DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE Pp. 80-89 from Victorian Poetry

DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE pp. 80-89 from Victorian Poetry

1. When was the term „dramatic monologue” invented?

2. What does it mean that the genre is a hybrid?

3. How does it combine narrative, dramatic and lyric elements?

4. Why is the auditor a key aspect of the dramatic monologue? Why does Sliin prefer the term interlocutor? (How can you support the argument through “My Last Duchess”?)

5. What does a “perfect” dramatic monologue look like? (cf: “My Last Duchess”)

6. What are the characteristics of the reading process? What does he mean by sympathy and judgment?

7. What does he mean by saying that the Duke also stands there, “as if alive”?

8. Explain: the dramatic monologue “sets up a fictional speaker whilst claiming for him, by use of the first person, a real-life existence.” (Is there any difference, then, between the d.m. and other works of fiction?)

9. Explain: “the fictive selves in monologues represent the fictive inventions and rhetorical processes that constitute selves in real life.” And “dramatic monologue foreground the role of language in the construction of subjectivity”

10. Drawing on Eaglestone’s “The Author is Dead”, how can you explain the difference or tension between the unified, true, “self” that the speakers of dramatic monologues wish to present through their speech and the speech that necessarily dissolves this unity?

11. How and why do dramatic monologues introduce a paradigm shift? What is a paradigm shift?

12. How does the dramatic monologue as a genre react to the Romantic and Victorian obsession for self-scrutiny? (87-88 + end of page 89!)

13. In what sense does the dramatic monologue respond to the emergence of modern psychology?

14. What is moral insanity?

15. How is the reader supposed to negotiate between “empathetic self-projection” and his/her position as “mental health professional”? (cf also: question 6. on sympathy and judgment)

16. What is the social role ascribed to the auditor/interlocutor? What do they draw attention to?