2010, Vol.23, No.2

Memory of Desires in Williams' Vieux Carré

Soim Kim | 2010, 23(2) | pp.5~31 | number of Cited : 1

Vieux Carré, the memory play about Williams’ 1938 New Orleans experience, has been criticized for its “incoherent and unfocused” plot and for lacking substantial character development. However, those criticisms are based upon the expectations about traditional realistic drama, from which Williams maintained an artistic distance. Williams, wanting to prove that he was not a “ghost” in the literary world, produced a play that contains many innovative techniques, and stage presentations. These elements mark a departure from the earlier works of his prime. Being a memory play, this play implements the dream-like free associations and grotesque images of painful desires. The play also contains multi perspectives such as the young writer, the old writer, and Williams who has frequently commented about his New Orleans experience. These multiple voices intermingle the unique portraits of various desires that gradually emerge as the key subject matter in this memory play. However, this play reveals the limitations in both the techniques and the representations of desires. Unlike the voices in Beckett’s memory play, Krapp’s Last Tape; the writers’ voices in this play are not balanced. While the young writer, passive and uninvolved, stays in the fringes of the picture, the old writer seems to show off the omnipresent perspectives. The portraits of desires that fall toward the painful resolutions are reminiscent of Williams’ earlier works. Nevertheless, using the discrepancy in the two writers’ perspectives, the play evokes the fundamental questions toward what to do with desires. In the last narration, the writer who discards the house of desires, describes memory as remaining in a shadow and implies the rebirth of desire as the subject of art. Even though this play withdraws from the full confrontation with the issues of homosexuality and free sex, it reveals that Williams is not a “ghost” yet, but rather an artist still very alert regarding the techniques and ideas of the present.

A Streetcar Named Lisbon Traviata Is Still Running

Seung Jin Baek | 2010, 23(2) | pp.33~57 | number of Cited : 3

Yeats's Tragic Joy and Heroism

DOHYUN RIM | 2010, 23(2) | pp.59~85 | number of Cited : 5

Female Space and Symbolic Violence in American Women's Drama

Jung,Byung-Eon | 2010, 23(2) | pp.87~107 | number of Cited : 7

PDF

Brian Friel's Subjectification and Hybridity: A Focus on Translations

Jeong Youn Gil | 2010, 23(2) | pp.109~138 | number of Cited : 14

Today Irish writers in literature, philosophy, and history, as well as other discourses, are in the process of rewriting Ireland. Friel is concerned particularly with the images and myths that have shaped the national consciousness. In demythologizing some of these images and myths, they hope to alter the cultural foundations that sustain many of the traditional prejudices that inhibit cultural and political harmony. This essay explores how Brian Friel rejects traditional and normative concept of language and national identity and how he reconfigures through his works postcolonial alternative forms of language and national identities. Hinging upon Homi Bhabha’s theory of “hybridity, ambivalence, in-between and the third space,” this study puts a great emphasis on the possibility of multiple perspectives by which we look at and interpret the problem of identity and language in understanding postcolonial Ireland. I focus on how Friel turns his postcolonial milieu into alternative forms so that his works could provide an alternative perspective which shows the process of postcolonial subjectification and renarrates his nation/history/identity. There is the appropriation of language/culture of the colonial Ireland in the 1830s in Translations. The play dramatizes some of the key issues pertaining to Anglo-Irish colonial relations and depicts Bailybeg in Donegal country around 1830. Translations became the crucible in which various elements of his outlook on language, fiction, and history fused. What Friel captures in Translations is a critical passage in Ireland’s history when the last remnants of a living Gaelic culture are about to become Anglicized. Colonial mapping typically involves the demarcation of such cultural territories as self and other, center and margin and the concomitant superimposition of imperial values on the colonized. Friel’s concerns are the act of translation and communication. It is based on the linguistic theory of George Steiner. These concerns have been transformed into a political device to hide and to reveal the colonial intentions as well as the post-colonial implications. Brian Friel like Hugh in this play makes English his own language in order to create a very special Irish English. As a conclusion, Translations demonstrates a keen awareness of the relations between language, politics, and history. Friel describes the extinction of the Gaelic by the colonial England, and shows the emergence of the new language, Irish English. He says there is a possibility that a new identity can be constructed through the formation of the new language.

Post-modernism in History and The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World

Cho Sook Hee | 2010, 23(2) | pp.139~164 | number of Cited : 2

PDF

Reading Blasted by Sarah Kane ‘Based on Violence’

Choi, Sunghee | 2010, 23(2) | pp.165~188 | number of Cited : 3

This essay is an attempt to read Sarah Kane’s Blasted ‘based on violence,’ which is distinguished from dealing with violence just as means of representation; it is to see violence expressed in this play as necessary choice for Kane to reveal the reality she feels. In a word, what matters is the connection between violences looking irrelevant at first glance or in the common sense: i.e., the daily violence which seems to be personal and take place ‘here,’ and the terrible violence that we can watch in medias or news, which seems to take place ‘there.’There appears several levels of violence in this play: first, the violence by act or idea that we would be likely to do, have, and confront in everyday life are shown through Ian; and the violence in lawless area through Soldier. The most impressive violence―and the most controversial―is the dislocation of the set through the intruding Soldier and subsequently its being blasted by bomb. This takes a role to connect the two violences but many critics, even those having favorable opinion for Kane, I think, have failed to explain its implications appropriately. The way that most interpret it is to see it as a kind of ‘metaphor.’ But I think it can be called a reality itself because it reveals the hidden mechanism of the modern politics and the condition of the life of today as Giorgio Agamben depicts. The dislocation in this play is so abrupt and outside logic, but it shows that our place inside the state with juridical order turns into outside of it. Most of people thinks such a dislocation unrealistic, but it can be truly a real. According to Agamben, a place of the state of exception, a dislocation localization, that is a ‘camp,’ in which law is suspended and power meets a ‘bare life’ without any mediation of law, is ‘created’ rather than determined based on particular real emergency state. This means that a camp is not exceptional but already exist in juridical order and can appear at any moment. In Blasted, Kane surprisingly detects such features and conditions of life in modern society and even further asks if there could be a hope in such a place.

“A Monster Play on a Subsidized Stage”?: A Portrait of the Middle-class Radical in David Edgar’s Maydays

KIM, YOO | 2010, 23(2) | pp.189~211 | number of Cited : 1

When Edgar’s Maydays, a historical play on three generations of political defectors, was premiered by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1983 at the Barbican Theatre, the degeneration of socialism in the post-war Britain and Eastern Europe was portrayed in such a vivid way. The controversy surrounding Maydays, condemned as “a monster play on a subsidized stage,” was even more compounded by the fact that the play was actually performed to the middle-class audience, which had been traditionally regarded as class enemy of the Left. However, as many critics both from the Right and the Left argued, Maydays does not simply dismiss the moral validity and relevance of revolutionary socialism. Tackling a range of significant issues such as adopting, re-discovering or silencing the ‘resisting’ human nature, the play investigates the centrality of the middle-class radicals to the process of social change. Edgar’s move to the RSC with Maydays was made with a recognition of the possibility of the middle-class audience as a potential political vanguard. The play is deeply related to his perception of a new political status quo in the 1980s.: the end of a period of considerable working-class militancy and the increasingly conservative middle-class theatre audience. The play is revolved around Edgar’s emotional and intellectual manipulation of the middle-class liberals at the Barbican. The Eastern strand of the story constantly counteracts the Western experience of socialism. The ideological journey of Martin Glass, an English middle-class radical, who eventually deserts his revolutionary self and returns to his old middle-class reactionary self, is juxtaposed with that of Lermontov, a disillusioned Soviet dissident, who finally reclaims the value of socialism. Concentrating on the shifting of political affiliations of the middle-class radical, Edgar brings the frequently ignored issues of human nature back into the British Left: what is the fundamental difference between Western socialism and its Eastern counterpart; what motivates the political defections of the middle-class radical; what determines one’s revolutionary stance (or identity) and does it form part of individual feelings? Aiming directly at the middle-class audience at the Barbican, Edgar discusses the relevancy of the British middle-class radical intellectuals to the process of social change in the post-war political history. Key Words David Edgar, Maydays, political defection, Western socialism, the middle-class radical, the resisting self

In Between History and Historiography: Hybrid Identity and the Discourse of the Nation in Brian Friel’s Making History

이형섭 | 2010, 23(2) | pp.213~241 | number of Cited : 3

PDF

The Demand for the Change of the Subject's Consciousness and Action in Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Jang, Seon Young | 2010, 23(2) | pp.243~266 | number of Cited : 1

Tom Stoppard’s RGAD, though based on Shakespeare work, Hamlet, has not much to do with Hamlet, which indicates certain ‘non-relation’ between RGAD and Hamlet. I argue that this ‘non-relation,’ rather than meaning there is nothing between RGAD and Hamlet, can be thought as denoting a profound relation between them, which insists on the power of ‘divergence’ and ‘decentering’ in Deleuze’s concept of ‘simulacrum’. This ‘simulacrum’, negating both original and copy, allows both RGAD and Hamlet subversive and rebellious. Thus, RGAD and Hamlet form divergent series founded on the eccentric circle with a constantly decentered center. The ‘simulacrum’ is expressed in RGAD and Hamlet as a way of portraying and urging the awakening of consciousness and the need for human choice in taking responsibility for us and others. This paper interrogates how Stoppard realizes this revolutionary spirit of ‘simulacrum’ within his work, RGAD. For Stoppard, the identity of man is not something that is matured by accepting his own mortality and finitude but something enriched with his consistent pursuit in the truth. But Ros and Guil, unfortunately, standing before their coming deaths, do not make any choice and take action. They just follow the things as they are told, comforting themselves, until things happen to them. Passive in proceeding the work related to themselves but also to Hamlet, they do not take action in making some change in their present state. Often self-conscious and discontented with their state, they try to avoid the anxiety or the fear by relying on philosophical logic, meaningless question-answer games, and ridiculous acts, but do not feel any responsibility for their state and make meaningful action. In the sense of emphasizing the subject’s responsibility, Stoppard’s stance is differentiated from the Player’s advice to Ros and Guil. The Player, though characterized as substantial and supremely confident, does not tell the truth. What the Player espouses is that a person should act natural and conform to the present reality. The Player’s insistence that one should merely respond to circumstances, though acceptable as a proposal to explain human situation prisoned in the reality, it is certainly the fatalism or the conformism. These cannot be stated as truth. In RGAD, Stoppard guides the audience to the awakening of consciousness and the change of action by erasing the distinction between reality and fantasy. By breaking the boundary between reality and fantasy, it makes the spectator not to remain as an onlooker but as a participant. The stage does not remain as the place they can confirm their fantasy, but is changed into the space they can think as more real than reality, thus believe their reality can be always radicalized by this new space.

KJCKorea
Journal Central

Journal of Modern English Drama 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.11

2010, Vol.23, No.2