Realism - final exam

Realism

Realism is a literary genre that contains believable stories and plausible plots. Works in this genre have realistic characters doing everyday things. These stories focus on an often relatable protagonist struggling through their daily life.

Mother Courage and Her Children

Bertolt Brecht

• epic theater

Look Back In Anger

John Osborne

• Kitchen Sink Theater

Waiting for Godot

Samuel Beckett

Epic Theater

Rejection of Aristotelian models of dramatic unity

• Rejection of identifying emotionally with psychologically rounded characters in a ‘well-made play’

• “Catharsis” as bourgeois • Narrative succession (hence ‘epic’) of loosely related episodes interspersed with songs and commentary

Alienation

Alienation:

• audience to be reflective, critical

• far-off places / times

• “It is a dramatic effect aimed at encouraging an attitude of critical detachment in the

audience, rather than a passive submission to realistic illusion; and is achieved by a variety of

means, from allowing the audience to smoke and drink to interrupting the play’s action with

songs, sudden scene changes, and switches of role.” (The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms

(Baldick, Chris))

• Seeks to engage audience in ideas of history as changeable, rather than a fated process that

should be accepted passively. We can change things!

• legacies of Romanticism to Modernism (e.g. via Shelley writing about poetry making the

familiar unfamiliar.