Episode 43: The Literary World of Oscar Wilde
On today's episode of The Literary Life, our hosts, Cindy Rollins, Thomas Banks and Angelina Stanford introduce us to Oscar Wilde and our next literary selection, his satirical play The Importance of Being Earnest. They begin with a discussion on the purpose of art and literature in depicting truth without preaching it at us, making so many connections along the way. Thomas gives us a biographical sketch of Oscar Wilde, both his life and work. Angelina expands on the emphasis on respectability in Victorian society. Cindy talks about her first experience with reading Oscar Wilde and the accessibility of his plays.
Commonplace Quotes:For your face I have exchanged all faces.
Philip Larkin
Just as conscience, or the moral sense, recognizes duty; just as the intellect deals with the truth; so is it the part of taste alone to form us of BEAUTY. And Poesy is the handmaiden but of Taste. Yet we would not be misunderstood. This handmaiden is not forbidden to moralize\u2013in her own fashion. She is not forbidden to depict\u2013but to reason and preach, of virtue. As, of this latter, conscience recognizes the obligation, so intellect teaches the expediency, while taste contents herself with displaying the beauty waging war with vice merely on the ground of its inconsistency with fitness, harmony, proportion\u2013in a word with beauty.
Edgar Allan Poe
E Tenebris (Out of the Shadows)The diversity of Ruskin\u2019s concerns was not simply the product of a restlessly questioning mind. He was convinced of the vital connections between things, as they bind and blend themselves together. The Intellectual separations that characterize the modern professionalization of knowledge seemed to him corrosive, a denial of what unites different levels of human experience\u2014spiritual and aesthetic, political and scientific, historical and contemporary. His argument is always that knowledge connects. He wants readers to these connections, as clearly and comprehensively, as they can. This is an exercise in humility, since it confirms the imperfections and limitations of our vision, and the mystery of what lies beyond it. But the attempt to see clearly enables us to celebrate what is large than our own lives. His capacity for admiration makes him the most magnanimous of critics. It can also make him the angriest, the he witnesses the betrayal of human history and human potential. Ruskin\u2019s intention is always to teach us to use our eyes, and these \xa0remains the best reason or reading his work. He will show you how to look at the world afresh.
Dinah Birch
by Oscar Wilde
Come down, O Christ, and help me! reach thy hand,
For I am drowning in a stormier sea
Than Simon on thy lake of Galilee:
The wine of life is spilt upon the sand,
My heart is as some famine-murdered land,
Whence all good things have perished utterly,
And well I know my soul in Hell must lie
If I this night before God\u2019s throne should stand.
\u2018He sleeps perchance, or rideth to the chase,
Like Baal, when his prophets howled that name
From morn to noon on Carmel\u2019s smitten height.\u2019
Nay, peace, I shall behold before the night,
The feet of brass, the robe more white than flame,
The wounded hands, the weary human face.
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Treasures of the Snow by Patricia St. John
Little Pilgrim\u2019s Progress by Helen Taylor
The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe
Marius the Epicurean by Walter Pater
The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde
An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde
Esther Waters by George Moore
Tess of the D\u2019Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
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