An Analyses "The Importance of Being Earnest"

The Importance of Being Earnest is a well-known play, written by an Anglo-Irish playwright, novelist, poet, and critic. He is regarded as one of the greatest playwrights of the Victorian Era. He was born in Dublin on 16 October 1854. In his lifetime he wrote nine plays, one novel, and numerous poems, short stories, and essays. Among his work the most popular and well-known are “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, “The Importance of Being Earnest”, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”. Wilde was a proponent of the Aesthetic movement, which emphasized aesthetic values more than moral or social themes. This doctrine is most clearly summarized in the phrase 'art for art's sake'. Besides literary accomplishments, he is also famous, or perhaps infamous, for his wit, flamboyance, and affairs with men. He was tried and imprisoned for his homosexual relationship (then considered a crime) with the son of an aristocrat. The text under analyses is taken from the play and presents a piece of dialog between Jack and Gwendolen. The puprose of this analyses is to prove that we deals with a play and find some special features of a comedy. Let’s dwell upon some functions: The informative functions deals with the ability of the text to inform the reader. Here we deal with extralinguistic and linguistic information Thus, the text provides the following extralinguistic features: first – facts and ideas, second – realia, third – intertextual units. While reading the exctract we can find see some facts, such as: Gwendolen and Jack speak about their relationsips and about their marriage. Jack asks Gwendolen would she love him if his name was not Earnest, trying to find out how she likes the name Jack (his real name), but doesn’t tell her the truth. The text provides us with different realia (markers of culture in the text). They are: geographic or toponymic realia (England, London, the village ), cultural realia (christening, a propose, pulpits), historical (carriage, pulpits) and