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Geographical Imagery and Writing:Shepard’s True West as a Metadrama

  • Journal of Modern English Drama
  • Abbr : JMBARD
  • 2006, 19(3), pp.281-299
  • Publisher : 한국현대영미드라마학회
  • Research Area : Humanities > English Language and Literature > English Literature > Contemporary English Drama

Jung,Byung-Eon 1

1부산대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Jung, Byung-EonThis essay is a reading of True West as a play of fictive narrative commenting on Shepard's new style of writing by focusing on the relationship between two distinctive writing styles reflected by two characters in conjunction with geographical images. This analysis suggests a metadramatic reading based on Shepard's desire to create a new play form in so far as True West addresses the nature of his act of composition. Since Curse of the Starving Class (1976), he has drastically changed his writing style by introducing the realistic tradition to the family trilogy mainly by linking the themes of family and love. In True West, Shepard especially juxtaposes the East or northern California as a space for Austin, "Shepard the legitimate playwright," with the West as a space for his brother Lee's "asocial, renegade tendencies." These two spaces represent the two natures of Shepard as playwright. His desire for "a whole different way of writing," confessed at an interview, is expressed at the end by the "desert-like landscape" of Austin and Lee as a metaphor for the harmonious equilibrium of Shepard's two kinds of style: realism and surrealism, order and chaos. True West is a play that involves a significant degree of self-consciousness about the act of writing as a strategy for surviving the difficult climate of the American theatre during the seventies.

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