Tuesday, 4/22 - The Victorians - where the Wilde things are

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

• P&P

• Extended Chapel today

• NOT GUM: "The Victorian Age made one or two mistakes, but they were mistakes that were really useful; that is, mistakes that were really mistaken. They thought that commerce outside a country must extend peace: it has certainly often extended war. They thought that commerce inside a country must certainly promote prosperity; it has largely promoted poverty. But for them these were experiments; for us they ought to be lessons. If we continue the capitalist use of the populace — if we continue the capitalist use of external arms, it will lie heavy on the living. The dishonour will not be on the dead." — G. K. Chesterton

• Intro to The Victorian Period (see Notability for Brit Lit - Historical Contexts pg. 67).
• Learning the context by teaching: Break into eight groups. Read your assigned section(s) listed below, and write down what you believe to be the three most important facts/quotes/statistics to share with the class . . . IN YOUR OWN WORDS.
• Groups
1. "Peace and Economic Growth" and "The Idea of Progress"
2. "The Hungry Forties"
3. "The Movement for Reform"
4. "Decorum and Authority"
5. "Intellectual Progress"
6. "Questions and Doubts"
7. "From Trust to Skepticism and Denial"
8. "Revealing Reality"

• Copy new Nails, Lit terms, and Vocab

• Comedy of Manners - A comic drama consisting of five or three acts in which the attitudes and customs of a society are critiqued and satirized according to high standards of intellect and morality.
• e.g. Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest

• Hyperbole - Calculated overstatement, exaggeration

• e.g. "I'm so hungry I could eat a ________"
• e.g. "He ate everything in the house."

• Understatement - Says less than is intended

• e.g. "Adolf Hitler was a naughty man."
• e.g. "I hate to seem inquisitive, but would you kindly inform me who I am?" (Oscar Wilde) 

• Paradox - Using contradiction in a manner that oddly makes sense on a deeper level.

• e.g. "Without laws, we can have no freedom."
• e.g. "If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life." (Oscar Wilde)
• e.g. "The simplicity of your character makes you exquisitely incomprehensible to me." (Oscar Wilde)

• Epigram - a short, witty, often paradoxical--sometimes satirical--statement designed to surprise the audience

• e.g. "Swans sing before they die--'twere no bad thing /
  Should certain people die before they sing!" (Coleridge)
• e.g. "What is an epigram? a dwarfish whole, /
  Its body brevity, and wit its soul" (Coleridge)
• e.g. "Forty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin and forty years of marriage make her look like a public building" (Oscar Wilde). 
• e.g. "God made women beautiful so that men would love them; and he made them stupid so that they could love men" (attributed to La Belle Otero).     

HW: update Nails, Lit Terms, and Vocab in binder.