Monday, 4/6 - Eagleton on Wilde

The iconic cucumber sandwich (note the requisite absence of crust)

• P&P

• Cont. TIBE after reading the insights below.

HW: (Wed) Finish your quotes (two per act, six total) and vocab words (five per act, fifteen total). 

• Before we forge ahead with TIBE we have a rarity: your teacher(s) invoking some insights on Wilde from Marxist critic Terry Eagleton's Figures of Dissent: food for thinking on or, if you will, critical cucumber sandwiches:

• "English was not the native tongue of the Irish. Because, as Wilde remarked, they were 'condemned to express themselves in a language not their own,' . . . they could stamp it with their native speech patterns to create an alluring new idiom." 
• "[Wilde's] drama is all about secret selves, ghostly doubles, tainted origins, split identities. . . . parodying both the stereotypical Irishman (wild, anarchic, imaginative, witty, passionate and self-destructive) and the the stage Englishman (cool, elegant, contemptuous, manipulative). What is laziness in the former becomes leisureliness in the latter." 
• "Wilde's aphorisms belong, like so much else in his writing, to an Irish oral tradition that prefers the voice to the printed sign, rather as he himself preferred an ephemeral identity to a fixed one."
• "Wilde's epigrams are subversive deconstructions of English cliches, taking some stale piece of conventional wisdom and, by altering a word or two, standing it on its head or pressing it to an absurd extreme."  
• "Wilde's fellow Protestant Dubliner Bernard Shaw, another licensed Irish jester to the English, observed that nothing in the world is quite as exquisitely comic to the Irish as the Englishman's seriousness." 
• Wilde's dandyism his disdain for high-toned moralism and metaphysical depth, his love-affair with style, mask, surface, appearance, is a politics in itself, deflating the ideological portentousness of late-Victorian England in the name of a very Irish compact with failure, marginality, dispossession."
• "It is the women in The Importance of Being Earnest who read heavy works of philosophy, while the men lounge around eating dainty cucumber sandwiches."