Showing papers on "Plot (narrative) published in 1970"

"Samson Agonistes" and the "Tragedy" of the Apocalypse

Abstract: MILTON'S reference in the preface to Samson Agonistes to the Book of Revelation as one of the models for tragedy has not, surprisingly enough, provoked much comment. That this was not merely a casual remark is indicated by the fact that it substantially repeats Milton's statement in The Reason of Church Government (1642), describing the Apocalypse, with support from "the grave autority of Pareus," as "the majestick image of a high and stately Tragedy, shutting up and intermingling her solemn Scenes and Acts with a sevenfold Chorus of halleluja's and harping symphonies."' In the Preface to Samson (written over twenty-five years later if one accepts the conventional dating)2 Milton cites as his models in regard to style and plot the examples of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, "the best rule to all who endeavor to write Tragedy," but on the prior question of the dignity and gravity of Tragedy he cites the biblical precedent of the Book of Revelation. And he refers again to Pareus' commentary, which "divides the whole Book as a Tragedy, into Acts distinguisht each by a Chorus of Heavenly Harpings and Song between."3 It can be argued that such statements merely invoke biblical authority to deflect the hostility of a Puritan audience from the suspect genre of drama,4 and that the description of the Book of Revelation as tragedy seems to rest solely upon the slight formal resemblance between the alternations of visions with choruses of praise in the Apocalypse and the interspersing of choral odes between the agons in Greek tragedy. Yet Milton's equally unlikely reference to the Book of Job as a "brief" model of epic, occurring in the same passage in The Reason of Church Government, has proved to be an important key to the genre and meaning of Paradise Regained.5 And Frank Kermode's stimulating study of the way in which the fiction of Apocalypse-the expected end of time-helps to form all our fictions incorporates the suggestion that early English tragedy developed on the Apocalyptic model: "The humble elect survive not all the kings of the earth as in Revelation, but the one king whose typical story is enacted before them. When tragedy established itself in England it did so in terms of plots and spectacles that had much more to do with medieval Apocalypse than with the mythos and opsis of ^_istotle."6 It would seem worth asking, therefore, whether Milton's biblical drama may owe something to a tradition of exegesis which approaches the Book of Revelation as a tragedy, and which points to certain typological relationships between the Book of Revelation, the Book of Judges, and the situation of the elect in the world in any era. Set forth in these terms, such an inquiry begs -to begin with-the much discussed question of whether Samson Agonistes can be regarded as a tragedy at all, given the shape of the plot and the effects produced. Aristotle declared that in the plot of tragedy "the change of fortune should be not from bad to good, but, reversely, from good to bad," and he denied true tragic effect to dramas which have a double catastrophe, an opposite issue for the good and the wicked.7 Yet this would seem to be just what occurs in Samson. The fall of the hero has occurred before the play begins, and the dramatic action proper traces the moral and spiritual growth of the hero to the point where he can fulfill his vocation as God's faithful champion. The final catastrophe, though it causes Samson's death, is yet a triumph for him, whereas it brings defeat and annihilation to the Philistines. For many readers, accordingly, the work illustrates the impossibility of producing true tragedy in a Christian cosmos which is ordered, ultimately, by God's providence and love. It may be, as W. R. Parker argued, that

Knemon's Hamartia

Abstract: In a recent article on Menander, Professor Arnott acknowledges his debt to the conclusions of the late Armin Schafer with regard to the construction of the Dyskolos. Schafer's theory, briefly stated, is that Menander was faced in this play with the problem of combining two different themes—the romantic love-interest (involving Sostratos and Knemon's daughter) demanded of New Comedy, and a character-study of the misanthropic Knemon. Menander comes near to a solution, argues Schafer, but these two elements are basically irreconcilable, and the play consequently fails to achieve complete unity of action. In the following pages I shall try to show that the conflict between the two sides of the play is an imaginary one (created in our minds, perhaps, by our knowledge of the lines along which ‘comedy of intrigue’ and ‘comedy of manners’ subsequently developed), and that the carefully integrated plot reflects a unity of theme in the comedy as a whole.

Handbook of short story writing

Abstract: Some of the best advice available on how to create character, use description, create a setting and plot a short story.

Major Scenes in Minor Key

Abstract: T has been observed that many of Shakespeare's plays have short scenes not indispensable to dramatic plot but significant, nevertheless, in a variety of ways. Hereward T. Price, in "Mirror Scenes in Shakespeare", describes them when he says, "Apparently loose detachable scenes, so-called episodes, are frequent in Shakespeare. They vary in function as well as in techniques, but certain features tend to recur. Many of them are ... mirror scenes, reflecting in one picture either the main theme or some important aspect of the drama. Other offer some kind of contrast to the general run of the action.... Others again affect the plot by keying up or keying down the suspense."' Creizenach called these "Szenen des Stillstands."2 They are, in fact, setpieces; and in most instances, they represent a marked change in tone. They are quiet scenes in minor key, serving all the ends described by Price-and more. Three of these scenes do much more than to mirror a major theme: they provide an emotional experience for the audience which defines a major character who might, without the scene, be wrongly interpreted. These scenes are the Garden Scene in Richard II, the Mad Scenes of Ophelia in Hamlet, and the Music-under-the-ground scene in Antony and Cleopatra. In each, the action, not really essential for plot-advancement, is pivotal in the sense that it shows the audience, first and last, how it is supposed to feel about a character and about the play as a whole. It is commonplace to point out that the Garden Scene in Richard II develops the symbolism of the nation-gone-to-waste under a ruler whose sentimental love of country and of kingship are equalled only by his utter neglect of both.3 England, the sea-walled garden, "this other Eden", has suffered "a second fall of cursed man."4 And the gardener, "old Adam's likeness" and "little better thing than earth", unwittingly reports it to the weeping Queen. The irony is, of course, that this natural man is tending his garden as the King is not. The elaborate metaphor of the garden is, indeed, a mirroring of the play's subsidiary theme: the necessity of order in the state. However, this mirrorfunction is by no means the principal purpose of the episode. Actually we have no need for a reaffirmation of this theme. It has been clear from Act I that

The Better School

Abstract: There are those, critics and literature professors, in particular, who regard the theater as a branch of literature. When they say so, there are those whose workaday world is in the theater, who rise in scorn, undiluted with sadness, and speak of the theater as an art wholly its own, and bewail the poor professors who know nothing of costumes or lighting, and therefore cannot understand the many-sided art of the theater.2 The Elizabethans, who wrote some of the best plays that our language has, and virtually the only old plays that are now presented, did not regard the theater as a branch of “literature.” They did not even use this word in its eighteenth to twentieth century meaning. Nor did they see the theater as sui generis. Of lighting and costumes they knew little. They did not have the modern skills at deception. Of their speech we have no recordings. But each play had at least one logos, the logos of its own apparent and simple development. The word “plot” is too thin, for the logos encompasses the reasoning, the reality, the poetry, the schooling of which Burke speaks. The drama itself was a form of poetry, from Aristotle’s Poetics during the days when poets wrote for the theater, and close to our own time. And Aristotle pointed to the deterioration when poetry gave way to spectacles. But the theater was also a school, a “school of moral sentiments,” as Burke called it. To be a school of moral sentiments, and a school to which the generations turned in eagerness and wonder, it had to know the condition humaine. It had to have something of a philosophical understanding.

Sun and Water Imagery in Richard II: Its Dramatic Function

Abstract: HE imagery of Richard II has a dramatic as well as a poetic function. The two functions are not separable, of course, yet -l?:4@ the imagery of the play is most often examined statically for its relevance to the poetic whole. Richard Altick's is the most thorough of these studies;' the sun imagery has been frequently considered in this context;2 the farm-garden metaphor is well known.3 The "dynamic" approach, used less often,4 studies the relevance of the imagery to the play's dramatic action. This action, as Francis Fergusson describes it, is not "the events of the story but the focus or aim of psychic life from which the events, in that situation, result."5 From this action arise plot, characters, and words which are its imitation. Derek Traversi has given a good account of the dramatic action in Richard II. It is, he says, "the downfall of a natural, sanctioned conception of royalty, and its replacement, in an action the pattern of which leans heavily on the conception of Fortune's wheel, by a political force at once more competent, more self conscious, and more precariously built on the foundations of its own desire for power."' The play arises from the dilemma of this usurpation: the breaking of a political order which itself has been wielded against the order and health of the kingdom. In expressing the pattern of this action the images of sun and water7 play an integral part. The development of their opposition is a metaphor both for the historical action of the play, the political conflict of Richard and Boling-

Sinclair Lewis's Sociological Imagination

Abstract: S INCLAIR LEWIS was a novelist blessed with what C. Wright Mills called "the sociological imagination," the capacity to see and be interested in the overriding dramatic quality of "the interplay of man and society, of biography and history, of self and world."' Lewis was often accused of being a kind of social scientist, although usually the similarity noted was in investigative and preparatory techniques and not in quality of mind. Mark Schorer for example pointed out that "with Lewis, the subject, the social section always came first; systematic research, sometimes conducted by research assistants and carrying Lewis himself into 'the field' like any cultural anthropologist, followed; the story came last, devised to carry home and usually limping under the burden of data."2 And Lewis too recognized the assumptions which underlay most of his work; he certainly was aware that his habits. of mind and method of composition resembled the habits and practices of the social scientist. Most writers, he tells us, when asked what form the first idea of a story takes, will reply that they think first of a plot, of a person, or even of a setting. But speaking of his own practice Lewis says, "Actually, these three are from the beginning mixed in your mind; you want to do a story abou.t a person who, as he becomes real to you, dwells in a definite house, street, city, class of society."3 It is, of course, this view of the individual imbedded in a matrix of neighborhood, city, and class which constitutes the basis of the sociological imagination. The power that this matrix has over the behavior of the individual is enormous. The universal recognition of this fact leads many to conclude that the human individual is completely bound up and hemmed in by his. culture. Yet somehow the human remains in-

Jose Maria Gutierrez Estrada: Monarchist Pamphleteer

Abstract: The whole world is talking of a pamphlet written by Senor Gutierrez Estrada, which has just appeared and seems likely to cause a greater sensation in Mexico than the discovery of the gunpowder plot in England. Frances Calderon de la Barca Thus Did the wife of the first Spanish Minister to Mexico describe, in October, 1840, the reception given a letter written by Jose Maria Gutierrez Estrada and published in pamphlet form together with an essay which amplified and clarified his position. The letter, addressed to President Anastasio Bustamante, carried the date August 25, 1840, whereas the pamphlet did not appear until October 18, 1840. The letter pointed to the necessity for a convention to seek a remedy for Mexico’s problems. The remedy advocated by Gutierrez Estrada in the essay which amplified his position, and which caused such a sensation— was a constitutional monarchy.

King Philip's War in representative American literary works of the period 1820-1860

Abstract: This study examined the literary treatment of the Indian in the works of five representative writers who, between 1820 and 1860, used the materials of King Philip's War as their narrative focus. The works are James Eastburn and Robert Sands' Yamoyden (1820), a verse romance, John Augustus Stone's Metamora (1829), a stare melodrama, James Fenimore Cooper's The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish,(1828) G. B. Hollister's Mount Hope (1851), and D. P. Thompson's The Doomed Chief (1860), all prose romances.The above works reflect the principal trends and influences operative upon American writers who utilized Indian subjects during the Romantic era. King Philip's War appealed to these writers primarily because its remoteness in time cast, in William Tudor's words, "a shade of obscurity resembling that of antiquity,"l and its events and characters were colorful enough to be of romantic interest. Primitivistic tradition had conceived the Indian as Noble Savage, presumably a creature better able to live virtuously than civilized man.1William Tudor, Jr., "An Address Delivered to the Phi Beta Kappa Society," The North American Review, II (November,1815), 14.Most writers felt the need, nevertheless, to accommodate this myth to historical realities. Unlike the Noble Savage of tradition, experience had shown the American Indian to have been neither "innocent" nor able to withstand the encroachments of civilization. A new and paradoxical concept of the Noble Savage therefore emerged--that of a being heroic but cruel, generous but vengeful, honest but immoderately passionate, and a man, above all, fated to be crushed by a higher culture which he did not understand and which did not understand him.Stone's Metamora is closest to the primitivistic tradition. The play contains little, if any, implication that the savage's way of life is inferior to that of the civilized man. In each of the romances discussed, however, just such an unfavorable implication is central to each author's treatment of the Indian. Yamovden, on the other hand, is a muzzling work which leaves the reader doubtful that Eastburn and Sands ever had a settled conception of the Noble Savage.Stone excepted, the writers studied were concerned about historicity and tried to base their treatment of the Indian, in part at least, upon authentic historical materials. Generally, they followed Puritan sources in order to Five a sense of realism to the background, a procedure plainly evident in the works when the narrations of several battles are compared with Puritan accounts. The writers did not hesitate, however, to depart from their sources when history contradicted the characterizations made necessary by romantic themes.The several works discussed show evidence of the influence exerted upon characterization and plot making by the literary conventions which dominated the popular writing of the early and middle nineteenth century. Most characters are stereotypes which fill roles in a standard plot in which the white heroine is endangered, rescued, then reunited with the white hero.The study was organized as follows: chapter one described the growth of enthusiasm for Indian subjects in America from 1815 through 1830; chapter two discussed the Noble Savage myth and its influence upon American writing; chapters three through seven examined Yamoyden, The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, Metamora, Mount Hope, and The Doomed Chief as works representative of the general trends and influences discussed in the earlier chapters; and the conclusion summarized the study and attempted to formulate the writer's conclusions concerning the Indian's Place in American romanticism.

The Novels of Shirley Jackson: A Critical-Analytical Study

Abstract: This study will discuss each of Shirley Jackson's six novels. The discussions will concentrate on plot, setting, theme, characterization, and style.

Διπλους μυθος 1

Abstract: Aristotle's Poetics is a treatise notoriously difficult to understand, largely because of Aristotle's treatment of his theme, with its elliptical thought and loose terminology, but also because Aristotle's influence on subsequent drama and criticism makes it difficult to isolate the original thought from subsequent attempts at implementation or interpretation. However, as Aristotle devotes most of his treatise to tragedy—despite the wider subject he professes—and in discussing tragedy deals most extensively with plot, his views on the tragic plot should be reasonably clear. The passages cited have some importance for the understanding of his views.