EN2112

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EN2112

• Week IV from Our Town to Death (of a Salesman)
  via
• A Streetcar Named Desire

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EN21122 September 2008

• Essay 1
• Finish Our Town, then take break
• Wee little breakie
• Proceed to 1st half of Streetcar
• Apples and Oranges how to have a common
  denominator in order to make comparisons theme,
  character, setting
• Decadent lyricism vs primitivist lyricism
• Next Week
• Finish Streetcar
• Watch Lanham video
• Revise some paragraphs (time permitting)

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LAST CLASS americana with criticism

• Claim all art requires aesthetic
  tensionperhaps modelled on the tension between
  bodily desire and fulfillmentand Wilder offers a
  tension between national flattery and criticism.
• The first act sets this up by combining
  americana and estrangement.
• Grovers Corners as microcosm of America. All
  life?
• Wilder might say yes to that questionbut we
  might disagree.
• Consider pages 20-21 flattering self-concept is
  gently held up to a questioning light.
• NB this is a thoroughly modernist work, but it
  is NOT avant-garde the modernism of Joyce and
  Eliot was, we see in this 1938 play, to become an
  orthodox approach. Note epic beginning 5-6

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4 Second Act hinting at depth

• Why is depth in quotation marks?
• The Norman Rockwell surface is in place.
• Intellectual respectability demands the
  hermeneutic of suspicion (Ricouer), and there
  are subtle hints that the demons of sexuality,
  mental illness, aggression, daftness compromise
  the cozy self-portrait.
• Note the fundamental confusion on 60, 63, 71,
  and esp. 72
• Act 2 is about adolescent love (and sex)
• working out of sexual desire, but it redeems this
  fundamental childishness by showing how our lives
  depend on juvenile sleepwalking (of the sort the
  spirits will disavow in Act III). See p. 60.
• Modernist works by Joyce, Faulkner, Lawrence,
  Henry Miller challenged taboos vigorously. Wilder
  is a gentler lover of the world.
• Criticial appreciation of the cliché of romantic
  love requires some detachment.
• Note the anthropological transcendence of 77-78.
  We pull ourselves out of the picture and see it
  clinically.

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5 Third Act the death cure

• Claim the play is organized around a tension
  between sentimentality and disillusion, BOTH OF
  WHICH are flattering to readers/viewers.
• Sentimentality offers the Rockwellish vision of
  Americana, of an idyllic identity that more or
  less explains us. Mirror, Mirror on the
  wallyou (Americans) are the fairest.
• Disillusion flatters we intellectuals (for
  example)the selves that define themselves in
  contradistinction to the herd mentality.
  Mirror, mirror you (anti-sentimental critics)
  are the fairest.
• Not to say that the purpose is to protect
  uncritical nationalism only that the mechanism
  allows for constructive reconfiguration Youre
  basically okay, but you could be better.
• Since everyone dies (so far as I know), the
  death cure approach signifies a universalist
  (universalizable?) approach.
• We neednt accept universalist rhetoric, but it
  is a key feature of SMs discourse.
• This approach, in which Art (as personified by
  SM) is a gentle but potentially firm teacher,
  expresses key liberal-humanist values.

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5b liberal humanism

• Humanism is a broad category of ethical
  philosophies that affirm the dignity and worth of
  all people, based on the ability to determine
  right and wrong by appeal to universal human
  qualities  particularly rationality. It is a
  component of a variety of more specific
  philosophical systems and is incorporated into
  several religious schools of thought. Humanism
  can be considered the process by which truth and
  morality is sought through human investigation.
  In focusing on the capacity for
  self-determination, humanism rejects the validity
  of transcendental justifications, such as a
  dependence on belief without reason, the
  supernatural, or texts of allegedly divine
  origin. Humanists endorse universal morality
  based on the commonality of the human condition,
  suggesting that solutions to human social and
  cultural problems cannot be parochial.
• Emilys quest in act 3 is the human
  investigation through which we find out the
  meaning of life.
• wikipedia http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_
  humanism

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Breakplease come back

• In 15 minutes..

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Comparisons between works

• There are numerous threads connecting the plays
  across this course
•  
• Real estate every play we read is about who
  owns the house (or farm, or legacy)
•  
• Madness Emily is ?nervous,? Blanch is always on
  the verge of being sick, and Willy talks to
  himself a bit too much.
•  
• Sex we get a silhouette of the unspeakable
  subject in Our Town and an ambivalent treatment
  of Stanley?s non-hypocrisy (he?s a cruel brute,
  but he also transcends the hypocrisy that makes
  most civilization work) in Streetcar Named
  Desire.
• So What? Why make comparisons?
• All thought is comparativewhy?

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Genre as common denominator is this play
tragic?

• Arthur Miller, in his essay Tragedy and the
  Common Man, asserts that there is a prevailing
  idea that tragedy is of necessity allied to
  pessimism. He counters this idea with the
  argument that in truth tragedy implies more
  optimism than comedy, and that its final result
  ought to be the reinforcement of the onlookers
  brightest opinion of the human animal.

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To answer

• We need a definition Abrams 321
• To answer succinctly, we need to focuson a
  particular character? Who might be the tragic
  hero (or heroine) of Streetcar Named Desire?
• So looking at genre requires that we also look
  at character. And Theme.

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Some themes of Streetcar

• Taken from a cheat-sheet web page
• But first, What is a theme?
• 1- The reluctance or inability of people to
  accept the truth.
• 2- The final destruction of the Old South,
  symbolized by Blanche and Belle Reve (the family
  property seized by creditors).
• 3- The despoliation of the sensitive and feminine
  by the feral and masculine.
• 4- Unbridled sexual desire leads to isolating
  darkness and eventually death.

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Reality vs Illusion, Primative vs Decadent

• Decadent lyricism vs primitivist lyricism
  Stanley as primitive Min 48 of DVD

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A theme is recurrent

• Its repeated, not one-off
• It structures the playit is the play thinking
• Image 116 of DVD
• sparks fly in factory---- one literal visual
  image
• then Blanche's song about pasteboard sea,
  phoniness,
• then followup speech

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So far we have

• 1. created a question Is it a tragedy?
• 2. gone shopping for definitions (eg tragedy,
  but we still must buy catharsis)
• 3. Assembled some themes well look at when we
  make judgments about characters and catharsis
  illusion vs reality

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Next week

• We have to complete our collection of data/
  evidence/ representative moments
• We have to sort them carefully so we do not try
  to add apples and oranges
• We can make a hypothesis (provisional thesis)
  about the play as a tragedy
• Then we could write a response that would be more
  thorough (smarter!) than from the hip responses.