abstract:Though much lauded as a playwright in his day, Maxwell Anderson was also an outspoken dissident, fired from two teaching posts early in his career for his political views. , staged during the period of McCarthyism and the outbreak of the Korean War, investigates those political events and their impact on free speech, dramatizing the marginalization of the intellectual through parallels with the life and trial of Socrates of Athens in 399 BCE. I draw on critics including Julien Benda and Edward Said, as well as Martin's Puchner's discussion of the "Socrates Play" genre, to triangulate Anderson's vision of the public intellectual as a truth-seeker whose social commitments propel him to interrogate powerful authorities and expose non-democratic principles. In Barefoot, Anderson diagnoses the pathologies of contemporary American democracy through his depictions of the last weeks of Socrates' life, portraying the great thinker not as an aloof philosopher but as an engaged intellectual. In this way, Anderson leverages the long tradition of the "Socrates Play" to cast a light on the political forces that sought to sideline and silence public intellectuals during his own era while seeking new definitions of and roles for the public intellectual based on the evaluation of past models.
{"title":"Staging Socrates: The Public Intellectual and Democracy in Maxwell Anderson's Barefoot in Athens","authors":"R. Farhadi","doi":"10.3138/md-65-4-1162","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/md-65-4-1162","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:Though much lauded as a playwright in his day, Maxwell Anderson was also an outspoken dissident, fired from two teaching posts early in his career for his political views. , staged during the period of McCarthyism and the outbreak of the Korean War, investigates those political events and their impact on free speech, dramatizing the marginalization of the intellectual through parallels with the life and trial of Socrates of Athens in 399 BCE. I draw on critics including Julien Benda and Edward Said, as well as Martin's Puchner's discussion of the \"Socrates Play\" genre, to triangulate Anderson's vision of the public intellectual as a truth-seeker whose social commitments propel him to interrogate powerful authorities and expose non-democratic principles. In Barefoot, Anderson diagnoses the pathologies of contemporary American democracy through his depictions of the last weeks of Socrates' life, portraying the great thinker not as an aloof philosopher but as an engaged intellectual. In this way, Anderson leverages the long tradition of the \"Socrates Play\" to cast a light on the political forces that sought to sideline and silence public intellectuals during his own era while seeking new definitions of and roles for the public intellectual based on the evaluation of past models.","PeriodicalId":43301,"journal":{"name":"MODERN DRAMA","volume":"65 1","pages":"571 - 592"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48673071","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Juliet Guzzetta, The Theater of Narration: From the Peripheries of History to the Main Stages of Italy","authors":"Enza De Francisci","doi":"10.3138/md-65-4-br3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/md-65-4-br3","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43301,"journal":{"name":"MODERN DRAMA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42045875","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
abstract:In the preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), James Weldon Johnson argues that "the colored poet in the United States needs to do something like what Synge did for the Irish." This article considers the theatrical works of Zora Neale Hurston in light of Johnson's injunction. In their theatres, John Millington Synge and Zora Neale Hurston work to create a breathing archive of Irish and Black American cultures, respectively, using the stage to portray Irish and Black American folk cultures and give spectators the opportunity to see, hear, and experience performative aspects of those traditions. In addition to drafting scripts that attempt to stage Irish and Black American rituals, their emphasis on interpreting the unique rhythms of vernacular spoken traditions and of directly staging collected folk stories offers evidence of this goal. This article focuses on the use of the keen in Riders to the Sea and the use of the cakewalk in Color Struck to highlight how Synge and Hurston locate rituals in their cultural contexts, thereby giving a representation of them that audiences might consider authentic, while also writing against the stereotypes associated with the cultures under discussion.
{"title":"Foregrounding (Lost) Rituals in the Irish and Harlem Renaissances: John Millington Synge, Zora Neale Hurston, and the Transatlantic Gesture","authors":"Chanté Mouton Kinyon","doi":"10.3138/md-65-4-1128","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/md-65-4-1128","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:In the preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), James Weldon Johnson argues that \"the colored poet in the United States needs to do something like what Synge did for the Irish.\" This article considers the theatrical works of Zora Neale Hurston in light of Johnson's injunction. In their theatres, John Millington Synge and Zora Neale Hurston work to create a breathing archive of Irish and Black American cultures, respectively, using the stage to portray Irish and Black American folk cultures and give spectators the opportunity to see, hear, and experience performative aspects of those traditions. In addition to drafting scripts that attempt to stage Irish and Black American rituals, their emphasis on interpreting the unique rhythms of vernacular spoken traditions and of directly staging collected folk stories offers evidence of this goal. This article focuses on the use of the keen in Riders to the Sea and the use of the cakewalk in Color Struck to highlight how Synge and Hurston locate rituals in their cultural contexts, thereby giving a representation of them that audiences might consider authentic, while also writing against the stereotypes associated with the cultures under discussion.","PeriodicalId":43301,"journal":{"name":"MODERN DRAMA","volume":"65 1","pages":"499 - 521"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43703591","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
abstract:Much has been written in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries about the pessimistic tenor of Samuel Beckett's middle-period plays. With specific reference to Waiting for Godot, however, this essay draws a distinction between the pessimistic appearance of the content that partially constitutes this text and the nature of the formal medium through which it is realized. In short, I argue that there is a critical disjunction between what this play says and what this play does. Conceptually speaking, this essay is primarily concerned with Beckett's textual engagement with the theory of eternal recurrence, that is, the idea that all occurrences have happened innumerable times before, and will happen again, and again, in an infinitely recurring cycle. Focusing on how Waiting for Godot developed, both in translation and as a performance piece under the direction of its author, I demonstrate that Beckett's metatheatrical dramatization of eternal recurrence explores this theory's capacity to function as an ethical imperative in the morally nihilistic atmosphere of post-Holocaust Europe. In doing so, Beckett's play implicates the viewer in a dramatization that is aligned with the axiological iteration of eternal recurrence that modern and contemporary scholars associate with Friedrich Nietzsche. Indeed, it is in this sense that Waiting for Godot is, as Beckett himself puts it, "a positive statement of a negative thing."
{"title":"\"A Positive Statement of a Negative Thing\": Nietzschean Eternal Recurrence as Dramatic Form in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot","authors":"M. Fogarty","doi":"10.3138/md-65-4-1182","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/md-65-4-1182","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:Much has been written in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries about the pessimistic tenor of Samuel Beckett's middle-period plays. With specific reference to Waiting for Godot, however, this essay draws a distinction between the pessimistic appearance of the content that partially constitutes this text and the nature of the formal medium through which it is realized. In short, I argue that there is a critical disjunction between what this play says and what this play does. Conceptually speaking, this essay is primarily concerned with Beckett's textual engagement with the theory of eternal recurrence, that is, the idea that all occurrences have happened innumerable times before, and will happen again, and again, in an infinitely recurring cycle. Focusing on how Waiting for Godot developed, both in translation and as a performance piece under the direction of its author, I demonstrate that Beckett's metatheatrical dramatization of eternal recurrence explores this theory's capacity to function as an ethical imperative in the morally nihilistic atmosphere of post-Holocaust Europe. In doing so, Beckett's play implicates the viewer in a dramatization that is aligned with the axiological iteration of eternal recurrence that modern and contemporary scholars associate with Friedrich Nietzsche. Indeed, it is in this sense that Waiting for Godot is, as Beckett himself puts it, \"a positive statement of a negative thing.\"","PeriodicalId":43301,"journal":{"name":"MODERN DRAMA","volume":"65 1","pages":"522 - 546"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49025610","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In his 1943 essay “Pythian Heritage,” the exsurrealist Roger Caillois — whose Man, Play and Games (1958) would inform early work in performance studies — took aim at the artistic tradition of valuing chance, accident, and spontaneity. The surrealists he had broken from tended to oppose their unconscious automatism against the suffocations of rational planning. Caillois replied that the true surrealist repression was not planning, but skillful work:
{"title":"Christin Essin, Working Backstage: A Cultural History and Ethnography of Technical Theater Labor","authors":"Chrystyna M. Dail","doi":"10.3138/md-65-4-br2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/md-65-4-br2","url":null,"abstract":"In his 1943 essay “Pythian Heritage,” the exsurrealist Roger Caillois — whose Man, Play and Games (1958) would inform early work in performance studies — took aim at the artistic tradition of valuing chance, accident, and spontaneity. The surrealists he had broken from tended to oppose their unconscious automatism against the suffocations of rational planning. Caillois replied that the true surrealist repression was not planning, but skillful work:","PeriodicalId":43301,"journal":{"name":"MODERN DRAMA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44563912","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
abstract:This article discusses antigone. a requiem (2019) by the Austrian playwright Thomas Köck as one of the latest contributions to a growing body of work that has engaged with Sophocles' Antigone in light of current migration debates. Avoiding psychological realism in favour of postdramatic techniques, antigone. a requiem differs aesthetically from other recent revisions in that this tragedy-as-requiem does not primarily aim for the audience's affective response. Inspired by Judith Butler's theory of the spectral return of socially neglected, ungrievable lives, the play replaces Antigone's unburied brother with corpses washed ashore on European beaches to question European migration policies through a critical assessment of Europe's necropolitics. Formally recomposing Sophocles' tragedy as a requiem with a distinct linguistic musicality, Köck's play skilfully repurposes the funeral song shared by Sophocles' Antigone and chorus and relocates Antigone's anagnorisis to the chorus of contemporary Europeans who eventually recognize themselves in the dead. Köck's requiem also decomposes its model, as it stages the undead as revenants who return to remind Europe of its history of colonization and exploitation, in which Sophocles' Antigone was employed as a carrier of European values. In this respect, Köck's recomposition also sings a requiem for Antigone itself.
{"title":"Migrant Deaths and European Revenants in Thomas Köck's antigone. a requiem (2019): Sophocles' Tragedy Recomposed and Decomposed","authors":"C. Wald","doi":"10.3138/md-65-4-1216","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/md-65-4-1216","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This article discusses antigone. a requiem (2019) by the Austrian playwright Thomas Köck as one of the latest contributions to a growing body of work that has engaged with Sophocles' Antigone in light of current migration debates. Avoiding psychological realism in favour of postdramatic techniques, antigone. a requiem differs aesthetically from other recent revisions in that this tragedy-as-requiem does not primarily aim for the audience's affective response. Inspired by Judith Butler's theory of the spectral return of socially neglected, ungrievable lives, the play replaces Antigone's unburied brother with corpses washed ashore on European beaches to question European migration policies through a critical assessment of Europe's necropolitics. Formally recomposing Sophocles' tragedy as a requiem with a distinct linguistic musicality, Köck's play skilfully repurposes the funeral song shared by Sophocles' Antigone and chorus and relocates Antigone's anagnorisis to the chorus of contemporary Europeans who eventually recognize themselves in the dead. Köck's requiem also decomposes its model, as it stages the undead as revenants who return to remind Europe of its history of colonization and exploitation, in which Sophocles' Antigone was employed as a carrier of European values. In this respect, Köck's recomposition also sings a requiem for Antigone itself.","PeriodicalId":43301,"journal":{"name":"MODERN DRAMA","volume":"65 1","pages":"547 - 570"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44138531","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Galina Kiryushina, Einat Adar & Mark Nixon, Samuel Beckett and Technology","authors":"Trish McTighe","doi":"10.3138/md-65-4-br5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/md-65-4-br5","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43301,"journal":{"name":"MODERN DRAMA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41755278","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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