United States adopted the nineteenth century British model of colonialism for the twentieth century, specially in the exercise of controlling people's perspectives within the country while ...undertaking the adventure of directly interfering in other countries’ affairs. When President Bush addressed three countries around the world as Axis of Evil on January 29, 2002, he was following the same route. Nevertheless, coining the phrase was not enough, and making people believe it required the main task that became possible through creating an intellectual atmosphere in which the focus was to promote the picture of good and evil embedded in the addressing of Axis of Evil. Consequently, any voice out of tune was hushed instantly, even if it meant Sam Shepard who had previously won great fame on the American stage by his family plays. Shepard never stopped on the notion of revealing the multiplicity of self, interacting with different geopolitical situations. As such, it is no wonder that his God of Hell is pursuing the same aim, a play totally neglected by the critics and reviewers for being too political and incoherent. Nevertheless, the research at hand is to demonstrate that Shepard is a true intellectual or, in Rorty's term, a liberal Ironist, able to entangle himself from the tissues of the aforementioned cultural war by considering people's susceptibility to humiliation.
This article examines the intersection of gender and disability in The Glass Menagerie, a 1944 play by the acclaimed American dramatist Tennessee Williams, and the 2010 Iranian film adaptation Here ...Without Me, scripted and directed by Bahram Tavakoli. Disability studies is a relatively new discipline which seeks to investigate the variegated continuum of embodiment through cultural discourses that challenge the medical and scientific perceptions of disability. In the adapted film, compulsory able-bodiedness, the belief that perfect healthy bodies are the norm, while freakish, different, and disabled ones are deviations from the said norm, is seen on the screen countless times, a view established by the dominant culture of normalcy. As a site of intercultural transposition, the film re-contextualizes the intersection of gender and disability in contemporary Iran and hence throws into relief some of the tacit assumptions regarding embodied experience. Both the play and the film implicate fantasy as an implicit critique of normalcy.
The consumer culture of late capitalism is more than ever associated with the concept of urban space. Prevalent in the late capitalist society is abstract space that homogenizes and flattens out the ...differences, conflicts and contradictions on the social scene. This process of homogenization acts as a mechanism of control to preserve the current status quo. In Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero, abstract space, by homogenizing and fragmenting the body and lived experience, makes the characters comply with the consumer culture and suppresses the potentials for the difference and the emergence of alternative spaces. In this paper, the role abstract space plays in Ellis's novel is analyzed in the light of Henri Lefebvre's theory of space. The present study argues that abstract space numbs the potentials for difference and heterogeneity in Ellis's novel. Instead, it imposes homogeneity on social relations, pushing the characters to the brink of invisibility and nothingness.
Regressive progression is a concept which interestingly describes the developmental process of Western tragedy based on the recurring motif of the quest for the higher self and Nietzsche’s ...understanding of Dionysian tragic hero. This motif reveals itself in three manifestations - action, imagination and inaction- respectively visible in the three major dramatic eras of the Renaissance tragedy, European nineteenth-century drama, and the Absurd Theatre. Although the approach of the quest regressively shifts from action to inaction, the degree of success of the tragic questers in approximating the wished-for higher self reveals a progressive line in the developmental process of Western tragedy.
Children’s theatre in Iran reflects two distinct categories: performances in schools or community centres and plays in private theatre spaces. Hasan Dolatabadi is the most prominent Iranian ...children’s playwright whose plays are the main representatives of the first category. The second category has a longer history and provides us with popular plays which can be analysed to see what features have contributed to their success. As this study scrutinizes Dolatabadi’s plays for similar features, it becomes clear that they lack aesthetic value and concern for the public. However, because they reinforce beliefs that further the ideological causes, they are well supported and publicized. Their increasing popularity coincides with the marginalization of unfunded plays, which may ultimately damage Iranian children’s theatre as well as Iranian culture.
The present article explores how William Shakespeare’s King Lear thoughtfully challenges the primacy of sight among the senses, with implications for our understanding of the play’s relationship both ...to its immediate political context and to the history of ocularcentrism in early modern England. Adopting a new historicist approach, this article claims that writing King Lear in the midst of heated debates on the Anglo-Scottish Union was both a reaction to any possible ocularcentric behaviour by King James and a part of active criticism against the ocularcentrism of the period. Regardless of his personal opinion on James’s plan for the Union, Shakespeare was worried that the king would act according to his ocularcentric understanding of the two countries under his rule. Therefore, King Lear can be read as an advance warning to King James, who needs to be wary of superficial, sight-centred behaviours so as not to suffer the same fate as Lear.
Once theatre aims at children, who are the citizens and decision makers of the future, it can influence the course of society through the values and worldviews that it promotes. The exceptional ...capacity of this medium in engaging the audience, along with children’s receptiveness, necessitates a meticulous study of the ideologies embedded in plays. This study unravels how these ideological factors can hamper the theatre’s main purpose which is to encourage the audience to form individual fantasies. Accordingly, Žižek’s theories are drawn upon for their hints on ideology, fantasy, reality, and subjectivity. Taking his psychoanalytic views into account, four Persian plays are examined to determine what ideologies underlie these plays’ motifs and instructions, as well as what may justify their presence in plays. On close inspection, it becomes evident that these plays are loaded with conscious manipulative ideologies which are intended to train homogeneous social members rather than present objective glimpses of real life.
A great number of analyses have already been devoted to the study of the concept of madness but none has ever used Karl Jaspers' psychopathological notion of insanity as a touchstone to examine ...prominent literary works. The present investigation aims to portray the manifestation of madness in Brian Yorkey and Tom Kitt's Next to Normal. Applying the eclectic perspective of Karl Jaspers which bridges the gap between empirical and interpretive psychiatry, this research will examine the enigmatic nature of mental illness in postmodern era. Jaspers' book, General Psychopathology includes a tentative classification of mental disorders which will be used to look at this particular work of art from his perspective, offering a standpoint which is equally person-centered and science-based.
This study attempts to investigate the process of canonization that Ionesco’s initial play went through by means of Martin Esslin’s famous work of theater criticism that labeled the unknown plays of ...the 50’s “absurd”. The present study argues that Esslin’s attempt to canonize these plays under the label of The Theater of the Absurd did not do justice to the ethical perspectives that these plays set forth. By focusing on a postmodern performance by Jean-Luc Lagarce, the study tries to elucidate how his performance of The Bald Soprano challenged the pre-judged attitude of the audience through challenging the previously established beliefs concerning the Theater of the Absurd. The semiotics as the study of the way meaning is created will be drawn on. In The Semiotics of Theater, Erika Fischer-Lichte outlines the internal theatrical code at three different levels of system, norm, and speech. Here, the emphasis will be on speech to illuminate the staging by Lagarce and explain how a classic work precipitates postmodern production from within the established canon.
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