American Drama and the Postmodern PDF Download

Author:
Publisher: Cambria Press
ISBN: 1621969843
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Author: Kerstin Schmidt
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9401202478
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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The Theater of Transformation: Postmodernism in American Drama offers a fresh and innovative reading of the contemporary experimental American theater scene and navigates through the contested and contentious relationship between postmodernism and contemporary drama. This book addresses gender and class as well as racial issues in the context of a theoretical discussion of dramatic texts, textuality, and performance. Transformation is contemporary drama's answer to the questions of postmodernism and a major technique in the development of a postmodern language for the stage. In order to demonstrate the multi-faceted nature of the postmodern theater of transformation, this study draws on a wide range of plays: from early experimental plays of the 1960s by Jean-Claude van Itallie through feminist plays by Megan Terry and Rochelle Owens to more recent drama by the African-American playwright Suzan-Lori Parks. The Theater of Transformation: Postmodernism in American Drama is written for anyone interested in contemporary American drama and theater as well as in postmodernism and contemporary literary theory. It appeals even more broadly to a readership intrigued by the ubiquitous aspects of popular culture, by feminism and ethnicity, and by issues pertaining to the so-called 'society of spectacle' and the study of contemporary media.

Author: Deborah R. Geis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Assesses monologue's postmodern disruptions of linear narrative and character development.

Author: David K. Sauer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781624993091
Category : American drama
Languages : en
Pages : 363

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This study seeks to reunite American drama with more of the mainstream of American literature using contemporary literary theories of feminism, Derrida, Lacan, as well as the nature of language. It also focuses on the theatrical ways that plays work through performance and staging. This reveals how contemporary playwrights see themselves not as authors, but as parts of a team of designers, actors, and directors. Stage directions are largely omitted, but knowledge of original productions--both as seen live and recorded on tapes archived at Lincoln Center--reveal aspects of fragmentation of scenery, minimalist acting, emphasis on the "unsayable," which makes these plays far more postmodern than they might seem merely as read. More importantly, the final chapter reveals how these techniques culminate in 1990s play' ability to extend beyond the real in a myriad of ways, all united by a new, postmodern view of the divine as interpenetrating reality.In one sense, this seems to be juggling quite a few different items-poststructural theory, modernist realists, as well postmodern deconstructive realists and theatrical practice. All fit together neatly, however, in each chapter through a focus on performance, staging is seen as central to the dramatic experience, with reviews, photographs, and archival videotapes of productions used to verify and explore the plays' meanings.The plays, taken as a whole, reflect the key issues of American society from reactions to the Vietnam War, through issues of sexual preference, race, and feminism and its backlash, through issues of wealth and poverty to arrive at a new vision of a forgiving divine which accepts without judgment all the issues of diversity.American Drama and the Postmodern is an important book for collections in American literature, drama and theatre, as well as for literary theory.

Author: Stephen Watt
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472108725
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Scrutinizing the critical tendency to label texts or writers as "postmodern", scholar Stephen Watt argues that "reading post modernly" merely implies reading culture more broadly. In contemporary drama, Watt considers postmodernity less a question of genre or media than a mode of subjectivity shared by both playwright and audience. 6 illustrations.

Author: Annette Saddik
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 074863066X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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This book explores the development of contemporary theatre in the United States in its historical, political and theoretical dimensions. It focuses on representative plays and performance texts that experiment with form and content, discussing influential playwrights and performance artists such as Tennessee Williams, Adrienne Kennedy, Sam Shepard, Tony Kushner, Charles Ludlum, Anna Deavere Smith, Karen Finley and Will Power, alongside avant-garde theatre groups. Saddik traces the development of contemporary drama since 1945, and discusses the cross-cultural impact of postwar British and European innovations on American theatre from the 1950s to the present day in order to examine the performance of American identity. She argues that contemporary American theatre is primarily a postmodern drama of inclusion and diversity that destabilizes the notion of fixed identity and questions the nature of reality.

Author: Jeanette R. Malkin
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472110377
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Provides a new way of defining--and understanding--postmodern drama

Author: Rodney Simard
Publisher: Lanham, MD : University Press of America
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Author:
Publisher: Cambria Press
ISBN: 162196938X
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Author: Deborah R. Geis
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780472083527
Category : American drama
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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