Towards a Poetics of Postmodern Drama

Towards a Poetics of Postmodern Drama PDF Author: Mufti Mudasir
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443862932
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 135

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Book Description
The book is a study of Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard, arguably the two most eminent British playwrights of the past sixty years or so, from a perspective of what it describes as a poetics of postmodern drama. Arguing for the application of Linda Hutcheon’s model of postmodernism to the study of drama, Towards a Poetics of Postmodern Drama shows that postmodern drama should be seen as a self-consciously contradictory and double-coded phenomenon, one which simultaneously inscribes and subverts the conventional categories of dramatic representation. In spite of its indebtedness to Beckett’s Absurdist and Brecht’s Epic theaters, postmodern drama should not be conflated with either. This is primarily because postmodern drama retains a critical edge towards contemporary reality in a manner which Hutcheon very aptly terms as a ‘complicitous critique’. The book demonstrates that both Pinter and Stoppard are pre-eminently postmodern in their treatment of issues such as the human subject, the notion of truth, historical verifiability and linguistic reference. Pinter’s preoccupation with non-referential modes of language-use, the role of power in the construction of the subject, and unreliable memories is as potent a way of disrupting the representational status of drama as Stoppard’s repeated recourse to devices such as parody, theater-within-theater and the fictional treatment of history.

Towards a Poetics of Postmodern Drama

Towards a Poetics of Postmodern Drama PDF Author: Mufti Mudasir
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443862932
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 135

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Book Description
The book is a study of Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard, arguably the two most eminent British playwrights of the past sixty years or so, from a perspective of what it describes as a poetics of postmodern drama. Arguing for the application of Linda Hutcheon’s model of postmodernism to the study of drama, Towards a Poetics of Postmodern Drama shows that postmodern drama should be seen as a self-consciously contradictory and double-coded phenomenon, one which simultaneously inscribes and subverts the conventional categories of dramatic representation. In spite of its indebtedness to Beckett’s Absurdist and Brecht’s Epic theaters, postmodern drama should not be conflated with either. This is primarily because postmodern drama retains a critical edge towards contemporary reality in a manner which Hutcheon very aptly terms as a ‘complicitous critique’. The book demonstrates that both Pinter and Stoppard are pre-eminently postmodern in their treatment of issues such as the human subject, the notion of truth, historical verifiability and linguistic reference. Pinter’s preoccupation with non-referential modes of language-use, the role of power in the construction of the subject, and unreliable memories is as potent a way of disrupting the representational status of drama as Stoppard’s repeated recourse to devices such as parody, theater-within-theater and the fictional treatment of history.

A Poetics of Postmodernism

A Poetics of Postmodernism PDF Author: Linda Hutcheon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134986270
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
First published in 1988. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

W.H. Auden

W.H. Auden PDF Author: R. Emig
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230286976
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
This study reads Auden's poetry and plays through the shifts from modernism to postmodernism. It analyses the experiments in Auden's writings for their engagement with crucial contemporary problems: that of the individual in relation to others, loved ones, community, society, but also transcendental truths. It shows that rather than providing firm answers, Auden's poetry emphasises the absence of certainties. Yet far from becoming nihilistic, it generates hope, affection, and most importantly an ethical challenge of responsibility out of its discoveries.

The Late Harold Pinter

The Late Harold Pinter PDF Author: Basil Chiasson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137508167
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
This volume is the first to provide a book-length study of Pinter’s overtly political activity. With chapters on political drama, poetry, and speeches, it charts a consistent tension between aesthetics and politics through Pinter’s later career and defines the politics of the work in terms of a pronounced sensory dimension and capacity to affect audiences. The book brings to light unpublished letters and drafts from the Pinter Archive in the British Library and draws his political poems and speeches, which have previously been overshadowed by his plays, into the foreground. Intended for students, instructors, and researchers in drama and theatre, performance studies, literature, and media studies, this book celebrates Pinter’s later life and work by discerning a coherent political voice and project and by registering the complex ways that project troubles the divide between aesthetics and politics.

Eroding the Language of Freedom

Eroding the Language of Freedom PDF Author: Farah Ali
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351625551
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Let down by the uncertainties of memory, language, and their own family units, the characters in Harold Pinter’s plays endure persistent struggles to establish their own identities. Eroding the Language of Freedom re-examines how identity is shaped in these plays, arguing that the characters’ failure to function as active members of society speaks volumes to Pinter’s ideological preoccupation with society’s own inadequacies. Pinter described himself as addressing the state of the world through his plays, and in the linguistic games, emotional balancing acts, and recurring scenarios through which he put his characters, readers and audiences can see how he perceived that world.

Drama and the Postmodern

Drama and the Postmodern PDF Author:
Publisher: Cambria Press
ISBN: 162196938X
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description


Edward Albee and Absurdism

Edward Albee and Absurdism PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004324968
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
In Edward Albee and Absurdism—the inaugural volume in the new book series, New Perspectives in Edward Albee Studies—Michael Y. Bennett has assembled an outstanding team of Edward Albee scholars to address Albee’s affiliation with Martin Esslin’s label, “Theatre of the Absurd,” examining whether or not this label is appropriate. From scholarly essays and lengthy review-essays to an important interview with the noted playwright and director, Emily Mann, the aim of this collection is to, at last, directly (and indirectly) confront Esslin’s label in regards to Albee’s plays in order to create a scholarly atmosphere that allows future Albee scholars to move on to new and, frankly, more relevant lines of inquiry. Contributors are: Michael Y. Bennett, Linda Ben-Zvi, David A. Crespy, Colin Enriquez, Lincoln Konkle, David Marcia, Dena Marks, Brenda Murphy, Tony Jason Stafford, and Kevin J Wetmore Jr.

Thornton Wilder in Collaboration

Thornton Wilder in Collaboration PDF Author: Jackson R. Bryer
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527523640
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 389

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Book Description
The essays in this volume evolved from papers presented at the Second International Thornton Wilder Conference, held at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island, in June 2015. They examine Wilder’s work as both playwright and novelist, focusing upon how he drew on the collaborative mode of creativity required in the theatre, when writing both drama and fiction. The book’s authors use the term “collaboration” in its broadest sense, at times in response to Wilder’s critics who faulted him for “borrowing” from other, earlier, literary works rather than recognizing these “borrowings” as central to the artistic process of collaboration. In exploring Wilder’s collaborative efforts of different kinds, the essays not only consider how Wilder worked with and revised earlier literary texts and the ideas central to those texts, but also analyze how Wilder worked with and inspired other creative individuals and how recent productions of Wilder’s plays, both in the US and abroad, have been the products of unique forms of collaboration.

John Fowles's Fiction and the Poetics of Postmodernism

John Fowles's Fiction and the Poetics of Postmodernism PDF Author: Mahmoud Salami
Publisher: Associated University Presse
ISBN: 9780838634462
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Salami presents, for instance, a critique of the self-conscious narrative of the diary form in The Collector, the intertextual relations of the multiplicity of voices, the problems of subjectivity, the reader's position, the politics of seduction, ideology, and history in The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman. The book also analyzes the ways in which Fowles uses and abuses the short-story genre, in which enigmas remain enigmatic and the author disappears to leave the characters free to construct their own texts. Salami centers, for example, on A Maggot, which embodies the postmodernist technique of dialogical narrative, the problem of narrativization of history, and the explicitly political critique of both past and present in terms of social and religious dissent. These political questions are also echoed in Fowles's nonfictional book The Aristos, in which he strongly rejects the totalization of narratives and the materialization of society.

Poetics of Imagining

Poetics of Imagining PDF Author: Kearney Richard Kearney
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 147446971X
Category : Imagination (Philosophy)
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Richard Kearney has produced a new and revised paperback edition of his classic book Poetics of Imagining. This volume offers an accessible account of the major theories of imagination in modern European thought. It analyses and assesses the decisive contributions made to our understanding of the imaginary life of phenomenology (Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard), hermeuneutics (Heidegger, Ricoeur) and post-modernism (Vattimo, Kristeva, Lyotard). Richard Kearney achieves this with a coherent and committed approach which displays his own passionate concern for the claims of imagination in our post-modern world of fragmentation and fracture.