TRIAL TEST

• Engels
• Middelbare school
• vwo
• Leerjaar 6

TRIAL TEST 

Themes and quotes explained

The importance of Being Earnest

Earnestness / (dis)honesty

"Lady Bracknell: “My nephew, you seem to be displaying signs of triviality.”

Jack: “On the contrary, Aunt Augusta, I’ve now realized for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest.”"

The nature of Marriage: Business or pleasure?

"JACK: I am in love with Gwendolen. I have come up to town expressly to propose to her. 

ALGERNON: I thought you had come up for pleasure? . . . I call that business. 

JACK: How utterly unromantic you are! 

ALGERNON: I really don’t see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. "

Earnestness 

Seriousness or sincerity is the great enemy of morality in this book. One of the play’s paradoxes is the impossibility of actually being either earnest or moral while claiming to be so. The characters who embrace triviality and wickedness are the ones who may have the greatest chance of attaining seriousness and virtue.

Satirical play

Oscar Wilde's, “The Importance of Being Earnest”, play carefully uses satire as a didactic tool to mask the underlying social commentary with the help of comedy through characters theme and dialogue. Wilde uses satire to ridicule class and wealth, marriage and the ignorance of the Victorian Age.

"The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one’s clean linen in public."

-Algernon.

"It is awfully hard work doing nothing."

-Algernon.

"Gwendolen, it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me?"

- Jack.

To Kill a Mockingbird

"It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived." -Scout, chapter 11. 4.

Atticus Finch

Atticus Finch is seen as one of literature's finest father figures: his warmth and honesty towards his daughter Scout Finch, coupled with his pragmatic idealism to fight injustice fosters life long values of truth and compassion in readers of all ages.

Gothic Fiction

To Kill a Mockingbird is primarily an example of Southern Gothic fiction in that it takes place in the South, contains both dark and comedic elements, uses Southern vernacular, features exaggerated characters, and references the supernatural. Southern Gothic is a genre that became popular in the first half of the twentieth century, as a sub-genre of the American Gothic.

A preoccupation with the unresolved past informs many Southern Gothic novels, as characters are forced to confront the South’s legacy of racism, slavery, and violence, often in the form of either literal or figurative ghosts. In Mockingbird, the character of Boo Radley functions as a living ghost, both in terms of his physical appearance and his name. The novel’s plot centers on an act of violence, and the town’s deep-seated racism informs the outcome. However, To Kill a Mockingbird is not as gruesome as other examples of the genre, and Lee’s characters are more sympathetic than in many Southern Gothic novels, whose authors exaggerate their characters’ defects for comedic purposes.

A preoccupation with the unresolved past informs many Southern Gothic novels, as characters are forced to confront the South’s legacy of racism, slavery, and violence, often in the form of either literal or figurative ghosts. In Mockingbird, the character of Boo Radley functions as a living ghost, both in terms of his physical appearance and his name. The novel’s plot centers on an act of violence, and the town’s deep-seated racism informs the outcome. However, To Kill a Mockingbird is not as gruesome as other examples of the genre, and Lee’s characters are more sympathetic than in many Southern Gothic novels, whose authors exaggerate their characters’ defects for comedic purposes.

Brave New World

Title

The title, Brave New World, is referring to a wonderful new world, that is perfect, and undisturbed. However as the novel progresses, it is apparent, that the world is not so perfect after all, so the meaning changes into, a world that will hopefully change into a wonderful one.

Technology

Technology should be bettered so as to create a happy, superficial world through

things such as the ‘feelies’.

Technology

Science is censored and limited because the fundamental basis for science is the

search for truth, which is a threatening to the State’s control.

Science

Science is censored and limited because the fundamental basis for science is the

search for truth, which is a threatening to the State’s control.

Science

“It isn’t only art that is incompatible with happiness, it’s also science. Science is dangerous, we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.”

Genre

Utopia becoming a Dystopia. Science fiction  Huxley's novel is a novel of Utopia, and a science-fiction novel. In both kinds of books the portrayal of individual characters tends to take a back seat to the portrayal of the society they live in. In some ways, the brave new world itself becomes the book's main character. 

Quote

“Till at last the child's mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child's mind. And not the child's mind only. The adult's mind too—all his life long. The mind that judges and desires and decides—made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions... Suggestions from the State.”

The Help

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee's classic novel about a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman in a Southern town in the 1930s, was published in 1960, two years before The Help opens. Basically, in this novel, reading To Kill a Mockingbird is a hint that a character is one of the good guys. Skeeter finishes it while she's getting her hair defrizzed with the Shinalator, as she gets all dolled up for her first date with Stuart. At Aibileen's request, Skeeter gets her a copy of it from the library. Minny notices that Johnny Foote is also reading it, and admires the fact, because it's a book in which black people are represented in a time and place where that was pretty rare.

Interestingly, Skeeter specifically identifies with Boo Radley, a character in Mockingbird. After being fired from her position as editor of the Jackson Junior League newsletter, she's driving around upset. She knows she was fired because she's suspected of being in favor of racial integration, and because she decorated Junior League president Hilly Holbrook's lawn with toilets. She thinks, "I've become one of those people who prowl around at night in their cars. God, I am the town's Boo Radley, just like in To Kill a Mockingbird" (chapter 27).

Historical Fiction

The story is made up, but based on actual experiences and REAL historical events occur throughout the book.

 "There's no difference between ... government laws and Hilly building Aibileen a bathroom in the garage." (Jim Crow)

Miss Skeeter, Chapter 13  

A Clockwork Orange

As Anthony Burgess writes in the introduction, the title refers to a person who "has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State."

In other words it stands for the "application of a mechanistic morality to a living organism oozing with juice and sweetness." So, basically, it refers to a person who is robotic behaviorally but one that is, in all other respects, human. The title is significant not only because Burgess references it about, but also because it sums up what threatens our protagonist-narrator.

Dystopia

A Clockwork Orange is a short dystopian or anti-utopian novel. Such a novel is concerned with the opposite of an ideal society.  

Dystopia

Not only the inclusion of ultra-violence in everyday life but also Alex’s legitimizing his acts of ultra-violence through emphasizing that he gets pleasure from them is a dystopian element in the novel presenting a more nightmarish vision: Man can commit crimes just because he takes pleasure from them(p. 25). Alex associates violence and music providing him with similar kinds of aesthetic pleasure

Dystopia/Satire

To turn a decent young man into a piece of clockwork should not, surely, be seen as any triumph

for any government, save one that boasts of its repressiveness (p. 87). The government, for the author

is “recruiting brutal young roughs for the police [and] proposing debilitating and will-sapping

techniques of conditioning (p. 89).

Satire

A Clockwork Orange may be seen in part as an attack on communism, given the novel’s extremely negative portrayal of a government that seeks to solve social problems by removing freedom of choice. However, A Clockwork Orange shouldn’t be understood simply as a critique of the Soviet Union or of communism, because the dystopian world of the novel draws just as much on elements of English and American society that Burgess detested. Burgess felt that the socialistic British welfare state was too willing to sacrifice individual liberty in favor of social stability. He regarded American law enforcement as hopelessly corrupt and violent, referring to it as “an alternative criminal body.” Each of these targets gets ridiculed in A Clockwork Orange, but Burgess’s most pointed satire is reserved for the psychological movement known as behaviorism.