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A Study on the Historical Consciousness in the Post-1968 British Political Drama with a Post-Marxist View to History and Class

  • Journal of Modern English Drama
  • Abbr : JMBARD
  • 2005, 18(3), pp.87-118
  • Publisher : 한국현대영미드라마학회
  • Research Area : Humanities > English Language and Literature > English Literature > Contemporary English Drama

KIM, YOO 1

1성균관대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the historical drama of contemporary British dramatists, David Edgar, Howard Brenton, David Hare and Trevor Griffiths with a post-Marxist perspective on history and class. It aims to illustrate the changing ways in which history is represented by the post-1968 brood of writers who saw the theatre itself as a weapon of political struggle. My emphasis is on the coherence rather than the contradictions in their historical perceptions. Despite the varying perceptions in their views of historical processes and the relationship between historical agency and structure, the growing concern of these writers is what Frederic Jameson called ‘the crisis of historicity itself.’ Beyond sharing a political vision engendered by Marxism, their post-1968 plays cast increasing doubts on classical notions of class and pose a serious challenge to orthodox Marxist ideas on history. Their focus shifts increasingly from advancing the view of ‘history from the below’ to much deeper issues regarding post-modern approaches about the discursive constructedness of reality, the so-called ‘linguistic(cultural) turn.’ The plays under my study are a series of responses to the changing socio-political climates, which might be largely identified as three critical periods, the much polticised year of 1968, the surge of the New Right since 1979, and the widespread discrediting of Marxism sparked off by the collapse of East European socialist regimes since 1989. I understand the plays in the context of post-Marxist response where the Marxist binary model of labour and class politics is on the continuous decline and a multiplicity of resistance and discourse politics are gradually espoused. However, the plays produced in the early 1990s stand as a growing indication of the urgent search for the common values which might cut across of gender, race and class.

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