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بنات الله يعافيكم من وين بتدرسون النثر =(

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The End of A Doll’s House

A Doll's House is a play written in 1879 by Henrik Ibsen with an open ending . The play is a journey of the character Nora's self-discovery and struggle against the oppression of her husband Torvald and the society that he represents.
A Doll’s House traces the awakening of Nora Helmer from her previously unexamined life of domestic, wifely comfort. Having been ruled her whole life by either her father or her husband Torvald , Nora finally comes to question the foundation of everything she has believed in once her marriage is put to the test. Having borrowed money from a man of ill-repute named Krogstad by forging her father’s signature, she was able to pay for a trip to Italy to save her sick husband’s life (he was unaware of the loan, believing that the money came from Nora’s father). Since then, she has had to contrive ways to pay back her loan, growing particularly concerned with money and the ways of a complex world.
Torvald has just been promoted to manager of the bank, where he will receive a huge wage and be extremely powerful. Krogstand tells Nora that he will reveal her secret if she does not persuade her husband to let him keep his position. Nora tries to convince Torvald to preserve Krogstad’s job, using all of her feminine tricks (which he encourages), but she is unsuccessful.One night Krogstad sends a letter to Torvald telling him about the loan story .The husband has just read Krogstad’s letter and is enraged by its contents. He accuses Nora of ruining his life. He essentially tells her that he plans on forsaking her, contrary to his earlier claim that he would take on everything himself. During his tirade, he is interrupted by the maid bearing another note from Krogstad and addressed to Nora. Torvald reads it and becomes overjoyed. Krogstad has had a change of heart and has sent back the bond. Torvald quickly tells Nora that it is all over after all: he hasnforgiven her, and her pathetic attempt to help him has only made her more endearing than ever.
Nora, seeing Torvald’s true character for the first time, sits her husband down to tell him that she is leaving him. After he protests, she explains that he does not love her—and, after tonight, she does not love him. She tells him that, given the suffocating life she has led until now, she owes it to herself to become fully independent and to explore her own character and the world for herself. As she leaves, she reveals to Torvald that she hopes that a “miracle” might occur: that one day, they might be able to unite in real wedlock. The play ends with the door slamming on her way out.

A Doll's House ends with the slamming of a door. Nora turns her back on her husband and kids, and takes off into the snow to make her own way in the world. It's a pretty bold decision, to say the least. Some might even call it foolish. She doesn't have a job. Not a whole lot of marketable skills. No home. No prospects of any kind. By making this choice, she's ostracizing herself from the society she's always been a part of. Most "respectable" people just aren't going to hang out with her. The comfortable life she's leading will be totally destroyed.
Nora makes her reason for her decision pretty clear in her last argument with Torvald. Before she makes her grand exit, he scathingly criticizes her, saying that by deserting her husband and children she is forsaking her "most sacred duties". Nora doesn't see it this way. She tells him that the duties that are most sacred to her now are the "duties to [herself] .
It seems like Nora has gone through a kind of personal awakening. She's come to the conclusion that she's not a fully realized person. She has to spend some time figuring out who she is as an individual or she'll never be anything more than someone's doll. This would be impossible under the smothering presence of Torvald. She must force herself to face the world alone. Nora knows that she is about to suffer. It seems that some part of her may even welcome it. In a way Nora is like the Biblical Eve after she ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. All of a sudden, she is enlightened, but that enlightenment comes with a heavy cost.
But is there any hope for Torvald and Nora getting back together? The last line of the play seems to suggest that maybe there is. Torvald is alone in the living room. Stage directions tell us that, "A hope flashes across his mind" and then Torvald says, "The most wonderful thing of all?" He's referring to the conversation he and Nora had right before she walked out of the room. Nora says that if they're ever to be more than strangers "the most wonderful thing of all would have to happen," that their "life together would be a real wedlock" .So, has Torvald realized what this means? Has he figured out that they both have to respect each other as individuals in order to have a real marriage? Has he taken a bite of the forbidden fruit as well? Ibsen doesn't tell us for sure. Maybe Torvald runs out into the snow and makes it all better. Maybe his pride keeps him in the apartment and maybe there are other final actions .
Though Nora is economically advantaged in comparison to the play’s other female characters, she nevertheless leads a difficult life because society dictates that Torvald be the marriage’s dominant partner. Torvald issues decrees and condescends to Nora, and Nora must hide her loan from him because she knows Torvald could never accept the idea that his wife (or any other woman) had helped save his life. Furthermore, she must work in secret to pay off her loan because it is illegal for a woman to obtain a loan without her husband’s permission.
Nora realizes that she is childlike and knows nothing about the world. She feels alienated from both religion and the law, and wishes to discover on her own, by going out into the world and learning how to live life for herself, whether or not her feelings of alienation are justified. Nora’s eating of macaroons against Torvald’s wishes foreshadows her later rebellion against Torvald.
Nora’s abandonment of her children can also be interpreted as an act of self- sacrifice. Despite Nora’s great love for her children—manifested by her interaction with them and her great fear of corrupting them—she chooses to leave them. Nora truly believes that the nanny will be a better mother and that leaving her children is in their best interest.
The action of the play is set at Christmastime, and Nora and Torvald both look forward to New Year’s as the start of a new, happier phase in their lives. They both must become new people and face radically changed ways of living. Hence, the new year comes to mark the beginning of a truly new and different period in both their lives and their personalities.learning how to live life for herself, whether or not her feelings of alienation are justified. Nora’s eating of macaroons against Torvald’s wishes foreshadows her later rebellion against Torvald.
For Nora's exit is a heroically brave manifestation of her uncompromising integrity, her passionate sense of herself, her absolute refusal to live a life where she is not in control of her actions. There is about her actions something grand, defiant, and totally free, values all the more precious given the infected society she is rejecting. The sight of such a person acting in such a way can scare us, for such action calls into question all the compromises we make in our lives to remain within our own doll houses. Such a vision of freedom challenges our sense of what we have done and are doing with our lives. Those contemporaries who were outraged at the ending of the play were being honest enough about their own feelings. If we are less upset, that may be because we have consoling ways to reassure ourselves, to neutralize the full effect of what she is doing.
This heroic quality in Nora's character indicates why the alternative "happy" ending Ibsen wrote for the play is so totally false. Technically it resolves the work into a comedy, by having Nora finally learn the importance of compromise for the sake of social bonds. But that shift violates everything that is most interesting and vital about her. There is nothing about this fascinating character which indicates that she would collapse so abjectly and unexpectedly. It's as if Sophocles provided an alternative ending in which Oedipus comes running back full of apologies, eager to make an appointment to see an eye doctor and a family counselor]
At the same time, however, her actions make no rational sense. They violate the strong bonds (and the social responsibilities those bonds bring with them) she has with Torvald and her children (whose major purpose in this play is to underscore this point about Nora). The frozen dark world she is going into is as unforgiving and brutal as the desert Oedipus wanders off into at the end of his tragedy. It is a world which has broken people like Krogstad and Kristine, who were better equipped in some respects than Nora is to cope with its demands. And she is carrying out into that world the most fragile of illusions: the demand for Romantic self-realization.
Hence, the question so many people want resolved ("Is Nora right or wrong to walk out the door at the end?") does not admit of a clear answer. The play insists that such a demand for simple moral clarity in the face of human actions is naive--rather like asking if Oedipus is right or wrong to destroy his own eyesight and become an exile. Nora is both triumphantly right and horribly wrong. She is free, brave, strong, and uncompromisingly herself and, at the same time, socially irresponsible, naive, self-destructive, and destructive of others. We may well want to sort out these contradictions into something more coherent and reassuring, something we can fit into our comfortable conventional moral frameworks (Nora the militant feminist, Nora the selfish home-wrecker), and there are productions which make that easy for us to do. My sense of the text, however, suggests that Ibsen is not going to sort out these contradictions for us, for they lie at the heart of the tragic experience he is inviting us to explore
When Nora walks out on Torvald and her family, she has asserted the final step on her first course to independence. This active step towards independence leads her into new and uncharted territory. However, it is a place that she knows that she must enter, scared and excited at the same time. She leaves her husband to find a new and independent life on her own.
At the end of the final scene, when Nora leaves the house assumedly for good, the screen directions help to provide closure for the play and for the audience. Although this is still a very open ended play, and many watchers would be left wondering how Nora survives and whether she manages to change her life for the better away from the controlling influence of Torvald. "From below the sound of a door slamming" shows that she has walked out of her past life for good.
Open Endings are a great way to infuriate an audience. But by leaving the major conflict initiated by The suspense plot unresolved, they can also force us to confront your themes.
On one hand as a story-telling technique, Open Endings are unsatisfying for most audiences: the pay-off of the play's conflict never arrives. Playwrights using this device often do so because they doubt there's a real possibility of a solution to the problem and conflict they've just explored. They take the risk of using them because they believe strongly that this is how they must end the play. Open Endings are not an idle choice.
On the other hand ,many authors of contemporary short-stories are opting for the open endings. There is an interaction between the reader, character and writer-- an understood agreement that life just like the story is an open ending, but many people prefer endings with a precise conclusion.In this category the reader’s position is particularly so strong.
The drama A Dolls House although laden with symbolism is purely by chance this is backed up when reading Henrik Ibsen’s own words in a letter he wrote in 1887 “As to symbolism, [Ibsen] says that life is full of it, and
therefore his plays are full of it, though critics insist on discovering all sorts of esoteric meanings in his work of which he is entirely innocent .
The last door, is a representation of the menacing reality of the outside world. It does however; eventually become the door of liberation, for the newly awakened Nora .
At the last scene there is an emphasis to the tragic color black and on the darkness of the night. Rank, Torvald and Nora all wear prominently black colors; (the men's evening dress; Nora's colored dress is covered with a black shawl).
The slamming of the door as Nora leaves the house is interpreted as a rebuff to the role which Torvald imposed, that being a doll in a dolls house, this rejection is explained in the Metheun Edition of A Dolls House as essential in Nora’s quest to realize her full potential in the outside world
The ending of this Ibsen play is a powerful one that emphasizes the finality of Nora's decision to leave Torvald. She doesn't merely close the door to their relationship; she slams the door. That chapter in her life as Torvald's "doll" wife is completely over; Nora is never coming home. She has made her decision deliberately and explained it calmly to Torvald before she walks out, but the slammed door punctuates her statement with an exclamation point that she no longer suffer his treatment of her silently. Nora declares she is an individual first, and she leaves to pursue her life as one. The audience is not left wondering about her choice; we don't know, however, whether she will succeed in her new life as a woman who has abandoned her family .
But is there any hope for Torvald and Nora getting back together? The last line of the play seems to suggest that maybe there is. Torvald is alone in the living room. Stage directions tell us that, "A hope flashes across his mind" and then Torvald says, "The most wonderful thing of all?" He's referring to the conversation he and Nora had right before she walked out of the room. Nora says that if they're ever to be more than strangers "the most wonderful thing of all would have to happen," that their "life together would be a real wedlock" .So, has Torvald realized what this means? Has he figured out that they both have to respect each other as individuals in order to have a real marriage? Has he taken a bite of the forbidden fruit as well? Ibsen doesn't tell us for sure. Maybe Torvald runs out into the snow and makes it all better. Maybe his pride keeps him in the apartment and maybe there are other final actions .
Open ending can make a profound statement about the human condition and about and the absurdity existence , they can leave an audience contemplating for days , months , even years about their significant endings . As in A Doll’s House , many critics until now right articles and essays on it’s significant open ending . These endings manipulate the audience to make them dance to the author’s tune .
Another reason why Ibsen wrote his ending in that way , because he is writing about a new strange attitude by a mother in his time . He writes about a mother who give up all her duties toward her husband and her children to search and create her own life . He is like lightening the mind of his audience , that one day women may explosion and face their society with a rebellious and different personality .
When Nora walks out on Torvald and her family, she has asserted the final step on her first course to independence. This active step towards independence leads her into new and uncharted territory. However, it is a place that she knows that she must enter, scared and excited at the same time. She decides to face the harsh society in a snowy night and shuts the door of her back dependent life .

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Theatre of the Absurd

The term “Theatre of the Absurd” was coined by Martin Esslin in his 1962 book by that title , it refers to a set of plays written primarily in France from the mid-1940s through the 1950s. In these plays, the dramatists used illogical situations, unconventional dialogue and minimal plots to express the apparent absurdity of human existence. There existed no formal “absurdist movement” in the theatre. Dramatists whose works fell under the category had a pessimistic vision of humanity struggling vainly to find a purpose in life and to control its fate.
The existential philosopher, Albert Camus, and other philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre used the term absurdto express their inability to find any rational explanation for human life. The dramatic works of certain European and American dramatists of the 1950s and 1960s have been referred to as the “Theatre of the Absurd”. This was so because they essentially subscribed to the theory proposed by Albert Camus, in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus.
The works of well-known dramatists such as Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, Arthur Adamov, Harold Pinter and a few others have been classified under the “Absurd” Theatre. A British scholar Martin Esslin, in his critical study of Samuel Beckett and French playwrights Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet and Arthur Adamov, first used the term “Theatre of the Absurd”.
Since the ideas dictated the structure of the plays, such playwrights did away with logical structures such as those exist in conventional theatre. Dramatic action, as conventionally associated with theatre and plays is in small doses, although the players continue to perform. It is one way of conveying that whatever they did, nothing will change their existence or fate. For instance, there is no specific storyline or plot in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.The play revolves around two tramps, who are apparently lost and who are filling their days waiting for somebody called Godot. Who was Godot, when he would come and whether he would come at all are issues to which they have no answer. The absurdity of life and living is subtly brought out.
Theatrical Features
Plays within this group are absurd in that they focus not on logical acts, realistic occurrences, or traditional character development; they, instead, focus on human beings trapped in an incomprehensible world subject to any occurrence, no matter how illogical . The theme of incomprehensibility is coupled with the inadequacy of language to form meaningful human connections.
· Characters

The characters in Absurdist drama are lost and floating in an incomprehensible universe and they abandon rational devices and discursive thought because these approaches are inadequate. Many characters appear as automatons stuck in routines speaking only in cliché .Characters are frequently stereotypical, archetypal, or flat character types.
The more complex characters are in crisis because the world around them is incomprehensible. Many of Pinter's plays, for example, feature characters trapped in an enclosed space menaced by some force the character can't understand. Pinter's first play was The Room – in which the main character, Rose, is menaced by Riley who invades her safe space though the actual source of menace remains a mystery – and this theme of characters in a safe space menaced by an outside force is repeated in many of his later works (perhaps most famously in The Birthday Party). Characters in Absurdist drama may also face the chaos of a world that science and logic have abandoned. The plots of many Absurdist plays feature characters in interdependent pairs, commonly either two males or a male and a female. Some Beckett scholars call this the "pseudocouple". The two characters may be roughly equal or have a begrudging interdependence . one character may be clearly dominant and may torture the passive character .The relationship of the characters may shift dramatically throughout the play .
· Language

Despite its reputation for nonsense language, much of the dialogue in Absurdist plays is naturalistic. The moments when characters resort to nonsense language or clichés–when words appear to have lost their denotative function, thus creating misunderstanding among the characters, making the Theatre of the Absurd distinctive. Language frequently gains a certain phonetic, rhythmical, almost musical quality, opening up a wide range of often comedic playfulness.
Distinctively Absurdist language will range from meaningless clichés to Vaudeville-style word play to meaningless nonsense. The Bald Soprano, for example, was inspired by a language book in which characters would exchange empty clichés that never ultimately amounted to true communication or true connection. Likewise, the characters in The Bald Soprano–like many other Absurdist characters–go through routine dialogue full of clichés without actually communicating anything substantive or making a human connection. In other cases, the dialogue is purposefully elliptical; the language of Absurdist Theater becomes secondary to the poetry of the concrete and objectified images of the stage. Many of Beckett's plays devalue language for the sake of the striking tableau. Harold Pinter–famous for his "Pinter pause"–presents more subtly elliptical dialogue; often the primary things characters should address is replaced by ellipsis or dashes. The following exchange between Aston and Davies in The Caretaker is typical of Pinter:
ASTON. More or less exactly what you...
DAVIES. That's it ... that's what I'm getting at is ... I mean, what sort of jobs ... (Pause.)
ASTON. Well, there's things like the stairs ... and the ... the bells ...
Much of the dialogue in Absurdist drama reflects this kind of evasiveness and inability to make a connection. When language that is apparently nonsensical appears, it also demonstrates this disconnection. It can be used for comic effect .
· Plot

Traditional plot structures are rarely a consideration in The Theatre of the Absurd. Plots can consist of the absurd repetition of cliché and routine. Often there is a menacing outside force that remains a mystery; in The Birthday Party, for example, Goldberg and McCann confront Stanley, torture him with absurd questions, and drag him off at the end, but it is never revealed why.
Absence, emptiness, nothingness, and unresolved mysteries are central features in many Absurdist plots: for example, in The Chairs an old couple welcomes a large number of guests to their home, but these guests are invisible so all we see is empty chairs, a representation of their absence. In many of Beckett's later plays, most features are stripped away and what's left is a minimalistic tableau: a woman walking slowly back and forth in Footfalls, for example, or in Breath only a junk heap on stage and the sounds of breathing.
The plot may also revolve around an unexplained metamorphosis, a supernatural change, or a shift in the laws of physics. For example, in Ionesco's Amédée, or How to Get Rid of It, a couple must deal with a corpse that is steadily growing larger and larger; Ionesco never fully reveals the identity of the corpse, how this person died, or why it's continually growing, but the corpse ultimately – and, again, without explanation – floats away. In Jean Tardieu's "The Keyhole" a lover watches a woman through a keyhole as she removes her clothes and then her flesh.
Like Pirandello, many Absurdists use meta-theatrical techniques to explore role fulfillment, fate, and the theatricality of theatre. This is true for many of Genet's plays: for example, in The Maids, two maids pretend to be their masters; in The Balcony brothel patrons take on elevated positions in role-playing games, but the line between theatre and reality starts to blur. Another complex example of this is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead: it's a play about two minor characters in Hamlet; these characters, in turn, have various encounters with the players who perform The Mousetrap, the play-with-in-the-play in Hamlet. In Stoppard's Travesties, James Joyce and Tristin Tzara slip in and out of the plot of The Importance of Being Earnest
Plots are frequently cyclical : for example, Endgame begins where the play ended – at the beginning of the play, Clov says, "Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished" – and themes of cycle, routine, and repetition are explored throughout.

Playwrights of the Absurd

There are many playwrights whose works could be described as absurd; they include such writers as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet and Harold Pinter. Within their plays they explore such ideas as the state of existence, the questionable presence of God, the unreliability of language, and the concept of time.
Nearly all these concepts are present in the plays of Samuel Beckett. In his play Waiting for Godot Beckett’s characters, like Sisyphus, are engaged in a fruitless task; they are to wait for an indeterminable amount of time for the mysterious Godot. They fear silence and void and so fill it with seemingly meaningless chat. Beckett uses repetition to highlight the ceaseless circularity of life and his characters throw doubt on the reliability of memory, language and of existence itself.

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Realism and the Theater of the Absurd

Realism can be defined as the representation of everyday life in literature. Concerned with the average, the common place, the ordinary, realism employs theatrical conventions to create the illusion of everyday life. With realistic drama came the depiction of subjects close to the lives of middle-class people: work, marriage, and family life. From this standpoint, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Henrik Ibsen's A Doll House are more realistic than Shakespeare's Othello, which in turn is more realistic than Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. Although each of these plays possesses a true-to-life quality, each operates according to different theatrical conventions. Royal personages, gods, military heroes, and exalted language are absent from Miller's and Ibsen's plays, as modern dramatists turned to an approximation of the daily life of the lower and middle classes.
One means by which realistic drama creates the illusion of everyday life is trough setting. Whereas settings consist primarily of painted backdrops in Moliere's plays and are often established by dialogue in Shakespeare's plays, the settings of modern realistic plays are designed to look authentic. Moreover, setting in plays such as Ibsen's A Doll House often functions symbolically. In Elements of Literature 3, Robert Scholes has noted that the elaborately detailed setting of A Doll House symbolizes both "the impact of the Helmers' environment on their marriage" and the "very nature of their marriage"; it also embodies "the profound pressures placed on Helmer and Nora by the material and social conditions of their world."
Other conventions designed to create and sustain the illusion that the audience was watching a slice of domestic life include the following: the use of a three-walled room with an open fourth wall into which the audience peers to view and overhear the action; dialogue that approximates the idiom of everyday discourse, polished to be sure, but designed especially to sound like speech rather than poetry; plots that, though highly contrived, seem to turn on a series of causally related actions; subjects not from mythology or history, but from the concerns of ordinary life.
Absurdist drama on the other hand is nonrealistic, even antirealistic. Absurdist playwrights reject the conventions of realism, substituting well-contrived plots with storyless action; they replace believable characters of psychological complexity with barely recognizable figures; and for witty repartee and grand speeches they offer incoherent ramblings and disconnected dialogue.
This rejection of realistic theatrical conventions primarily because ways of perceiving reality in the twentieth century had changed so radically that realistic dramatic conventions were considered to be inadequate to the task of representing reality as dramatists of the absurd envisioned it. absurdist dramatists reject the implications that lie behind realistic conventions; they object, for example, to the idea that characters can be understood or that plot should be rationally ordered. For them, people are not understandable, and life is disorderly and chaotic. Absurdist writers attempt to dramatize these and other conceptions in plays that depict experience as meaningless and existence as purposeless; they portray human beings as irrational, pathetic figures, helpless against life's chaos. For the absurdist, humans are uprooted, cut off from their historical context, dispossessed of religious certainty, alienated from their social and physical environment, and unable to communicate with others.
Martin Esslin, a leading drama critic and expert on absurdist drama, has noted that the word absurd when used with reference to the theater of the absurd does not mean "ridiculous," but "out of harmony." Modern individuals, according to the absurdist dramatists, are out of tune with nature, with other human beings, and with themselves. This sense of being at odds with life thwarts their hopes, deprives them of happiness, and robs their lives of meaning.
Esslin has also recognized that dramatists of the absurd, such as Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco, have moved beyond arguing about the absurdity of the human condition to present that condition in concrete dramatic terms of the theater. When dramatists of the absurd, thus, violate the rules of conventional drama, they do so because they see that strategy as the most effective way to illustrate the conditions of modern human experience as they understand them.

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The Theater of the Absurd and the Angry Young Men

In the late 1950s a number of young writers, among whom we can mention A. Wesker,Kinsley Amis and above all John Osborne, had an immense success in Britain. They were grouped under the label of “Angry Young Men”. They gave voice to the young generation who, dissatisfied with the world they lived in, wanted to create their own way of living. They struggled against the Establishment and some of its values: family, patriotism, the Established Church and culture. They began to cry out against conventions, tradition and authoritarianism. They felt cheated as the promises of the Welfare State had revealed to be empty: society fed them well, educated them well, but still kept them trapped in a class system that opened the doors to the rich public school members of the upper-middle class and kept them closed in the faces of the members of the working class.
Jimmy Porter, the main character of Osborne’s play “Look Back in Anger”, became a model to be imitated for the British young generation of the late 1950s. Jimmy spoke the raw language of a frustrated generation, the language spoken by real people in the streets and not the sophisticated one used by the upper classes.
The Angry Men’s works were politically committed and dealt with contemporary themes. They took as subject matter the middle and the working class and depicted in realistic terms their typical habitat, generally a gloomy and shabby room; they were torn between the hope provided by their ideals and the depressed reality which shattered all hopes of a better future.
Unlike the “Theatre of the Absurd”, which was a European phenomenon, the “Angry Man” was typically English.


Relationship with Existentialism

The Theatre of the Absurd is commonly associated with Existentialism, and Existentialism was an influential philosophy in Paris during the rise of the Theatre of the Absurd; however, to call it Existentialist theatre is problematic for many reasons. It gained this association partly because it was named (by Esslin) after the concept of "absurdism" advocated by Albert Camus, a philosopher commonly called Existentialist though he frequently resisted that label. Absurdism is most accurately called Existentialist in the way Franz Kafka's work is labeled Existentialist: it embodies an aspect of the philosophy though the writer may not be a committed follower.

Many of the Absurdists were contemporaries with Jean-Paul Sartre, the philosophical spokesman for Existentialism in Paris, but few Absurdists actually committed to Sartre's own Existentialist philosophy, as expressed in Being and Nothingness, and many of the Absurdists had a complicated relationship with him. Sartre praised Genet's plays, stating that for Genet "Good is only an illusion. Evil is a Nothingness which arises upon the ruins of Good".
Ionesco, however, hated Sartre bitterly. Ionesco accused Sartre of supporting Communism but ignoring the atrocities committed by Communists; he wrote Rhinoceros as a criticism of blind conformity, whether it be to Nazism or Communism; at the end of the play, one man remains on Earth resisting transformation into a rhinoceros Sartre criticized Rhinoceros by questioning: "Why is there one man who resists? At least we could learn why, but no, we learn not even that. He resists because he is there". Sartre's criticism highlights a primary difference between the Theatre of the Absurd and Existentialism: The Theatre of the Absurd shows the failure of man without recommending a solution. In a 1966 interview, Claude Bonnefoy, comparing the Absurdists to Sartre and Camus, said to Ionesco, "It seems to me that Beckett, Adamov and yourself started out less from philosophical reflections or a return to classical sources, than from first-hand experience and a desire to find a new theatrical expression that would enable you to render this experience in all its acuteness and also its immediacy. If Sartre and Camus thought out these themes, you expressed them in a far more vital contemporary fashion". Ionesco replied, "I have the feeling that these writers – who are serious and important -- were talking about absurdity and death, but that they never really lived these themes, that they did not feel them within themselves in an almost irrational, visceral way, that all this was not deeply inscribed in their language. With them it was still rhetoric, eloquence. With Adamov and Beckett it really is a very naked reality that is conveyed through the apparent dislocation of language".
In comparison to Sartre's concepts of the function of literature, Samuel Beckett's primary focus was on the failure of man to overcome "absurdity"; as James Knowlson says in Damned to Fame, Beckett's work focuses "on poverty, failure, exile and loss — as he put it, on man as a 'non-knower' and as a 'non-can-er' ." Beckett's own relationship with Sartre was complicated by a mistake made in the publication of one of his stories in Sartre's journal Les Temps Modernes. Beckett said, though he liked Nausea, he generally found the writing style of Sartre and Heidegger to be "too philosophical" and he considered himself "not a philosopher".

The Absurd Theatre began to decline in the mid-1960s. Although it shocked the audiences when it first appeared, many of its characteristic features were absorbed in mainstream theatre, when the Absurd Theatre declined. The techniques used are now common in modern theatre.

(Waiting For Godot) As Practical Part:

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Theatre of Absurd and Waiting for Godot by SAMUEL BECKETT:
After the dawn of twentieth century, many kinds of theatres existed .One of the prominent theatres was the Theatre of Absurd. The Theatre of Absurd applied many plays . Those plays , such as Waiting for Godot, expressed "a confusing, seemingly meaningless world where people encounter(ed) bizarre or absurd circumstances" (Eugene Ionesco , Theatre of Absurd ).However, The Theatre of Absurd and Waiting for Godot had some themes in common .

Waiting for Godot applied many themes that Theatre of Absurd h b andled. Firstly, repetition was observed in every single scene . "Nothing to be done" was repeated continually by more than one character, and in whole scenes, to emphasize the sameness in lives of people , and the unimportance of time. Repetition caused some kinds of routine and cliché . Secondly, meaninglessness was an important issue which the Theatre of Absurd focused on. This play had many meaningless actions such as ; waiting for Godot . Moreover , the characters' dialogue was so meaningless , and had no effect on others . For example, the two characters, Estragon and Vladimir, were talking just for passing time. To avoid loneliness, this two characters tried to keep in touch , and be together . Thirdly , the plays in the Theatre of Absurd , as we noticed, were tragic- comedy . In Waiting for Godot , we noticed that there were many comical incidents .To make audience laugh, Estragon continually took his boots on and off, as Vladimir did with his hats. In contrast, to arouse sadness, the play presented injustice which the audience couldn't change or stop. In this tragic comedy play, the audience laugh, but at the end ,the play made them feel sorrow.

At the end , we must know that this theatre symbolized many issues in people's society at that time ; people's reaction toward war, seeking for peace, etc. So, remember when you are reading the absurd plays , you are reading about the absurdity of life .

[E.M.H]

بنااات بلييز المحاضرة الاخيرة للحضارة ضروروي الله يوفقكم

[يآحلآتي]

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) – in England

Uncommon for his witty humor

Made fun of societies notion using for the purpose of educating and changing. His plays tended to show the accepted attitude, then demolished that attitude while showing his own solutions .

Arms and the Man (1894) – about love and war and honor .

Mrs. Warren’s Profession – prostitution .

Major Barbara (1905) – a munitions manufacturer gives more to the world (jobs, etc.) while the Salvation Army only prolongs of the status quo .

Pygmalion (1913) – shows the transforming of a flower girl into a society woman, and exposes the phoniness of society. The musical My Fair Lady was based on this play .

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) – in Russia

Chekhov is known more for poetic expiration and symbolism, compelling psychological reality, people trapped in social situations, hope in hopeless situations. He claimed that he wrote comedies; others think they are sad and tragic. Characters in Chekhov’s plays seem to have a fate that is a direct result of what they are. His plays have an illusion of plotlessness .

*The Seagull (1898) .

*Three Sisters (1900) – we did the show here last year; about three sisters who want to move to Moscow but never do .

The Cherry Orchard (1902) .*

Again, his realism has affected other Playwrights, as did his symbolic meanings in the texts of his plays and in the titles of his plays .

ghosts

Ghosts is one of Henrik Ibsen's most haunting plays, though not necessarily for the reasons that shocked the public sensibility when it was first produced. Despite the headline-grabbing representation of venereal disease and the references to free love outside of marriage, the most important element to the modern eyes is that of a middle-aged woman, who is trapped by her past and the ideas that have been imposed upon her gender.

Like Ibsen's other great portrayal of social malaise and gender subjugation, A Doll's House, Ghosts is a damning indictment of the antiquated notions that kept women in their place during Ibsen's time. More heart-breaking than Nora, Ghosts features a mother and widow, who fights against society's preconceptions and bigotries in order to do the best for her son.

The play opens with an argument between a roughly spoken worker, Jakob Engstrand, and his daughter, Regina, who is a maid working for aging widow, Mrs. Alving. Regina thinks she is too good for her father, and she shoos Engstrand out of the house. On his way out, he meets Pastor Manders, who has come to talk about the orphanage that is being built in the name of Mrs. Alving's dead husband. The community believes that Captain Alving was an upright and moral man, but Mrs. Alving explains to Manders that the captain was really a philanderer and a drunk.

An illicit relationship with the household maid resulted in the birth of a baby girl, Regina, who was given away to Engstrand to raise as his own. When Regina was old enough to work, Mrs. Alving took her in as her maid. Manders is also glad to see Mrs. Alving's son, Osvald, who is an artist--recently returned from living on the continent.

At the end of the first act Mrs. Alving and Pastor Manders hear noises from the kitchen, where Osvald is propositioning his half sister. Mrs. Alving tries to tell Osvald about Regina and his father, but before she can Osvald tells her that he is sick and that the French doctor told him that his illness is due to the sins of his father – a notion that Osvald could not countenance because of the good things he has heard about Captain Alving.

Mrs. Alving struggles to tell her son the truth about his father, but then news arrives that the orphanage is burning to the ground. Although the fire is clearly Engstrand's fault, the canny scoundrel convinces Pastor Manders that he is to blame, and ropes him into a dodgy business that he is planning.

After they leave together, Mrs. Alving finally tells Osvald and Regina that they are brother and sister. Osvald admits that he wanted Regina because she would be able to look after him; and Regina demonstrates her true character. When she realizes that she can't marry Osvald, she storms out of the house.

With Regina gone, Osvald turns to his mother, and asks her to administer morphine to him if he loses his mind. Mrs. Alving hardly knows how to respond, but then the sun comes up. Osvald asks his mother to give him the sun, and we come to see that Osvald has slipped into madness. In the final moments of the play, Mrs. Alving is on stage. And, we are unsure (as is she) whether she will go abide by her son's final wishes.
The beauty of Ghosts rests in the new realism that Ibsen brought to the dramatic genre, and in the stark, clear nature of its thinking. In Ghosts, Ibsen attacks the old morality--specifically sexual propriety. But, he still offers human understanding to those people still tied to ideas from which they cannot or will not release themselves. These are the ghosts of which Ibsen speaks: the dead-but-not-departed morals and ideas that still hold people under their spell. These are the ghosts from which Mrs. Alving desperately tries to escape.

Brilliant, vital and enormously intelligent, Ghosts is one of the most memorable plays in modern literature. Decried when it was first written, it has grown to be one of the great classics that theatre revisits time-and-again. So vibrant--Ghosts still feels alive and valid today.

Ibsen, The Bourgeoisie, and the Problem Play
“A Doll’s House” and many other of Ibsen’s plays deal with the lives and anxieties of the bourgeoisie, a class of people who, though not born of royalty or aristocracy, ascended to social and financial well-being through education and/or employment. Ibsen himself was born into a bourgeois family---his father was a well-to-do merchant who ran a general store---so he had an insider’s look at the bourgeois lifestyle, and was able to inject an astounding (and, to some critics at the time, offensive)amount of realism into his plays, especially “A Doll’s House.” This realism was crucial to Ibsen’s goal of creating a play that challenged toxic societal norms, or in other words a “social problem” play. Quite the opposite of escapism, a social problem play deals first-hand with realistic situations in an attempt to expose and analyze a perceived problem with society. As Jens-Morten Hanssen puts it, a problem play displays these four characteristics:
-They make problems in society the subject of debate.
-They have a socio-critical perspective.
-The action is in a contemporary setting.
-They present everyday people and situations.
Clearly “A Doll’s House” embodies these traits. To understand fully why Ibsen was one of the most revolutionary and influential playwrights of his time is to understand that, instead of viewing the theater going experience as a mere leisure-time activity, Ibsen believed it could be a soul-searching, society changing event. And while “A Doll’s House” did not change society in one fell seismic shift, the fervent reaction the play received indicates that the pot was most definitely stirred.
By taking a close look at the Victorian society, attention should be drawn to the significance of woman characters. These women that Ibsen created did not think and act in ways that were shocking to society in which they lived in. These actions might seem normal today because women have came so far since the 1800's, but for the society in which they lived ,these women were so different ,so daring that even some women of the time were distressed over the characterization these plays challenged the cultural norms of the time in regards to women and Ibsen's personal relationships with women in real life contributed to these characterizations . This gave him a different prescriptive on issues that women were facing and these same issues still effect women today. The feminist themes are including:
1- Money: men have the money and give it to the women in the form of allowance or they must ask for more if they need it, making on their own was considered scandalous
2- Dominance and power : the woman does what the man says and what he wants even if she disagrees because compliance is better than upsetting the man
3- Work: refers to a skill that the woman enjoys and wants to do but is not one of her duties, therefore, it is considered unimportant
4- Desires: refers to some thing that the woman wants for herself that is not one of her duties
5- Role :refers to all things that are expected of women ;their duties according to society
6- Children :refers to woman's feeling about reproduction and children, and the that women have no say in the matter
7- Body-image: refers to the way that men see women in that the body and woman's beauty are her most important traits and also women using this image to get what they need or want from men
8- Property :women are men's possession
9- Intellect women are not smart so, they have no need for knowledge or education and do not understand the things that men must deal with on a regular basis
10- Rebellion: refers to incidents n women do not confirm to the other nine categories and choose instead of rebel.
By looking at the actual text of the play, it appears clearly that the prevalence of feminist themes in the dialogue of the sentences it can be determined if Henrik Ibsen was tending to put feminist themes and problems in the play and therefore, whether or not he him self was a feminist becomes a mute point .feminism is defined in the Websters Dictionary : as the theory of political , economic ,and social quality of the sexes.
The main conflict in “A Doll’s House” revolves around money. Nora secretly owes Krogstad a large sum from trying to save her husband’s life with a trip to the warmer climate of the south. She doesn’t want Torvald to find out because it would hurt his pride---to borrow money is bad enough in Torvald’s eyes, to have his wife borrow money behind his back is unthinkable. Torvald would not borrow even to protect his own well-being, which is Ibsen’s comment on the stubborn pride and commitment to saving face that the middle class of this era displayed. Obviously at the end of the play Torvald is not able to save any face---Nora leaves him and he’s left wondering what Nora meant when she said that only “the most wonderful thing of all” could repair their marriage. In “A Doll’s House,” Ibsen challenged the bourgeois mindset of the time with regards to both money and male/female relationships.
A Doll's House has had dozens of problems propounded for it. We have heard them -- after the theatre: "Did Nora do right to leave her husband?" "Was their marriage an ideal one?" "Is a marriage that is not ideal a real marriage?" "Ought Nora to have deceived her husband?" "Was she justified in forging the note?" "Is one ever justified in breaking a law?" "Was Nora's conduct ideal?" "Does Ibsen believe in marriage without mutual trust?" "Ought married women to eat candy?"

The real problem of the play is perhaps a little more concrete than any of these and more universal than all of them. The conception of a problem play as one in which some problem of modern life is discussed by the characters and worked out in the plot is foreign to Ibsen, as to all great artists. His plays deal with situations and characters from modern life and are, in so far, allied to the problem play. But they do not present problems, in the ordinary sense of the word, nor do they solve them.
The problem of A Doll's House, for instance, is not concerned with the marriage relations of Nora and Helmer, but with the character of Nora. The question whether she had a right to forge the note that saved her husband's life is of far less importance than the fact that she is what she is, and that as she is, she will face life and find herself. In so far as this is a problem, it might be the problem of any playwright, from Shakespeare to Bernard Shaw.
The play questioned a woman's place in society, and asserted that a woman's self was more important than her role as wife and mother, was unheard of. Government and church officials were outraged. Some people even blamed Ibsen for the rising divorce rate! When some theaters in Germany refused to perform the play the way it was written, Ibsen was forced to write an alternate ending in which the heroine's rebellion collapses. Despite the harsh criticism of A Doll's House, the play became the talk of Europe. It was soon translated into many languages and performed all over the world. The furor over Ibsen's realistic plays helped him to become an international figure. Some writers like Tolstoy thought Ibsen's plays too common and talky; but the English author George Bernard Shaw considered Ibsen to be more important than Shakespeare.
No matter what individual viewers thought about its merits, in A Doll's House, Ibsen had developed a new kind of drama, called a "problem play" because it examines modern social and moral problems. The heroes and heroines of problem plays belonged to the middle or lower class, and the plays dealt with the controversial problems of modern society. This seems commonplace today, as popular entertainment has been dealing with controversial topics for years. Until Ibsen's day, however, it just wasn't done. Many of the most important plays written in our day, like Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, have their roots in the problem play.
Ibsen's Realistic Period (1877 to 1890) earned him a place as a theater giant. Not only did he introduce controversial subjects, everyday heroes, and modern language, he resurrected and modernized the "retrospective" plot, which had been popular with the ancient Greek playwrights. In a retrospective play, like A Doll's House and Hedda Gabler, the major events have taken place before the curtain goes up. The play concerns the way the characters deal with these past events.

A Doll's House was published on December 4, 1879, and first performed in Copenhagen on December 21, 1879. The work was considered a publishing event, and the play's initial printing of 8,000 copies quickly sold out. The play was so controversial that Ibsen was forced to write a second ending that he called "a barbaric outrage" to be used only when necessary. The controversy centered around Nora's decision to abandon her children, and in the second ending, she decides that the children need her more than she needs her freedom. Ibsen believed that women were best suited to be mothers and wives, but at the same time, he had an eye for injustice, and Helmer's demeaning treatment of Nora was a common problem. Although he would later be embraced by feminists, Ibsen was no champion of women's rights; he only dealt with the problem of women's rights as a facet of the realism within his play. His intention was not to solve this issue but to illuminate it. Although Ibsen's depiction of Nora realistically illustrates the issues facing women, his decision in Act III to have her abandon her marriage and children was lambasted by critics as unrealistic, since according to them, no "real" woman would ever make that choice.
That Ibsen offered no real solution to Nora's dilemma inflamed critics and readers alike who were then left to debate the ending ceaselessly. This play established a new genre of modern drama; prior to A Doll's House, contemporary plays were usually historical romances or contrived comedy of manners. Ibsen is known as the "father of modern drama" because he elevated theatre from entertainment to a forum for exposing social problems. Ibsen broke away from the romantic tradition with his realistic portrayals of individual characters and his focus on psychological concerns as he sought to portray the real world, especially the position of women in society.
Halvard Solness is a master builder and self-taught architect who is married to Aline, a woman above his station. Through an ambitious career he has built himself up to be a man of power in his home town, and it is hinted that he founded his success on an incident in which his wife's childhood home burned down to the ground. Aline has never got over the loss of her childhood home and the death of her newborn twins soon after. Latterly she has also been worried about her husband's mental health, as she confides to their family doctor and friend, Dr. Herdal. Solness has three employees: Ragnar Brovik, his father Knut Brovik who as a younger man trained Solness in his work and is now an ailing, bitter old man, and Kaja Fosli, who is engaged to Ragnar but deeply and unhappily in love with Solness. When Solness finds out that Ragnar wants to set up in business on his own, he is unwilling to help Ragnar, whom he tries to get Kaja to marry, in order to keep them both in his own employment. Solness has an unexpected visit by a young woman, Hilde Wangel, whom he met ten years earlier at a ceremony to celebrate the completion of the roofing of a church tower he had built in her home town. She tells him that on that occasion he had kissed her and promised to return in ten years' time to offer her a "kingdom", which she has now come to claim.

Solness has just built a new house, with a high tower, for Aline and himself, and Hilde dares him to climb to the top of the tower, carrying the celebratory wreath, as he had done before, although he is obviously afraid of heights. As he reaches the top she waves a white shawl and calls out in triumph, but the master builder falls to his death.

[يآحلآتي]

ياحلوين كل اللي كتبته هو تجمعي من البريزنتيشن حق البنات

ماعرفت انزله بمرفق

باقي الستيج دايريكشن والسمبلز حق الروايه الثانيه
وانشاء الله راح انزلهم هنا

مابي اللا دعوه بظهر الغيب

انشاء الله تستفيدون منهم


وعلى فكره د.مها باخر محاضرة قالت احفظو امثله لبرنارد شو ولواحد ثاني نسيت اسمه

قالت يمكن باحد الاسئله اطلب منك تجيبين اقزامبلز


وبالختبار راح يكون في 3 اسئله لكل واحد 20 درجه

[Angelica]

المشاركة الأصلية كتبت بواسطة يآحلآتي

[color=black]وبالختبار راح يكون في 3 اسئله لكل واحد 20 درجه

طيب قالت اذا في تشويسز والا لا ؟