The Theatre of the Absurd, the Grotesque and Politics PDF Download

Author: Jadwiga Uchman
Publisher: Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften
ISBN: 9783631853764
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
The book discusses the political dramas of Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard regarding their employment of the two critical terms used in its title. It provides a new look at the output of the artists in reference to the employment of the grotesque, justifying their classification together with the East European absurdist playwri...

Author: Martin Esslin
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307548015
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
In 1953, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot premiered at a tiny avant-garde theatre in Paris; within five years, it had been translated into more than twenty languages and seen by more than a million spectators. Its startling popularity marked the emergence of a new type of theatre whose proponents—Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter, and others—shattered dramatic conventions and paid scant attention to psychological realism, while highlighting their characters’ inability to understand one another. In 1961, Martin Esslin gave a name to the phenomenon in his groundbreaking study of these playwrights who dramatized the absurdity at the core of the human condition. Over four decades after its initial publication, Esslin’s landmark book has lost none of its freshness. The questions these dramatists raise about the struggle for meaning in a purposeless world are still as incisive and necessary today as they were when Beckett’s tramps first waited beneath a dying tree on a lonely country road for a mysterious benefactor who would never show. Authoritative, engaging, and eminently readable, The Theatre of the Absurd is nothing short of a classic: vital reading for anyone with an interest in the theatre.

Author: Carl Lavery
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472513207
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd is an innovative collection of essays, written by leading scholars in the fields of theatre, performance and eco-criticism, which reconfigures absurdist theatre through the optics of ecology and environment. As well as offering strikingly new interpretations of the work of canonical playwrights such as Beckett, Genet, Ionesco, Adamov, Albee, Kafka, Pinter, Shepard and Churchill, the book playfully mimics the structure of Martin Esslin's classic text The Theatre of the Absurd, which is commonly recognised as one of the most important scholarly publications of the 20th century. By reading absurdist drama, for the first time, as an emergent form of ecological theatre, Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd interrogates afresh the very meaning of absurdism for 21st-century audiences, while at the same time making a significant contribution to the development of theatre and performance studies as a whole. The collection's interdisciplinary approach, accessibility, and ecological focus will appeal to students and academics in a number of different fields, including theatre, performance, English, French, geography and philosophy. It will also have a major impact on the new cross disciplinary paradigm of eco-criticism.

Author: Carmen Dominte
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527559882
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
Using the character as a central element, this volume provides insights into the Theatre of the Absurd, highlighting its specific key characteristics. Adopting both semiotic-structuralist and mathematical approaches, its analysis of the absurdist character introduces new models of investigation, including a possible algebraic model operating on the scenic, dramatic and paradigmatic level of a play, not only exploring the relations, configurations, confrontations, functions and situations but also providing necessary information for a possible geometric model. The book also takes into consideration the relations established among the most important units of a dramatic work, character, cue, décor and régie, re-configuring the basic pattern. It will be useful for any reader interested in analyzing, staging or writing a play starting from a single character.

Author: M. Bennett
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230118828
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description
Fifty years after the publication of Martin Esslin's The Theatre of the Absurd , which suggests that 'absurd' plays purport the meaninglessness of life, this book uses the works of five major playwrights of the 1950s to provide a timely reassessment of one of the most important theatre 'movements' of the 20th century.

Author: Michael Vena
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838638941
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
"Michael Vena highlights here some of the significant innovations of these "grotteschi" both in terms of ideas and in the relationship between author, actor, and the public, thereby suggesting that the time is ripe for a systematic rassessment of these and other voices of that brief but significant movement, widely acclaimed then, certainly underestimated now, and perhaps all along misunderstood."--BOOK JACKET.

Author: Arnold P. Hinchliffe
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351631160
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 85

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Book Description
First published in 1969, provides a helpful introduction to the study of Absurdist writing and drama in the first half of the twentieth century. After discussing a variety of definitions of the Absurd, it goes on to examine a number of key figures in the movement such as Esslin, Sartre, Camus, Ionesco and Genet. The book concludes with a discussion of the limitations of the term ‘Absurd’ and possible objections to Absurdity. This book will be of interest to those studying Absurdist literature as well as twentieth century drama, literature and philosophy.

Author: Nada Saab
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004385835
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
In Modern and Contemporary Political Theater from the Levant, A Critical Anthology, Robert Myers and Nada Saab analyze the region’s political theater through translations of five plays by significant contemporary Levantine playwrights and critical essays about these works and the impact of these writers’ oeuvres.

Author: Enoch Brater
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Original essays honoring Martin Esslin, author of a seminal book on the theater of the absurd

Author: Elena Penskaya
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110622033
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
The papers of the present volume investigate the potential of the metaphor of life as theater for literary, philosophical, juridical and epistemological discourses from the Middle Ages through modernity, and focusing on traditions as manifold as French, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian and Latin-American.