The American Stage and the Great Depression: A Cultural by Mark Fearnow

By Mark Fearnow

The yank level and the good melancholy: A Cultural background of the gruesome proposes a correlation among the divided ''mind'' of the United States throughout the melancholy and well known level works of the period, that are interpreted as theatrical reflections of melancholy culture's feel of being trapped among a discredited prior and a nightmarish destiny. the writer analyzes the Nineteen Thirties as an period of the gruesome, within which the irreconcilable have been compelled into annoying and dynamic coexistence.

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How to Win Friends and Influence People (1937) defined a new way for success: through cooperation rather than competition. Shirley Temple's perpetual screen self was persistently forced to suffer deprivation and heartbreak but eventually found happiness through her kindness to others. Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz (1939) achieved her own wish, not by pursuing it at the expense of her fellows, but by sacrificing her own desires in order to help her friends; her reward was the discovery of the companionship and love she had been seeking from the start.

Kayser sees the grotesque performing what amounts to a mystical task: performing a sort of exorcism of a culture's despair by first naming a horror and then deflating it with the comic. He also posits a "failed grotesque" that performs a malignant action by invoking a horror from out of commonplace experience and then leaving it undefeated, a type of "play with the absurd" that only makes us afraid of the "ghosts" it has "invoked" (p. 187). : MIT Press, 1968); this book, although written in 1940, was not published until 1968 because it did not conform with approved methods of Soviet criticism.

The most hopeless state into which the human mind can fall" (p. 122). Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, translated by Ulrich Weisstein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963); first published in Germany as Das Groteske: seine Gestaltung in Malerei und Dichtung (Hamburg: Gerhard Stalling Verlag, 1957). Kayser sees the grotesque performing what amounts to a mystical task: performing a sort of exorcism of a culture's despair by first naming a horror and then deflating it with the comic.

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