1. Have one or two presentations. Do the students see any material in the presentations that would be fodder for satire?
2. Give students background on Oscar Wilde. Tell them there are three terms they should know: aestheticism, decadence, and epigram.
3. Aestheticism: Wilde was a leader of the Aesthetic Movement, which professed a belief in "art for art’s sake." This meant that art shouldn’t be influenced by politics, science, or morality, but should be an expression of whatever it wished to be. Art shouldn’t merely look to life or nature for inspiration, for art that too closely imitates life is a failure, according to Wilde. Plays with characters who spoke and acted just like they would in real life were utterly boring to followers of Wilde’s philosophy. "Realism," Oscar Wilde said, "is a complete failure." Wilde also believed that "art was superior to life and that the one obligation was to transform life into art – to be as ‘artificial’ as possible."
4. Decadence: (from the Latin de, down, and cadere, to fall) in its most general sense, the term refers to a society's decay, its fall from a position of strength and prosperity to a state of weakness and ruin. Decadence also refers to any ideological appreciation, and therefore support, of social decay. During the nineteenth century, decadence acquired a third, closely related, aesthetic meaning that led to the formation of the Decadent Movement, which suggests that decadence is an individual approach to life and that social decay can be consciously perpetrated.
5. Epigram: 1) a concise poem dealing pointedly and often satirically with a single thought or event and often ending with an ingenious turn of thought 2) a terse, sage, or witty and often paradoxical saying.
6. Introduce essential questions to think about as students read Act I.
7. Begin reading Act I
Homework Collected: None
Homework Given: Webquest presentations starting on Monday, April 13th, Independent Reading: try to finish book by the last week of school,
Handouts given out: None
To Read: TIOBE, Act 1
