Heyya gang!

Time to leave the land of the absurd and move on to something that makes sense. It is time to visit Postcolonialism. 

So gear up for the class and prepare yourself by reading the super interesting comedy ‘Harvest’ by Manjula Padmanabhan.

In the neoclassical period, contemporary society became one of the central concerns of the comic dramatist. This age of balance, precision, and regularity insists upon certain norms of behavior in society. The “irregular,” eccentric individual had to be laughed back to normalcy. 

The very subject matter for neoclassical comedy became problems implicit in society. Although this type of drama, “social comedy,” necessitates a certain faith in the value of society, the dramatist does not necessarily condone all of the aspects of his particular contemporary society. Laughter is evoked when a character departs in his behavior from the sanctioned norms of society, but it is also evoked often enough from the very “norm” itself.

Repeated emphasis in neoclassical comedy is placed upon “rational” perspective and behavior. In many of Molière’s plays the characters, even when they are in error, maintain that they are acting from purely rational motives and in a most collected manner. They repeatedly express the exasperated wish that the rest of the world would act equally as rationally. A reader might be surprised at the number of times the word “reasonable” appears in this context in Molière’s plays. It is often used by opposing characters to add strength to their own contradictory points of view.