3.2 - Literature Flashcards
Explain baroque literature
unlike renaissance writers (content to catalog the beauties of the beloved), baroque writers explore the mysteries of love, both erotic and divine. the writers overall spend more time exploring their relationship to god often in passionate and dramatic terms. religious and secular baroque writing (poetry) often dramatizes emotional and personal encounters between speaker and listener.
Explain the baroque stage and plays.
during the baroque, stage plans differed from those of shakespeare and classical greece : 17th century plays took place indoors on a stage with a proscenium arch (arch that stands in front of the scene and divides the stage from the auditorium). a supporting curtain separates the audience from the actors. the plays were enacted on a box stage which represented a room with a missing 4th wall, allowing the audience to look in on the action.
painted scenery served as a backdrop for the action, candles and lanterns illuminated actors and audience. costume tended toward the ornate (as in elizabethan drama).on both elizabethan and baroque stages the actors were costumed in the contemporary dress appropriate to the social status of the characters they portrayed. an innovation in 17th century was that female actresses assumed womens roles for the first time enabling more extensive, frequent and realistic love scenes.
Explain French theatre in the 17th century
french theater was inspired by the classical drama of greece and rome. they observed what was known as the 3 unities : unity of time, place and action.
the action had to be confined to a 24-hour period. the place should be a single setting. the action should be unified in a single plot.
the 3 great practitioners of the french baroque theater all observed the unities : the 2 tragedians pierre corneille and jean racine, and its great comic genius moliere.
corneille´s themes are patriotism and honor, racine plays concentrate on the moral dilemmas of the greek tragedies. moliére´s satiric comedy is the sort of comic modern audiences still enjoy.
His tartuffe, first staged in 1664, antagonized some who considered it an attack on religion. even after naming it ´the impostor´ the play was banned. he then wrote 3 prefaces and later changed his original ending.
John Donne
considered the finest poet of his age. he wrote poems as well as verse, his poetry included amorous lyrics, philosophical poems, devotional sonnets. later converted to anglicanism.
His ´a valedicition : forbidding mourning´ is a philosophical love poem, noted for its extended anology or conceit comparing lovers to the 2 feet of a geometrician´s compasses.
Anne Bradstreet
first major poet in american literature. best known for her domestic lyrics , in her own day she was known for a cycle of historical poems based on the 4 ages of humanity. Donne´s philosophical poems and bradstreet´s domestic ones can be compared with the art of vermeer whose paintings embody near perfection of form and idea.
John Milton
represents a facet of baroque sensibility that john donne lacked. unlike donne whose poems are mostly brief lyrics, milton had a monumental conception of poetry attuned to the epic, he worked on grand scale.
he believed a poet had to prepare the mind and soul through study and prayer before attempting to produce great art.
combining the ideals of classical humanism and biblical moritality more thoroughly and more profoundly than any other writer in english he presents a summation of high renaissance art and christian humanism. from the greeks and romans he derived a sense of civic responsibility.
His life can be divided into 3 parts : 1. prepared for his vocation (written in his publication of Lycidas, his elegy on the death of a drowned friend followed by a 2-year tour of europe. 2. from 1640 to 1660 was a political involvement, during which he wrote prose rather than poetry. 3. spent last 15 years writing and publishing his most amibitious works, to justify they ways of god to man. this idea reflected his blend of Puritan theology and classical humanism.
Explain the picaresque novel.
during the 16th century in spain a narrative form known as the picaresque becan to develop. the picaresque novel details the life of a picaro (rogue or knave who wanders from adventure to adventure and marks the birth of the novel as a literary art form). it probably developed out of the pilgrimage tradition, in particular the pilgrimage across northern spain to santiago de compostela. The novel focuses on a single hero.
one characteristic feature is its pseudo-autobiographical nature. Narrated always by the hero, the point of view is clearly his, prejudiced and partial.
Miguel de Cervantes
greatest of all picareque novels. its in fact even more than that, satirizing the form even as it goes beyond it in complexity and ambition. composed between 1603 and 1615 ´don quixote´ was translated in the 17th century.
the novel represents, for the first time in western literature, the conflict between reality and the imagination .
