Worlds of Upheaval Critic Quotes

Quotes about Upheaval

The upheaval of our world and the upheaval of our consciousness are
one and the same. Jung

Conflicts and factions, violence and upheavals are caused by the

neglect of human values in daily life. Baba

Great literature must spring from an upheaval in the author's soul. If

that upheaval is not present then it must come from the works of any
other author which happens to be handy and easily adapted. Benchley

The real cause of the great upheavals which precede changes of

civilisations… is a profound modification in the ideas of the peoples ....
The memorable events of history are the visible effects of the invisible
changes of human thought .... The present epoch is one of these critical
moments in which the thought of mankind is undergoing a process of
transformation. Le Bon

Frankenstein

'Frankenstein's monster can be educated as a human being only if society is

willing to accept him as such. Otherwise, he can be educated only to know
the full extent of his exclusion, denied social identity by the very society he
longs to join'. Ann McWhir

'[Victor] embodies the Romantic rebelliousness towards accepted modes of

thought in his pursuit of forbidden knowledge' Ray Cluely
'Mary Shelley presents two models of scientific progress. Both men are
obsessed by the urge to discover and both pursue that obsession, enticed by
the possibility of 'immortality and power' that success would bring' Paul
O'Flinn

'the monster is something to be shown, something that serves to

demonstrate and to warn [...] to serve an increasingly moral function'
Botting

'[Victor was used by Shelley] to explore man's capacity for reason and his
attempts to use science as a means to control the natural world' Ray Cluely

"Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is famously reinterpretable. It can be a late

version of the Faust myth, or an early version of the modern myth of the
mad scientist; the id on the rampage, the proletariat running amok, or what
happens when a man tries to have a baby without a woman." Marilyn Butler

"Mary's creature warns of the dangers inherent in scientific experiment

without due thought for the results." Miranda Seymour

"The creature's desire for companionship is one of his most human

qualities."Warren Montag,

Shelley “registers anxieties about scientific progress unaccompanied by

social conscience". Mellor

"The first part of Walton's narrative serves to foreground the cautionary

note of the text"Caldwell

“She draws on political images… to warn of the dangers of reform”

“She uses the story of Frankenstein to express her views on the French
Revolution and the treatment of the lower class… seen through the analysis
of her personal history, the parallelism she draws between the poor masses
and the monster versus the upper classes and Frankenstein, and the
specific references she makes to historic sites and events” Scribano
“Mary Shelley also masterfully constructs the monster to represent the
lower class and Frankenstein to represent political officials and those of a
higher status” Scribano

“Just like Frankenstein was warned by the monster, so too was the French
government through countless petitions.” Scribano

“The monster created in Frankenstein is a likeness of the novel itself…the

horror that Frankenstein feels contemplating the monster can also be the
reaction of a reader who finds the letters on a page to lose their meaning.”
Cottom

“Frankenstein” is four stories in one: an allegory, a fable, an epistolary novel, and an

autobiography, a chaos of literary fertility that left its very young author at pains to explain her
“hideous progeny.” Lepore

If “Frankenstein” is a referendum on the French Revolution, as some critics have read it, Victor
Frankenstein’s politics align nicely with those of Edmund Burke, who described violent
revolution as “a species of political monster, which has always ended by devouring those who
have produced it.” Lepore

“The novel appears to be heretical and revolutionary; it also appears to be counter-revolutionary.

It depends on which [character] is doing the talking.” Lepore

“People are rendered ferocious by misery and misanthropy is ever the offspring of discontent.”
Mary Wollstonecraft

“The art of the book lies in the way Shelley nudges readers’ sympathy, page by page, paragraph
by paragraph, even line by line, from Frankenstein to the creature, even when it comes to the
creature’s vicious murders.” Lepore

“Watching the cottagers read a book, “Ruins of Empires,” by the eighteenth-century French
revolutionary the Comte de Volney [the creature] ‘heard of the division of property, of immense
wealth and squalid poverty; of rank, descent, and noble blood’ He learned that the weak are
everywhere abused by the powerful, and the poor despised… the creature’s account of his
education very closely follows the conventions of the slave narrative genre.” Lepore

"civilisation corrupts a benevolent being into a demon" O'Rourke

The novel’s embedded narrative “safely cocoons meaning inside a double layer of stories”
(Twitchell)

Shelley's novel posits that “to avert a bloody revolution is to treat the lower orders kindly."
(Shelley)

Waiting for Godot

“Although works of the theater of the absurd, particularly Beckett’s, are

often comical, their underlying premises are wholly serious: the
epistemological principle of uncertainty and the inability in the modern age
to find a coherent system of meaning, order, or purpose by which to
understand our existence and by which to live” (Hutchings 28).

Godot’s characters do not despair in the face of their situation, and this
“perseverance remains constant throughout a body of work that, in the
words of the citation awarding Beckett the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1969 had ‘transmuted the destitution of modern man into his exaltation’
(qtd. in Bair 606)” (Hutchings 30).

“Many relate the play to existentialism…:God is dead, life is absurd,

existence precedes essence, ennui is endemic to the human condition…In
many ways, such a reading is an evasion of the play’s complexity, a way of
putting to rest the uncertainty of one’s response to it” (Collins 33).

The reader, like modern man, must not give into “the arrogant presumption
of certitude or the debilitating despair of skepticism,” but instead must “live
in uncertainty, poised, by the conditions of our humanity and of the world in
which we live, between certitude and skepticism, between presumption and
despair “(Collins 36).

Tragicomedy is life enhancing because it tries to “remind the audience of

the real need to face existence ‘knowing the worst,’ which ultimately is
liberation, with courage and humility of not taking oneself or one’s own pain
too seriously, and to bear all life’s mysteries and uncertainties; and thus to
make the most of what we have rather than to hanker after illusory
certainties and rewards” (Esslin, Theater 47).

"The Theatre of the Absurd does not provoke tears of despair but the
laughter of liberation." Martin Esslin

"The characters are engaged in a perpetual act of waiting" Michael Worton

"Beckett's pairs are bound in friendships that are essential power-

relationships." Michael Worton

"Friendship is a function of [man's] cowardice" Samuel Beckett

A "human being must craft his/her own identity through self-realization and
do so without relying on anything transcending that life" such as God / a
higher wisdom - Nietzsche

Nietzsche: "To Live Is To Suffer, To Survive Is To Find Some Meaning In

The Suffering"

Nietzsche: "In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations

and epochs, it is the rule."

Our response to the play is driven by both our "need for purpose and the
emotional fragmentation" this causes. "This search for purpose in Waiting
for Godot recalls and involves a rereading of Albert Camus' “The Myth of
Sisyphus,” wherein Sisyphus also encounters a meaningless existence and
purpose, but labors on with his task of pushing his rock up the mountain"
Compared to Camus's Absurdism, " Vladimir and Estragon lack Sisyphus's
sense of defiance regarding their lot in life".
Lois Gordon 2002

"Estragon and Vladimir cannot easily be distinguished from each

other....for, funda-
mentally, they represent all mankind." Kern

"The human relationships dramatized in Waiting for Godot are those

between master and servant and between friend and friend (the bond of
love is rightly left aside, since it possesses elements of both). This master-
servant relationship is shown, in the play, to bring about an increasing
degeneracy in the people involved." Kern

Pozzo and Lucky are in a "relationship has become entirely meaningless,

and although they are closely tied together by a cord, they can give each
other no feeling of companionship. Yet Pozzo so craves companionship that
he accepts the meager crumbs of friendship which he receives from
Estragon and Vladimir even more eagerly than Estragon grabs the gnawed
chicken bones left over from Pozzo's picnic. Estragon and Vladimir, on the
other hand, although apparently free each to go his own way, are tied
together by a stronger though invisible bond: the bond of friendship." Kern

"What qualifies the play to be ranged among existentialist literature is the

strong notion which it conveys of the non-existence of a personal Heavenly
Father and the conviction of the absurdity and confusion of the universe. As
such, the play is a vivid dramatization of the paradox of the condition of
man, whose intellect makes him aware of the universe's slighting of reason
and makes him long for a state where
reason shall be conferred upon this universe."
Kern

"The name Godot itself bears witness to Samuel Beckett's genius for
evoking the great problems of our time without becoming pompous or
ponderous. To an Irishman writing in French the first syllable of the name
can but designate the deity, after which the suffix puts the question mark of
incredulity, made humorous by the particular quality of the French suffix -
ot. " Kern

"Beckett's characters in this play glorify the all-surpassing power of human

tenderness which alone makes bearable man's long and ultimately futile
wait for a redeemer and which, in fact, turns out itself to be the
redeemer of man in his forlornness." Kern
 Metropolis

“Urban landscapes tell their own story of rapid secularisation” Donahue

“Lang’s up-down, paternoster division of architectural forms into a

language of the class struggle… exploits the potential of the vertical as a
universally understood metaphor of social power” Elsacsser

“The “old world” of traditional Christianity of course lives on and pervades

this new postwar world” Donahue

“The final resolution staged in front of the massive gothic cathedral appears
visually to repudiate the celebration of modernist architecture and modern
technology” Donahue

“Before her role as a social prophet… she is introduced to us visually in…

terms of classic iconography, the Madonna” Donahue
“God really has nothing to do with the central conflict of this ransacked and
repackaged parable, which pits elite dreams against the mass of laborers
whose live will be spent… realizing the aspirations of their masters”
Donahue

There is a “need to quell class warfare while leaving the class structure
intact” Donahue

“The emperor of Metropolis intends to use technology to simulate religion

in order to further his control over workers and capital” Donahue

Economic growth is used as “the weapons of demagogues” Roger Ebert