Dear students,
I have been terribly busy for the last 4 weeks -needless to say-. Yesterday I went to bed late just trying to post the instructions for your homework. A few minutes ago I went to the Brit Lit blog to read your answers and... guess what? The post was not there! I DID post it but ON THE WRONG BLOG!!! If you go to ca-seminar.blogspot.com you will see it and you will see the date and time it was posted. Anyways, I am posting it here, again; and just answer if you feel like. After this mistake I cannot command you to carry out the activity. Excuse me, again.
Drama!
Dear Students,Sorry for the delay!!! I hope you got familiar with The Hour Glass (W B Yeats). Despite not being contemporary, the play sounds quite applicable to present day life.Let us have some sort of a forum, if you feel like sharing your opinion!Post your answer to the following questions:How is this effect achieved? How would you classify/describe this kind of play? Why?Now we can say the term is over. Thanks for your sensible company, see you any time, enjoy yourselves and... READ!D Duran
Galipan
About Me
- D Durán
- EFL Teacher at UPEL-IPC 1982. MSc Education (Teaching Literature in English) UPEL-IPC 1993. Currently: Head of the Culture & Literature Chair, English Programme, Department of Modern Languages and Coordinator of the MSc ToEFL Sub-Programme, UPEL-IPC.
7 comments:
The Hour Glass
Though the play does not seem not be contemporary, the situation itself is very applicable to present day life, since it deals with believes humanity might or might not have in God at certain moment. It is very obvious that the play has a lot of religious implications since the author, in this story, manages aspects like angels, God, paradise, believes, death, heaven, hell, and purgatory. This play represents a situation in which a person who have not believed in God for long time –and probably never has-, suddenly wants to believe and to change all that he has preached. Why this sudden change? Just because he realizes his death is near to come. And that is what usually people nowadays do: wait until last minute, until one finds oneself in a difficult situation to start regretting about all the mistakes that have been done and start trying to making things right. We only act like this; we only try to make things up just when we feel threaten by somebody or something, and when all means at our reach to change things have run out. So, it is then when we start to try to remember Lord’s Prayer to ask for favors and miracles.
Moreover, this play seem to be implicitly trying to influence or change their the audience`s believes to, like some sort of a warning; that they should start believing in God and doing God’s will in order to have his approval and be worth of rejoicing in paradise, before it is too late.
Now regarding the nature of this play, I would classify it as a closet drama play, because there are not many descriptions of the different scenes so it could be said that the play might have been intended to be read, and not necessarily to be performed but to be.
Fanzi Wong
However I am not sure if the classification of the previous work is accurate, so I would like to have a better explanation about what closet drama is. If someone or the teacher can help me clear this up, would be great, thanks :)
In the second paragraph I wanted to say:...the wise man represents a man that is involved in an unavoidable situation of death
Reality has been achieved by giving the play’s characters and situation a religious touch which might be applicable in our present day life in any religious society. In the play, it can be seen the eternal struggle between good and evil and the real existence of heaven and hell. The Wise man can be a clear representation of those persons who are about to die sheltering themselves in religion in order to search for forgiveness to a super natural entity who is going to provide them salvation. On the other hand, the angels are the representation of those who want people to believe the existence of God and there fore, the existence of heaven where people are going to be sent according to their acts and beliefs. Angel: “the doors of heaven will not open to you, for you have denied the existence of heaven, and the doors of purgatory will not open to you, for you have denied the existence of purgatory”.
I agree with Adrian. I would say that this play can be placed into the Realistic theatre. According to Bergmann, Yeats used to suggest about the backgrounds for his plays “…should be thought out not as one thinks out a landscape, but as if it were the background of a portrait”. (2003,p.92).In this play we can see how the universality can be applied to our context, at the very beginning of the play, when the wise man has a struggle between his and the fool’s point of view. He stands for his scientific perspective, which he spread among his students and acquaintances, and denies the religious one. That situation changes when he was told by an angel, he was about to die in an hour. He seriously revised all his (dis)beliefs about heaven and hell, and pleads for forgiveness. That situation is quite common in our days, where many people practice that old saying, “seeing is believing”, and leave aside the plausible existence of a supernatural supremacy, until they are at the edge of the death,. In this regard there are some scientific researches,in which when people are about to die, for some unknown reason, many of them become believers. Do we have the right to judge whether they are right or wrong? We have to respect all those convictions, of course, although we differ with them.
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