Literature - CLEP Humanities

Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit takes place entirely in one room, featuring three people who cannot leave. Reflecting some of Sartre's philosophy, the characters slowly realize that they are dead and in hell. The play closes with the famous final line "Hell is other people."

Christopher Marlowe was an early contemporary of William Shakespeare, and was arguably more popular in his time than Shakespeare. Marlowe's death in 1593 under mysterious circumstances was seen to have cut short a promising literary career. His work continues on, as in his telling of the Faust myth, Doctor Faustus, from 1589.

"Novella" is a diminutive of "novel," and authors will often use the term "novella" to describe a story that falls between a short story and a novel in length. An author will usually choose to do so because he or she believes that a story needs development beyond the length of a short story, but cannot be sustained over the full length of a novel.

Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being features the 1968 Prague spring uprising as a background story for its characters' lives. The novel also discusses many philosophical themes, particularly the low-art known as "kitsch." Kundera's discussion of kitsch helps reflect on the "lightness" in the title of the novel.

T. S. Eliot became one of the masters of Modernist poetry with the publication of his 1915 poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Eliot was even more lauded for his 1922 poem, The Waste Land. Eliot's poems were lengthy ruminations on the alienation of modern society, and he broke with traditional poetic forms by writing each in inventive blank verse.

The poet W.H. Auden had instant success and notoriety with his poems, which featured strict rhyme and metrical schemes, features unusual in the poetry of his time. His "Funeral Blues" was published in 1938, and set to music by the composer Benjamin Britten. "September 1, 1939" was published in October of that same year; it concerns Germany's invasion of Poland and was immediately widely read.

William Shakespeare wrote several historical plays in addition to his comedies and tragedies. The histories focus on English history, especially the Wars of the Roses. The Wars of the Roses were English civil wars that happened in the 1400s.

Beowulf, an epic story of a hero who shares his name with the poem, was originally written in Anglo-Saxon, the ancient forebear of modern English. The poem, written by an unknown author, is one of the earliest extant examples of English literature that survives today.

The Oresteia is the only surviving trilogy of Ancient Greek theater that was written to be performed in one sitting. Its author, Aeschylus, gained fame and prizes for his version of the story of Agamemnon, the hero of the Trojan War who is murdered by his wife Clytemnestra when he arrives home. The plays take their name from the character of Orestes, Agamemnon's son who seeks vengeance for his father's death.

The image of three witches calmly prophesying the future is one of the indelible images of Shakespeare's Macbeth. The titular character's rise to power is conditioned and effected by the witches' proclamations, providing one of the key themes of the play, predestination and foreshadowing.

Ophelia is featured in Shakespeare's Hamlet.

This quote is from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, and is spoken by Shylock about his reasons for seeking revenge against Antonio. The revenge that Shylock is seeking is the right to exact a pound of flesh from Antonio for not repaying the money that Shylock lent him.

(Passage adapted from The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare_,_ III.iii.54-58)

The general consensus among scholars reflects that Shakespeare derived his story and main characters for Romeo and Juliet from Ovid's story of Pyramus and Thisbe. The story of Pyramus and Thisbe depicts two tragic lovers who are separated by their families, who do not approve of their marriage. They communicate their love through a cement wall and plan to meet under a tree outside to confess their love. However, when Thisbe comes out first, she mistakes the blood of a lion for Pyramus' blood and, believing he had been killed, kills herself.

Antonio, Jessica, and Portia are all characters in The Merchant of Venice.

Hamlet was a turning point in the writing career of William Shakespeare. Taking an old tale about a Prince of Denmark whose father has mysteriously died and whose uncle has usurped the throne, Shakespeare focused intensely on Hamlet's character and inner drama. The play features many ruminations on philosophy and psychology, which were used in most of Shakespeare's later tragedies.

The Faust story is an old one, told in traditional German folk tales, puppet plays, and songs, but Goethe retold the story of an intellectual who sells his soul to the devil to plough psychological depths. Goethe's story finds a man questing for a more fulfilling life, and being tempted by a demon to achieve this goal. Goethe's two-part play is the most widely performed and seen play in the German language.

Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman won both the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play in 1949. Its protagonist, Willy Loman, became a classic character of the American theater, thanks to Miller's story about the aged salesman and his fraught relationships with his family. Loman's struggles with work and disappointment in his sons provide the emotional depth for the character.

Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible in 1953, at the height of the second "Red Scare," when figures like Senator Joseph McCarthy were investigating Communism in America and targeting artists. Miller chose the Salem witch trials as a similar moment in American history when wild accusations generated by fear were prevalent. Miller himself was cited for "contempt of Congress" for refusing to name people he had seen at meetings of the Communist Party.

Thornton Wilder won the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 1938 for Our Town, and the play featured many peculiar staging and narrative features. The three acts of the play take place in 1901, 1904, and 1913. The narrator of the play is the "Stage Manager," who often inserts himself into the story as various characters. No scenery or props are used. Most strikingly, the final act takes place in the town's cemetery, with actors portraying the dead by sitting in chairs.

Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, which first premiered in 1922, was one of the first works in the genre known as "The Theater of the Absurd." Pirandello's metatheatrical work featured all of the characters in the play openly asking the director how the plot would unfold. Such groundbreaking work would prove influential to the next generation of playwrights, including Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, and Eugene Ionesco.