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Author: W. B. Worthen
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520286871
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
The history of drama is typically viewed as a series of inert "styles." Tracing British and American stage drama from the 1880s onward, W. B. Worthen instead sees drama as the interplay of text, stage production, and audience. How are audiences manipulated? What makes drama meaningful? Worthen identifies three rhetorical strategies that distinguish an O'Neill play from a Yeats, or these two from a Brecht. Where realistic theater relies on the "natural" qualities of the stage scene, poetic theater uses the poet's word, the text, to control performance. Modern political theater, by contrast, openly places the audience at the center of its rhetorical designs, and the drama of the postwar period is shown to develop a range of post-Brechtian practices that make the audience the subject of the play. Worthen's book deserves the attention of any literary critic or serious theatergoer interested in the relationship between modern drama and the spectator.
Author: W. B. Worthen
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520286871
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 240
Get Book Here
Book Description
The history of drama is typically viewed as a series of inert "styles." Tracing British and American stage drama from the 1880s onward, W. B. Worthen instead sees drama as the interplay of text, stage production, and audience. How are audiences manipulated? What makes drama meaningful? Worthen identifies three rhetorical strategies that distinguish an O'Neill play from a Yeats, or these two from a Brecht. Where realistic theater relies on the "natural" qualities of the stage scene, poetic theater uses the poet's word, the text, to control performance. Modern political theater, by contrast, openly places the audience at the center of its rhetorical designs, and the drama of the postwar period is shown to develop a range of post-Brechtian practices that make the audience the subject of the play. Worthen's book deserves the attention of any literary critic or serious theatergoer interested in the relationship between modern drama and the spectator.
Author: William B. Worthen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780685526835
Category : American drama
Languages : en
Pages : 230
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Book Description
In Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater, W.B. Worthen examines how the dynamic interplay between dramatic text and stage production shapes the audience's experience in the modern theater. Dividing the "rhetoric" of theatrical performance into three modes--realistic, poetic, and political--Worthen traces the course of British and American drama from the 1880s through the 1980s, showing how textual conventions and performance practices direct the interpretive performance of the theater audience. The realistic theater translates the objectivity associated with science into a vehicle for treating social class. Worthen examines realism's onstage representation of social "others" for an invisible, privileged offstage audience; he discusses the problem drama of the turn of the century (Robins, Shaw, Galsworthy, Glaspell), the experiments of O'Neill, Rice, and the American Method, and the contemporary realism of Pinter, Shepard and Bond. Where realistic theater relies on the "natural" qualities of the stage scene, poetic theater uses the poet's word, the text, to control performance. The plays of Yeats, Auden, Eliot, and Beckett explore the kinds of authority--over actors and audiences--that poetic theater can achieve. Modern political theater, by contrast, openly places the audience at the center of its rhetorical designs, and the drama of the postwar period (Barnes, Brenton, Churchill, Fornes, Nichols, Osborne, Soyinka) is shown to develop a range of post-Brechtian practices that make the audience the subject of the play. Treating a wide variety of plays and drawing extensively on performance history, Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater outlines the strategies that have produced both the modern drama onstage and the modern audience in the theater.
Author: Jody Enders
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801487835
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292
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Book Description
Why did medieval dramatists weave so many scenes of torture into their plays? Exploring the cultural connections among rhetoric, law, drama, literary creation, and violence, Jody Enders addresses an issue that has long troubled students of the Middle Ages. Theories of rhetoric and law of the time reveal, she points out, that the ideology of torture was a widely accepted means for exploiting such essential elements of the stage and stagecraft as dramatic verisimilitude, pity, fear, and catharsis to fabricate truth. Analyzing the consequences of torture for the history of aesthetics in general and of drama in particular, Enders shows that if the violence embedded in the history of rhetoric is acknowledged, we are better able to understand not only the enduring "theater of cruelty" identified by theorists from Isidore of Seville to Antonin Artaud, but also the continuing modern devotion to the spectacle of pain.
Author: William B. Worthen
Publisher: Wadsworth Publishing Company
ISBN: 9781428288140
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Consistently daring while being solid, W.B. Worthen's selection of plays now includes topical and provocative pieces like Sophie Treadwell's Machinal and classroom favorites like William Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, Luis Valdez's Los vendidos, and Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian's The Other Shore. --Book Jacket.
Author: Michael John MacDonald
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199731594
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 844
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Book Description
Featuring roughly sixty specially commissioned essays by an international cast of leading rhetoric experts from North America, Europe, and Great Britain, the Handbook will offer readers a comprehensive topical and historical survey of the theory and practice of rhetoric from ancient Greece and Rome through the Middle Ages and Enlightenment up to the present day.
Author:
Publisher: Cambria Press
ISBN: 1621969843
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 393
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Book Description
Author: Christopher J. Thaiss
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Longman
ISBN: 9780205280001
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
In Hamlet, when the melancholy prince kills Polonius, the dramatic tension is enhanced by the audience's knowledge that Polonius lurks behind the curtain, and that Hamlet will mistake him for his detested stepfather. Though this tension is understood and appreciated by readers of the play, its dynamics of raw intensity are perhaps best understood by the interplay between performers and audience members. By addressing both enthusiasts of theater and enthusiasts of dramatic literature, Thaiss and Davis demonstrate how one's understanding of drama is enriched by critical attention to both performance and text. It specifically addresses the writing needs of a novice playwright, not in conjunction with "writing about literature," but about the play as subject in its own right. This book provides critical analysis of play texts, as well as performance reviews, theater history research, and other examples that enliven understanding and promote versatility. In its sequence of chapters, it addresses projects of increasing sophistication, from performance reviews and play analyses to theater history research and dramatic theory papers. As a general guide to good writing, this book also promotes learning and critical/creative thought. Introductory chapters cover the principles of good writing and offer strategies to help readers overcome writer's block, organize effectively and avoid common usage and style pitfalls. Anyone interested in drama and/or literature.
Author: Matthew S. Buckley
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801884349
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204
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Book Description
Publisher description
Author: William B. Worthen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521008006
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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Book Description
This book analyses how Shakespeare is recreated in historical performance.
Author: Ric Knowles
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442658630
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236
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Book Description
Theatre, like other subjects in the humanities, has recently undergone quintessential changes in theory, approach, and research. Modern Drama – a collection of twelve essays from leading theatre and drama scholars – investigates the contemporary meanings and the cultural and political resonances of the terms inherent in the concepts of 'modern' and 'drama,' delving into a range of theoretical questions on the history of modernism, modernity, postmodernism, and postmodernity as they have intersected with the shifting histories of drama, theatre, and performance. Using incisive analyses of both modern and postmodern plays, the contributors examine varied topics such as the analysis of periodicity; the articulation of social, political, and cultural production in theatre; the re-evaluation of texts, performances, and canons; and demonstrations of how interdisciplinarity inflects theatre and its practice. Including work by Sue-Ellen Case, Elin Diamond, Harry J. Elam Jr, Alan Filewod, Erika Fischer-Lichte, Stanton B. Garner Jr, Shannon Jackson, Loren Kruger, Josephine Lee, David Savran, Michael Sidnell, and Ann Wilson, the collection highlights the importance of continuing to investigate not only critical texts but also the terms of the debate themselves. Incorporating both drama history and modern studies, this compilation will be an invaluable work to all scholars of theatre and drama, and as well as those students of the humanities and modernism.
