Postmodern/drama: Reading the Contemporary StageThe absence of drama in most considerations of the "post-modern condition," Stephen Watt argues, demands a renewed exploration of drama's relationships with late capitalist economy, post-Marxian politics, and commodity culture. But Postmodern/Drama asks a provocative question: Does an entity such as postmodern drama in fact exist? Scrutinizing the critical tendency to label texts or writers as "postmodern," and delineating what it might mean to "read" drama more "postmodernly," Watt demonstrates that playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Cherrié Moraga, Harold Pinter, David Rabe, Karen Finley, and others should not be labeled "postmodernist," but rather recognized as producers of texts that might be termed "post-modern." Watt demonstrates that reading contemporary drama in such a fashion means reading culture more broadly, and he charts the kinds of exploratory movements such reading demands. Rigorously interdisciplinary, Postmodern/Drama carefully articulates the margins among genres and media. The book also considers novels by Beckett, Italo Calvino, and Don DeLillo; films by George Huang and Robert Altman; and commentary on postmodernity by Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson. In the end, the postmodernity of contemporary drama is shown as less a question of genre or media than of a certain mode of subjectivity shared and contested by playwrights, producers, and audiences. "A very readable and well constructed book. Watt's approach is exploratory and this is particularly impressive. His thesis is all the more convincing for his willingness to consider both sides of any given critical argument or approach." --Lois Oppenheim, Montclair State University Stephen Watt is Professor of English, Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of Joyce, O'Casey, and the Irish Popular Theater, and coeditor of Marketing Modernisms (with Kevin J. H. Detmar), American Drama: Colonial to Contemporary (with Gary L. Richardson), and When They Weren't Doing Shakespeare (with Judith L. Fisher). |
Contents
The Problematics of a Phrase | 1 |
PostmodernDrama or the Bankrupt Logic | 15 |
Joyce Beckett | 65 |
Copyright | |
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Adrienne Kennedy aesthetic American Drama architecture articulation audience Baudrillard Beckettian become Bigsby Boom Boom Room Buddy catastrophe chapter characters commodity conception contemporary drama critical culture industry David Deleuze describes discourse dominant earlier Endgame ernism essay example Family Reading Hour father fiction film Finley's Fredric Jameson gender Gómez-Peña Grossberg Guattari Harold Pinter Hirst Hollywood Homecoming Hurlyburly hype identity ideological Ill Seen Ill Joyce Joyce's Karen Finley later literary London Lyotard Mamet Man's Land mass culture memory Mercier and Camier metaphor modernism modernist Monod Mountain Language movie narrative narrator Nirvana nomadic subject novel numbers object opposition Palomar play's plays political postmod postmodern drama postmodernist quotations Rabe Rabe's relationship resistance Routledge Sam Shepard Samuel Beckett scene seems sense sexual Shepard simulation Slavoj Žižek social space Speed-the-Plow Spooner Sticks and Bones structure television textual theater things tion Total Blame trans University Press Winnie York