HC - Oscar Wilde Lesson
Oscar Wilde
The final comic play we will study is a satirical play by Oscar Wilde called The Importance of Being Earnest. Wilde wrote the play in 1899 during the Victorian Period in England In his play, Wilde criticizes the foibles of Britain's upper class by using comedy. Take note of Wilde's use of verbal irony, satire, facades, and any other literary elements. Reflect on the rhetorical devices' impact on the play's comic tone.
Reading Assignment: The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
Click here to read The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. Read the play in its entirety.
Self-Assessment and Practice
Read each passage below, and decide if it illustrates ethos, pathos, logos.
Let us begin with a simple proposition: What democracy requires is public debate, not information. Of course, it needs information too, but the kind of information it needs can be generated only by vigorous popular debate. We do not know what we need to know until we ask the right questions, and we can identify the right questions only by subjecting our ideas about the world to the test of public controversy. Information, usually seen as the precondition of debate, is better understood as its by-product. When we get into arguments that focus and fully engage our attention, we become avid seekers of relevant information. Otherwise, we take in information passively--if we take it in at all.
Christopher Lasch, "The Lost Art of Political Argument"
Answer: Logos
My Dear Fellow Clergymen:
While confined here in Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities "unwise and untimely."...Since I feel that you are men of genuine goodwill and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable in terms.
I think I should indicate why I am here in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the view which argues against "outsiders coming in."...I, along with several members of my staff, am here because I was invited here. I am here because I have organizational ties here.
But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their "thus saith the Lord" far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco-Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.
Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail"
Answer: Ethos
For me, commentary on war zones at home and abroad begins and ends with personal reflections. A few years ago, while watching the news in Chicago, a local news story made a personal connection with me. The report concerned a teenager who had been shot because he had angered a group of his male peers. This act of violence caused me to recapture a memory from my own adolescence because of an instructive parallel in my own life with this boy who had been shot. When I was a teenager some thirty-five years ago in the New York metropolitan area, I wrote a regular column for my high school newspaper. One week, I wrote a column in which I made fun of the fraternities in my high school. As a result, I elicited the anger of some of the most aggressive teenagers in my high school. A couple of nights later, a car pulled up in front of my house, and the angry teenagers in the car dumped garbage on the lawn of my house as an act of revenge and intimidation.
James Garbarino "Children in a Violent World: A Metaphysical Perspective"
Answer: Pathos
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