Studying English Literature

The term “comedy of menace” was first used by David Campton as a subtitle to his four short plays The Lunatic view”. Now it signifies a kind of play in which a character or more characters feel the menacing presence—actual or imaginary, of some obscure and frightening force, power or personality. The dramatist exploits this kind of menace as a source of comedy. Harold Pinter exploited the possibilities of this kind of situation in his early plays like "The Room", "Birthday Party" and "A Slight Ache", where the both the character/s and the audience face an atmosphere, apparently funny but actually having suggestiveness of some impending threat from outside. Pinter himself explained the situation thus: "more often than not the speech only seems to be funny - the man in question is actually fighting a battle for his life". He also said: Everything is funny until the horror of the human situation rises to the surface! Life is funny because it is ...

In his essay “Structure, Sign, Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”, Derrida demonstrated how a written text lacks structural coherence and organic unity and how the text undermines its own assumptions and is thus divided against itself.  We come across almost an artistic demonstration of the theory in The Birthday Party, which revolves round a central event, namely “the birthday party” of the protagonist.  In every culture, ‘birthday’ is treated as an important event and is invested with meanings through certain rituals, which are considered archetypal activities in the human culture in general. More particularly, in western culture ‘birthday’ is looked upon as a sacred moment in one’s life and this sacredness is generated from the memory of the greatest religious event, namely the birth of the Babe, the Son of God. Christ’s birth is significant not simply because it marks the Advent of the Redeemer as a point in time, but structurally it marks the beginning of th...

--> Generally speaking, Wordsworth’s "Tintern Abbey" has been seen in relation to many an aspect of his poetic career. First of all, it is said to be a historical record of the different stages of the growth of his poetic imagination, and that is why some view it as a miniature epic that anticipates his epical endeavour with "The Prelude", in both thematic and artistic designs. Tintern Abbey contains and expounds many of Wordsworth’s poetic and philosophical beliefs, which were intended to be the themes of his other poems like, “Recluse”, “The Excursion” and, of course, “The Prelude”. Again the poem is unusual in examining the composition of the landscape, like his contemporary artist of his country Constable, rather than expressing the spirit of the landscape—its topography, its arrangement of vegetation, its placement of the works of men and its colours and light and shade have been scrupulously described. These scenes ultimately become the “objective...