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Modern drama and the rhetoric of theater / W. B. Worthen.
De Gruyter University of California Press Complete eBook-Package 2014-2015 Available online
View online- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Worthen, William B., 1955- author.
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- English drama--20th century--History and criticism.
- English drama.
- American drama--20th century--History and criticism.
- American drama.
- Theater--Production and direction--History--20th century.
- Theater.
- Theater--English-speaking countries--History--20th century.
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource (241 p.)
- Edition:
- 1st ed.
- Place of Publication:
- Berkeley, California : University of California Press, 1992.
- Language Note:
- English
- Summary:
- The history of drama is typically viewed as a series of inert "styles." Tracing British and American stage drama from the 1880's onward, W. B. Worthen instead sees drama as the interplay of text, stage production, and audience. How are audiences manipulated? What makes drama meaningful? Worthen identifies three rhetorical strategies that distinguish an O'Neill play from a Yeats, or these two from a Brecht. Where realistic theater relies on the "natural" qualities of the stage scene, poetic theater uses the poet's word, the text, to control performance. Modern political theater, by contrast, openly places the audience at the center of its rhetorical designs, and the drama of the postwar period is shown to develop a range of post-Brechtian practices that make the audience the subject of the play. Worthen's book deserves the attention of any literary critic or serious theatergoer interested in the relationship between modern drama and the spectator.
- Contents:
- Front matter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1. Theater and the Scene of Vision
- 2. Actors and Objects
- 3. Scripted Bodies: Poetic Theater
- 4. Political Theater: Staging the Spectator
- Postscript. Sidi's Image: Theater and the Frame of Culture
- Works Cited
- Index
- Notes:
- Description based upon print version of record.
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- Description based on print version record.
- ISBN:
- 9780520963047
- 0520963040
- OCLC:
- 904425955
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