Скачать презентацию Oscar Wilde Celebrity Author Lecture 8
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Скачать презентацию Oscar Wilde Celebrity Author Lecture 8
Скачать презентацию Oscar Wilde Celebrity Author Lecture 8
Oscar Wilde – Celebrity Author Lecture #8
Wilde and aestheticism Why write? In Lycidas, Milton said, “Fame is the spur, ” Byron added two other factors: money and the love of beautiful women. Still another reason for writing is celebrity, in which the author’s reputation hinges more on glamour and glitz than on the literature he or she produces A celebrity author is one whose public image is better known than his or her works Wilde himself liked to assert that his major work of art was himself.
Wilde’s works Poems (1881) The Happy Prince and Other Stories (1888, fairy stories) Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories (1891, stories) House of Pomegranates (1891, fairy stories) The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891; novel) Lady Windermere's Fan (1892, play) A Woman of No Importance (1893, play) An Ideal Husband (performed 1895, published 1898; play) The Importance of Being Earnest (performed 1895, published 1898; play) De Profundis (written 1897, published variously 1905, 1908, 1949, 1962; epistle) The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898, poem)
Wilde’s place in English literature These writings would have secured Wilde only a minor place in literature, but his status is elevated by his notoriety. Bohemianism was rampant and, with it, the notion that artists and writers were not the sages of mankind or incarnations of morality but denizens of an underworld with mores different from those of the majority. Such artists and writers were experimenters with life and, often, exponents of dangerous alternatives. This clash is found everywhere in the 1890 s as artists sought to shock the society in which they worked. The motto of literature in this decade was épater le bourgeois, “affront the middle classes. ” It was the artist’s duty to rebel against previously sacred orthodoxies. Wilde danced in the no man’s land between respectability and outlawry and, in the last phase of his life, criminality.
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was born in Dublin in a highly cultured milieu Father - distinguished surgeon Family - Anglo-Protestant Studied in Trinity College, Dublin. received a scholarship to Magdalen College at Oxford came under the influence of the doctrine of aestheticism and its prophet, Walter Pater.
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) The aim of art, according to Pater, was to recover the aesthetic glories of the Renaissance and transplant them into 1890 s England. Art for art’s sake was the doctrine of the aesthetes. “All that I desire to point out is the general principle that life imitates art far more than art imitates life. ” Wilde wrote in “The Decay of Lying” that lies are preferable to truth because “Lies are more beautiful than truth. ”
“The Decay of Lying” Wilde wrote in “The Decay of Lying” that lies are preferable to truth because “Lies are more beautiful than truth. ” a work in favor of lying as a high form of creative artifice. depicts two young aesthetes having a relaxed but hightoned conversation. The more radical of the two, Vivian, is clearly Wilde himself. Vivian enunciates three doctrines: that life imitates art far more than the reverse, that nature also imitates art, and that lying is the proper aim of art. For Wilde, artifice—lying—raised art above mere Realism, which he despised.
Wilde’s style Wilde had the best scholarly credentials of almost any great writer since Milton, yet no one wore learning more lightly than Oscar or wore his poet’s garb with more style. He threw himself into the London literary world and was a prominent figure in Paris and America. Above all, he threw himself into the world of publicity, gossip sheets, newspapers, and photography. All these enhanced the Wildean image. The green carnations in the buttonhole, the elaborate dress, the flowing hair, the cosmetics—all were justified as a cult of Hellenism, which Wilde had studied. He was the embodiment of what was called “gilded youth. ”
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pinkflowering thorn. From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame-like as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussoresilk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive.
Epigrams “The English have really everything in common with the Americans, except, of course, language. ” A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her. A man is very apt to complain of the ingratitude of those who have risen far above him. Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much. Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination. Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing. At twilight, nature is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets.
Epigrams Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative. Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months. It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is fatal. One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation. Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go. True friends stab you in the front. We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
Epigrams sinner has a future. Every saint has a past and every The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. . . I can resist everything but temptation. Women are made to be loved, not understood. Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes. There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.
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