ESSAY CEMETERY

Tom Stoppard's 1982 play The Real Thing and Patrick Marber's Closer , written fifteen years later, have much in common. The plays are structured in two acts and twelve scenes. Both feature two principal couples who exchange partners, one of whom is a writer; the characters frequently lie, cheat and make false assumptions about one another; meta-literary and self-reflexive techniques are often used to endow both works with additional depth. The Real Thing and Closer are also both set in London. Although the plays share the same urban setting, the backdrop of the city is utilized in different ways, and with a very different effect.             Closer is set almost entirely in public spaces. Alice, Dan, Larry and Anna move between a hospital, an aquarium, a gallery and a museum, a restaurant and a public park. In all of these, of course, privacy is out of the question. When the characters are situated in locations inaccessible t...

Featuring exclusively female characters, Caryl Churchill's Top Girls is indeed filled with remarkable women. The 1988 play contains women from across the globe who have distinguished themselves over the span of a thousand years, from Joan, the ninth-century pope, to Marlene, a twentieth-century career woman. The women, despite their vastly diverse backgrounds, have all had to sacrifice their femininity, freedom, and their families in order to pursue their individual goals in a male-dominated, male-oriented world. Churchill cleverly uses historical figures to create powerful criticism of contemporary feminism, particularly of that present in 1980s England, and explores what it really means to be a "top girl". With disorienting theatrical and linguistic technique, she ensures the audience's active participation and encourages critical socio-political thinking and self-reflexivity.             From its very beginning, the play diso...

Throughout the twentieth century, the assimilation of Jews in America underwent a transformation. Mary Antin's The Promised Land , written in 1912, shows a young immigrant's desperate struggle to learn English and prove herself worthy of the country, its people, and its language, while repressing every relic of the Old World, its language, and its customs. Lamed Shapiro's New Yorkish shows the beginning of a shift of power relations between non-Jewish American society, but to another, equally unhealthy extreme: the story's protagonist has powerful conflicting feelings toward gentiles, betraying the gap that still exists between Jews and non-Jews. Finally, Grace Paley's The Loudest Voice relates the experiences of a second-generation Jewish American child, in a loving mockery of both gentile and Jewish America that shows that self-aware assimilation in America is entirely possible; the intense emotions and conflicts that surrounded Jew-Gentile interactions are gon...

In the latter half of the twentieth century, several Jewish American writers have taken on the task of representing the Holocaust and its victims in their art. Even though Isaac Bashevis Singer, Art Spiegelman and Cynthia Ozick are did not experience the Holocaust themselves, several of their works center on this sensitive issue. Through their short story, graphic novel and novella they explore the difficulty of writing about a topic that is for them as American Jews both near and distant, and raise issues regarding American society's treatment of Holocaust victims. Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus embodies the artist's struggle with depiction of the Holocaust on several levels. First, such a struggle is inherent the narrative's very form. For the depiction of a Holocaust story, Spiegelman chose the graphic novel, a medium he associates himself in the novel with the lighthearted fun of Walt Disney's cartoons (in a conversation with Vladek). Even though the su...

At times it seems that art cannot help but be self-reflexive. In the poetry of both Shakespeare and Keats, literature and the creative process are themes that surface and dominate their work, even when the presumed subject of their work is entirely unrelated. Shakespeare's Sonnet "66" and "76", despite being written in a form that traditionally celebrates love, explore the difficulties of the artistic process. "Sonnet 66" addresses the issue of external hardships imposed upon the artist, whereas "Sonnet 76" concentrates on difficulties that originate within. John Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" seems to be more of an ode to imagination and the creative process, defying its self-proclaimed subject, the urn. External examination of the vessel inspires questions as to the events depicted on it, resulting in speculation that goes beyond the urn and creates vivid, colorful poetry. Through the form of their poetry and the various sound...

The Great Gatsby by Scott F. Fitzgerald is set in post-World War I New York. Long hailed as one of the greatest American works, the novel presents a set of questionable values through an array of characters. The title character traverses class and economical differences, rising from poverty at a North Dakota farm to apparent glamour and success in New York. James Gatsby acts with relentless determination in pursuit of the woman of his dreams. Instead of a romantic tale of attainment, however, The Great Gatsby is a story of disappointment and disaster, at the core of which lies the corrupting, blinding motivator- money. Initially, Gatsby is presented as a somewhat mysterious figure, the obscure host of glamorous, exorbitant parties. He owns a huge house, much too big for the mere purpose of housing him. The vast majority of the guests at his parties come uninvited; most of them do not know who Gatsby is (47). He does not seem to be invested in his guests but rather in the spectacle...