The Return of Silent Tongue: Sam Shepard’s Feminist, Gothic Western

Abstract

In his screenplay/film Silent Tongue (1992), Sam Shepard appears to synthesize the elements of multiple genres from the modern literary repertoire of his American and European precursors (Poe, O’Neill, Williams, Beckett), including facets of expressionism, magic realism, surrealism, the gothic, science fiction, the absurd, etc. And yet, it also appears that his work does not exactly belong to “any literary or theatrical tradition at all” but emerges from the subversion of “all such traditions” in America (Gilman, Sam Shepard xiii), thus paradoxically endorsing an original form of drama that reflects the complexity of his generation in the Vietnam era and after.