Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory Commons^™

When Language Fails: A Critical Analysis Essay Of Kathryn Stockett’S The Help:, Evan Mccreary

Black Album Mixtape

A critical analysis essay of Kathryn Stockett's New York Times Bestselling book, The Help, and it's subsequent film adaptation, and how in recent years, particularly following the murder of George Floyd, the story has been used as a classroom tool for teaching students about racism and its effects. Written by a Black student in a primarily white school community, this essay was written as an antithesis to the ideology that the book and movie exceed their intended intentions of being a beneficial teaching tool to youth.

Palestine Without Borders: A Study Of Arab And Western Voices In Theater, Bassem Mohsen Ahmed El-Sayed Ahmed Ibrahim

Theses and Dissertations

Theater has always been perceived as a way to link different cultures together and bring them under one large domain. Regardless, the genre does not give the needed attention to works written in certain regions that may otherwise fall outside the consensus. One good example is Palestine and any works that deal with it as a setting. The first thing that comes to mind whenever the word “Palestine” is brought up is almost always of a political nature, having to do with the Palestinians’ national conflict with Israel. This thesis undertakes to amend this by probing into plays written by …

“There’S A Double Meaning In That”: Heroism And Blessedness In Much Ado About Nothing, Laura Elizabeth Gregory

Graduate Review

I have chosen to include this line “There’s a double meaning in that” (spoken by Benedick in Act 2 scene 3) in the title of this analysis as a way of introducing the play’s two heroines: Hero and Beatrice, and my argument that these women’s names at once symbolically exemplify and ironically contrast with their characters’ natures. While referring to scholarship on Shakesperean names, allegory, and societal and gender roles, I will consider the meaning of these names—Hero meaning “hero” and Beatrice meaning “blessed” or “blessing”—and examine the ways that these characters define and are defined by heroism, blessing, and …

Literature, Pandemic, And The Insufficiency Of Survival: Boccaccio’S Decameron And Emily St. John Mandel’S Station Eleven, Anthony P. Russell

Interdisciplinary Journal of Leadership Studies

The question of literature’s utility in relation to the “real world” has been asked since at least the time of Plato. This essay examines an extreme instance of this problem by investigating two works, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1349-1353) and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2016), that argue for the value of art in the midst of catastrophe. Boccaccio’s collection of 100 tales, written in the context of the Black Plague, and Mandel’s post-apocalyptic novel about a world devastated by a killer flu, overlap and diverge in instructive ways in making their cases for the important role of literature in …

Desmitificando Un Nombre. Juana, “La Loca”, A Través De Su Representación Biográfica Y Dramática. Siglos Xviii-Xxi, Maria Carmen Vera Lopez

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The mythification of the character of Queen Juana I of Castile is the subject of this thesis. The biographical and literary representation are discussed from the biographical and literary perspectives which implies the study of two fundamental aspects in the formation of this myth: woman-power and madness. The main objective of this research is to break down the myth known today as Juana, “the mad” through historical and literary analyses.

This work is part of new Hispanic medievalism because it explains a phenomenon that began in the Middle Ages. The five chapters affirm that, in the case of Juana I …

Convents And Novices In Early Modern English Dramatic Works: In Medias Res, Vanessa L. Rapatz

Late Tudor and Stuart Drama

Convents and Novices in Early Modern English Dramatic Texts: In Medias Res attends to the religious, social, and material changes in England during the century following the Reformation, specifically examining how the English came to terms with the meanings of convents and novices even after they disappeared from the physical and social landscape. In five chapters, it traces convents and novices across a range of dramatic texts that refuse easy generic classification: problem plays such as Shakespeare's Measure for Measure; Marlowe's comic tragedy The Jew of Malta; Margaret Cavendish's closet dramas The Convent of Pleasure and The Religious …

Teatro, Ciencia Ficción Y Distopía En La España Tardofranquista: Sodomáquina (1970), De Carlo Frabetti, Miguel Carrera Garrido

Alambique. Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía / Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía

La ciencia ficción no es uno de los géneros más practicados en el teatro español del siglo XX. Ello no obsta para que exista algún que otro título merecedor de atención y estudio. El presente artículo se centra en Sodomáquina, del italiano afincado en España Carlo Frabetti (Bolonia, 1945). Publicada en 1970 en las revistas especializadas –en ciencia ficción y en teatro, respectivamente– Nueva Dimensión y Yorick, constituye uno de los más dignos intentos de aclimatar el género en las tablas, con todo su potencial imaginativo y discursivo. En nuestro análisis, valoramos su condición de distopía crítica, …

Undocumented Crime In Juan Mayorga’S Animales Nocturnos, Jeffrey K. Coleman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The link between criminality and immigration is often personified in the undocumented immigrant. As nations have constricted the flow of immigrants, laws have inscribed a criminal culpability attached to the lack of documentation. The lack of papers becomes such a part of their persona that in Spanish the colloquial term for an undocumented immigrant is a sin papeles ‘illegal immigrant.’ Juan Mayorga’s chilling 2003 play Animales nocturnos (Nocturnal) explores the lengths to which laws can be used to criminalize and psychologically abuse undocumented immigrants. This paper will explore how immigration law manifests itself in the play and how …

To Speak Ghosts And See Echoes: Longing In Lolita, Emily Aucompaugh

CURCE Annual Undergraduate Conference

Underneath the plot of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, which focuses on the musings of a pedophile and murderer who attempts to “confess” actions and impulses of which he feels no guilt, a secondary motif emerges of a man motivated, guided, and consumed by longing, which he cannot assuage due his fixation of desire on a subject that does not exist. Longing embodies Humbert’s greatest joy and deepest pain, a feeling of anxiety and anticipation which eclipses the necessity of completion. Lolita invokes longing, the desire towards absent things, in two ways. Firstly, Nabokov alludes to a cornucopia of other poetic, …

Rethinking Ionesco’S Absurd: The Bald Soprano In The Interlingual Context Of Vichy And Postwar France, Julia Elsky

Julia Elsky

Rereading Eugène Ionesco’s postwar play La cantatrice chauve (The Bald Soprano) in the light of the original, wartime Romanian version alongside archival materials concerning his political activity in Vichy France allows us to reconsider his role in the theater of the absurd. Instead of staging the emptiness of language in a conformist world, the Romanian play dramatizes how language and language exchange created meaning but also upheld state violence during the Second World War. Although the French version of the play adapts this theme to the postwar context, traces of state power over language remain. This new approach …

The Unruly Womb In Early Modern English Drama: Plotting Women's Biology On The Stage, Ursula Potter

Late Tudor and Stuart Drama

This study provides an accessible, informative and entertaining introduction to women’s sexual health as presented on the early modern stage, and how dramatists coded for it. Beginning with the rise of green sickness (the disease of virgins) from its earliest reference in drama in the 1560s, Ursula Potter traces a continuing fascination with the womb by dramatists through to the oxymoron of the chaste sex debate in the 1640s. She illuminates how playwrights both satirized and perpetuated the notion of the womb’s insatiable appetite.

Christine Hegenbart. Zum Politischen Der Dramatik Von Thomas Bernhard Und Peter Handke. Neue Aufteilung Des Sinnlichen. Peter Lang, 2017., Catherine Girardin

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Christine Hegenbart. Zum Politischen der Dramatik von Thomas Bernhard und Peter Handke. Neue Aufteilung des Sinnlichen. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2017.

Michael Wood. Heiner Müller’S Democratic Theater: The Politics Of Making The Audience Work. Camden House, 2017., Josh Alvizu

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Michael Wood. Heiner Müller’s Democratic Theater: The Politics of Making the Audience Work. Rochester: Camden House, 2017.

Literarische Filmsimulation: Heinrich Eduard Jacobs Medienphilosophische Filmästhetik In "Blut Und Zelluloid", Paula Vosse

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Heinrich Eduard Jacob´s novel Blut und Zelluloid was published in 1929 and therefore mostly reviewed as a critical artwork regarding European film-propaganda before the outbreak of the Second World War. This thesis provides the interested scholar with a different approach: It discusses Jacob´s media-philosophical method to simulate the upcoming medium film in literature. With his implicitly and explicitly organized systems of diverse media, he circumvents constraints of the Paragone-discourse and offers a well-balanced literary construction.

Jacob´s method is compared with Pinthus´ Kinobuch and Pirandello´s Shoot!, while Simmel and Benjamin provide the thesis with a fundament to support Jacob´s theoretical approach. …

Rethinking Ionesco’S Absurd: The Bald Soprano In The Interlingual Context Of Vichy And Postwar France, Julia Elsky

Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Rereading Eugène Ionesco’s postwar play La cantatrice chauve (The Bald Soprano) in the light of the original, wartime Romanian version alongside archival materials concerning his political activity in Vichy France allows us to reconsider his role in the theater of the absurd. Instead of staging the emptiness of language in a conformist world, the Romanian play dramatizes how language and language exchange created meaning but also upheld state violence during the Second World War. Although the French version of the play adapts this theme to the postwar context, traces of state power over language remain. This new approach …

Radical Black Drama-As-Theory: The Black Feminist Dramatic On The Protracted Event-Horizon, Jaye Austin Williams

Faculty Journal Articles

In this essay, I elaborate my present project, grounded in what I call drama theory, the critical theoretical dimensions of dramatic writing, and address the deeply troubling intramural tensions across Black Studies, between those who read blackness, and black cultural production, through largely futurist, celebratory lenses; and those who apply a structural analysis to blackness as the site against, upon, and through which the world coheres its soci(et)al apparatuses and machinations. I situate myself within the latter constellation, and sample here two plays by Suzan-Lori Parks to demonstrate how I translate the analyses of antiblack violence by black feminist …

The Irishtheatre As Imaginative Space: A Vehicle And Venue For The Reconstruction Of The Irish Identity, Rania M Rafik Khalil

English Language and Literature

Current cultural and political changes have prompted the theatre to play a significant role in staging the transformations of the Irish identity. Over time, it has provided an impetus for expressions of the collective new self-image of the Irish. Re-inventing the self requires a manifestation of space and the production of space whether geographical, metaphorical or a physical stage representation. ‘Space’has been utilisedin Irish drama in terms ofgeographical location, cartography, socialmedia, technology, immigration, and the theatre stage. Globalisation has also played a crucial role in terms of creating overlapping spacesand multiple belongings.This study will examinethrough Henri Lefebvre’s theory of space, …

French Theater And The Memory Of The Great War, Susan Mccready

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

A systematic examination of the ground on which French-language playwrights chose to stage their confrontation with the war would expose many of the literary and cultural biases on which our collective memory of the Great War is based. Even the brief outline of French-language war plays provided in this essay challenges many of our most cherished assumptions about war experience and the meaning of the Great War.

The Unkindness Of Strangers: Exploring Success And Isolation In The Dramatic Works Of Tennessee Williams, Chelsea Nicole Gilbert

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis aims to explore the theme of isolation in the dramatic works of Tennessee Williams using his essay “The Catastrophe of Success” as the base theory text. The essay attacks the American idea of success though an in-depth examination of the “Cinderella myth” that Williams claims is so prevalent in both Hollywood and American Democracy. Williams’ deconstruction of this myth reveals that America’s love for stories like it results the isolation of three groups: homosexuals, women and the physically disabled and terminally ill. Williams passes no judgment on his characters, instead showing their lives as they truly are. Through …

Simulacrum And Post-Dictatorship Representation Of Violence In Argentina: Translation And Critical Reading Of Eduardo Pavlovsky’S Paso De Dos, Liliya Alexandrovna Galenkova-Riggs

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Think, Pig! Beckett At The Limit Of The Human [Table Of Contents], Jean-Michel Rabate

Literature

“Very few critics have all the qualities and competencies required to engage fully with the entirety of Beckett’s work in all genres: a detailed familiarity with Beckett’s texts in both English and French; a sensitivity to his linguistic, stylistic, and thematic maneuvers; an encyclopedic knowledge of his intellectual context; an awareness of the range and detail of Beckett studies; and an ability to write with refinement and wit. It is clear from this remarkable book that Jean-Michel Rabaté is one of those few.” —Derek Attridge, University of York

We Are Standing In The Nick Of Time: Translative Relevance In Anne Carson's "Antigonick", Michelle Alonso

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The complicated issues surrounding translation studies have seen growing attention in recent years from scholars and academics that want to make it a discipline and not a minor branch of another field, such as linguistics or comparative literature. Writ large with Antigonick, Carson showcases the recent Western push towards translation studies in the American academy. By offering up a text that is chaotic in its presentation, she bypasses the rigid idea of univocality. By giving the text discordant images, she betrays the failed efficacy of sign and signification, and by choosing a text to be performed and mutually participated …

Cat On A Hot Tin Roof: 60 Years Of American Dialogue On Sex, Gender, And The Nuclear Family, Amy Brooks

Masters Theses

This thesis is a two-part work. Its components, a written paper and a one-night symposium/film screening event entitled Tennessee Williams: Gender Play in 2015 and Beyond, have been closely coordinated with my dramaturgical research for the February 2015 University of Massachusetts Amherst Department of Theater production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The written inquiry is structured around a chronological, selected American production history of Cat; this history, rendered in a series of three case studies, will (1) synthesize preexisting analyses of Cat’s dramaturgical profile, its impact on American theater, and its position in Williams’s oeuvre; …

Everyone’S Their Own Worst Critic Or How I Learned Not To Fear The End, Audrey Belle Rosenblith

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Jean Genet, author ofThe Balcony, and Dante Alighieri, author of Inferno, have more in common than you might think. For one thing, they were both obsessed with death.

The Vestibule (a devised theater piece) was made to examine this obsession with (and fear of) death further.

Art is a tool we can use to confront our fear of death. All people fear death.

Eye For The Gap: Frenzy, Liberty, And The Nietszchean Chorus In Conor Mcpherson's The Weir And Shining City, Frances Krieg

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study situates The Weir and Shining City by Conor McPherson as embodying elements of Dionysian aesthetics as elucidated by Friedrich Nietzsche. Working through the lenses of Samuel Beckett’s linguistic philosophy and the premium of theater as established by Nietzsche, Artaud, and Brecht, the aim of this paper is to demonstrate how McPherson pierces the boundaries of language in drama by establishing his audience as chorus. Background information on Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and McPherson’s own comments on the plays are included with the research on the plays themselves. This work articulates the chorus itself but also the choral, …

Mind The Gap: An Analysis Of The Function Of Love In The Works Of Tom Stoppard And C.S. Lewis., Jacqueline C. Lawler

Pell Scholars and Senior Theses

Writers C.S. Lewis and Tom Stoppard, though philosophically different, both write about love that embodies the natural law. The natural law can be defined as law that is inherent in man and can be discerned by reason rather than by revelation. Both writers use their observational style in order to reason their way to nearly identical laws of love. Stoppard’s The Invention of Love, Arcadia, Rock ‘n’ Roll and The Real Thing will be analyzed using the framework of C.S. Lewis’s book, The Four Loves.

Power And Relationships In The Plays Of Neil Labute: Directing And Performing In Some Girl(S), Mary Peyton Griffith

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores the major works of Neil LaBute's career as a playwright and screenwriter, including the criticism he has received on theatrical and literary levels. The themes most prevalent in the thesis are the use of power and manipulation in the relationships between LaBute's characters and the ongoing maturation of his characters that coincides with the maturation of his work. The second section of the thesis follows the production, directing, and acting in LaBute's play Some Girl(s).

Rain Inside The Elevator: Dualities In The Plays Of Sarah Ruhl As Seen Through The Lens Of Ancient Greek Theatre, Hannah Fattor

Summer Research

Considering the modern playwright Sarah Ruhl’s current body of work through the paradigm of ancient Greek theatrical tradition illuminates many links to Greek theatre and highlights the depth of the emotions within her plays. The ancient Greek playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, along with Ruhl, confront themes of love and death with both sorrow and humor, considering the different ways people cope with traumatic circumstances. They focus in particular on the relationships that form between people after a significant loss, and how humans come together in a community, seeking connection with each other. By theatrically exploring the themes of …

Mediums Change, Fears Stay The Same, Lucy Wilhelms

Honors Theses

Although generally dismissed by scholars as being overly sentimental or superstitious, the gothic genre has survived for over four centuries and maintained significant cultural appeal, outlasting the sentimental novel and the travelogue as popular literature. What, then, makes this genre different? What is so special about the gothic?

In my thesis, I examine the evolving cultural appeal of the gothic genre that keeps it attractive and relevant for readers by tracing the gothic text, The Woman in Black by Susan Hill, through its initial inception and its subsequent adaptations. As a novel, The Woman in Black both repeats and revises …

Stages Of Evil: Occultism In Western Theater And Drama, Robert Lima

Studies in Romance Languages Series

“The evil that men do” has been chronicled for thousands of years on the European stage, and perhaps nowhere else is human fear of our own evil more detailed than in its personifications in theater. In Stages of Evil, Robert Lima explores the sociohistorical implications of Christian and pagan representations of evil and the theatrical creativity that occultism has engendered. By examining examples of alchemy, astronomy, demonology, exorcism, fairies, vampires, witchcraft, hauntings, and voodoo in prominent plays, Stages of Evil explores American and European perceptions of occultism from medieval times to the modern age.