The Soulflakes

Unit-III Prose Essay What is an Essay? The word ‘Essay’ means an attempt or assay. It is a composition of moderate length on any particular subject or branch of the subject. Definition of an Essay: Dr Johnson says “A loose sally of the mind, an irregular, undigested piece, not a regular and orderly composition”. An essay could be defined as a short piece of writing that reveals the writer's views or analysis of a particular subject. The word "Essay" is from the word "Assay", meaning 'an attempt or an effort. It can also be defined as a discussion in prose of a certain topic. The word "Essay" has the same meaning as the word "Assay, i.e. an attempt or an "effort". This signifies that the essay is a composition, somewhat incomplete and systematic. The Oxford Dictionary defines it as, A Composition of moderate length on any particular subject, originally implying a want of finish, but now said of composition more or less elabor...

  Unit-II Drama "Melodrama" The word melodrama is coined from melo (music) and dran (drama). It is, therefore, a play that utilizes music extensively. But the utilization of music is not the only factor in melodrama, what really makes it melodrama is its portrayal of the protagonist and the antagonist. The protagonist suffers a lot but triumphs in the end while the antagonist suffers. So, melodrama can be defined as a play that has serious action caused by a villain and a destruction of the villain which brings about a happy resolution in the play. The hero is usually involved in very dangerous circumstances but is rescued or he disentangles himself at the last possible moment. The rescuer is usually a benevolent character who identifies himself with the good role of the protagonist. An ideal melodrama, therefore, must have a protagonist and an antagonist. The protagonist always fights the antagonist who is usually poised to destroy goodness. In the end, the characters are ...

  Unit-II Drama “Farce” Farce which is referred to as comedy of situation, is a humorous play on a trivial theme usually one that is familiar to the audience. The themes that are treated in farce include mistaken identity, elaborate misunderstanding, switched costume (men in women’s clothes) heroes forced under tables, misheard instructions, discoveries, disappearances and many such situations.   Farce is not considered an intellectual drama because it does not appeal to the mind. It deals with physical situations and does not explore any serious idea. It presents physical activities that grow out of situations like the presence of something when something is not expected or the absence of something when something is expected. Farce does not treat serious social issues. Sometimes it does not tell a full story or presents a logical plot. A good example is somebody walking and slipping on a banana peel and falling in an exaggerated manner. The main objective is to enter...

Unit-II drama "Absurd Drama"   The term is applied to a number of works in drama and prose fiction that have in common the view that the human condition is essentially absurd and that this condition can be adequately represented only in works of literature that are themselves absurd. Both the mood and dramaturgy of absurdity were anticipated as early as 1896 in Alfred Jarry’s French play Ubu roi (Ubu the King) . The literature has its roots also in the movements of expressionism and surrealism, as well as in the fiction, written in the 1920s, of Franz Kafka (The Trial, Metamorphosis). The current movement, however, emerged in France after the horrors of World War II (1939–45) as a rebellion against basic beliefs and values in traditional culture and literature. Another French playwright of the absurd was Jean Genet (who combined absurdism and diabolism); some of the early dramatic works of the Englishman Harold Pinter and the American Edward Albee are written in a simi...

 Unit-II Drama "Masque" The masque (a variant spelling of “mask”) was inaugurated in Renaissance Italy and flourished in England during the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I. In its full development, it was an elaborate form of court entertainment that combined poetic drama, music, song, dance, splendid costuming, and stage spectacle. A plot—often slight, and mainly mythological and allegorical—served to hold together these diverse elements. The speaking characters, who wore masks (hence the title), were often played by amateurs who belonged to courtly society. The play concluded with a dance in which the players doffed their masks and were joined by the audience. In the early seventeenth century in England the masque drew upon the finest artistic talents of the day, including Ben Jonson for the poetic script (for example, The Masque of Blackness and The Masque of Queens) and Inigo Jones, the architect, for the elaborate sets, costumes, and stage machinery. In...

 Unit-II Drama "One-Act Play" One-Act plays were written & staged throughout the 18th & 19th centuries as “The Curtain Raisers” or “The After Pieces”. They were chiefly farcical & served to amuse the audience before the commencement of the actual drama or were staged for their amusement just after it had come to an end. The famous one-act play “Monkey’s Paw” was first staged as a ‘Curtain Raiser’ & it proved to be more entertaining than the main drama. It may be said to mark the beginning of the modern one-act play. Chief Characteristics of One-Act Play (i) One-act play is a play that has only one act but may consist of one or more scenes. (ii) One-act plays are usually written in a concise manner. (iii) It deals with a single dominant situation, & aims at producing a single effect. (iv) It deals with only one theme developed through one situation to one climax in order to produce the maximum effect. (v) It treats the problems of everyday life ...

Unit-II Drama “Tragi-Comedy”  A type of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama which intermingled the standard characters and subject matter and the typical plot forms of tragedy and comedy. Thus, the important agents in tragicomedy included both people of high degree and people of low degree, even though, according to the reigning critical theory of that time, only upper-class characters were appropriate to tragedy, while members of the middle and lower classes were the proper subject solely of comedy. Tragicomedy represented a serious action which threatened a tragic disaster to the protagonist, yet, by an abrupt reversal of circumstance turned out happily. As John Fletcher wrote in his preface to The Faithful Shepherdess 1610 . Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice is by these criteria a tragicomedy because it mingles people of the aristocracy with lower-class characters (such as the Jewish merchant Shylock and the clown Launcelot Gobbo ), and also because of the developing threat of...