Title:  Drama and the Postmodern: Assessing the Limits of Metatheatre

Author:  Daniel K. Jernigan

ISBN:   9781604975420

Date:   November, 2008

Price:   $119.95 / £ 70.95

Pages:   420

Format:   6 x 9 in or 229 x 152 mm Case Laminate

Description

This collection of essays is impressive in its breadth, ranging over English (Shakespeare, Stoppard, Churchill, Ravenhill, Penhall), Irish (MacNamara, Johnston), American (O’Neill, Stein, Kushner, Lynn), and Continental (Beckett, Weiss, Jelinek) dramatists; furthermore, many of the plays given extended treatment––King Lear, The Emperor Jones, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, The Investigation, Top Girls, and Angels in America––are frequently anthologized and/or taught. And because each of these essays was written by a different author, the range of theorists and critics drawn upon (Lyotard, Jameson, McHale, Hutcheon, Derrida, Barthes, Baudrillard, Levinas, Hassan, etc.) is so extensive as to provide a veritable overview of postmodern theory as it might usefully be applied to the theatre.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Postmodern Tipping Points (Daniel K. Jernigan)

Spatial Ambiguity and the Early Modern Postmodern in King Lear (Jenn Stephenson)

Metadrama, Authority, and the Roots of Incredulity (Bill Angus)

Parody, Metatheatre, and the Postmodern Turn: A Secret History of Irish Drama (Eugene Mcnulty)

Lost in the Dark: Performing the Postmodern Moment in Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (Lance Norman)

Landscapes of Metatheater: Gertrude Stein’s Anticipation of the Postmodern (Teresa Requena Pelegrí)

“Nayman” No More: Reconsidering Samuel Beckett (Matthew Walker Paproth)

Tom Stoppard’s Regressive Postmodernity: Tracking the Major Plays, from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead to Indian Ink (Daniel K. Jernigan)

Elfriede Jelinek: Staging a Heideggerian Postmodern Debate in Totenauberg (Christine Kiebuzinska)

Staging the Audience: Peter Weiss’s The Investigation (Scott Windham)

Top Girls: Postmodern Imperfect (Prapassaree Thaiwutipong Kramer)

“Pessimism of the Intellect-Optimism of the Will”: Tony Kushner’s Postmodern Aesthetic (James Fisher)

Postmodern Ethics in Mark Ravenhill’s Some Explicit Polaroids (Leslie A. Wade)

The Rise and Fall of the Lad: Joe Penhall’s Early Plays (William C. Boles)

Utopia in Absentia: Staging Possibilities in Kirk Lynn’s War (Margaret F. Savilonis)

Beckett and the Stage Image: Towards a Poetics of Postmodern Performance (Neil Murphy)

Contributors

Index

About Author

Daniel Jernigan is assistant professor of English at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He holds a PhD from Purdue University. His interests include drama and theatre studies, postmodernism, playwriting, and science studies. Dr. Jernigan's essays on Caryl Churchill and Tom Stoppard have been published in Modern Drama, Comparative Drama, and Text and Presentation.

Front Cover