2013, Vol.26, No.3

“In an Ocean of Ashes, Islands of Order”: Chaos Theory in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia

Hye-Gyong Kwon | 2013, 26(3) | pp.5~31 | number of Cited : 1

In his 1993 play, Arcadia, Tom Stoppard appropriates scientific theories, such as chaos theory, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, entropy, and fractals, as literary metaphors. Overall, Stoppard covers a shift in the scientific paradigm from the mechanical, predictable universe described by Newton to the unpredictable determinism described by deterministic chaos. He pointedly utilizes chaos theory to show that there is underlying order to seemingly random events. For this, he draws heavily from James Gleick’s famous 1987 book Chaos: Making a New Science. In Arcadia, Stoppard suggests a connection between twentieth-century chaos theory and early nineteenth-century British Romanticism. He sets up a contrast between the classical gardening styles and the Romantic ‘picturesque’ style. Irregularity found in the picturesque style is related to irregularity in nature that Thomasina pursues in her iconoclastic studies. Her “Geometry of Irregular Form” is essentially fractal geometry, which is realized as fractal images through Valentine’s computer. As he puts it, “In an ocean of ashes, islands of order,” Arcadia dramatizes Stoppard’s view of the world which comprises a complex, dynamic interaction of randomness, determinism, and metaphysics. From the opening line’s reference to “cardinal embrace” to the final image of dancing, sexual energy drives much of the play. Mrs. Chater, Mrs. Croom, and even Chloé are its heroines. As it is called “the attraction that Newton left out,” sexual energy represents the deterministically unpredictable side of humanity. Sexuality is not only literally creative of life, but also gives meaning and value to life. Sexual energy plays an important role in presenting theatrical vitality and also shows resistance against death, the entropic dissipation of a human being. The last waltz scene consisting of two couples from two centuries gives a beautifully moving finale as these couples celebrate a moment of eternity. The play becomes a metaphor for loss and recovery.

Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women:A Harmony Between Autobiographical Experiences and Universal Themes

Kim In Pyo | 2013, 26(3) | pp.33~60 | number of Cited : 1

Women's Madness in Head-Rot Holiday by Sarah Daniels

Kyung Ran Park | 2013, 26(3) | pp.61~87 | number of Cited : 1

Head-Rot Holiday starts with a scene preparing for a Christmas party at the Penwell Special Hospital. The special hospital, however, is a euphemism for a psychiatric prison for women, who call it the ‘Head-rot Hotel’. The patients-criminals are persuaded to put on their best clothes for the Christmas disco with male inmates who are invited to join them. The play dramatizes the entangled lives of the three main characters: Dee (aged 22), Ruth (33) and Claudia (29). They are detained in this hospital for many different reasons without the limit of time. Dee has reached the end of the road and has nowhere to go. Ruth sometimes can’t remember if her life is real or part of a song. However, she hates being watched by the men who work there. Ruth refuses to be an object of voyeurism, as she is big and handled by men during her bath. Claudia, a black and a mother is too arrogant to realize her own situation and she cannot afford to raise her own children. They cannot lead their own lives and even during the Christmas party, they are forced to mingle with the male inmates from the prison. They have no freedom to enjoy their own Christmas time, when they want to throw themselves into disco. Just like the female patients, the nurses have also been driven from ‘normal’ hospitals, as they stood against the male authority of the medical institution. The play also portrays the compassion the women harbours, even though they are confined in an isolated space as insane criminals, and the contradiction of the society they belong to, which has ruined their lives. By exploring the secret world of special hospitals such as Broadmoor, Rampton and Ashworth, Daniels poses a series of “vital questions: what is treatment and how sane is it, what is therapeutic about our institutions, and how normal is it to be ‘feminine’?”(Clean). They are not independent emotionally and economically to take care of themselves and their loved ones. They are forced to be in the special hospital and thus put under the constant scrutiny of the medical institution that has traditionally been controlled mainly by males. However, these women try to embrace and support each other.

A Revolution as a Fable: a Case of Baraka’s The Slave

Paek,Hwankie | 2013, 26(3) | pp.89~111 | number of Cited : 0

Violence on Stage and Audience’s Pain — Focusing on Shepard’s Family Trilogy

So Young Yoon | 2013, 26(3) | pp.113~134 | number of Cited : 3

This paper examines the nature and characteristics of violence presented in Shepard’s family trilogy. Violence is one of recurring themes that Shepard adopts in his plays. Shepard makes the best use of visual and auditory imagery to represent violence on the stage and invites violent experience to the audience. In Curse of the Starving Class, Weston as a father plays a role of invader not a family provider. In this play, tons of violent actions are performed by actors: Wesley’s urination on Emma’s chart, Weston’s intrusion by breaking fences and so on. What is noteworthy is a kind of storytelling about a cat and an eagle between Wesley and Emma. Like their story, their relationship is torn by sharing no experience as a family. Buried Child represents a family including Dodge, Halie, Tilden, Bradley, and Vince. Tilden and Bradley are brothers and Vince is Tilden’s son. Their father, Dodge, shows himself sitting on a sofa in the living room, which was succeeded to Bradley, and then Vince in the end. They have a family secret in common, which might be related to infanticide and incest between Halie and Tilden. Through violence the family can recognize Vince as their grandson. Also, they cannot communicate by eating or drinking food, which is just object for violence. Ironically, food functions as a tool for violent communication between them. True West shows extended violence between brothers which is called Pinteresque menace. As an author Austin conflicts with his brother Lee as a desert rat and a fake writer. Their obvious desire toward the West is revealed through extrem ely tout conflict in the last scene. Wrangling Lee with a telephone wire by Austin discloses endless violent image, delivering the image of the West on stage. In this connection, Shepard considers violence impetus to develop his plays. Especially, Shepard puts emphasis of violent experience on audience in order to arouse their easiness and the invisible fourth wall between stage and audience. Through visual and auditory imagery, the playwright insists on the importance of the power and persistence of violence. On top of that, Shepard’s intention is on leaving painful experience to the audience by making striking images. These are closely related to body in that visual and auditory imagery is to appeal audience’s eyes and ears through violent experiences. Consequently, pain left on audience is inseparable from violence of body.

Clybourne Park: The Inefficacy of ‘Jim Crow’ and ‘Post-race’

JUN, JOON-TAEK | 2013, 26(3) | pp.135~159 | number of Cited : 2

Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park (2010), the first American drama to win the triumvirate of an Olivier (2010), a Pulitzer (2011) and a Tony (2012), functions both as a prequel and sequel of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959). Act One of the play begins in 1959, in the midst of the age of Jim Crow, as a white couple sell their home in Clybourne Park to the Youngers, who are depicted in A Raisin in the Sun. The couple receive a visit from Karl, another character in Hansberry’s work, informing them that the Youngers are black, and pleading with the couple to back out of the deal, for fear that local property values will fall if black residents move in. Act Two is set in the same house in 2009, the first year of post-racial Obama’s presidency. In the intervening years, Clybourne Park has become an all-black neighborhood, but now gentrification is setting in. A white couple seeking to buy and renovate the house are being forced by local housing regulations to negotiate with a black couple representing a neighborhood organization. The female spouse is Lena, named after her great aunt Lena, who purchased the house in A Raisin in the Sun. While Hansberry’s drama was a serious statement about black pride, Norris’s play, by contrast, shows that good manners and political correctness enshrine and repress racism, maintaining race as a category of truth. Though the story is definitely about racial territoriality, both acts delve into the problem of class, gender and sexuality as well. As the same actors play different characters in both acts, Norris finally suggests that America has changed but not evolved at all, reflecting the playwright’s pessimistic views inspired by John Gray and Alexis de Tocqueville. This paper aims to investigate this side of America and envisions the future of American racial drama, when Clybourne Park’s treatment of race issues, which counters Obama’s hollow policies, has gone mainstream.

A Comedy Pleasing/Displeasing to the Audiences:The Politics of Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven

jung mi kyung | 2013, 26(3) | pp.161~190 | number of Cited : 6

King Hedley II as an Act of “Resolution”in the Pittsburgh Cycle

Cho,Eun-Young | 2013, 26(3) | pp.191~220 | number of Cited : 3

This paper examines King Hedley II in the whole spectrum of the Pittsburgh Cycle. Wilson perceives of the 1980s as a period of loss and rupture in terms of black lives but of history, too. The African American community in the play is in need of spiritual and social regeneration which is possible only through the recognition of the blacks’ acknowledging of their own worth which in turn is possible through their acceptance of their past. King Hedley II is the least appreciated play among the ten plays and the dominant criticism against the play is that it is excessively violent, overly dark, and too long. It was also criticized for having an unduly complicated back story, too. Situating the play in the whole spectrum of the 10 plays, however, could effectively explain the necessity of those elements many critics have doubts about. To examine the plays in the Pittsburgh Cycle from their actual order of composition enables the reader to see that connecting Seven Guitars and King Hedley II is essential to provide for the kind of conclusion the author had in mind for the grand conclusion of black experience during the 20th century. Written right before the opening and concluding plays in the Pittsburgh Cycle, King Hedley II functions as an act of resolution necessary for the spiritual and social regeneration of the black community. With the sacrificial death of King Hedley II presided over by Stool Pigeon, King Hedley II, unfairly criticized for being pointlessly violent and pessimistic, ends with the intimations of imminent resurrection of Aunt Ester, the repository of the black community’s collective memory. It is Wilson’s firm idea that as long as Aunt Ester’s presence or the promise of it remains, the shared history of the community can be passed on, and the integrity of the black community can flourish.

Female Aesthetics in Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf

Joo, Kee Wha | 2013, 26(3) | pp.221~241 | number of Cited : 0

Guilt and Repression in Hare’s Skylight

김화순 | 2013, 26(3) | pp.243~261 | number of Cited : 0

Performative aspects in Yang Jung-ung’s Hamlet in terms of adapting Gut performance

Nam, Ji-soo | 2013, 26(3) | pp.263~290 | number of Cited : 2

This study aims to research and analyze the performative aspects of the Korean production of Hamlet(2010), adapted with shamanic ritual Gut, by the theatre company Yohangja and Yang Jung-ung. It is worth mentioning that there has been a sort of trend for Korean theatre directors to adopt Hamlet with Gut since the 1990s. Especially, there has been a Korean Shakespeare boom in the last twenty years, and Hamlet has definitely been the most performed and admired by Korean audience. In particular, in this period, Hamlet has been closely connected with shamanism. The most prominent of Hamlet production since the 1990s stage ritual like Gut – in which a shaman appears to be possessed. All stage shaman rituals or a scene of shamanistic possession. As the Korean Hamlets, with few exceptions, have incorporated shamanism, it is within bounds to say that shamanism has become a theatrical trend in any Hamlet adaptation. In this thesis, among many others, I choose to analyze Yang Jung-ung’s Hamlet because it is a unique adapting performance in which director tries to bring the form and structure of Gut to the text. My research is to analyze the performative characteristics of Hamlet, which spontaneously happens during its performing process, principally with German scholar Erika Fischer-Lichte’s aesthetics. In the theatre field, the studies on Gut or theatrical adaptation with Gut have been usually concentrated in particular aspects: the studies on symbolic signs in some representative scenes of Gut, shamanic narrative, meaning of shaman’s chanting etc. Or their researching subject has not been Gut itself, but rather shamanic representation limited to songs or script. There may be a possibility that someone might raise a skeptical question that performativity is an idea to highlight the ongoing process of an event and theoretical tool of the performativity might be too arbitrary to get based on analyzing the performance. That is why it becomes important to analyze performance from a phenomenological perspective as well as semiotic view. And I consider Fischer-Lichte contributes to make the performative theory more concrete and firm by supplementing semiotic aspect into phenomenal body. Based on this theory, I am to analyze how Gut is adapted in Hamlet, how Gut penetrates into spectators’ perception and consciousness, and what kind of performative effects it ultimately earned throughout Gut.

Julia Cho’s Desert Trilogy: A Topography of the Lost

정광숙 | 2013, 26(3) | pp.291~311 | number of Cited : 6

The Deconstruction of American Orientalism in Diana Son’s R.A.W. (’Cause I’m a Woman)

Joo, Kyoung-Jung | 2013, 26(3) | pp.313~335 | number of Cited : 0

This article examines the deconstruction of American Orientalism through stereo-typicality of Asian American women in Diana Son’s R. A. W. (’Cause I’m a Woman) (1993). She is known for her exploration of Asian American identities from various angles with idiosyncratic and disturbing women characters in her plays, 2000 Miles (1993), Boy (1994), Stop Kiss (2000) and Satellite (2006). R.A.W. is significant in presenting possible oriental Asian women stereotypes in various perspectives and creating a new identity of them. These stereotyped images mainly come from American Orientalism. Edward Said’s West Orientalism extends to American Orientalism which is related to American imperialism and it influences on American culture. Asian American women in American culture generally appear as distorted and stereotypical objects; in particular they are sexually objectified. In this article, the identities of Asian American women are analyzed with such critical terms as passivity, Oriental sensuality and unknowability. These stereotypical images discriminate and oppress four female Asian American characters. In the end, they deconstruct the false oriental images and replace them by the obverse images of powerful, independent and positive Asian American women. In other words, they try to be free from oriental negative restraints, in particular race-negative sexuality. This play succeeds in presenting, testing, and subverting deeply rooted Oriental identity of Asian American women. The play theatrically presents deconstructive strategy through avant-garde theatre. Son experiments theatrical devices such as slides, a song, non-characteristic characters, no-dialogues and fragmentary narratives. In particular, she uses theatricality of the Theatre of Image as one of American avant-garde theatre influenced by Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre. The play presents a new and diverse paradigm to Asian American theatre which was stuck with political realism plays. Ultimately, Son suggests political and social change of American society as well as theatrically subversive avant-garde theater in her play.

The Localized Acceptance of Modern American Plays in China

Du Xinyu | 2013, 26(3) | pp.337~354 | number of Cited : 0

From the early 20th century on, many modern American playwrights and their plays have been introduced to and accepted by Chinese audience. Then, studies on American drama became prosperous in China after the opening-up policy of China. The article discerns the acceptance of modern American plays in the new era mainly through three American playwrights: Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller and Sam Shepard. O’Neill is the American playwright who is most familiar to Chinese audience and the one whose plays are studied most widely by Chinese scholars. The acceptance of him is generalized from two aspects. Firstly, the article shows the acceptance of him through some related drama seminars, collections of critical essays on him and the publication of his Anthology in China. Then, the article discusses the localized adaptation of O’Neill’s two plays: Desire Under the Elms has been adapted to Sichuanese Opera and Henan Quju Opera while Anna Chiristie has been adapted to Yongju Opera, and all such adaptations are very successful in China. Miller visited China several times. Therefore, the article sets out to review his visits to China, the staging of Death of a Salesman in China with Miller himself as the director, and his friendship with many Chinese dramatists and scholars. Shepard is not so widely accepted in China as O’Neill and Miller, but his later family plays, which can be depicted as neo-realistic ones, have been staged and accepted by Chinese audience, too, especially his Fool for Love, which became the opening drama of People’s Art Mini Theatre in 1995. Through these three playwrights, the article aims to analyze the localized acceptance of modern American plays on Chinese stage: when the American dramatists were introduced to China, their plays were adapted in accordance with the interests of Chinese audience. They are adapted so successfully that some of them have won many prizes and become classical plays in the country. Then, by analyzing some features of the dramatists and their plays, the article discerns reasons why these playwrights and their plays are widely accepted in China.

The Disordering Impulse:Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Anti-Play’ The Stonemason

O’Sullivan, James | 2013, 26(3) | pp.355~378 | number of Cited : 0

Translation, Production, and Dramatic Impact of Modern English Playwrights in Republican China

Siyuan Liu | 2013, 26(3) | pp.379~402 | number of Cited : 0

KJCKorea
Journal Central

Journal of Modern English Drama 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.11

2013, Vol.26, No.3