David K. Sauer's American Drama and the Postmodern: Fragmenting the Realistic PDF

This research seeks to reunite American drama with extra of the mainstream of yank literature utilizing modern literary theories of feminism, Derrida, Lacan, in addition to the character of language. It additionally makes a speciality of the theatrical ways in which performs paintings via functionality and staging. This unearths how modern playwrights see themselves no longer as authors, yet as components of a group of designers, actors, and administrators. degree instructions are mostly passed over, yet wisdom of unique productions--both as visible dwell and recorded on tapes archived at Lincoln Center--reveal features of fragmentation of surroundings, minimalist performing, emphasis at the "unsayable", which makes those performs way more postmodern than they may appear basically as learn. extra importantly, the ultimate bankruptcy finds how those ideas culminate in Nineties play' skill to increase past the true in a myriad of how, all united by way of a brand new, postmodern view of the divine as interpenetrating fact. in a single experience, this appears to be like juggling a variety of diverse items-poststructural conception, modernist realists, besides postmodern deconstructive realists and theatrical perform. All healthy jointly well, notwithstanding, in each one bankruptcy via a spotlight on functionality, staging is obvious as important to the dramatic event, with stories, images, and archival videotapes of productions used to make sure and discover the performs' meanings. The performs, taken as an entire, mirror the foremost problems with American society from reactions to the Vietnam battle, via problems with sexual choice, race, and feminism and its backlash, via problems with wealth and poverty to reach at a brand new imaginative and prescient of a forgiving divine which accepts with out judgment the entire problems with variety. American Drama and the Postmodern is a vital ebook for collections in American literature, drama and theatre, in addition to for literary theory.