Towards a Poetics of Postmodern Drama

A Study of Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4438-5408-5
Verlag: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Buch, Englisch, 135 Seiten

The book is a study of Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard, arguably the two most eminent British playwrights of the past sixty years or so, from a perspective of what it describes as a poetics of postmodern drama. Arguing for the application of Linda Hutcheon’s model of postmodernism to the study of drama, Towards a Poetics of Postmodern Drama shows that postmodern drama should be seen as a self-consciously contradictory and double-coded phenomenon, one which simultaneously inscribes and subverts the conventional categories of dramatic representation.

In spite of its indebtedness to Beckett’s Absurdist and Brecht’s Epic theaters, postmodern drama should not be conflated with either. This is primarily because postmodern drama retains a critical edge towards contemporary reality in a manner which Hutcheon very aptly terms as a ‘complicitous critique’.

The book demonstrates that both Pinter and Stoppard are pre-eminently postmodern in their treatment of issues such as the human subject, the notion of truth, historical verifiability and linguistic reference. Pinter’s preoccupation with non-referential modes of language-use, the role of power in the construction of the subject, and unreliable memories is as potent a way of disrupting the representational status of drama as Stoppard’s repeated recourse to devices such as parody, theater-within-theater and the fictional treatment of history.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mudasir, Mufti

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturtheorie: Poetik und Literaturästhetik
• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Theaterwissenschaft Einzelne Theaterschauspieler & Regisseure
• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Theaterwissenschaft Theatertheorie, Ästhetik des Theaters, Theaterkritik

Über Autor(innen)

Mudasir, Mufti
Mufti Mudasir is currently Senior Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Kashmir, Srinagar. He received his MA and PhD degrees from the University of Kashmir, and was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the program ‘Zukunftsphilologie: Revisiting the Canons of Textual Scholarship’ at the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin, from 2012 to 2013. He has published articles on literary theory, postmodern drama, Indo-Persian poetry and Kashmir’s hagiographical tradition, and has also translated Kashmir’s foremost Persian poet, Tahir Ghani Kashmiri (d. 1669), recently published as The Captured Gazelle: Poems of Ghani Kashmiri (2013) by Penguin India.

Mufti Mudasir is currently Senior Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Kashmir, Srinagar. He received his MA and PhD degrees from the University of Kashmir, and was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the program ‘Zukunftsphilologie: Revisiting the Canons of Textual Scholarship’ at the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin, from 2012 to 2013. He has published articles on literary theory, postmodern drama, Indo-Persian poetry and Kashmir’s hagiographical tradition, and has also translated Kashmir’s foremost Persian poet, Tahir Ghani Kashmiri (d. 1669), recently published as The Captured Gazelle: Poems of Ghani Kashmiri (2013) by Penguin India.