Brian Johnston's approach to Ibsen, now well known, is unlike
any other. Johnston sees Ibsen's twelve realist plays as a single
cyclical work, the "realist" method of which hides a much larger
poetic ...intention than has previously been suspected. He believes
that the cycle constitutes one of the major works of the European
imagination, comparable in scale to Goethe or Dante. And he has
shown Ibsen to be the heir to Romantic and Hegelian art and
thought, adapting this heritage to the circumstances of his own
day.This work demonstrates how the language and scene, characters
and "props," of the Ibsen dramas establish a bold and far-reaching
theatrical goal: nothing less than an account of our biological and
cultural identity in its multilayered totality. Johnston argues
that Ibsen's realist text, while stimulating the appearance of
nineteenth-century life, also objectively and precisely builds up
an alternative image in which archetypal figures and situations
from our cultural past repossess the realist stage. Thus he sees
the Ibsen "strategy" in his realist plays as twofold: (1) the
dialectical subversion of the nineteenth-century reality presented
in the plays, and (2) the forced recovery of the archetypal from
the past, in a procedure similar to James Joyce's in
Ulysses . By "supertext" Johnston means a reservoir of
cultural reference upon which Ibsen continuously drew in his
realist work just as in is earlier poetic and historical
dramas.
Modernism in European drama Innes, Christopher; Marker, Frederick J
Modernism in European drama,
c1998, 19981103, 1998, 2000, 1998-01-01
eBook
This collection of essays, originally published over the last forty years in the journal Modern Drama, explores the drama of four of the most influential European proponents of modernism in the ...European Drama: Ibsen, Strandberg, Pirandello and Beckett.
