Analyzing Social Class and Humanity in Samuel Becketts Waiting for God

Analyzing Social Class and Humanity in Samuel Becketts delay for Godot and SeinfeldTypically, the relationships between theatre and film are encountered--both pedagogically and theoretically--in terms of authorial influence or aesthetic comparisons. In the first method, an instructor builds a syllabus for a Theatre and Film course by illustrating, for example, how Bergman was influenced by Strindberg. In the second method, the aesthetic norms of the theatre (fixed spectatorial distance and stage-bound locations) are compared to those of the movie house (editing and location shooting) to determine which art form is better suited (or quality) to which material.My work proposes a broader view of the theatre-film interface, one that relies on intertextuality as its instructive method. I believe it is valuable-both pedagogically and theoretically-to ask broad questions about the aesthetic, narrative, and ideologic exchanges between the history of theatre and contemporary film and te levision. For example, this paper go forth study how the Chinese Restaurant episode of the sitcom, Seinfeld, intertextually reworks Samuel Becketts modernist play, delay for Godot. In separately text, characters encounter an existential plight as they are forced to continue interminably, and thus confront their powerlessness at the hands of larger cordial forces. As a pedagogical matter, this connection encourages the students to see academic enculturation in the guise of having to read Becketts play for my course, not as distant and alienating, but instead as continuous with their understanding of leisure activities alike(p) watching sitcoms. As a theoretical matter, this intertextual connection allows important ideologic matters to come into bold relie... ...ng it in light of Godot, we can appreciate something such(prenominal) more fundamental, that Seinfeld is every bit as compassionateitarian as Godot because it shows how our human frailties militate against our d esire to end all human contact with others. every critic who out-of-hand dismisses the sit-com as trash should for this reason alone be well distrusted, because the desperate communitarian cultural function of the sitcom has been completed ignored. I show that there are reasons we watch sitcoms that are not all reducible to the notion that we are stupid, cultural dupes. Seinfeld, as well as Waiting for Godot, offers us insights into what makes us human. At some basic level, this is a get explanation for why we care to watch television as much as it is for why we go to live theatre.Works CitedBeckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. bran-new York Grove P, 1954.