High Comedy Research Articles

Своеобразие образа лжеца в легкой комедии конца XVIII – начала XIX века

The article explores the image of a liar in the comedies of the late 18th –early 19th centu-ries. The following texts are analyzed: The Talkerby N.I.Khmelnitsky (1817), Don’t Like –Don’t Listen, But Don’t Interfere with Lyingby A.A. Shakhovskoy (1818), A Lesson to Liars, or a Bridegroom for an Hourby Ya.Lyustikh (1823), The Punished Hypocrite, or a Lesson to Everyone in Turnby B.M.Fedorov (1817), Deception, or It’s All About Screens by V.Sveshnikov (1834). The connection of the Russian light comedy with the French-style salon comedy is noted, special attention is paid to the specifics of translation, adaptation of the work to Russian mores. The main characteristics of the light comedy of the period are high-lighted: aphoristic speech, love theme, matchmaking as the key motif. The signs of the salon comedy in-clude: the text size, a comedic intrigue, the recognition of the characters by readers/viewers (the characters’ resemblance to real prototypes), which distinguish this genre from the high comedy of the 18th century. Theanalysis showed the motif of deception to be the core, plot-forming motif. The representatives of the noble society act as deceiving characters, the age of the character does not matter. Despite the lack of strict didacticism, the hero-deceiver gets what he deserves, he loses either a lucrative position or a bride. Thus, we can talk about the national specifics of the comedies under consideration: the cheater protagonist gets noth-ing and often loses his influence, status, and even honest name. Despite the negative attitude to deception, showing the liar in his true colors is a virtuous mission, often it is a conflict of close people or relatives. Sveshnikov’s comedy Deception...is considered separately since it is written in prose, not in verse. In addi-tion, theliar is a female character; in this play, ‘verbal’ deception is replaced by deception in action.

МОЛЬЕР И МАРИВО

The article examines the originality of Moliere’s comedy tradition transformation in the plays of Marivaux. Being the great comedy reformer Moliere created classic examples of the genre and had a huge impact on the world theater. At the same time, this does not mean that subsequent comedians are completely dependent on Moliere’s manner. Marivaux, although he relies on Moliere’s experience, uses Moliere’s techniques of commedia dell’arte, however, is achieving a different artistic result, a different tone, and uses a different type of comic. This is especially clear when comparing two comedies belonging to the “school” genre - “School of Wives” by Moliere and “School of Mothers” by Marivaux. Moliere, incorporating elements of farce into the “high comedy”, enhances the laughter tone, in essence, the first to associate the comedy genre with laughter. The playwright of the 18th century, condensing various kinds of intrigues in the plot of a one-act comedy, driving an easily resolved ironic-playful love conflict, was finally able to create an original type of rococo love-psychological comedy.

Dramatizing Chinese Intellectuals of the Republican Era in Face for Mr. Chiang Kai-shek: Encoding Nostalgia in a Comedy of Ideas

Face for Mr. Chiang Kai-shek, one of the most influential Chinese plays to have garnered attention in recent years, serves as a reminder of the importance of campus theatre in the formation and development of modern Chinese spoken drama from the early twentieth century onwards. As an old-fashioned high comedy that features witty dialogues and conveys philosophical and political ideas, it stands in opposition to such other forms of theatre in China today as the extravagant, propagandistic ‘main melody’ plays, as well as the experimental theatre of images. This article argues that the play’s focus on Chinese intellectuals of the Republican era and their ideas encodes nostalgia both in its dramatic content and theatrical form: the former encodes nostalgia for the Republican era through a nuanced representation of Chinese intellectuals of that period, while the latter encodes nostalgia for orthodox spoken drama (huaju) in the form of a comedy of ideas. Yuan Li (first author) is Professor of English in the Faculty of English Language and Culture, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. She has published extensively on contemporary Chinese and Anglo-Irish drama, theatre, and cinema. Tim Beaumont (corresponding author) is Assistant Professor at the School of Foreign Languages at Shenzhen University. His research is primarily philosophical, and it is currently focused on the relationship between nineteenth-century liberal nationalism and contemporary multiculturalism.

“First Connections with Stagecraft”: S. N. Behrman Finds His Vocation

ABSTRACTThis article discusses previously unpublished material from the S. N. Behrman Papers that marks S. N. Behrman’s first encounter with live theater. This material is thus a significant contribution to the biographical record on Behrman. A theater memoir submitted to but rejected by The New Yorker sheds light on Behrman’s early experiment in vaudeville, and records his early encounter with high comedy in the work of Somerset Maugham and his early fascination with actors, a primary focus of his theatrical career. The unpublished material discussed here was intended as part of his New Yorker series about growing up in a Jewish neighborhood in central Massachusetts, reminiscences seen as a resource for information about Behrman’s adolescence and early adulthood. Since Behrman’s book The Worcester Account (1954) offers only passing mention of the author’s eventual career in drama, the material covered here illuminates his choice of a vocation in the world of theater.

Latin Woostered and Hard-Boiled: The Classical Style of P. G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler

Latin Woostered and Hard-Boiled: The Classical Style of P. G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler KATHLEEN RILEY The Victorian classicist Benjamin Jowett, outlining his vision for Oxford’s classical curriculum (or “Greats”), believed “the function of the scholar was to bring Greek ideas into contact with the modern world, and the purpose of university education was to produce not scholars or researchers but statesmen and men of the world.”1 One Oxford alumnus who exemplified this vision was Oscar Wilde. For him the classics were not just essential to education ; they were an important part of another aspect of the modern world—mass entertainment. From his journalism to his plays and his novel, Wilde incorporated the ancient world in literary “products” designed to be consumed by large middle -class audiences. Effectively, he found a way of reconciling Parnassus and Piccadilly, the cloister and the marketplace. Two later writers, born at a time when Wilde was making his mark as a wit, cultural critic and boulevardier, also epitomized Jowett’s worldly vision—though their training ground was not Oxford but an English public school, Dulwich College, founded by Elizabethan actor-manager Edward Alleyn. They were P. G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler, near contemporaries who, while apparently very different from one another, had in common a classical education to which they subsequently ascribed their great facility as English prose stylists. The current Master of Dulwich College, Joseph Spence, maintains: “Chandler’s Philip Marlowe may speak with a Los Angeles accent, but his syntax owes more to Virgil and Livy than to any later writers.”2 And Chandler himself remarked: “It would seem that a clasarion 26.2 fall 2018 sical education might be a rather poor basis for writing novels in a hardboiled vernacular. I happen to think otherwise.”3 Wodehouse described his schooling on the “Classical side” as “the best form of education I could have had as a writer.”4 And here is another point of comparison with Wilde, of whom Seamus Heaney once said: “The lighter his touch, the more devastating his effect. When he walked on air, he was on solid ground.”5 Heaney was referring to the brilliant paradoxes and high-wire wordplay of Wilde the Society satirist, the subversive insider and scourge of Victorian hypocrisy, but he also pinpointed an intrinsic aspect of Wilde the freelance classicist. Wilde wore his erudition lightly but the sheer nimbleness of his creative genius, the assiduous court paid to triviality , the formation of so “delicate [a] bubble of fancy”6 as The Importance of Being Earnest, all had a rootedness and authority attributable in large measure to his formal classical training. Wodehouse as weaver of whimsy and Chandler as purveyor of pulp fiction have a similar rootedness and authority that derive from a solid grounding in classics. Like Wilde again, and his pitch-perfect High Comedy, Wodehouse and Chandler create very particular worlds in their writing—contrasting worlds of light and dark. Chandler ’s is the Los Angeles demimonde, a world of hard edges, of blackmailers, femme fatales and tuxedoed racketeers, of seedy saloons and gambling joints; a world both repellent and seductive in its lurid, noirish venality. In his penultimate novel, The Long Goodbye, L.A. is personified as “a city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.” Descending the mean streets of this urban underworld is Chandler’s private eye, Philip Marlowe, a hero with mythic resonance, “a shopsoiled Galahad,”7 a gumshoe Aeneas every bit as worldweary as Virgil’s hero and just as attuned to the lacrimae rerum, the tears inherent in the human condition. If Chandler depicts a city and its inhabitants indisputably banished from the Garden of Eden to the Garden of Allah (a notorious Hollywood hotel of the 1930s and ’40s), Wode18 latin woostered and hard-boiled house captures a world delightfully preserved in prelapsarian aspic or, as Evelyn Waugh put it, “a world of pristine paradisal innocence. For Mr. Wodehouse there has been no Fall of Man; no ‘aboriginal calamity’. His characters have never tasted the forbidden fruit.”8 An article in the New Yorker, in March...

«Свойство комедии…» (рецензия на книгу: Лебедева О.Б. Поэтика русской высокой комедии XVIII – первой трети XIX веков. М.: Языки славянской культуры, 2014. 472 с.)

«Свойство комедии…» (рецензия на книгу: Лебедева О.Б. Поэтика русской высокой комедии XVIII – первой трети XIX веков. М.: Языки славянской культуры, 2014. 472 с.)

HERCVLEVS LABOR – LABOR LIMAE: EPIC ARITHMETIC AT VIRGIL,AENEID8.230-2

A distinctive feature ofAeneid8 is the constant interplay and fluctuation of registers, with high epic and thegenus grandealternating with the lighter strains or learned allusions associated with thegenus tenue. As one commentator has remarked, ‘Man darf das Buch allein schon wegen seines Reichtums an Aitien als das ‘kallimacheischste’ derAeneisbezeichnen.’ Beyond the emphasis on aetiology—the Cacus myth in particular is presented asaitionfor the consecration of the Ara Maxima—the Callimachean complexion comes out also in several smaller not-so-serious or learned touches, typically at unlikely moments to infuse an element of humour in an otherwise intensely dramatic narrative. The Hercules–Cacus episode conflates high drama and low comedy as the cattle rustler's slightly ridiculous stratagem becomes a gigantic clash resonating with the primal gigantomachy. Among the rudimentary weapons of mass destruction unleashed by Hercules upon Cacus (omniaque arma|aduocat et ramis uastisque molaribus instat, 8.249-50), the hapaxmolaris(massive boulder, lit. millstone) echoes its Homeric equivalent μύλαξ (Il. 12.161), itself a hapax, with the recherché term then reappearing (again as hapax) at Ovid,Metamorphoses3.59: missiles and diction are equally outlandish. When Hercules in a reprise of the celebrated Empedoclean leap plungesper ignemin pursuit of Cacus (8.256-8), an (incongruous) evocation of the Sicilian philosopher's fiery exit adds a touch of comedy at the heated moment. And from this inferno Virgil moves to Olympus, lowering the tone but raising the temperature as Venus in a domestic comedy seduces the uxorious Vulcan into preparing new armour for Aeneas: now she kindles flames of a different sort in the fire-god (8.388-92, 8.404-6) in a scene marked by witty double entendre that provides a playful contrast with the unfolding drama at Pallanteum. At moments like these, a lighter strain is audible through the epic thunder,Vergilius ludensis hard at work (or play).

Something Else Very Barbara Pym: Cultural Criticism in Quartet in Autumn

Abstract In this article—providing both historical context and critical analysis—I challenge the popular line of scholarly thought that has for years maintained that Miss Pym is not an “issues” writer. I specifically employ Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (1977) and Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (1981)—recognized classics of twentieth-century cultural criticism—to show how Pym, in her last novels, independently arrives at many of the same conclusions for which Berry and MacIntyre are celebrated. It is my further contention that one need not disagree with Lord David Cecil's assessment of Pym's novels as superb “examples of high comedy,” to also include her among the relevant cultural critics of her time.

On the Tragedy of the Commoner: Elektra, Orestes, and Others in South Africa

Like their counterparts in other countries beset with internal conflicts if not outright civil war, such as Jean Anouilh in occupied France (ca. 1940) or Griselda Gambaro in Argentina (ca. 1980), South African theatermakers during the apartheid era found in classical tragedy scenarios for representing the struggle against the brutality of an authoritarian state. Sophocles' Antigone, in particular, which inspired both Anouilh and Gambaro, also prompted the well-known South African playwright Athol Fugard, as well as lesser-known locals like Peter Se-Puma, to depict Antigone as a political rebel who defies Creon, her kinsman and her king, and asserts on pain of death an ethical obligation to resist the tyranny of the state. (1) In The Island (1973), Fugard's collaborators Winston Ntshona and John Kani, both of whom created the roles of political prisoners, play Antigone and Creon respectively. The drama concludes not with death but with defiance, with Winstoffs endurance despite his life sentence, John's anticipated release and, by implication, the amplification of this defiance in the world outside. In this scenario, the hero and her drama represent not so much tragic sacrifice as commitment to struggle. The darkness of tragedy, the fatal outcome of the collision between hubris and necessity, appear to fade in light of prospective liberation. If the commitments of the antiapartheid movement encouraged a theater of resistance whence the suffering protagonist emerged transformed as an agent of struggle, the achievement of democracy in the post-apartheid era might appear to have escaped the threat of catastrophe and thus the grasp of tragedy. Invoking tragedy in this context may invite the argument that South Africa avoided the calamity of full-blown civil war, and achieved instead a relatively peaceful transfer of power in 1994. (2) Moreover, so the argument might continue, the historically divided population has come, as a result of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as well as lesser known but far-reaching changes in law, economics, and education, to understand itself as a nation. Even if the TRC's final report could not produce a universally sanctioned truth or full consensus about the legitimacy or illegitimacy of acts of violence committed by the apartheid state or its opponents, which might have led to collective reconciliation, the hearings compelled those who paid attention to reevaluate their place in the country after apartheid) This aspiration to national belonging invites the representation of resolution if not quite reconciliation. If this representation does not rise to the rounded form of high comedy, defined by the resolution of conflict and harmonization of difference rather than by eliciting laughter, then it might still offer the redress proposed by satire, or the critical resolution of the Brechtian parable play, through which the audience comes to see beyond characters blind to history and their own contradictions to reach an understanding of social conflict and its potential redress. (4) Despite the strong appeal of resolution, the comedic scenario has only partial purchase in today's South Africa. The persistence in post-apartheid society of inequity and injustice perpetuated by new rulers, even if they were former victims, prompts a skeptical revaluation of the official narrative in which the African National Congress (ANC) claims the moral high ground of a national hero. As the wealth gap increases, poverty remains entrenched, and death stalks the country in the shape of AIDS, assaults on women and children, and criminal violence out of all proportion to the value of property being stolen, the epic narrative of national liberation and the victory of justice over oppression have been cast into doubt. As expressed by a recent book, Do South Africans Exist?, some have become skeptical about the very identity of a national protagonist. (5) Many local theatermakers have used satire to indict the corruption, impunity, and indifference of the newly powerful. …

Scalia Agonistes: Takings Law Under the Florida Sun

To a Peircean pragmatist it is a thing of delight to watch the thrashing about of a libertarian logical positivist as he seeks to escape the contradictions of his flawed epistemological convictions. Observing Justice Scalia at work is high comedy for those of us who are not the objects of his abundant derision. I should imagine that his hectoring is rather tiresome to those who must live with it for nine months every year. The place to start, it seems, is to ask: Why all the fuss?

Stage as Hyperspace: Theatricality of Stoppard

Most of Tom Stoppard’s critics have tried to assess his greatness in terms of his conserving and developing the tradition of British high comedy. Thus, his Arcadia (1993) has been largely acknowledged as the best of high comedy, with “a quality of high Englishness” (Kelly, Introduction 17). In fact, as a major British playwright, he has experimented with dramatic strategies to lure his audience into a series of critical engagements with British politics and culture. As for his politics, critics have argued that he is not a radical but a conservative. This study, however, will argue that he is revolutionary and subversive b y pointing out how he has taken a l ine of f light f rom being a “molar” major writer. It can be argued that Stoppard, a Czech Jew, writes, as Deleuze puts it, “like a foreigner in [his] own language” (Deleuze and Parnet 4), with a political purpose of deterritorializing the dominant Oedipal system, like Kafka, who was admired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as a great minor writer (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka). The Czech-born English playwright has left some clues in his plays as to how they may be read as a form of minor literature whose main characteristic is political (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka 18). Especially his play Arcadia, which is in the form of a seemingly traditional high comedy, shows how to “minorate” this traditional form of major literature (Deleuze, “One Less Manifesto” 243). Thus, as Deleuze tries to do with Shakespeare, this reading will subject Stoppard, who is considered a major contemporary writer, to “a minor author treatment” in order to rediscover his potential for becoming minor (243). In other words, it will extract his development or process of becoming in antithesis to the major tradition in order to recover the active force of the minority in Stoppard.

High comedy in American movies: class and humor from the 1920s to the present

Chapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 1 Europe in Hollywood Chapter 3 2 High Comedy, American Style Chapter 4 3 High Comedy and Social Satire Chapter 5 4 The Poison in the Champagne: What It's Really Like to Be Rich and Famous Chapter 6 5 The Aristocracy of the Hip Chapter 7 6 The Eighties and Beyond Chapter 8 Filmography Chapter 9 Bibliography

Art, glitter, and glitz: mainstream playwrights and popular theatre in 1920s America

Introduction by Arthur Gewirtz and James J. Kolb Mainstream Playwrights (Re)Claiming O'Neill's Strange Interlude As a Modernist Theatre Text by Thomas R. Adler Stillborn Future: Dead and Dying Infants and Children as a Secondary in the Plays of Eugene O'Neill: An Analysis of the Image in Desire Under the Elms by Linda L. Herr De New Dat's Moiderin' de Old: Oedipal Struggle as Class Conflict in Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape by Julia Walker Tempest in Black and White: The 1924 Staging of Eugene O'Neill's All God's Chillun Got Wings by Glenda Frank Not Enough?: The High Comedy of Philip Barry by Leonard Ashley Philip Barry's Holiday: High Comedy as Morality Play by Harry B. Parker The Subway: Sophie as Elmer Rice's Ms. Zero by Cynthia McCown Without a Plot, Idea, Hero, or Heroine: The Unlikely Strategy of Sidney Howard's Lucky Sam McCarver by Cynthia McCown Some Kind of Damned Religion: A Reading of What Price Glory? by Maxwell Andersen and Laurence Stallings by Stanley Brodwin Baker's Boys: The Legacy of George Pierce Baker by Lue Morgan Douthit Broadway, The Elements of Success: An Analysis of Jed Harris's 1926 Production of the Play by Philip Dunning and George Abbott by E. James Zeiger Playwrights and Power: The Dramatists Guild's Struggle for the 1926 Minimum Basic Aggreement by T. J. Walsh Popular Theatre John Barrymore & Company, 1920-25: American Standard-Bearers of the Shakespeare Company by Michael A. Morrison When Actors Were Still Players by Ronald H. Wainscott No Sirree! A One Night Stand with the Algonquin's Vicious Circle by Jay Malarcher The Grand-Guignol in New York City: October-November, 1923: Violence Fails to Draw an Audience by John M. Callahan The Other Worlds of Ring Lardner: Popular Entertainment and the Legitimate Theatre by Richard Pioreck Feathers, Finals, and Frou-Frou: Florenz Ziegfeld's Exoticized Follies Girls by Ann Marie McEntee Gags, Girls, and Guffaws: Burlesque in Downtown New York in the 1920s by William Green Barbette: That Daring Young [Wo]Man on the Flying Trapeze by Joe E. Jeffreys A. H. Woods, Producer: A Thrill a Minute, a Laugh a Second! by Julian M. Kaufman The Girl Friends: Lew Fields and the Early Musicals of Rodgers, Hart, and Fields by Jason Rubin Bibliography Index

Oscar Wilde: a certain genius

After William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) is the most quoted of writers. His epigrams turned conventions upside down and are part of our cultural inheritance. His personality defined an era. His popularity as a wit, a dramatist and an icon continues to grow. One hundred years after Wilde's death, he remains entertaining and outlandish, talking about everything and nothing. Wilde's rise to prominence as an unparalleled playwright of high comedy, and his ego-driven fall from grace continue to fascinate. His life, famous trial and his death were played out in the full glare of the public's gaze. Barbara Belford's Wilde is for a new generation of readers: not the tragic figure, the martyr, the self-destructive fop. Instead Belford explores his sexuality in a more relaxed manner than previous biographers, she opens up the gaps between the facts to portray Oscar Wilde in all his complexity, genius and humanity.

Style: Acting in High Comedy, and: Acting with Shakespeare: Three Comedies (review)

Reviewed by: Style: Acting in High Comedy, and: Acting with Shakespeare: Three Comedies Janet L. Gupton Style: Acting in High Comedy. By Maria Aitken. New York: Applause, 1996; pp. 142. $12.95 paper. Acting with Shakespeare: Three Comedies. By Janet Suzman. New York: Applause, 1996; pp. 153. $12.95 paper. Style: Acting in High Comedy by Maria Aitken and Acting With Shakespeare: Three Comedies by Janet Suzman provide meaty advice and anecdotal wisdom about acting comedy, a craft that often, as these two authors freely admit in their books, defies clear explanation. Written by veterans of the British stage, these two new additions to Applause’s Acting Series do not provide sufficient instruction in and of themselves for the newcomer to this more specialized area of acting. However, these books do provide insightful commentary and helpful explanations of some of the more well-known scenes from comedies of times past, particularly with respect to the historical context of the plays and their use of language. For these reasons, they are good additions to an acting teacher’s or an advanced actor’s library. Aitken suggests that Style: Acting in High Comedy is not intended as a scholarly, critical analysis of comedy but rather for the actor who must find the way to make the words on the page spring to life in performance. It is in this realm that her book provides the most insight. Like other acting texts on “styles of acting,” Aitken’s book provides the standard steps an actor should take to prepare a role for high comedy (research the period by reading both published and unpublished materials, examine the art work, listen to the music of the period, etc.) Through this process, Aitken suggests the actor must devise the means by which his or her character can live truthfully in the world of the play. Aitken divides her book into several chapters and uses selected scenes from high comedy, such as The Way of the World, The School for Scandal, Much Ado About Nothing, The Importance of Being Earnest, Private Lives, The Rivals, and The Double Dealer, to illustrate her points through line-by-line paraphrasing, analyses, and commentaries. She begins with the reminder that an actor must understand the period in which the play is written and the “rules” for success within its society. Her first chapter, “Delivery: Naturalism and Energy” plainly tells actors that in order to make the witty and heightened language of high comedy more natural to the actor and accessible to the audience, the actor must know his or her lines inside and out; only then will the actor’s words take flight. Aitken explains that today’s actors often want to develop the psychological make-up of characters without concern for the exact words they are speaking. With high comedy such an approach is fatal because the character is the language and vice versa. Aitken’s line-by-line commentary on Congreve’s The Way of the World is a fine example of how a close examination of language can yield information as to character development. Aitken also provides helpful explanations of some of the archaic references or words whose meanings have changed over time. But while such explications of The Way Of The World show off her ability to mine a scene of high comedy for all its wonderful innuendo, her discussion of the need for energy in line delivery in The School for Scandal lacks the keen eye and fresh ideas she provides in her other commentaries. However, her analysis of repartee with respect to Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing brings things back on track, with practical advice on how to “pass the baton” or “serve it up” for the other actor(s) when involved in a feisty round of repartee. Likewise her discussion of irony and its subtleties in Gwendolen’s and Cecily’s tea scene in The Importance of Being Earnest is superb because of [End Page 287] its careful grounding within the text and the acting hints a text can offer. The discussion Aitken provides on “Character” using Noel Coward’s Private Lives is less impressive, perhaps because it is weaker in...

Fonteyn & Nureyev: the great years

Keith Money was beginning the first of his noted photographic books on the ballet exactly at the time the great partnership of Fonteyn and Nureyev was formed, and from the start he had a privileged view of the moulding of the two dancers into the team that was to take the world by storm in the 1960s. Money's camera recorded matters on an hour-to-hour, day-to-day basis, from first rehearsals to public performance. To complete certain sequences, the photographer (who had become a close friend of his subjects) often travelled extensively; once he joined the pair on a 7000-mile round trip. He has now assembled a panoramic selection of masterprints to provide a record of one of the outstanding theatrical experiences of our time. Money's introduction and commentary provide a counterpoint to his photographic history. Every mood is displayed, from high comedy to tragedy, and we see the moods backstage as well, recorded by someone deeply versed in the exactitude of ballet.

Disruptive Memories: Cynthia Ozick, Assimilation, and the Invented Past

He that applieth himself to fear God, And setteth his mind upon Law Most High, He searcheth out wisdom all ancients, And is occupied with prophets old. - The Wisdom Ben Sira The popular and academic successes Jewish writers in 1950s and 60s led John Updike - in what now seems high comedy - to a sustained fret over popularity things ethnic in American literature.(1) While Updike's paranoia about his unmarketable ethnicity has abated, predominance and importance Jewish writers certainly have not. Even as I was writing this essay, Philip Roth won P.E.N./Faulkner award for 1993. By almost any standard, achievement Jewish-American artists denotes a success that parallels general prominence Jewish-Americans in American life. Still, for Cynthia Ozick that very success marks a more profound failure. In her estimation, Jewish-American authors have too often bought literary success at price an internal colonialism, or - to use a more Ozickian term - at price an idolatry by which they eschew that which is historically Jewish in favor ephemera Jewish ethnicity. While Jewish writers maintain an ethnic exoticism that is currently attractive to an American audience, in Ozick's view they have lost a full-blown Jewish identity: To be a Jew is to be old in history, but not only that; to be a Jew is to be a member a distinct civilization expressed through an oceanic culture in possession a group essential concepts and a multitude texts and attitudes elucidating those concepts. Next to density such a condition - or possibility - how gossamer are stories those writers of Jewish extraction whose characters are pale indifferent echoes whatever lies at hand.... (Metaphor 224) In conflict between descent and consent outlined by Werner Sollors, Ozick is dismayed that, in her estimation, Jewish-American writers have eschewed descent - density Jewish civilization and memory - for easy currency consent which enables success in American mainstream. For Ozick, success Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Henry Roth, and even Saul Bellow, marks failure specifically Jewish religious and ethical ideals and loss Jewish memory as an effective cultural force in present(.2) The centrality Jewish historical memory to Ozick's imagination suggests her commitment to central traditions Jewish religious thought and practice.(3) Wielding an iconoclastic club against Oedipalizing literary history practiced by Harold Bloom, Ozick affirms that [Jewish liturgy] posits recapturing without revision precursor's stance and strength when it iterates God, and God our fathers, God Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Nearly every congeries Jewish thought is utterly set against idea displacing precursor. Torah includes meanings tradition and transmittal together. (Ardor 194) Thus, Elaine Kauvar is right to assert that for Ozick the principle continuity overwhelmingly takes precedence over desire to create new forms... (xii). However, such desire for continuity is as much a problem as it is a resource. If memory is at root Jewish life, contemporary cultural developments have threatened continuity that memory. Jewish memory, in Ozick's estimation, has faced a number threats in contemporary culture, not least which is threat assimilation. Ozick's sense Jewish cultural crisis motivates her work as she attempts to recreate collective memories through fiction. In balance this essay, I will analyze ways in which Ozick addresses threat assimilation as she forges a fiction that is at once contemporary and memorial, in keeping with history Jewish religious practice. Guarding against assimilation, to some extent, has been a constitutive feature Jewish religious imagination since Moses - as is evidenced by Biblical injunctions against worshipping idols and against intermarriage. …

Cynthia Ozick's comic art: from levity to liturgy

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I. Introduction: Cynthia OzickOs Comic Art of Truth-Telling II. Trust: Comedy of Manners and Morals III. Envy or Yiddish in AMerica: Elegy, Satire, and Celebration IV. The Pagan Rabbi, Levitation, and Usurpation: Wry Jokes on Realism V. The Puttermesser Stories: Feminist Follies VI. The Cannibal Galaxy: From Caustic Humor to Midrashic Laughter VII. The Messiah of Stockholm and the Cackle of Satire VIII. The Shawl: The Tragicomedy of Revolt and Survival IX. Conclusion: From Low to High Comedy SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

Seeing Clearly through Fuzzy Speech

����� The years of searching in the dark for a truth that one feels but cannot express, the intense desire and the alternations of confidence and misgiving until one breaks through to the clarity and understanding are known only to him who has himself experienced them. -Einstein Speech is a wonderful capability that only our species possesses. Those who have made speech the focus of their research have added much to human understanding. But others, who seem to suppose that speech and language are two names or aspects of the same thing, have often confounded knowledge. Speech is physical-sound produced by the voice and received by the sense of hearing, but language is mental; it begins in neural activity and integrates sensory and motor systems-plus knowledge, intellect, will, desire, and much else-into thought and social interaction. Failure to see the separation between language and speech has resulted in wasted intellectual effort, because ever since the time of Aristotle, most students of speech and language have attempted to apply crisp categorical logic to something that defies such precise categorization. Speech is by nature imprecise. Not only do speakers of different languages speak differently; speakers of the same language have various ways of making the sounds of their own language. The term labels the speech of speakers from different regions or classes or with different first languages. This kind of difference is often artistically exploited: An actor learns to speak in the dialect used by the character portrayed; a writer uses odd spelling and phrasing to represent the speech habits of a region or class. Individual speech differs at least as much as individual fingerprints. The expert impersonators on Saturday Night Live almost make us believe that we are listening to the prominent personality whose utterances are being turned into high comedy.

L'obra teatral de Llorenç Villalonga

This book analyzes the whole of Llorenc Villalonga's dramatic production - the relationship between the theatrical plays and the novels, and the classification and study of the dramatic production - following two basic lines: circuit theatre (halfway between comedy and customs and manners scenes, an approach to tragedy, drama and high comedy) and innovative, ground-breaking theatre (the absurdities).