Textual Analysis and Textual Theory

TEXTUAL ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL THEORY

Session Seven

Søren Hattesen BalleEnglish

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 Class room discussion:

Kenneth Koch, ”George Washington Crossing the Delaware” (1962)

the thematic function of pastiche in Koch’s play

The Specificity of Dramatic Texts: A Summary of Key Concepts

Staging and stage directions: characters, setting, placement of actors, historical setting, props, visual appearance, audio-visual appearance

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 Dramatic Texts: A Summary of Key

Concepts

The Specificity of Dramatic Texts: 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.]

1889 Victor CyclesOverman Wheel Co, Boston, Mass, USA

Bernard Shaw, Mrs Warren’s Profession

Plot

Act One Act Two Act Three

Act Four

TurningPoint: Vivielearns abouther mother’spast:Climax:Harmony

Turning point:Vivie learnsabout hermother’spresent:Crisis:Conflict

ComplicationConflict:Vivie vsher mother

Resolution:

Goodbye mother(and Frank)

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 literary projects in the 19th and 20th centuries

Pre-1960: Desire for national unity and cultural homogeneity: the essence of America – the American way of life:

Ernest Hemmingway: John Steinbeck: The great American novel

American literary projects in the 19th and 20th centuries

Post-1960: Against national conformity - conflicts along the lines of ethnicity (and gender). Traditions rather than tradition: plurality and cultural complexity

Jewish, African, Asian, Native, Latino, Italian, Irish Americans

Sexual identity, 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 vs little narratives; totalising vs local stories; naturalising vs pragmatic explanations

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

Postmodernism and the postmodern

Postmodern art and literature

Intertextuality Pastiche Eclecticism

Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, George Washington Crossing the

Delaware, 1851

Larry Rivers, George Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1951

Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon in his Study, 1812

Larry Rivers, The Greatest Homosexual, 1964

Alex Katz, George Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1961

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