Some have already mentioned who Ethel Rosenberg was: a traitor executed along with her husband for sharing American nuclear secrets with the Russians at the beginning of the Cold War. Here’s a short video on the subject, and a web page with more information. Roy says the following line before passing away on page 247: […]
Read More →Archive for October, 2014
No doctors, all business
This is our first text where we encounter HIV/AIDS as the subject of contagion in our course. Event though I am sure we all know what HIV/AIDS is and what the distinction between the two terms are, here is a short video reminder nonetheless. What can we say about the symbolic role of the disease […]
Read More →Apparitions
Ghosts and hallucinations are a recurring feature of the play. We see that Harper becomes slightly deranged (most probably as a result of her excessive pill-taking), developing an imaginary friend named “Mr. Lies” and becoming convinced that there are men with knives lurking in the shadows. Her hallucinations progress to the point where she is […]
Read More →Kushner resources
I’m repeating a post from Contagion 2012 about resources for thinking about Kushner. You can also look at the conveners’ post from 2012 and one from last spring. And here’s a clip I plan to discuss on Wednesday. In the several years Cyrus Patell and I taught our Writing New York course on the Square, […]
Read More →Cold War, Cheeseburgers, Religion, Hallucinogen
Perestroika was a political movement for reformation within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during 1980s, which brought on the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy through the democratization of the Kremlin under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev, thus marking the end of the Cold War and a solving to the conflict between capitalism and […]
Read More →Harper, Harper, Harper
The distant, quirky, pitiable character of Harper Pitt is an agoraphobe and a Valium addict. She represents the negative harm that can be inflicted on those surrounding an individual in denial of their sexual identity.Troubled by the unescapable truth that is her given reality, Harper cannot leave the house and resorts to drug-induced hallucinations. Here is […]
Read More →Reagan and Reaganomics
As the subtitle of this play suggests, Angels in America portrays several themes that were prevalent in the American society during the 80s and 90s. One of the conspicuous themes is politics, which is well represented in the dialogue between Louis and Belize: Louis: But I mean in spite of all this the thing about […]
Read More →Sex and Drugs and… Religion as an Affective Influence?
Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, self-labeled as a ‘gay fantasia’ aims to provoke from the title onwards, describing itself as being a play based ‘on national themes,’ thus truly horrifying every Republican and ‘Nationalist’ that encounters the text. Kushner feels that the issues presented in the plays are representative of the themes in America at […]
Read More →St. James Infirmary Blues
Two of many versions of “St. James Infirmary Blues,” mentioned on pp. 118 & 123 of Camus’ The Plague (Penguin Classics). The former, 1928, could have been on that gramophone. The latter, 1959, was released after “194-,” so technically it didn’t exist yet. I went down to St. James Infirmary, Saw my baby there, Stretched […]
Read More →Grand
Grand spent the entire time of the plague writing the first sentence to his novel. This project gave him purpose and distraction at a time when it was very easy to fall prey to ruminating about his wife who ran away. Interestingly his first attempt at the sentence read “On a fine morning in the […]
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