Word: ibsens
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...APRIL 1900 the eighteen-year-old James Jovce wrote a worshipful review of Henrik Ibsen's last drama, When We Dead Awaken. He ranked the play with the greatest of the author's work and called the author himself "one of the world's great men before whom criticism can make but feeble show." Ibsen, reading the review, wrote to thank the young Dubliner with words which, Joyce vowed. "I shall keep in my heart all my life...
What makes Ibsen of primary importance for twentieth century literature--what Joyce called "his lofty, impersonal power"--is driven to its furthest conclusion in When We Dead Awaken. Subtitled "A Dramatic Epilogue" because it concludes a long series of socially critical dramas beginning with A Doll's House, the play also marks the epilogue to Ibsen's development as an artist. From the intense portrayal of the failures of bourgeois society, Ibsen's discontent has flooded over into a despairing view of art itself and of the artist as a man who has not lived...
Like Exiles, the great play which his young reviewer would later create, Ibsen's last work is a story of homelessness. The aging sculptor Arnold Rubek has returned with his young wife Maja to a coastal resort in his "homeland." But Rubek's life and work have subsided into boredom and mediocrity. His master-piece, a representation of the idea of resurrection in the form of a beautiful young woman, is finished, and its model, the only woman he could ever have loved, has left him. His new wife, his new house, and all the belated rewards which bourgeois society...
When We Dead Awaken by Henrik Ibsen. Loeb Ex. 7:30. April 13 through 15. Free...
...Ibsen's ardent disciple, Shaw, saw women as serene, witty goddesses of reason, but he usually defined them solely by their relationships to men. Candida's final choice is to stay with the bumbling preacher husband who needs her rather than flee with the fiery bohemian poet who can fend for himself. There are exceptions. St. Joan wins martyrdom, and Major Barbara wins control of a munitions empire, both rather atypical social pursuits. And that tells us something. Drama is a reflexive, not an innovative art form, and a playwright can rarely advance much beyond the boundaries that...