prelims 4 critics

Ghadir Zalloum - Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf - silence and alienation

There is no conventional progression of ideas; instead, the irrational, and illogical speech of the characters leads to the ultimate conclusion, silence and the alienation of individuals

Ghadir Zalloum - Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf - paradox

On Martha and George: ‘these linguistic battles that may paradoxically bring them together as much as drive them apart

Ghadir Zalloum - Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf - existence

Their twenty year linguistic game of word-sparring and duelling has safeguarded the couple against the cruel reality of their childless, and in terms of 1960s culture, meaningless, existence

J. R. Maulkin - Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf - power tool

on the one hand, language is treated as a power tool, to be controlled and possessed… but there is another way George and Martha wield language together against the numbing platitudes of the outside world

J. R. Maulkin - Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf - strangling

George’s strangling of martha is not about killing her but stopping her from speaking

Jennifer Gilchrist - Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - castration

In killing the child, George reclaims power over Martha (‘the killing of the myth of the son is the castration of martha’

Katherine Weiss - Waiting for Godot - pozzo

Pozzo is a slave to social convention, compacted by the prop of the pocket watch

Katherine Weiss - Waiting for Godot - conflict

the conflicts in the play are in the language games Didi and Gogo play

Xuejiao Lin - Waiting for Godot - repetition

‘all their repetitions serve one sole purpose - to fleet time’

Xuejiao Lin - Waiting for Godot - narration

Narration in this drama is futile and mere repetitions of one point, showing the degrading of plot to a motionless point.

Xuejiao Lin - Waiting for Godot - existence

Narrative time becomes some void and meaningless flow with no start, no consequence, implying the emptiness of human existence

Jing Wang - Waiting for Godot - salvation

Human beings will be patient to wait on, to wait for the arrival of Godot, and to wait for the realization of salvation

Jing Wang - Waiting for Godot - God

relationship with godot in the play is evocative of that between humanity and god (‘In the play, Godot can save, or punish, or try or take care of man. The tramps think that as long as Godot comes, they can be saved’)

Thomas Adler - Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - Ending

ending signals a redirection in the love of nick and honey

Lois Gordon - Waiting for Godot - anchor

‘the human creature, even is no longer motivated by the conviction of a divine mission, is continuously compelled toward purposeful activity. The need for a moral or spiritual anchor remains’

Lois Gordon - Waiting for Godot - fragmentation

‘Waiting for Godot portrays both the need for purpose and the emotional fragmentation that accompanies the struggle for this anchoring of the self’

Virginia Eby - Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - masculinity

As the field for publicly displaying masculinity shrank, the need to demonstrate it increased, and so the post war period also witnessed an intensified dissemination of the ideal nuclear family

Tony Sharpe - Auden - theology

theology seems to have always been of interest to Auden

Interview with auden, 1975 - Yeats

called yeats a bad influence because he was an aesthete

interview with auden, 1975 - aesthete

‘an aesthete is a person who writes something not because he believes in it but because it sounds poetic or beautiful’

Auden interview, 1975 - history

‘poets don’t change the course of history’

Edward Mendelson - Auden - As I Walked Out One Evening

In ‘as I walked out one evening’, ‘time is a destroyer as undiscriminating and implacable as death

Edward Mendelson - Auden - Great poet

Auden believed a great poet must have a profound understanding of the age in which he lived

Edward Mendelson - Auden - progress

Auden believed progress was inevitable, telling an audience ‘’you cannot stop it; you can only limit its rate of progress’ in April 1939

Arthur Kirsch - Auden - need

auden always stressed the human need for the unconditional as a foundation of religious belief

Donald Morse - Auden - intro to essay

Ellen key – ‘century of the child’ v Van Wyck Brooks: ‘the century of Moloch, the eater of children’

Daniel Morse - Auden - historic events

The frequent and traumatic historic events of the twentieth century for Auden ‘became almost inevitably central to his poetry either as an on-going subject or, when not the direct subject, as an omnipresent background for his poetry’

Edward Callan - Auden - metaphysics

‘In his earlier critical writings in America, AUden constantly stresses the importance of metaphysics: the science of being which views all things in their relationship to total order, culminating in God’

Edward Mendelson - Auden

‘auden was deeply unsettled by his experiences in Spain’

Johanna Garvey - Mrs Dalloway - war and violence

‘For Woolf, war and violence were obviously forces to be countered and erased, in part by searching for continuity and community’

Johanna Garvey - Mrs Dalloway - Rezia

lucrezia has submerged her life in her husband’s, has identified herself completely with septimus and forsaken her own family, country, language, even the possibility of motherhood and some degree of autonomy

Christie Purifoy - The Waves - mourning the empire

Written at a time when Great Britain’s glorious imperial identity seemed to be slipping away, Virginia Woolf’s 1931 novel The Waves suggests that even a critic of the empire should pause to mourn this decline

Christie Purifoy - The Waves - post ww1

post ww1: “england and english offer reliable and optimistic alternatives to a threatened britishness”

Sarah Cole - war

created the narrative of ‘war-as-watershed’

Ford Madox - Mrs Dalloway - life

Mrs Dalloway creates a ‘liminality of life and death’ → leads to the association of death in Woolf with radical uncertainty

Marlene Dirschauer - Woolf - nineteenth century values

woolf not only witnessed the collapse of many nineteenth century values… and the transition from one age to the next, from the Victorian era to modernism, but also both privately and artistically proved herself an influential part of this transition

Marlene Dirschauer - Orlando - time

while orlando seems physically above time (s/he barely ages and does not die) s/he is also the product of its changes.

Wyatt Bonikoski - Mrs Dalloway - London

‘london for many of them is the seat of civilisation, and septimus’ madness and suicide speak to a destructive tendency at the heart of civilisation’

Wyatt Bonikoski - Mrs Dalloway - window

his leap from the window of his home onto the area railings below - his body impaled on the boundary that separates his home from what lies outside it - punctuates an implicit statement about the home’s lack of place for him

Lisa Marie Lucenti - The Waves - mythologising

‘All the characters in The Waves participate in this drama of Percival rising amongst the spears of the enemy, and they gain a national identity by mythologising the hero’

Elien Arckens - Moore - precision

 ‘throughout her life, she believed that to feel deeply one had to see clearly, and she perceived the world with precision’

Elien Arckens - Moore - accuracy

Moore’s desire for accuracy results in impairment, ultimately destroying what it would preserve

Heather Love - Moore - past

Moore’s poems are based on the ‘challenge to engage with the past without being destroyed by it’

Hugh Haughton - Moore and Bishop - balancing act

For bishop, as for Moore, each poem is a difficult balancing act, weighing the vulnerability personal with an almost anthropological sense of other worlds behind the self

Heather Cass White - Moore - family unity

the tightly knit Moore household was unified by devotion to family, spiritual values, academic study

Heather Cass White - Moore - war

‘there are at least two major Moores: pre- and post- war’

Ian Hamilton - Moore and Bishop

On Moore and Bishop: ‘apart from a shared enthusiasm for accurate observation, the two poets have little in common’

Stephen Gould Axelrod - Bishop and politics

‘although not overtly political, the poems are indirectly so’ / ‘Elizabeth Bishop was deeply enmeshed in historical and political discourses’

Stephen Gould Axelrod - Bishop’s political position

‘Bishop was a radical who felt uncomfortable in the presence of political commitment’

Stephen Gould Axelrod - Bishop and war

‘Bishop’s poetry continued to reflect the pain of the World Wars, the Korean war, and the Vietnam war - and an enduring wish for a time beyond war.

Fiona Green - Bishop and Moore

calls Bishop the ‘postmodern heir to Moore’s modernism’

Linda Anderson - Bishop - death

the death of Elizabeth Bishop’s father, William, when she was eight months old, and the subsequent distress of her mother, Gertrude… were to leave an irradicable mark on her works

Marilyn Brownstein - Moore - repetition

Moore’s repetitions are indictments of the symbolic

Marilyn Brownstein - postmodern

‘the fragmentary of the postmodern, on the other hand, is an attempt at presenting the unpresenting’