A Doll House was one of Henrik Ibsen’s most controversial plays. He wrote this realistic play in 1879. Ibsen’s writing style of realism was clearly shown in this play. This play was controversial at the time it was written, shocking conservative readers. But, at the same time, the play served as a rallying point for supporters of a drama with different ideas.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Art Nouveau style became an international movement. For the first time in decorative arts history there was a simultaneous movement throughout Europe and America. Art Nouveau brought the finest designers and craftsmen together in order to design buildings, furniture, wallpaper, fabrics, ceramics, metalwork and glasswork. Art Nouveau was considered more than a style, it was a philosophy. From this philosophy carefully designed articles for the home were designed intended to fit into the scheme of the whole Art Nouveau style. Line was the most important aspect of the Art Nouveau period. Art Nouveau was a rebellion against machine made articles of the 19th century that were copies of past designs. Art Nouveau was also a reaction against the old Victorian tradition. Art Nouveau designers borrowed from the past but because of the emphasis on line and adaptation of natural forms to design. Art Nouveau is easily distinguishable from any other period in decorative arts.
In conjunction with Art Nouveau style, the Edwardian style of costume and dress was also implemented during this time period. The Edwardian style embodied both extravagance and pageantry.
A Doll House was a play written well ahead of its time. This play was written in a time when it was considered an outrage for a woman such as Nora not only to display a mind of her own, but also to leave her husband in order to obtain her freedom. This play relates to the Art Nouveau and Edwardian period because just as the furniture and clothing were considered decorative pieces, so were women. Women were expected only to tend to the husband’s and children’s needs. Women were not supposed to do anything without first consulting the husband and certainly never do anything without his prior knowledge and approval. Women were expected to be at home and always looking presentable for their husbands.
*Please note all visual elements for this term paper can be viewed at the conclusion of this project.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Told by the blurb that we have here “one of the most unique and exciting books in the history of American letters,” one bridles both at the grammar of the claim and at its routine excess. The grammar stays irreparable. But I have a hunch that the assertion itself is valid. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values, by Robert M. Pirsig (Morrow), is as willfully awkward as its title. It is densely put together. It lurches, with a deliberate shift of its grave ballast, between fiction and philosophic discourse, between a private memoir and the formulaic impersonality of an engineering or trade journal. As it stands, it is a very long book, but report has it, and fault lines indicate, that a much longer text lies behind it. One hears of an eight- hundred-thousand-word draft and feels perversely deprived of it by the mere sanity and worldliness of the publisher. Zen and the Art is awkward both to live with and to write about. It lodges in the mind as few recent novels have, deepening its grip, compelling the landscape into unexpected planes of order and menace.
The narrative thread is deceptively trite. Father and son are on a motorcycle holiday, traveling from Minneapolis toward the Dakotas, then across the mountains, turning south to Santa Rosa and the Bay. Asphalt, motels, hairpins in the knife-cold of the Rockies, fog and desert, the waters dividing, then the vineyards and the tawny flanks of the sea. Mr. Pirsig is not the first ever to burst: Kerouac has been here before him, and Humbert Humbert, a clutch of novels, films, stories, television serials of loners on the move, lapping the silent miles, toasted or drenched under the big skies, motelling from one neon oasis to the next, and glidin…
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… exception. The cracker-barrel voice grinds on, sententious and flat. But the book is inspired, original enough to impel us across gray patches. And as the mountains gentle toward the sea with father and child locked in a ghostly grip-the narrative tact, the perfect economy of effect, defy criticism.
A detailed technical treatise on the tools, on the routines, on the metaphysics of a specialized skill; the legend of a great hunt after identity, after the salvation of mind and soul out of obsession, the hunter being hunted; a fiction repeatedly interrupted by, and meshed with, a lengthy meditation on the ironic and tragic singularities of American man- the analogies with Moby Dick are patent. Robert Pirsig invites the prodigious comparison. It is at many points, including, even, the almost complete absence of women, suitable.
What more can one say?