Sep 23, · A Streetcar Named Desire Questions and Answers - Discover the blogger.com community of teachers, mentors and students just like you that can answer any question you might have on A Streetcar Named A Streetcar Named Desire Coursework Questio hand, is a perfect match for all my written needs. The A Streetcar Named Desire Coursework Questio writers are reliable, honest, extremely knowledgeable, and the results are always top of the class! - Pam, 3rd Year Art Visual Studies/10() Report Thread starter 12 years ago. #1. yeah I'm doing the play Streetcar Named Desire for our first coursework piece. It's about misunderstanding and insensitivity. However i feel that my teacher has been surprisingly harsh and it seems like she graded this when it was that time of the month. For one of the targets she wrote " name on work
Delivery Guide for OCR AS/A Level English Literature
Select an OCR site. Delivery guides are designed to represent a body of knowledge about teaching a particular topic and contain:. This guide is intended as a support for teachers teaching the play A Streetcar Named Desire to students of AS or A Level English Literature. It also contains activities for students themselves. As there are so many editions available of A Streetcar Named Desirewe have a streetcar named desire coursework questions scene, a streetcar named desire coursework questions, rather than page, references to quotations.
It is important to note that OCR do not prescribe specific editions of set texts in order that you can use copies you already have or else source cheap alternatives. A Streetcar Named Desire is an adult play, containing adult themes and events: sexuality, a streetcar named desire coursework questions, promiscuity, homosexuality, rape, violence against women. Teachers might like to tell students that Streetcar deals with such matters, not least because some students might be surprised at the contrast with their GCSE literature texts, which tend to skate over such visceral matter.
As the play is to some a streetcar named desire coursework questions realistic as in, of the genre of realismit does venture into sexual and linguistic territory which GCSE texts tend to skate over.
A good place to start in studying the play is to read it aloud in class, with students and teachers taking the parts. A reading of the play in class should be followed swiftly by a viewing of a streetcar named desire coursework questions of the film versions, available widely on DVD.
It is still a fine version of the play, a streetcar named desire coursework questions, although bowdlerised for the screen and somewhat dated in style and acting. Another interpretation is the film version starring Ann-Margret as Blanche and Treat Williams as Stanley, directed by John Erman Prism Leisure Corp, plc.
DVD, : Ann-Margret is a much stronger and more robust Blanche than Vivien Leigh, and a a streetcar named desire coursework questions formidable opponent for Stanley. Other versions are available and the play is occasionally performed in British theatres: students who have the opportunity to see a theatre production should certainly see it. After watching the film, students should discuss the differences between the film version s and the original text. See also Activity 1 Thinking contextually section.
The American Dream is the obsessive theme of much twentieth century American literature. It is returned to again and again by Steinbeck, Miller, Albee, Williams and a host of other writers.
More particularly, their work — and A Streetcar Named Desire — considers different aspects of the failure of the American Dream. The American Dream is the romantic notion that, in America, anyone can succeed through hard work and personal endeavour.
No matter how humble your background, no matter if you start with nothing, if you work hard and apply yourself, you can rise to the top of society. America is the land of opportunity, which disdains social class and the old boy network as ways to rise. It is a true meritocracy. The statue and inscription were put in place at the end of the nineteenth century, welcoming new immigrants to New York at a time when new labour was desperately needed from abroad. The American Dream worked for the father of the playwright Arthur Miller, who arrived in the States from Europe with nothing but the clothes he stood up in.
He started by selling buttons on the street and, by the s, was head of a large and successful family business which gave employment to many. Such was the reward of hard work in the land of opportunity.
If you earn your money, the American Dream decrees that you deserve to keep it and to enjoy it. It rejoices in materialism: essentially, the notion that the more consumer goods you have you have, the happier you will be, and the pricier or more prestigious the stuff — clothes, car, house, television — then the more your happiness and fulfilment is increased. Material possessions are the measure and symbol to all of your success. Although he has started small, Stanley takes pride in his material possessions as symbols of his manhood and success.
He is on his way up:. his love of good drink and food and games, his car, his radio, everything that is his, that bears his emblem of the gaudy seed-bearer. The American Dream is an idea associated with the political right in America and, in particular, the Republican Party. Americans have been described as a romantic people and the idea has something of the fairy tale, rags to riches, element.
If you are any of these things, it is probably your fault because you don't work hard enough. If only you applied yourself, you too could be head of a successful manufacturing business and rich. The notion that the poor like being poor and choose to be so is behind the patchy American provision of welfare and health care for its less fortunate citizens. Writers like Williams recognise the obvious truth that the American Dream cannot and does not work.
Not everyone can be head of a business: if they were, who would run the assembly lines? A wonderfully ironic treatment of the American Dream is showcased in the movie The Godfather, Part II A little Italian boy arrives in the port of New York with nothing, and begins to scratch a living in the poor Italian sector of the city.
By hard work and by murdering the local head of the dominant criminal familyhe rises to become Vito Corleoni, the wealthy a streetcar named desire coursework questions powerful Mafia Godfather. The film which ideally needs to be seen with The Godfathera streetcar named desire coursework questions, has all the features of the American Dream: wealth, power, success, a loving extended family, the rewards of hard work.
The family happens to be one of criminal murdering psychopaths, but who cares? Wittily, Francis Ford Coppola cast Marlon Brando as Don Vito Corleoni, the Godfather in the original a streetcar named desire coursework questions. Both Stanley and Vito are archetypes of the Dream: both are undesirable.
Stanley is, of course, the archetypal figure of the American Dream in the play. Williams writes of the death of the decadent part of the South from which Blanche and Stella hail. Instead of a meritocracy, this community was one of inherited wealth and wealth made from the sweat of the slaves. It was squandered. as, piece by piece, our improvident grandfathers and father and uncles and brothers exchanged the land for their epic fornications — to put it plainly!
Blanche recognises its loss and the need for her to find a new home in a new community. Like Stella, Blanche — at least initially — accepts the value of Stanley as the representative of the new, dominant class who will give her a new place in the world:.
She left because of her tragic individual circumstances — the loss of her husband — and, eventually, her promiscuity. This focus on Blanche as a person, rather than a representative of a social class, may be what Arthur Miller was thinking of when he wrote that Williams had a better empathy for the individual than an a understanding of political process.
Stanley is the representative of the American Dream because his individual drive and determination will ensure his success. He was determined to come through the Battle of Salerno, when four out of five of his fellow soldiers were dying around him, and he did. As Stella says of her husband and his fellow workers:.
His drive and determination to succeed and to dominate are, a streetcar named desire coursework questions, as Stella recognises, absolutely entwined with his sexuality:. Animal joy in his being is implicit in all his movements and attitudes.
Since earliest manhood the centre of his life has been pleasure with women with the power and pride of a richly feathered male bird among hens. Branching out from this complete and satisfying centre are all the auxiliary channels of his life, such as … his love of good drink and food and games, his car, his radio, everything that is his, that bears his emblem of the gaudy seed-bearer, a streetcar named desire coursework questions.
Curiously, Arthur Miller also used one of these wonderful and relatively new devices as a central symbol of the American Dream in Death of a Salesman. Stanley appears more successful than Willy: has he paid for his fridge outright? Hire-purchase payments never feature in Streetcarso we might assume that he has done so and thus bested Willy in the game of materialism.
The clue is in the language itself. The American Dream is a nice idea but an illusion: dreams are not real and fade when one confronts reality. Does materialism really bring fulfilment, and can one really rise to the top through hard work alone? Such ideas are illusions and dreams. Labelling texts by genre is an obsession of critics and examiners of English Literature. Williams wrote, rewrote and polished his plays, going through several versions and drafts.
The play, then, is not straight realism in the way that, say, EastEnders is realism. The television writer Andrew Davies argues that realism is entirely inadequate as a form to capture the wonder and complexity of beautiful human beings.
The symbolism is almost in neon colours and draws attention to the play as a made thing, a play, a streetcar named desire coursework questions, in an auto-referential manner that is, the text refers to itself as a text.
It is far from straight realism and its bold, primary colours are to be rejoiced in, as well as responsible for its wonder and success. It is important to impress upon students that they are studying a play. The book they hold in their hands is a script: A Streetcar Named Desire itself is the play performed in the theatre. The films of Streetcar are other versions of the play. Insisting on the text as a play to be performed helps students, who otherwise sometimes treat all texts, plays and poems alike, as novels, forgetting that this is a script, written to be performed for an audience.
It is similarly worth reminding students that the Shakespeare play they are studying is a script: the performance itself is the play. A Streetcar Named Desire was written to be performed on the stage. This, of course, determines every line of its creation. In the opening stage direction for scene I, Williams uses sensuous imagery to evoke the New Orleans street where Stanley and Stella live. The detail may seem excessive to modern readers:. Williams is not, however, inviting directors to dump some over-ripe bananas in the wings so the front row gets a whiff of New Orleans atmosphere.
Rather, the detail is intended to help the reader reproduce the play in her or his mind. When the play was first published, readers would not necessarily have easy access to a production or even the film, which would have been confined to movie theatres.
These were, of course, the days before video tape and DVD. Like George Bernard Shaw before him, Williams goes into such apparently excessive detail to give the reader who has never seen a production — or who has seen a bad one or the film - a better idea of what Williams intends and of what the play should be like when performed. Dramatic function: This term, unsurprisingly, asks us to consider the dramatic function of something in the play.
We can write about the dramatic function of: a character; a line; a speech; an effect on stage; a song; a setting…in fact, we can write about the dramatic function of anything that a streetcar named desire coursework questions or even fails to contribute to the play.
Dramatic effectiveness: This is a similar term to dramatic function but asks us to consider, how or why is this thing effective as drama? In what a streetcar named desire coursework questions does this thing have an affect or impact upon the audience?
Dramatic effectiveness emphasises the impact of the play on the audience and the relationship between the play and a streetcar named desire coursework questions audience. We might write about the dramatic effectiveness of: a speech; a line; an encounter between characters, especially moments of conflict or disagreement; a setting; a song.
Both terms — dramatic function and dramatic effectiveness — emphasise the centrality of genre.
A Level English Revision - A Streetcar Named Desire Relationships
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A Streetcar Named Desire Coursework Questio hand, is a perfect match for all my written needs. The A Streetcar Named Desire Coursework Questio writers are reliable, honest, extremely knowledgeable, and the results are always top of the class! - Pam, 3rd Year Art Visual Studies/10() Report Thread starter 12 years ago. #1. yeah I'm doing the play Streetcar Named Desire for our first coursework piece. It's about misunderstanding and insensitivity. However i feel that my teacher has been surprisingly harsh and it seems like she graded this when it was that time of the month. For one of the targets she wrote " name on work A Streetcar Named Desire was, of course, a hit and immediately acclaimed by critics. Arthur Miller, who had just had his first major success with All My Sons in , was initially wary of the play, thinking the title somewhat silly and melodramatic. He immediately loved it when he saw it, but believed that Williams had profound sympathy for the individual but missed the political implications for, for example,
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