2022, Vol.35, No.3

Journal of Modern English Drama 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.11

pISSN : 1226-3397
https://journal.kci.go.kr/medak

Council estates, the multi-storey tower blocks in Britain, were built in the early 20th century in order to improve housing affordability for the low-income inner-city working class. Throughout the post-war era, however, they have degenerated into the poorest and the most marginalized communities. Dominant media discourses which stigmatize council estates, highlight the sensational behaviors of the estates residents, eliminating their ‘quotidian’ experience and thus reducing the lived realities of the community to a dangerous, violent space. Top Boy, a British television drama series set in the housing estates of East London, moves beyond the generic conventions of crime drama and entails a piquant critique of the British society in the 21st century. The series focuses on the social inequalities and economic deprivation of the black community in the social welfare blind spots. This paper understands Top Boy as a challenge to the existing council estates discourses and evaluates the way the series attempts to represent the most underprivileged space in the interactions of class tension, racism and neo-liberalism. The paper examines the council estates as class-segregated and racialised space, focusing on cinematography in Top Boy. It also explores the way the quotidian experiences in the estates are reinstated through the narrative of Ra’Nell, a black teenager, and demonstrates how Top Boy revises the moralistic, behavioural aspects of the existing council estates discourses. Finally, the paper discloses how community solidarity in Top Boy challenges the established discourses which reduce the complex realities of the council estates to a simple tale of social dysfunction.

The House of Sorrow is a digital game-based performance piece that stages a video game as the platform to stage themes of memory, thoughts, and their transformations through streaming. This piece is takes the form of a metagame that deals with game within a game, as it employs the artist-created game contents as its central narrative element and welcomes the audience to a virtual theater on a Minecraft map. Yet, from a different point of view, The House of Sorrow simulates stage and theater through the double structure of the game that stages both the diegetic narrative space and the non-diegetic empirical environment. In this context, the argument of this study is that the aesthetic dimension of this piece is noticeable through the apparatus and grammar of theater. This paper thus posits The House of Sorrow as a performing art and investigates the dramatic function of the game-narrative and the staging characteristics of the game-streaming in order to examine the heterogeneous space that unfolds between the performance and digital media. The game “The House of Sorrow” as dramatic text has a self-reflexive and self-referential nature, but the meta-usage of this game operates through its relationship with another world via game-streaming. The game-streaming that mediates the virtuality of the game and the reality of the performance generates the theatrical structure of the performer’s role-playing and the spectators’ game-watching, so creating an interplayable environment for game-playing. Thus, The House of Sorrow appropriates the most trend in popular media culture and registers it within the context of theater, overlapping game and theater ― and what emerges amidst the double would be theater, or play in the most original sense.

This article is aimed at examining how Shaw’s rationalistic view of religion was formed, and then at confirming that Life Force and Creative Evolution are Shaw’s religious beliefs theoretically embodied and explaining what the meaning of Superman is, all of which are based on Shaw’s literary works. Another purpose is to show how Shaw’s rationalistic view of religion is converged in his play Saint Joan (1923) so that the oxymoron of its concept can be properly understood. While Shaw recognizes religious creeds which can be understood by reasonable mind, he believes that cosmic forces are spiritual and mental realities such as God, vitality, will, spirit and conscience, which cannot be resolved by reason. Therefore, I regard Shaw’s religious thought as a rationalistic view of religion between deism and pantheism. Life Force is not a tangible material but the spiritual force omnipresent in the universe and the driving force of the world, and morality is embedded in the force. Creative Evolution can be defined as the volitional, progressive, and creative manifestation of Life Force. Superman is the reformer of the world and civilization, who is born through the process of trial and error by Life Force. Superman should appear as a “political Providence” and a form of community of race that will replace the current mankind. Shaw embodies in Saint Joan his faith that a kind of amalgam of religion, morality and rationalism can contribute to the progress of humankind. Joan’s rationalistic attitude is clearly revealed not only in her witty refutation against the questions of the rulers but also in her conviction of wearing a soldier’s uniform all the time. In Joan’s rationalistic piety, morality can often be glimpsed, too. Her morality is most intensely expressed on her dying at the stake. Joan can be said to be a hero, genius and saint. However, it is difficult to assert that she is a Superman, on considering Shaw’s various conditions of Superman. Saint Joan can be regarded as the total figuration of Shaw’s realism in the light of its convergence of morality, rationalism, Life Force and Creative Evolution.