2013, Vol.26, No.2

The Politics of Stasis and Movement in Top Girls

Hyun-joo Ki | 2013, 26(2) | pp.5~26 | number of Cited : 0

The Story Beyond the American South: Segregation and Corruption in Sweet Bird of Youth

Soim Kim | 2013, 26(2) | pp.27~49 | number of Cited : 0

Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth (1956) has been analyzed as the ugly portrait of the American South which was obsessed with racial segregation. To be sure, the play is the product of America of the 1950’s which was filled with continuous legal and social conflicts surrounding racial segregation. Despite its popularity on the Broadway stage, critics claimed that the play lacks an integrated structure and plot development. But in-depth study of the play’s structure, spaces, plot, and characters reveals the great extent to which this lack of integration works within the play. It becomes apparent that the various forms of segregation found throughout Sweet Bird of Youth reinforce the play’s theme of segregation and isolation. Most of all, the play dramatizes racial segregation. Boss Finley, the political leader of St. Cloud, is a fanatic about the purity of white blood and makes no scruple of lynching and even castrating anyone who threatens his sacred beliefs and ideas. But the play also dramatizes Princess’s cultural isolation, and Chance’s psychological isolation. The play implicates a combination of different kinds of segregation in Chance’s castration, which is St. Cloud’s ultimate act of depravity. For instance, Princess, the aging actress from Hollywood, with various cultural experiences beyond that of St. Cloud and insights into humanity, chooses to maintain disconnection from the community, by ignoring the social conditions of St. Cloud. She never interacts with the St. Cloud’s residents and fails to provide positive influence upon the town. Chance Wayne psychologically blocks the positive influence of Princess as well as the warning remarks from old friends in his home town. His failure to build a meaningful relationship with anyone in St. Cloud including his girl friend, Heavenly, complete the total fiasco. The tragic ending of the play seems to suggest that unless we overcome segregations whether they are racial, sexual, cultural or spatial, castration which could be real or metaphoric, can haunt us in an unexpected moment.

Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love: Alfred Housman and Oscar Wilde

KIM,TAI-WOO | 2013, 26(2) | pp.51~72 | number of Cited : 3

Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love is a very complex work: It introduces quite a number of Housman’s contemporaries, John Ruskin, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde being notable names among them. It is also dotted with direct and indirect quotations from Housman himself and those contemporaries and classical texts, etc. In a word, it seems to be a literary labyrinth. For a critical appreciation of such a complicated work, a very basic method is employed in this thesis of analyzing the work scene by scene and proposing key themes of the work. And the tentative conclusion is that understanding the multi-layered meanings of the rather prosaic title, ‘the invention of love’, is essential in the overall understanding of the work. The meanings of ‘the invention of love’ in The Invention of Love can be summarized as follows. First, it means the initial invention of love poetry early in the Roman times as they reflect the poets’ real experiences in love and immortalize the mistresses depicted in the poems. Second, it means Housman’s writing of his poetry from his unrequited love experience with Moses Jackson, his Oxford mate, and immortalizing him with his poems. And lastly, it means the very property of love itself that it should be invented so far as we can love anybody. By the way, Wilde, the spokesperson for such a theory of love, seems intended to be a foil to Housman. However, he goes beyond the role, and becomes a mouthpiece for the author himself, and even makes the whole work a quite self-conscious one in that he provides us with information on how to interpret and appreciate the whole work. It is not certain whether the subjectivism and relativism latent in Wilde’s view on art and love reflects the author’s own view on the contemporary world, but it clearly serves as a guideline or a vision in bringing the historical Housman over into the artwork he was making. From this point of view it can be said that like the historical characters in Travesties, Housman and Wilde in The Invention of Love are Stoppard's own ‘creations’, and that the truths about them reflect Stoppard’s own subjective evaluation of the lives of Housman and Wilde.

An Ideal Speech Situation as a Just Society: Athol Fugard's Master Harold . . . and the boys

Sohn, Yoon-Hee | 2013, 26(2) | pp.73~95 | number of Cited : 0

This essay amis to explore a just society through a ‘discourse’ of an ideal speech situation to increase reciprocal understanding and a kite and ballroom dancing as a political vision which is a world without collisions in Athol Fugard’s Master Harold . . .and the boys. In fact, the just society based on a initial position of equality transcends the bounds of class, race, and gender. However, supporting an enlightened reason which is to challenge ideas grounded in tradition and faith, and advance knowledge through the scientific method, modern Western society brought on inequality and conflicts between different classes and races because the West used rationality as an instrument of exploitation. In a word, the West dominated human by means of instrumental rationality that depends on a subject-object relationship. So Adorno and Horkheimer thought of the Enlightenment as a process of decay. But Jürgen Habermas disagrees with his teachers’(Adorno and Horkheimer) view of enlightened reason. He suggests the possibility of reason, emancipation, and rational-critical communication latent in modern institutions. According to Habermas, the communicative action provides a vehicle for criticizing the distortions of communications that have characterized the human history. I apply the ‘discourse’ of an ideal speech situation to increase mutual understanding to the analysis of Fugard’s Master Harold . . .and the boys. In his play, there are lots of examples that blacks and whites had the discourse based on reciprocal understanding without oppression and exploitation. When Same and Hally picked the best intrepid social reformer who was not be daunted by the magnitude of the task he had undertaken, they exchanged opinions on the basis of mutual trust and respect. After all they can reach mutual understanding and harmony through the discourse of communicative action. At the same time, Fugard presents a harmonious society by means of the kite and ballroom dancing in an aesthetic point of view which symbolize a world without collisions. Sam and Hally can communicate with each other while dancing together and working together to make the kite. In the end, both men based on reciprocal trust was sympathetic to each other. In conclusion, this play suggests not only the possibility of the mutual understanding between white and black through the discourse of ideal speech situation, but also the just society by the medium of the kite and ballroom dancing as a world without collisions.

The Role of the Dramaturg in England and Its Developing Aspect

DOHYUN RIM | 2013, 26(2) | pp.97~119 | number of Cited : 0

Dr. Thomas Stockmann as Thoreauvian Spokesperson: The Supremacy of the Awakened Individual in Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People

Kang, Hyeong-min | 2013, 26(2) | pp.121~143 | number of Cited : 0

The Political Theatre of Trevor Griffiths and David Edgar in the 1980s: Changing Class Identities in Oi for England and That Summer

KIM, YOO | 2013, 26(2) | pp.145~171 | number of Cited : 1

If Thatcherism attempted to recast and forge new relationships between past and present, the people and the state, and between people themselves, the plays of Edgar, Hare, Churchill, Brenton and Griffiths in the 1980s were a crucial ideological intervention against the Thatcherite hegemony of the repressive constructions of the nation. What distinguished the works of Griffiths and Edgar in the 1980s from those of other political dramatists was their vigorous exploration of the dilemmas which concern the agents of social change in Thatcher’s Britain. Swerving away from a simple, agitprop critique of the values of the Thatcherite ideology, the plays of Edgar and Griffiths reflect the sense of crisis in Labourism during the 1980s. The plays of Griffiths and Edgar provide an acutely penetrating picture of conflicting class identities or motivations in the 1980s. Focusing on the changing political circumstances and the subsequent class identities/formations in the plays, this paper explores the dramatists’ growing concern with the political capacities of revolutionary agents in the 1980s. In Griffiths’s Oi for England(1982) and Edgar’s That Summer(1987), class consciousness is seen as the central key to explore people’s motives and to determine their political actions. The two plays are the immediate and urgent response to the fierce confrontations in Thatcher’s Britain, respectively the racial conflicts of 1981 and the miners’ strikes between 1984 and 1985. Oi for England is an investigation of the relationship between working-class culture and racism in the Thatcherite climate, whereas That Summer is a critical debate on what motivates the self-employed middle-class intelligentsia in face of the travails of the striking miners. These two plays, taken together and set against each other, successfully raise a larger critical debate about the possibility of cultural bonding between different classes.

Understanding the Dramatic Void of Forced Entertainment’s The World in Pictures

손원정 | 2013, 26(2) | pp.173~195 | number of Cited : 1

Asian American Male Sexuality Torn Between Communal and Self Identities in Julia Cho’s Durango

Miseong Woo | 2013, 26(2) | pp.197~216 | number of Cited : 4

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Journal of Modern English Drama 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.11

2013, Vol.26, No.2