"They Watch Me as They Watch This": Gertrude Stein's MetadramaUniversity of Pennsylvania Press, 1991 - 168 Seiten Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Gertrude Stein wrote almost one hundred plays, many of which were published and performed during her lifetime. In "They Watch Me as They Watch This," the first full-length study of Stein's plays, Jane Palatini Bowers focuses on the author's contributions to the genre and offers individual and clarifying readings of these often difficult texts. In writing about Stein's plays, Bowers employs both semiotic and structuralist concepts but avoids the excessively abstract language and "scientific" approach often associated with this kind of criticism. When compared with conventional drama, Stein's plays may appear so strange as to hardly seem like plays at all. Their extreme unconventionality arises from the role language takes in them. Conventional plays allow us to look through the language at the dramatic world created by it; Stein's plays force us to concentrate on the drama inherent in language and language-making. They record and reenact the poet's experiments with language and with theatrical conventions; they also preserve the improvisational writing process in the printed and enacted product. Futhermore, Stein's plays embody her critique of and her ideas about the conventional forms of drama. Thus, the plays are metadramatic: dramas about drama. Stein's belief in the theatricality and performability of language, her metatextual explorations of the interplay between poiesis, textuality, and performance, and her violations of the boundaries between literary criticism and practice have influenced postmodernist playwrights and poets such as David Antin, Richard Foreman, Dick Higgins, Jackson MacLow, and Jerome Rothenberg. They Watch Me as They Watch This provides critical analyses of key plays which illuminate the process of Stein's experimentation during her lifetime of playwriting. Stein's recent critics have eschewed a generic approach to her writing; they overlook her intense interest in genre, and therefore they do not consider the ways in which her texts oppose, subvert, and disrupt generic conventions. Bowers's approach to Stein's work yields rich insights into her writing and into the genre she used. It will be an important contribution to Stein scholarship and to drama criticism as well. |
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... listen to these plays is like listening to a tape recording made over the course of several hours in a room of an unidentified and unfamiliar house- hold.1 The identity of the person who supplied and activated the machine is irrelevant ...
... listen and listen and what they hear well what do they hear , they hear that they listen , they listen to hear , that is what it is to be poor " ( 69 ) . The voiceless poor had a spokesperson in Susan B. Anthony . The suffragist's ...
... listen they not alone would not listen they would revenge themselves . Men have kind hearts when they are not afraid but they are afraid afraid afraid . I say they are afraid , but if I were to tell them so their kind- ness would turn ...
Inhalt
1920 to 1933 | 25 |
1934 to 1937 | 72 |
The Last Plays 1938 to 1946 | 97 |
Urheberrecht | |
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They Watch Me as They Watch This: Gertrude Stein's Metadrama Jane Palatini Bowers Eingeschränkte Leseprobe - 2016 |