Analyzing Social Class and Humanity in Samuel Becketts Waiting for God

Analyzing accessible Class and Humanity in Samuel Becketts Waiting for Godot and SeinfeldTypically, the relationships between business firm and pick out are encountered--both didactically and theoretically--in terms of authorial influence or esthetical comparisons. In the first method, an instructor builds a syllabus for a battlefield and Film course by illustrating, for example, how Bergman was influenced by Strindberg. In the second method, the esthetical norms of the theatre (fixed spectatorial distance and stage-bound locations) are compared to those of the cinema (editing and location shooting) to determine which cunning form is better suited (or superior) to which material.My work proposes a broader good deal of the theatre-film interface, one that relies on intertextuality as its interpretive method. I believe it is valuable-both pedagogically and theoretically-to ask broad questions about the aesthetic, narrative, and ideological exchanges between the history of the atre and contemporary film and television. For example, this paper will study how the Chinese eating place episode of the sitcom, Seinfeld, intertextually reworks Samuel Becketts modernist play, Waiting for Godot. In each text, characters encounter an existential quandary as they are forced to wait interminably, and thus confront their impotence at the hands of larger social forces. As a pedagogical matter, this connection encourages the students to see academic culture in the guise of having to claim Becketts play for my course, not as foreign and alienating, but instead as continuous with their understanding of leisure activities like assimilateing sitcoms. As a theoretical matter, this intertextual connection allows important ideological matters to come into bold relie... ...ng it in light of Godot, we can appreciate something much more fundamental, that Seinfeld is every minute of arc as humanitarian as Godot because it shows how our human frailties militate against ou r desire to suppress all human contact with others. Any critic who out-of-hand dismisses the sit-com as spyglass should for this reason alone be thoroughly distrusted, because the desperate communitarian heathen black market of the sitcom has been completed ignored. I suggest 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 compelling explanation for why we fright to watch television as much as it is for why we go to live theatre.Works CitedBeckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. New York Grove P, 1954.