Monday March 15, 2010

Vocabulary 10 due today. There will be no additional grades put in for this marking period.

We are going over the Hamlet assessment. Some folks forgot what puns were. So below are some examples. Laugh, groan and remember how Hamlet was too much in the son! (this was a word play on his relationship with Claudius)
Puns "A Play on Words"
Using a word or words that have more than 1 meaning.
Examples:
1. I recently spent money on detergent to unclog my kitchen sink. It was money down the drain.
2. Our social studies teacher says that her globe means the world to her.
3. A jury is never satisfied with the verdict. The jury always returns it.
4. Sir Lancelot once had a very bad dream about his horse. It was a knight mare.
5. A dog not only has a fur coat but also pants.
6. Today I've got a pressing engagement. I must go to the cleaners.
7. The principal part of a horse is the mane, of course.
8. Having lots of good cookbooks only makes sense. They contain such stirring events.
9. If you want to make a pun from dunlop. Then lop off the lop and the pun is dun.
10. I used to be twins. My mother has a picture of me when I was two.
11. I work as a baker because I knead dough.
12. What is the difference between a conductor and a teacher?
The conductor minds the train and a teacher trains the mind.
AND…
13 .I wondered why the baseball was getting bigger. Then it hit me.
14. I couldn't quite remember how to throw a boomerang, but eventually it came back to me.
15. Did you hear about the guy whose whole left side was cut off? He's all right now.
16. . He drove his expensive car into a tree and found out how the Mercedes bends.
17. There was a sign on the lawn at a drug re-hab center that said 'Keep off the Grass'.
18. Police were called to a daycare where a three-year-old was resisting a rest.
19. . To write with a broken pencil is pointless.
20. A small boy swallowed some coins and was taken to a hospital. When his grandmother telephoned to ask how he was, a nurse said 'No change yet'.
21. What did the grape say when it got stepped on? Nothing - but it let out a little whine.
22. The butcher backed up into the meat grinder and got a little behind in his work.


Modernism begins with The Great War or World War I, as it was eventually come to be known, and runs until 1946. Keep in mind these dates are approximate and are design to reflect a literary movement that reflects the culture and history of this time period.

Make sure you are familiar with the following, especially the highlighted material, as it applies directly to what we will be reading these next three weeks.

Introductory Notes on Modernism

World War I was one of the bloodiest and most tragic conflicts ever to occur. When the initial advances of the German forces were stalled, the conflict was transformed into a trench war. The introduction of the machine gun made it virtually impossible for one side to launch a successful attack on its opponents’ trenches, however, and the war dragged on for several years with little progress being made by either side. Each unsuccessful attack resulted in the deaths of thousands of soldiers, and the war ultimately claimed almost an entire generation of European men.
President Wilson wanted the United States to remain neutral in the war, but that proved impossible. In 1915, a German submarine sank the Lusitania, pride of British merchant fleet. More than 1200 people on board lost their lives, including 128 Americans. After the sinking, American public opinion tended to favor the Allies—England, France, Italy and Russia. When Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare two years later, the United States abandoned neutrality and joined the Allied cause.

At first the reality of the war did not sink in. Americans were confident and carefree as the troops set off overseas. That cheerful mood soon passed. A number of famous American writers saw war firsthand and learned of its horror. E.E. Cummings, Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos served as ambulance drivers. Hemingway later served in the Italian infantry and was seriously wounded.
The end of the Great War in November 1918 brought little peace to Woodrow Wilson. His dream of the United States joining the League of Nations to prevent future wars failed. The war’s end brought little peace to the big cities of America either. Prohibition made the sale of liquor illegal, leading to bootlegging, speakeasies, widespread lawbreaking and sporadic warfare among competing gangs.

Throughout the 1920’s, the nation seemed on a binge. After a brief recession in 1920 and 1921, the economy boomed. New buildings rose everywhere, creating new downtown sections in many city—Omaha, Des Moines and Minneapolis among them. Radio arrived, and so did jazz. Movies became big business, and spectacular movie palaces sprang up across the country. Fads abounded: raccoon coats, flagpole sitting, the Charleston. The great literary interpreter of the Roaring Twenties was F. Scott Fitzgerald. In The Beautiful and the Damned and The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald showed both the glamorous and the pitiful sides of the American Dream.
During the 1920’s, artists and writers flocked to Greenwich Village in New York City. Older buildings in the area, including barns, stables and houses were converted to studios, nightclubs, theaters and shops. In 1923, playwright Eugene O’Neill founded the Greenwich Village Theatre, where experimental dramas were performed. Thomas Wolfe taught English at New York University in the Village, while writing his autobiographical novel, Look Homeward, Angel.
The devastation of World War I brought about an end to the sense of optimism that had characterized the years immediately preceding the war. May people were left with a feeling of uncertainty, disjointedness and disillusionment. No longer trusting the ideas and values of the world out of which the war had developed, people sought to find new ideas that were more applicable to the twentieth-century life. The quest for new ideas extended into literature, and a major literary movement known as Modernism was born.

The Modernists experimented with a wide variety of new approaches and techniques, producing a remarkably diverse body of literature. Yet the Modernists shared a common purpose. They sought to capture the essence of modern life in the form and content of the work.. To reflect the fragmentation of the modern world, the Modernist constructed their works out of fragments, omitting the expositions, transitions, resolution and explanations used in traditional literature. In poetry, they abandoned tradional forms in favor of free verse. The themes of their works were usually implied, rather than directed state, creating a sense of uncertainty and forcing reader to draw their own conclusions. In general, Modernist works demanded more from reader that words of earlier American writers.
This week we are reading Eugene O'Neill's play Beyond the Horizon.
Please see the following are biographical note on the playwright and introductory material on the play.
Eugene O’ Neil

Born October 16, 1888 in a hotel then situated at Broadway and Forty-third Street in New York City, Eugene O'Neill was the son of James O'Neill, one of America's most popular actors from the 1880s until World War I. The first seven years of Eugene's life were spent travelling the country with his father who had given up his career as a Shakespearean actor to tour in a less satisfying but highly profitable play called Monte Cristo. Eugene's violent reaction to everything conventional in the theatre may have been related to his intimate association with this play.

O'Neill spent six years in a Catholic boarding school and three years in the Betts Academy at Stamford, Connecticut. He attended Princeton for a short time, but when he was suspended at the end of his freshman year, he decided not to return. In 1909, he set out on a gold-prospecting voyage to Honduras--only to be sent home six months later with a tropical fever. During the period that followed, he spent time working as a stage manager, an actor, a tramp, and a reporter. He also tended mules on a cattle steamer and set out on several other voyages as a sailor. It was here that he came in contact with the sailors, dock workers and outcasts that would populate his plays, the kind of characters the American theatre had heretofore passed over in silence. But this irregular life took its toll on the young man, and in December 1912, he was forced to retire for six months to a sanatorium for tubercular patients. It was during this time that O'Neill began to read not only the classic dramatists, but also Ibsen, Wedekind and Strindberg--"especially Strindberg" he would later confess. He then turned his hand to playwriting, quickly churning out eleven one-act plays and two full-lengths, not to mention a bit of poetry.

Then, in 1916, O'Neill met at Provincetown, Massachusetts, the group which was founding the Provincetown Players, including Susan Glaspell and Robert Edmond Jones. Shortly thereafter, the group produced O'Neill's one-act play Bound East for Cardiff in Mary Heaton Vorse's Wharf Theatre at Provincetown. Other short pieces followed at the playhouse on MacDougal Street, and soon O'Neill's plays became the mainstay of this experimental group. It was a marriage made in Heaven. O'Neill got a theatre company which would produce his plays, and the company got a playwright who would--more than any other single author--provide it with the fuel to revolutionize the American Theatre.

With the Broadway production of Beyond the Horizon in 1920, O'Neill began a steady rise to fame. He received countless productions both in the United States and abroad, and when the Provincetown players finally collapsed, he became the Theatre Guild's leading playwright. But by the time he received the Nobel Prize in 1936--a feat which no other American playwright had been able to accomplish--his career had begun to fizzle. The new generation of critics--Francis Fergusson, Lionel Trilling, Eric Bentley--began to subject O'Neill to a closer scrutiny than their predecessors who had been satisfied simply to find an American playwright of international stature. Pushed about by this critical storm, obscurity began to settle in on the playwright, and it deepened more and more until his death in 1953. Ironically, it was during these dark years that O'Neill's real development began. Maturing in silence and motivated only by his obsessive urge to write, he developed a profound artistic honesty which would result in several genuine masterpieces of the modern theatre including A Touch of the Poet (1935-1942), More Stately Mansions (1935-1941), The Iceman Cometh (1939), A Long Day's Journey into Night (1939-41) and A Moon for the Misbegotten (1943). Most of these were not published or produced during O'Neill's lifetime.

Then, in 1956, three years after the playwright's death, a successful revival of The Iceman Cometh and the first Broadway production of A Long Day's Journey into Night, returned Eugene O'Neill once again to his rightful place at the forefront of American Drama. As George Jean Nathan noted, O'Neill "singlehandedly waded through the dismal swamplands of American drama, bleak, squashy, and oozing sticky goo, and alone and singlehanded bore out the water lily that no American had found there before him." Today, he is recognized not only as the first great American dramatist, but as one of the great dramatists of all time.
In Beyond the Horizon, O’Neill’s first full-length play to be produced and achieve success, O’Neill dramatizes the conflict of the two opposing ideals of adventure and security, embodied by the two brothers, Robert and Andrew. Each of the three acts in the play consists of two scenes: one, on the top of a hill looking toward the horizon; the other, in the sitting room of a farmhouse. In Act I, on the hilltop Robert talks about his dream of “the beauty of the far off and the unknown”; then he descends to the farmhouse to announce that he decides to stay on the farm and marry Ruth. In Act II, Robert and Ruth act out their frustrations in the farmhouse; then on the hilltop Andrew tells Robert about his disillusionment in the “East you used to rave about.” In the final act Robert learns in the farmhouse of the hopelessness of his disease, but, true to his dream, he escapes and struggles to the hilltop to die with his dream of looking beyond the horizon.
The structure of the play is often criticized for its over-neatness and clumsy scenery changes. The subtlety of the play, however, derives from the tension between its apparent and underlying meanings. On the surface, Robert is the pure dreamer, defeated by practical problems; Andrew, the gross materialist, disillusioned by a life different from his expectations. But actually, their failures are caused not so much by their temperaments as by the failure of each to know about himself. The play is tinged with mysticism, as the audience’s attention is constantly directed to “the force behind – fate, God, our biological past creating our present.”
China was hardly mentioned in this mystical play. Robert informs his brother Andrew early in Act I that he would sail “around the Horn for Yokohama first, …India, or Australia, or South Africa, or South America.” In Act II, Andrew tells Robert that he went through a typhoon “in the China sea” which knocked off a main topmast of the ship and it “had to beat back to Hong Kong for repairs.” China obviously did not yet occupy much of a place in O’Neill’s consciousness, and the East is only a vague term referring to any place beyond the horizon the protagonist dreams of.