece of necessary information just before the climax occurs.
ii) Ibsen innovated the well-made play formula by mixing action with exposition, rather than exposition alone. The Act 2 Scene in which Hedda Gabler and Eilert Lovborg looks at the photo album from Hedda’s honeymoon re-creates the same dynamic that Hedda and Eilert enjoyed years earlier when they were both younger.
3) While Hedda Gabler the play is arguably a work of “realist” drama, Hedda Gabler the character, like the Underground Man, is a product of self-deception and fantasy. She imagines that suicide could be committed “beautifully.”
a) HEDDA: “…people just don’t act that way here” (868)
b) BRACK: “People just don’t act that way!” (910)
c) These lines become interesting commentary on our course. Do people act this way? How realistic is the realist drama of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler?
4) This outline is based upon The History of World Literature by Grant L. Voth
Isabel Allende
1. “. . . Isabel Allende is not a writer who lends herself to easy classification. To suggest . . . That each of her stories unfolds in a unique way is to describe the diversity of content and style that characterizes this author’s remarkable oeuvre. ” Isabel Allende: A Critical Companion by Karen Castellucci Cox
2. “Since the publication of The House of the Spirits in 1985, Allende has become the most widely read Latin American woman writer in the world.” (Cox)
3. “And of Clay Are We Created” is told by the heroine of Allende’s third novel Eva Luna, whose lover, Rolf Carlé, is the main character. With a carefully crafted plot and delicate images, Allende illustrates the theme of self-discovery through love… –Magill’s Survey of World Literature
a. “And of Clay Are We Created” … is based upon a real event. In 1985, the volcano Nevado del Ruiz erupted, and the ensuing landslides and mudslides buried the surrounding towns, killing more than twenty thousand people. Omayra Sanchez was a young victim of this disaster.
i. Omayra was photographed by journalist Frank Fournier and became a symbolic face for the tragedy and the general difficulties and governmental incompetence in dealing with the situation.
b. “. . . Allende’s writing style reflects the influences of her Latin American predecessors, particularly in her treatment of magic and mysticism. At the same time, however, she relies on her training as a journalist to confront even the most atrocious political realities, including terrorism, torture, and murder.” (Cox)
4. According to Allende, Magical Realism is a literary device or a way of seeing in which there is space for the invisible forces that move the world: dreams, legends, myths, emotion, passion, and history.
a. She believes that this view of life is not unique to Latin American writers but instead belongs to the literatures of all developing countries where the sudden accelerations of change juxtapose the old and the new.
b. According to Allende, Magical Realism is the capacity to see and to write about all dimensions of reality, not just the realistic. –Magill’s Survey of World Literature
c. “In world literature . . . there are elements if the imagination as extraordinary as the ones employed by [writers of magical realism]. These occur in Scandinavian sagas, in German gothic literature, in all parts of the world. By incorporating these elements of the imagination, literature, precisely, enriches reality.” – Isabel Allende “The Difference between Fantasy and Imagination: A Conversation with Isabel Allende”
The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka
1)Modernists such as Kafka move the action of literature from the external to the internal world and question many of the fundamental assumptions about the self, the meaning of existence, and the human place in the universe with techniques that were dazzlingly new and sometimes difficult for readers.
a) Kafka’s interest in the inner life of the mind and its physical manifestations is tied to the literary expressionism movement of form and content,which tries to describe the way we experience the world, not what it looks like in a representational way.
b) In the visual arts, Edvard Munch’s The Scream pictures alienation and terror in a nonrepresentational way.
c) In an Expressionist way, perhaps Kafka is showing what it feels like to be human in the 20th century.
In an era of experimentation in literature, Franz Kafka is particularly innovative in in “The Metamorphosis.”
a) Instead of telling his story in the standard structure of exposition, complication, climax, and denouement, Kafka begins with the climax—in the first sentence. Everything after that is denouement, or unraveling.
b) The central oddity of the “Metamorphosis” is the lack of origin for the transformation. Scholars have consequently spent much time seeking out this origin.
i) Psychoanalytic (Freudian) approaches such as Walter H. Sokel’s argue that Gregor’s transformation is an unaccidental accident: Gregor’s extreme frustration with his job led to this unconscious excuse to shirk his responsibilities.
2) Though its symbols and events seem decipherable, “The Metamorphosis” resists any cohesive, singular interpretation.
a) Experienced readers will immediately try to interpret the story metaphorically – e.g. modern man has become an insect. But the story itself is not metaphorical. Gregor is the bug, through the prosaic reality of Kafka’s details, like slime trails and smells.
i) In Notes from Underground a man “becomes” a mouse
ii) In the Metamorphosis he becomes an insect.
iii) In the realist writer’s vision, this is metaphor.
iv) In Kafka, this is reality.
3) The first sentence leads the reader into thinking that this is a fantasy, fairy tale, or science fiction, but after that, the narrator treats Gregor’s transformation into an insect in the most literal way possible, forcing the reader to give the story a Realist reading.
a) Since Gregor is the family’s breadwinner, they are more annoyed than surprised or horrified.
b) For a time they try intermittently to take care of him, but eventually they get busy and abandon him.
c) Three times he emerges from his room, each time precipitating a disaster; then he dies, is swept into a dustpan, and the family goes on a picnic.
d) As Dostoevsky’s Underground Man foreshadows some aspects of the modern city-dweller, so Kafka’s Gregor can represent the plight of anyone with a special need in an increasingly impersonal and regimented world.
This outline contains portions of The History of World Literature by Grant L. Voth
