Kitchen Sink Realism, By Michael Billington

A particularly effective element of the production was the use of costume. The costumes exposed the time period, transporting the audience back to 1981, immediately involving me in the story. Costume represented the social class the characters belonged to. Mr and Mrs Lyons were rich and had a high social status, their costume established their character; Mr. Lyons was wearing a suit and Mrs. Lyons wore tights and uniform. In contrast, the Johnson family were living in poverty, and this is also shown through the usage of costume. I as audience felt empathy for Mrs Johnson as through costume I could see her financial struggle.

The first essay, “The Roles of Women in British Drama,” represents my first exposure to a new genre of literature. The essay was also one of my first formal and interpretative essays at the college level. As a woman and a student of literature, I feel a special connection to this essay’s topic of women’s roles in literature. In addition, this essay shows my “knowledge of the social, political, philosophical, and religious forces that influence authors and the people they write about” (Oral/Portfolio). After reading some of the most prominent British plays of the twentieth century, I observed a discontinuity in the roles of women in this genre. Sadly, women’s roles in literature were very similar to their role in society. During the twentieth century, women were still trying and failing to emerge out of the roles they had been cast in by a male dominated society. Even though women were almost always portrayed as inferior to men, I found a strong exception to this stereotype through the role of Thomasina. I admire Thomasina’s intelligence and wit, but I truly admire Tom Stoppard for creating this character.

I feel the article explores the political conflicts that arise when aspirations collide across a generational divide marked by sharply different political agendas. The character Tricia is a young, single mother whose family and financial difficulties reflect the circumstances of the urban poor. Furthermore, she delivers a compelling performance in scenes that reflect just how city policies affect individuals.

The discussion about American actors and their inferiority complex also highlight the centrality of power in the film. There is a debate about how Shakespeare causes some of the best actors to become self-conscious as they have been told ‘they cannot do Shakespeare’. There is a struggle for American actors as they ‘feel inferior to the British’ and these hurdles that must be overcome by the American actors highlight the significance of power in the play, and in the production of the play.

The working class in this film are forced to endure agonising labour in extremely dangerous environments whilst the upper class, the ‘sons’ are free to live at their will. The dystopic setting of the ‘depths’ becomes evident through Lang’s use of symbolism when the dictator’s son, Freder, journeys to the depths and starts to see the workers being eaten up by the machines in the scene ‘Slaves of the Means of Production” (14.58-17.52). This symbolises the dystopic society in which workers do not have the right to be safe. This idea forms a contextual connection to the 1920’s Weimar Republic where there were two distinct classes, the conservative elite, who were free to live at their will, and the workers who were forced to endure labour with no guarantee for safety. Through the contextual connections of political reform and the shared perspectives of dystopian societies the quote “the object of power is power” is strongly supported by George Orwell’s ‘1984’ and Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis’.

In the words of Karl Marx, the founding father of Marxism, Marxism principally believes that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” In essence, Marx asserts that every day is a tale of conflict between society’s upper and lower class. While controversial in the real world, this notion is not far-fetched in the realm of literature. For example, Alice Walker’s short story “Everyday Use” shows prominent signs of tension between classes. When examined from a Marxist perspective, Walker’s characters in “Everyday Use” highlight how each class values items and how survival needs and societal expectations differ among classes.

Analyse how Nineteen Eighty Four and Pleasantville imaginatively portray individuals who challenge the established values of their time.

    One of the best ways to fully understand an era is to study its literature. The printed word has the incredible capacity to both reflect and shape the hopes, fears, and ideologies of the time. This is very evident when reading literature from 1960's America, a turbulent period in the history of our country. While the authors' styles are very different, there are definite thematic patterns and characteristics evident in many of their works. For one, there is a prevalent concept of the unenlightened masses. This concept serves as a foil for the enlightened few often represented as the main characters and more specifically as the authors themselves. There also

It was not uncommon in 1920’s and 30’s film and literature to allude to the ostentatious capitalist figures of the times. Figures like

Contemporary realism can be defined as a straightforward realistic approach of representation. This play does exactly that. This play takes place during a civil war, and Nottage gives realistic examples of what it was like to live as a female during that time. To understand why the characters act they way they do, you have to see what shaped them into the person they are. In contemporary realism, the characters are all products of their society. The leading female characters in this play are Mama Nadi, Sophie, Salima, and Josephine. Before the war, all four of these women had happy lives filled with content, but in the heat of the war all of them were stripped of something they treasured. For example, Salima’s baby was murdered, and Josephine was taken away from her family who were the head of their tribe. The way these characters acted during the play was completely affected by their past. Another characteristic of realism is the belief that experiences are conditioned by society, and no one is truly free until they understand what is holding them back.

Life in the Iron Mills is a novella that is hard to classify as a specific genre. The genre that fits the most into this novella is realism, because of the separation of classes, the hard work that a person has to put into their every day life to try and make a difference, and the way society influences the actions of people and their relationships. However, no matter what genre is specifically chosen, there will be other genres present that contradict the genre of choice. While the novella shows romanticism, naturalism, and realism, this essay is specifically centered around realism. The ultimate theme in Rebecca Davis’ Life in the Iron Mills is the separation of classes and gender. It is the separation of classes when the people in the

Written in 1996, Fight Club expresses the issues of its time with Palahniuk using a Marxist lens to express the evils of capitalist society in relation to loss of identity in a society built on achieving relative gains with those at the top benefiting at the expense of those at the bottom. The 1990s was a decade of excess , where people became fixated on consumerism, which, characterised the period as one of social disconnection, recklessness and greed , destroying moral values and widening the gap between classes, as financially the “top 1% were worth as much as the combined worth of the bottom 90%” . Through homodiegetic narration, Palahniuk voices his frustrations of the struggle of an individual against repression from a capitalist society through the persistence of consumerism.

The concept of Social realism as a film genre is to portray the ‘real life’ of a working-class society. Social realism films depict the social, political and economic injustices’ that influence and impact people in society (Taylor, 2006). Social realism is raw, and gives the audience a true indication of what life is like (Lay, 2002).

Another example that highlights the conflict between the classes in the story is the scene where Tyler splices pornography into the films he airs. He uses his position as a projectionist in the movie theater to include split seconds of pornography into movies watched by the upper and middle class people. He enjoyed doing it because he had nothing to loose, he was the “the pawn of the world, everybody’s trash” (Palahniuk 106). He included pornography in the movies the upper class people watched just to get back at them by exposing them to pornography without their knowledge and consent. Exposing them to pornography without their knowledge was a way Tyler used to reverse the conventional roles of the society. The working class was proving to the upper class that they could oppress them if they want to and this was done through Tyler’s actions. Tyler used his position to do as he wished and the upper class people could do nothing about it rather, they watched the pornography in the movies.

The film seeks to highlight a progressive society in England during Margaret Thatcher’s entrepreneurship and opportunism era (Mohanram 1996). Britain