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Author: Ketu Katrak
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN: 0313240744
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
The tragic drama of Nigeria's leading playwright, Wole Soyinka, is the focus of this in-depth study. Ketu H. Katrak explores Soyinka's concept of the tragic experience as it relates to Yoruba culture and analyzes the unique features of his theory of tragedy which blends Yoruba traditional drama with Western tragic forms. Opening with a biographical overview of Soyinka's life and career, Katrak addresses the major issues presented by Soyinka in his essay on tragedy, The Fourth Stage. These include the origin of tragic feeling, the components of the tragic experience, and the concretization of these abstract notions in the Yoruba god Ogun. The author demonstrates that it is through these themes and the elements of ritual and myth that Soyinka imparts communal values to his work, ultimately achieving a metaphysical level of expression. Katrak also discusses the element of the death of the protagonist in a number of Soyinka's plays and how it is beneficial for the community. The history of a community, a nation, and mankind, as it appears in other Soyinka plays, is also discussed. Throughout the work, the study of Soyinka's drama is balanced with an analysis of dramatic structure and stagecraft. Included are interviews and discussions with many of Nigeria's academicians, as well as with Soyinka himself.
Author: Ketu Katrak
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN: 0313240744
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book Here
Book Description
The tragic drama of Nigeria's leading playwright, Wole Soyinka, is the focus of this in-depth study. Ketu H. Katrak explores Soyinka's concept of the tragic experience as it relates to Yoruba culture and analyzes the unique features of his theory of tragedy which blends Yoruba traditional drama with Western tragic forms. Opening with a biographical overview of Soyinka's life and career, Katrak addresses the major issues presented by Soyinka in his essay on tragedy, The Fourth Stage. These include the origin of tragic feeling, the components of the tragic experience, and the concretization of these abstract notions in the Yoruba god Ogun. The author demonstrates that it is through these themes and the elements of ritual and myth that Soyinka imparts communal values to his work, ultimately achieving a metaphysical level of expression. Katrak also discusses the element of the death of the protagonist in a number of Soyinka's plays and how it is beneficial for the community. The history of a community, a nation, and mankind, as it appears in other Soyinka plays, is also discussed. Throughout the work, the study of Soyinka's drama is balanced with an analysis of dramatic structure and stagecraft. Included are interviews and discussions with many of Nigeria's academicians, as well as with Soyinka himself.
Author: Wole Soyinka
Publisher: Lynne Rienner Publishers
ISBN: 9780914478492
Category : Nigeria
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
Distinguished scholars analyze the plays, poetry, and prose of Wole Smoyinka, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1986. Essays trace his career and place his work in the general context of African literature.
Author: James Moran
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350139793
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 185
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Book Description
What distinguishes modern tragedy from other forms of drama? How does it relate to contemporary political and social conditions? To what ends have artists employed the tragic form in different locations during the 20th century? Partly motivated by the urgency of our current situation in an age of ecocidal crisis, Modern Tragedy encompasses a variety of drama from throughout the 20th century. James Moran begins this book with John Millington Synge's Riders to the Sea (1904), which shows how environmental awareness might be expressed through tragic drama. Moran also looks at Brecht's reworking of Synge's drama in the 1937 play Señora Carrar's Rifles, and situates Brecht's script in the light of the theatre practitioner's broader ideas about tragedy. Brecht's tragic thinking – informed by Hegel and Marx – is contrasted with the Schopenhauerian approach of Samuel Beckett. The volume goes on to examine theatre makers whose ideas were partly motivated by applying an understanding of the tragic narrative of Synge's Riders to the Sea to postcolonial contexts. Looking at Derek Walcott's The Sea at Dauphin (1954), and J.P. Clark's The Goat (1961), Modern Tragedy explores how tragedy, a form that is often associated with regressive assumptions about hegemony, might be rethought, and how aspects of the tragic may coincide with the experiences and concerns of authors and audiences of colour.
Author: Jennifer Wallace
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350155101
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
In this book leading scholars come together to provide a comprehensive, wide-ranging overview of tragedy in theatre and other media from 1920 to the present. The 20th century is often considered to have witnessed the death of tragedy as a theatrical genre, but it was marked by many tragic events and historical catastrophes, from two world wars and genocide to the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the anticipation and onset of climate change. The authors in this volume wrestle with this paradox and consider the degree to which the definitions, forms and media of tragedy were transformed in the modern period and how far the tragic tradition-updated in performance-still spoke to 20th- and 21st-century challenges. While theater remains the primary focus of investigation in this strikingly illustrated book, the essays also cover tragic representation-often re-mediated, fragmented and provocatively questioned-in film, art and installation, photography, fiction and creative non-fiction, documentary reporting, political theory and activism. Since 24/7 news cycles travel fast and modern crises cross borders and are reported across the globe more swiftly than in previous centuries, this volume includes intercultural encounters, various forms of hybridity, and postcolonial tragic representations. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance and circulation; communities of production and consumption; philosophy and social theory; religion, ritual and myth; politics of city and nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality.
Author: John Orr
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349198293
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316
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Book Description
A study that examines the relationship between tragic drama of the late 19th and 20th centuries and present-day society. The author's theories are presented with excerpts from relevant plays, such as "Look Back in Anger", "The Glass Menagerie", "The Iceman Cometh" and "Hedda Gabler".
Author: David Krasner
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118893204
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 608
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Book Description
A History of Modern Drama: Volume II explores a remarkable breadth of topics and analytical approaches to the dramatic works, authors, and transitional events and movements that shaped world drama from 1960 through to the dawn of the new millennium. Features detailed analyses of plays and playwrights, examining the influence of a wide range of writers, from mainstream icons such as Harold Pinter and Edward Albee, to more unorthodox works by Peter Weiss and Sarah Kane Provides global coverage of both English and non-English dramas – including works from Africa and Asia to the Middle East Considers the influence of art, music, literature, architecture, society, politics, culture, and philosophy on the formation of postmodern dramatic literature Combines wide-ranging topics with original theories, international perspective, and philosophical and cultural context Completes a comprehensive two-part work examining modern world drama, and alongside A History of Modern Drama: Volume I, offers readers complete coverage of a full century in the evolution of global dramatic literature.
Author:
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781617032530
Category : Authors, Nigerian
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
Essays that examine the aesthetics and the radical politics of one of Africa's greatest writers
Author: Wole Soyinka
Publisher: Methuen Drama
ISBN: 9781474260763
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Elesin Oba, the King's Horseman, has a single destiny. When the King dies, he must commit ritual suicide and lead his King's favourite horse and dog through the passage to the world of the ancestors. A British Colonial Officer, Pilkings, intervenes to prevent the death and arrests Elesin. The play is a set text for NEAB GCSE, NEAB A Level and NEAB A/S Level. 'A masterpiece of 20th century drama' - Guardian "A transfixing work of modern world drama" (Independent); "clearly a masterpiece. . . he achieves the full impact of Greek tragedy" (Irving Wardle, Independent on Sunday); "the action of the play is as inevitable and eloquent as in Antigone: a clash of values and cultures so fundamental that tragedy issues: a tragedy for each individual, each tribe" (Michael Schmidt, Daily Telegraph)
Author: Adam Lecznar
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135024905X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 177
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Book Description
This book presents a new way of looking at Wole Soyinka's engagement with the classical past. Nigerian author and activist Wole Soyinka was the first Black African author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1986), and his oeuvre has become seminal to postcolonial literature. The frequent references to Greece and Rome that appear across Soyinka's writings, most explicitly in his 1973 play The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite, have often received short shrift in scholarship on the author. At best, these references have been understood as elements of Soyinka's prodigiously inclusive humanism. At worst, Soyinka's critics argue that the invocations of a Graeco-Roman past testify to the neocolonial cultural affinities that make Soyinka a problematic figure in postcolonial literary history. Adam Lecznar challenges these readings, arguing that Soyinka's authorial outlook is informed by a hybrid form of classicism in which he aligns the legacy of Greece and Rome with the African cultural heritage to form a narrative of literary and cultural value that looks beyond the ancient Mediterranean. This book turns a spotlight on how Soyinka's appeals to Greece and Rome inform his reflections on Africa's ancient past, Yoruba belief, and the modern significance of tragedy. Lecznar contends that Soyinka's notion of classicism is not solely dependent on the memory of the Graeco-Roman past. Rather, it draws innovatively on a global cultural heritage to advance revolutionary and futural narratives of history and identity.
Author: Mpalive-Hangson Msiska
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004358129
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 214
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Book Description
Soyinka’s representation of postcolonial African identity is re-examined in the light of his major plays, novels and poetry to show how this writer’s idiom of cultural authenticity both embraces hybridity and defines itself as specific and particular. For Soyinka, such authenticity involves recovering tradition and inserting it in postcolonial modernity to facilitate transformative moral and political justice. The past can be both our enabling future and our nemesis. In a distinctive approach grounded in cultural studies, Postcolonial Identity in Wole Soyinka locates the artist’s intellectual and political concerns within the broader field of postcolonial cultural theory, arguing that, although ostensibly distant from mainstream theory, Soyinka focuses on fundamental questions concerning international culture and political identity formations – the relationship between myth and history / tradition and modernity, and the unresolved tension between power as a force for good or evil. Soyinka’s treatment of the relationship between individual selfhood and the various framing social and collective identities, so the book argues, is yet another aspect linking his work to the broader intellectual currents of today. Thus, Soyinka’s vision is seen as central to contemporary efforts to grasp the nature of modernity. His works conceptualize identity in ways that promote and modify national perceptions of ‘Africanness’, rescuing them from the colonial and neocolonial logic of cultural denigration in a manner that fully acknowledges the cosmopolitan and global contexts of African postcolonial formation. Overall, what emerges from the present study is the conviction that, in Soyinka’s work, it is the capacity to assume personal and collective agency and the particular choices made by particular subjects at given historical moments that determine the trajectory of change and ultimately the nature of postcolonial existence itself. Postcolonial Identity in Wole Soyinka is a major and imaginative contribution to the study of Wole Soyinka, African literature, and postcolonial cultural theory and one in which writing and creativity stand in fruitful symbiosis with the critical sense. It should appeal to Soyinka scholars, to students of African literature, and to anyone interested in postcolonial and cultural theory.
