'The Birthday Party' by Harold Pinter is a study of power- where it comes from and how it is wielded.' Discuss with particular reference to Act One.

English Coursework Harold Pinter and Power By Jodie Gloster 'The Birthday Party' by Harold Pinter is a study of power- where it comes from and how it is wielded.' Discuss with particular reference to Act One. The Birthday Party is a play right written by Harold Pinter. The play is based on power. The dictionary definition of power is' The ability to act or produce an effect' or 'possession of control, authority, or influence over others' In the play there are several characters. These include Petey, a man in his sixties and his wife Meg, who is also in her sixties. Stanley is a man in his late thirties and a guest at Petey's and Meg's hotel. Goldberg and McCann then later become guests. Goldberg is a man in his fifties and McCann is a man of thirty. Lulu occasionally visits in the play; she is a young lady in her twenties. In the play right everyone seems to have power over everyone at some point apart from Meg and Lulu. From the start of Act One Petey pays no attention to Meg. He reads his newspaper and acts really disinterested towards her. An example of this is on page 10. Meg says "What does it say" and Petey simply replies "Nothing much." He makes her feel like she has to make conversation with her. This type of power is used without any effort. It is gained by silence towards the other person. You can imagine this one stage with Meg being very enthusiastic and

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  • Subject: Linguistics, Classics and related subjects
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"Evacuation was a great success" Do you agree or disagree with this interpretation? Explain your answer using the sources and knowledge from your own studies.

"Evacuation was a great success" Do you agree or disagree with this interpretation? Explain your answer using the sources and knowledge from your own studies. Evacuation was seen as both a success and a failure. It succeeded by saving many peoples lives but it failed because it was badly organised with many children arriving in the wrong places. I agree with the statement that evacuation was a success as it provided safe homes for Britain's wartime children. Source B gives evidence as to why it was a success. It shows how the children were happy, they saw evacuation as an exciting adventure and majority of them enjoyed it. The source also shows a lot of children making there way to the station; the Government were able to evacuate around 1.5 million people, saving many lives. The source is a photograph taken at the time; it is a primary source which means we can trust it. However, all the people in the photo are looking at the camera so it looks as if it has been posed and possibly used as propaganda. Furthermore, source D shows how evacuation was a success. It shows some evacuees taking a bath; they all look happy which is a sign to show that the children enjoyed themselves. The children also look very clean and healthy; this was very common for evacuees as it was a result of the clean country life. The source is a photo so it is dependable however it was used by the

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Arthur Miller’s Death Of A Salesman

Arthur Miller's Death Of A Salesman At the beginning of the play, Arthur Miller establishes Willy Loman as a troubled and misguided man, at heart a salesman and a dreamer with a preoccupation with success. However, Miller makes equally apparent that Willy Loman is no successful man. Although in his sixties, he is still a travelling salesman bereft of any stable location or occupation, and clings only to his dreams and ideals. There is a strong core of resentment within Willy Loman, whose actions assumes a more glorious and idealised past. Willy sentimentalises the neighbourhood as it was years ago, and mourns the days working for Frank Wagner, while his son Howard Wagner fails to appreciate him. Miller presents Willy as a strong and boisterous man with great audacity but little energy to support that impression of vitality. He is perpetually weary and exhibits signs of dementia, contradicting himself within his conversations and showing some memory loss. Linda, in contrast, displays little of the boisterous intensity of Willy. Rather, she is dependable and kind, perpetually attempting to smooth out conflicts that Willy might encounter. Linda has a similar longing for an idealised past, but has learned to suppress her dreams and her dissatisfaction with her husband and sons. Miller indicates that she is a woman with deep regrets about her life; she must continually reconcile

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In what ways does Miller use Willy's last day to raise questions about the validity of the American Dream?

Henry Bain In what ways does Miller use Willy's last day to raise questions about the validity of the American Dream? Death of a salesman primarily deals with the importance of consumerism and materialism, surpassing seemingly antiquated views and in this case, destroying a man who has failed in the attainment of "The American Dream." The fact that Willy dies in the play shows the effect that the delusion of unattainable greatness has on society and contradicts those who endorse it. Willy's financial status leads him to madness, talking constantly to himself and switching constantly between images of the present and past. He is more at ease with the potential and the once opportunities of the past than the difficulties and now missed opportunities of the present. He tells Charley in act 2 that after all the trains, and the appointments, and the years, "you end up worth more dead than alive." Willy seeks to justify everything in monetary terms, going as far as putting a price on his life. Charley tells Willy that no man is worth "nothin' dead," showing that a successful man can see that there is more to life than money, yet a man like Willy is constantly reminded of his inadequacy and can see nothing beyond material gain. Willy, who has failed to achieve what he wanted, lives vicariously through his sons, encouraging them to pursue money rather than happiness. When

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Account for the continuing popularity of ‘Death of a Salesman’ as a stage play.

Account for the continuing popularity of 'Death of a Salesman' as a stage play. 'Death of a Salesman' is a play that has come to redefine the concept of modern tragedy, whilst simultaneously enrapturing audiences around the globe. A challenge to Philip Sydney's judgement that 'tragedy concerneth a high fellow'i, 'Death of a Salesman' is the tragedy of the common man, tragedy of Willy low man. 'One of the major texts in our time'ii, 'Death of a Salesman' does not follow the traditional Aristotelian definition of a tragedy. This has ignited passionate debate among critics as to whether it is a tragedy at all, whilst ensuring its position and popularity as the epitome of what has been dubbed 'modern tragedy'. It is not the fall of a great man through a predestined flaw (hamartia), and it has been argued that Willy even lacks the self-knowledge to be a true tragic hero. Willy is a man of 'massive dreams', not high stature, although Biff calls him a 'prince', drawing comparison with Hamlet. His self-knowledge is present, countering those who claim to the contrary. It is clearly contained in the lines 'I'm fat. I'm very - foolish' (of himself) and 'I'm always in a race with the junk yard' (of payment of manufactured goods). His flaw lies in his determination to see material wealth as the only path to success. He is swallowed by 'the corporate dream machine'iii. The idea of the

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The Salem Witch Trials

Ragan 1 The Salem Witch Trials The year 1692 was a time of horror in Salem, MA. A witch-hunt took place after a group of girls became hysterical while playing in the woods and it was proposed that they were bewitched. These girls accused older women of consorting the devil. Before the trials were over, 300 men and women had been accused. By the time the chaotic witch-hunt was finished, little enthusiasm for the persecution of witches remained in Massachusetts and the superstition of witchcraft ended the trials (Sheffield). The trouble originated in the home of Reverend Samuel Parris who was the minister of the local church. Several girls in the community started spending their afternoons there in the kitchen with Tituba, the Rev. Parris' West Indian slave, to learn magic. The girls had been up to some mischief for some time and were curious about their futures, so they read each others palms until Abigail Williams spread the word about how Tituba could float an egg white in a glass and this unusual practice could tell " what trade their sweethearts should be of" ( Watson 116). As the girls grew closer to one another Ragan 2 something seemed to have come over them. They were no longer acting like good quite Puritan maidens but more like something possessed (Roberts 26). On January 20,1962 nine year old Elizabeth Parris and eleven year old Abigail Williams began to

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Brick says that 'Mendacity is a system we live in. Liquor is one way out, death is another...'. Discuss Williams' treatment of mendacity and truth and a theme in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof'.

Brick says that "Mendacity is a system we live in. Liquor is one way out, death is another...". Discuss Williams' treatment of mendacity and truth and a theme in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof'. 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof' is essentially about Tennessee Williams as a writer exposing universal truths to an unsuspecting audience, by testing social boundaries. The characters in this 1950s patriarchal play are sensationalised and give us an unclear ending to prove to the audience that his issues are something to be debated. The idea of 'mendacity' is Williams' way of microcosmically encompassing society through a central character's role within a family setting. It explores human relationships and attitudes towards one another. Brick is a character facing the effects of being pushed into social limbo in order to achieve a conventionality that simply cannot exist. All of the characters are involved with lies in one form or another. The audience is shown how people lie to placate themselves as the truth can be too difficult to accept. Brick significantly poses the question, 'Who can face the truth? Can you?' Brick's character depicts resignation and capitulation. His own name embodies this; he has assumed the status of a brick as a result of his entire life. Being one of the play's protagonists, he challenges the status quo as society's repressive attitude to 'unnatural

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We shall now attempt to explain the three main parts of a dream in reverse to the order in which they occur in the mind, but in the order that we become consciously aware of them. The Manifest dream

All Dreams Represent Wishes; Their Motive is a Wish and they Represent the satisfaction of It by Martin Pierce. Student No: 1057404 "Dreams, psychologists immediately recognized, are phenomena that offer a means to explore mental structures and processes that are inaccessible to normal waking awareness. By means of careful observation, experimentation, and research, psychologists have found that dreams reveal many important aspects of our mental world. The dynamics of personality, the workings of perception and memory, the interactions of reason and emotion, the complex relations between mental experiences and bodily functions -- these are just some of the important subjects that psychologists have learned more about by studying dreams" (Bulkeley, 1997, p. 2). A dream is the (disguised) fulfillment of a (repressed) wish (Freud, 1900a). This is probably the most concise definition of a dream given by Freud. "A more detailed definition of dreams would have to include such topics as the latent dream content, the dream work and the manifest dream, of which the dream-work is the most 'essential' part. Only through understanding its laws and conditions can we reach the latent dream content which contains the true and disguised wish. The reason behind the generally held view that dreams are invariably wish fulfillments is that dreams come from, and are products of the

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Discuss the Role and Importance of the First "Flashback" Scene in Death of a Salesman.

Discuss the Role and Importance of the First "Flashback" Scene in Death of a Salesman The main point of this scene is to show how Willy feels and what he is thinking. It also explains to the audience the reasons for why Biff's life has been turned upside down and how Willy was connected to this. We are not entirely sure whether all of this is true: I think that Willy changes his memories to how he interprets them. The structure of the scene is a crescendo. Basically it starts off with Willy remembering the best things that he did and how good those days were. Then as he remembers more he recalls all the bad things that happened and that maybe it wasn't such a good time. Everything in his life was going well, he was successful at his job, he had respect, his family looked up to him and his two boys were also doing well. Then Willy's bad memories start to filter through. There were signs that Biff was stealing and was not performing well at school when he takes a football from school without permission and Bernard informs Willy that he is going to flunk maths. We also find out that he is not doing so well at his job as he made out to his sons when he talks to Linda: he is not selling that much when working and that people don't really take him seriously. Probably the main revelation is that we find out that he has had an affair with a woman in Boston while on business.

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The American Dream in Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire

Leon Nepomniatshy American Literature II December 9th, 2002 The American Dream in Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire The American Dream is a central aspect of the plot of the two plays in question. It serves as both the motivation for Stanley's behavior in A Streetcar Named Desire, and Willy Loman's vision that his son Biff refused to uphold in Death of a Salesman. In Miller's play, Willy turned his vision of the American dream into more of a culture. He sincerely believes that the key indicators of success are how much money and brand-name appliances you have, how "well-liked" you are, and how hard you worked to achieve all you've got. His two sons, Happy and more so Biff, are victims of their father's failed vision and his efforts to make himself look good despite his obvious failure (through lying and inflating facts). Biff's view of the American Dream is different from that of Willy's - he wants to define success for himself, and not let success define him, as it did to his father, as his words "I've always made a point of not wasting my life, and every time I come back here I know that all I've done was waste my life" (Baym 2118) indicate. Perhaps, this difference was brought about when Biff found out about his father's affair back at the age of 17, and exclaimed "You fake! You phony little fake!" (Baym 2166) at both his father and the American Dream.

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