"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. |
Im Buch
Ergebnisse 1-3 von 13
... five composition notebooks she filled with this portrait , Stein lists the subjects of the portrait : “ Jenny ... five of them were living . All five of them had been living . Jenny and Helen had been living . Jenny was the older . Helen ...
... five more carry four for more if four more carry four , if four carry fifty more , if four more five hundred and four and for more than that , and four more than eighty four . Four more can carry sixteen if you please if it is ac ...
... five left to many many saints . ( 26 ) And : Scene VII One two three four five six seven scene seven . Saint Therese scene seven . Saint Therese scene scene seven . ( 27 ) And : Scene II Would it do if there was a Scene II . ( 24 ) In ...
Inhalt
1920 to 1933 | 25 |
1934 to 1937 | 72 |
The Last Plays 1938 to 1946 | 97 |
Urheberrecht | |
3 weitere Abschnitte werden nicht angezeigt.
Andere Ausgaben - Alle anzeigen
They Watch Me as They Watch This: Gertrude Stein's Metadrama Jane Palatini Bowers Eingeschränkte Leseprobe - 2016 |