English Literature Lesson 2 - Essay Example

responses to the plays 1992 New York production, adding that "one can expect few other reactions when Carol is such a viper."1 However that is an individual view. Mamet employs language that offers different points of view that we shall analyze. Mamets presentation of the conflict between a professor and his female student is marked by ambiguous discourse, troubling physical contact, and subsequent charges of sexual harassment. Oleanna, which unfolds in three acts, takes place entirely in the office of a male college professor in his forties who receives three visits from a twenty-year old undergraduate named Carol.

In the first of these visits, Carol seeks help from John because of her difficulties in his class on higher education. Carols questions, which are often cut off in midstream by his responses, are also interrupted by periodic phone calls, all of which involve Johns impending purchase of a house for himself and his family. Having just received word of his being considered for tenure, John feels secure enough to begin negotiating the purchase of a new home. Towards the end of the first act, as each character becomes more frustrated with the other, an exasperated John makes the mistake of offering Carol an "A" in the class, if she will just meet him in his office a few times during the semester to discuss her problems.

He does this because he "likes" Carol and thinks they might be "similar." She protests, only to have John tell her to "forget about the paper," for "what is The Class but you and me?" (21, 25, 26). John then punctuates his lesson on theories of higher education with an indecorous analogy about how "the rich copulate less often than the poor. But when they do, they take more of their clothes off" (32). Not surprisingly, Carol continues to profess a lack of understanding for the subject (35-37), even though she has started to ask some rather penetrating questions and is on the brink of telling her professor a secret that she has "never told