Literary Analysis of Timberlake Wertenbaker's After Darwin

Introduction

The play has been set in the light of discussing the impacts of Darwin and his work upon the one particularly clear example of this is “After Darwin”, a play that also deals with another of Wertenbaker's favorite theatrical themes, theatricality itself. The play centers around rehearsals for a modern day performance based on the 1831 Galápago's voyage of Charles Darwin aboard the Beagle.

To understand where we are and where we are going, indeed even who we are, Wertenbaker insists we must take into account where we, as a species and a culture, come from. In this paper, we will conduct literary analysis of timberlake Wertenbaker's “After darwin” in order to examine the relationship of language and identity.

Literature Analysis

Consistent with its view of language as universal, abstract systems, the more traditional approach to the study of language use views individual language users as stable, coherent, internally uniform beings in whose heads the systems reside. Because of their universal nature, the systems themselves are considered self-contained, independent entities, extractable from individual minds.

According to John (1978)“there is another whole range of questions about how we are using language or what we are doing in saying something which we have said may be, and intuitively seem to be, entirely different, further matters, which we are not trenching upon. For example, there are insinuating (and other non-literal uses of language), joking (and other non-serious uses of language), and swearing and showing off (which are perhaps expressive uses of language)” p. 18. What the words we use tell us about the way we think. Language reflects our brain structure, which itself is innate. Similarly, the way we talk about things is rooted in, but not identical to, physical reality: human beings take the analogue flow of sensation the world presents to them and packages their experience into objects and events (Pinker, p. 43).

Relationship between Language & Identity

Language use and identity are conceptualized rather differently in a socio-cultural perspective on human action. Here, identity is not seen as singular, fixed, and intrinsic to the individual. Rather, it is viewed as socially constituted; a reflexive, dynamic product of the social, historical and political contexts of an individual's lived experiences (Austin, p. 1-11). The purpose of this paper is to lay out some of the more significant assumptions embodied in Timberlak weterenbaker's “After Darwin”; the concept of identity and its connection to culture and language use. Included is a discussion of some of the routes current research on language, culture and identity is taking.

Wertenbaker has presented two scenarios, clashing against each other principles. we are presented with a fine synopsis of the relationship between Darwin and Fitzroy across the 30 years or so between Darwin's original discovery in the Galapagos, and Fitzroy's eventual suicide because he could not bear the weight of being the sailor who took Darwin there in the first place. From both the characters, their language depicts their identities.

In their modern outfit, Darwin is a blistering actor who ...