George Bernard Shaw

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW: (1856 – 1950)

In: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/audiointerviews/profilepages/shawg1.shtml

Profº Glauco Fratric – Literatura e Cultura dos Povos de Língua Inglesa II In: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/audiointerviews/profilepages/shawg2.shtml Born in Dublin of middle-class but impoverished stock, Shaw was forced to leave school at 15 to take a job as a clerk. His father became an alcoholic and in 1872 his mother left home, going to London with her 2 daughters. Shaw followed them there in 1876. In London, Shaw regularly went to the British Museum in order to educate himself, a fact which may partly account for the originality and independence of his thinking. In the mid-1880s, he began to be active in the Socialist movement, becoming a noted orator and an influential member of the recently-founded Fabian Society, an influential group of middle-class socialists who sought to transform society by nonrevolutionary means. In 1889, he edited and contributed to Fabian Essays in Socialism. He also became famous for his music, drama and art criticism. Shaw was quick to see the importance of Henrik Ibsen, the pioneering Norwegian dramatist who used the theatre to expose social issues. Ibsen's influence is apparent in Shaw's first play, Widowers' Houses (1892), which attacked slum landlordism in London. His second, Mrs Warren's Profession (1894), tackled organised prostitution and was banned as obscene. Other plays followed, all of which displayed the characteristic 'Shavian' mix of witty irony and moral seriousness.

Profº Glauco Fratric – Literatura e Cultura dos Povos de Língua Inglesa II Shaw's comic touch is seen at its best in Pygmalion (1913), which was adapted as the musical comedy and film My Fair Lady. But the play also addresses important issues of class, social power and even sexual politics in the relationship between the Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle and her teacher, the middle class Professor Henry Higgins. Shaw's productivity dried up temporarily during World War I, which he saw as a crude struggle between greedy imperial powers. In Heartbreak House (1920), he condemned the spiritual bankruptcy of his generation. Back to Methuselah (1921) was more optimistic, setting out Shaw's theory of creative evolution in a sequence of parable plays. In 1923, Shaw produced what many regard as his masterpiece, Saint Joan, for which he received the 1925 Nobel Prize for Literature. Witty yet deeply moving, the play depicts Joan of Arc as a mystic visionary and also as a plain-speaking peasant girl. Throughout his long career, Shaw always used his plays as a vehicle for his ideas. He was adept at blurring the distinctions between high drama and comedy to show simultaneously the absurdity and the seriousness of life. 'Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh,' he wrote in The Doctor's Dilemma (1906). Although his later work is not considered to be of the same standard, Shaw continued to write into his 90s and was always in the public eye. All his plays were accompanied by extended prefaces which persuasively and influentially set out the ideas contained in the plays. His letters are considered to be among the best in the English language.

Profº Glauco Fratric – Literatura e Cultura dos Povos de Língua Inglesa II

Main Works

Plays Unpleasant and Pleasant (1898) Caesar and Cleopatra (1901) Man and Superman (1905) Major Barbara (1905) The Doctor's Dilemma (1906) Androcles and the Lion (1912) Pygmalion (1913) Heartbreak House (1920) Back to Methuselah (1922) Saint Joan (1923) The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928) Selected Prose (1953) In: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/audiointerviews/profilepages/shawg2.shtml

Profº Glauco Fratric – Literatura e Cultura dos Povos de Língua Inglesa II

•A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education. •A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing. •Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them. •An American has no sense of privacy. He does not know what it means.There is no such thing in the country. •Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men. •Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.

Profº Glauco Fratric – Literatura e Cultura dos Povos de Língua Inglesa •England and America are two countriesIIseparated by a common language.

•Gambling promises the poor what property performs for the rich--something for nothing. •If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience. •Lack of money is the root of all evil.

•Martyrdom is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability. •Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it. In: http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/1317.html

Profº Glauco Fratric – Literatura e Cultura dos Povos de Língua Inglesa II

Henrik Ibsen – Um inimigo do povo - En Folkefiende  

 

Ibsen: um inimigo do povo Henrik Ibsen o grande dramaturgo que veio da Escandinávia, morto em 1906, foi um dos revolucionários do teatro moderno na medida em que colocou em cena não um mundo idealizado, povoado de heróis e heroínas sobre-humanas, mas sim os sentimentos resultantes das desavenças comuns a maioria das pessoas da classe média do tempo dele.Deste modo foi considerado o Shakespeare do drama moderno, superando o dualismo existente entre o artificial (o que se passava no placo) e a realidade (a vidas secreta das pessoas da platéia), tornando a representação dos verdadeiros dramas íntimos dos seus personagens tão interessante como antes, em épocas anteriores, fora o artificial. Fonte: http://educaterra.terra.com.br/voltaire/cultura/2005/11/08/001.htm “[Ibsen] (...) is credited with being the first major dramatist to write tragedy about ordinary people in prose”. (DRABBLE & STRINGER, 2007, p. 356)

Profº Glauco Fratric – Literatura e Cultura dos Povos de Língua Inglesa II

Crítica sobre Shaw 



[Shaw] produced a series of remarkable and controversial weekly articles (...) voicing his impatience with the artificiality of the London theatre and pleading for the performance of plays dealing with contemporary social and moral problems (DRABBLE & STRINGER, 2007, p. 647) The Irishman George Bernard Shaw was the leading figure in English drama from the 1890s until his death in 1950. He was well known for his use of the theatre to discuss issues, from pacifism to Ireland, and from prostitution to language itself. (CARTER & McRAE, 1996, p. 176)

Profº Glauco Fratric – Literatura e Cultura dos Povos de Língua Inglesa II

Crítica sobre Shaw 

(...) he edited and contributed to Fabian Essays in socialism (1889) and wrote many tracts setting down his socialist and colectivist principles. He was a freethinker, a supporter of women’s rights, and na advocate of equality of income, the abolition of private property, and a radical change in the voting system. He also campaigned for the simplification of spelling and punctuation and the reform of the English alphabet. (DRABBLE & STRINGER, 2007, p. 648)

Profº Glauco Fratric – Literatura e Cultura dos Povos de Língua Inglesa II

Detalhes sobre a ortografia do Modern English

 







MODERN ENGLISH (a apartir de 1500) Enquanto que o Middle English se caracterizou por uma acentuada diversidade de dialetos, o Modern English representou um período de padronização e unificação da língua. O advento da imprensa em 1475 e a criação de um sistema postal em 1516 possibilitaram a disseminação do dialeto de Londres - já então o centro político, social e econômico da Inglaterra. A disponibilidade de materiais impressos também deu impulso à educação, trazendo o alfabetismo ao alcance da classe média. A reprodução e disseminação de uma ortografia finalmente padronizada, entretanto, coincidiu com o período em que ocorria ainda a Great Vowel Shift. As mudanças ocorridas na pronúncia a partir de então, não foram acompanhadas de reformas ortográficas, o que revela um caráter conservador da cultura inglesa. Temos aí a origem da atual falta de correlação entre pronúncia e ortografia no inglês moderno. D’Eugenio assim explica o que ocorreu: O processo de padronização da língua inglesa iniciou em princípios do século 16 com o advento da litografia, e acabou fixando-se nas presentes formas ao longo do século 18, com a publicação dos dicionários de Samuel Johnson (figura ao lado) em 1755, Thomas Sheridan em 1780 e John Walker em 1791. Desde então, a ortografia do inglês mudou em apenas pequenos detalhes, enquanto que a sua pronúncia sofreu grandes transformações. O resultado disto é que hoje em dia temos um sistema ortográfico baseado na língua como ela era falada no século 18, sendo usado para representar a pronúncia da língua no século 20. (319, minha tradução) Da mesma forma que os primeiros dicionários serviram para padronizar a ortografia, os primeiros trabalhos descrevendo a estrutura gramatical do inglês influenciaram o uso da língua, incorporando conceitos gramaticais das línguas latinas e trazendo uma uniformidade gramatical. Durante os séculos 16 e 17 ocorreu o surgimento e a incorporação definitiva do verbo auxiliar do para frases interrogativas e negativas. A partir do século 18 passou a ser considerado incorreto o uso de dupla negação numa mesma frase como, por exemplo: She didn't go neither.

In: http://www.sk.com.br/sk-enhis.html , acesso em 05/03/2008.