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Competitive success : ‘’achieving victory over someone else. My success implies your failure.
3. Relative success: “here achieving the American dream consist in becoming
better off than some comparison point whether one’s childhood, people in the old country, one’s neighbors, a character from a book another race or gender-
anything or anyone that one measure oneself against. Relative success implies no threshold of well-being and it may or may not entail continually changing
the comparison group as one achieves a given level of accomplishment. The American dream ideology is its emphasis on individual people’s behavior
rather than on economic processes, environmental constraints or political structures as the causal explanation for social ordering which help American cope with or even to
recognize that the fact of dream myth. The most widely accepted cultural attitudes are expressed in social ideograms like
democracy, law and order, frontier, success. The use of these ideograms implies the existence of a complex of inter-related images and emotions working in the psyche in
a way that defies scientific analysis. the tradition of Anglo-Saxon parliamentary history of republican experience add the images of the land of the free, equal
opportunity, freedom of choice, free enterprise, right of individual and the forth.
2.4 American Literature and American Play
In general literature has some different kinds. Each of them has its own characteristics though they have much in common such as they have characters,
theme , setting and style. Peck and Coyle devide literature into three genres or types; they are : poetry, drama, and novel .
Poetry etymologically the work poetry derived from the Greek word poesis means to make or construct and poietis means the maker .usually the maker of a poem
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17 called poet. usually poem is a piece of writing in verse form, and the beauty ,the
power and the effect of a poem rarely depend on styles technique form and also the essential elements like rhyme, rhythm ,form and also the choice of words to create a
poem. A poem usually have some aspects such as: feeling, sense, tone and intention.
Sense is the subject matter of the poem. What is a poem about . Feeling is the attitude of the writer toward the subject matter, by reading a certain poem carefully we could
understand what does the writer think about the subject matter feel of it and his opinion about it. Tone is the attitude of the writer toward the reader weather he writer
in a good mood , pessimist, or optimist, sad or happy. We understand it by giving our intention to the words that poets used in their poem.
Novel is a narrative kind of fictitious writing. A novel is an extended fictional prose narrative dealing with human characters and action of a period of time. What is
old in a novel might have happened. The happenings and actions or even the events need not necessarily to be true and factual. They might all the same be true to every
day life. The author of the novel is the creator of the story He invents the characters, the happening, the action, the events, ect. The novelist usually tells his story through
his characters or his media. All characters must act and behave according to the novelist.
Novelist arranges everything who is to be the chief characters or hero and who is the heroine, and who will act minor actions. A novel is like mirror it reflects all the
lives of people in other people in other places, the way how they live their lives, how they love or hate, how they struggle for their ideals or better way of life. Usually a
novel have several aspects such as: the plot, the characters portrayals, the theme or themes, the tone, the background, the symbolism, and the language.
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18 The plot is the sequence of the events in the novel. the plot is like a chain, all
the events are linked together. The events are the links. If one of the links drops down the chain falls apart. If one of the events is missing the story will not go or the story
misses some of its part and the reader will not be satisfied. The characters is the actor of the novel and deal with how their appearances, their characters, their habits, their
way of lifeas portrayal in a novel. The theme is the attitude r the philosophical point of view of a novelist or the creator of a novel. Tone is the general or prevailing
characters of morals, sentiment, the tone maybe sad, joyful, sentimental, humours, satirical, bitter, humours, passionate.
Play is a form of literature written by a playwright, usually consisting of scripted dialogue between characters, in tended for theatrical performances rather than
reading. A play usually have some aspects or elements such as: characters, plot,theme, dialogue, convention. Most plays contain major characters and minor characters, The
delineation and development of major characters is essential to the play The distinction between heroes or heroines and villains, between good guys and bad guys,
between virtue and vice is useful in dealing with certain types of plays, but in many modern plays. Another common term in drama is protagonist.
Etymologically, it means the first contestant. The plot is usually structured with acts and scenes. The plot usually called the body of a play. The theme is the attitude r
the philosophical point of view of a playwright or the creator of the play. Dialogue provides the substance of a play. Each Dialogue provides the substance of a play
contributes to its effect as a whole.
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2.5 American Play
