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  • Generation gap, family antagonism and rootlessness of characters in Sam Shepard's True West, Fool for love and A lie of the mind = Generacijski prepad, antagonizem v družini in iskanje korenin v dramah Sama Sheparda True West, Fool for love in A Lie of the mind : diplomsko delo
    Starina, Maja
    Sam Shepard was born in 1943 in Fort Sheridan, Illinois. He spent his childhood moving from one air base to another due to the fact that his father was in the military, thus experiencing the rigidity ... and rootlessness of military life first-hand. However, Sam did not like following rules as he was a free spirit who loved movies and music. Rather than going to college, he joined a travelling theatre company and soon discovered the magic of the theatre. Therefore, he moved to New York, where it all began. Today, he is a successful screenwriter, actor and director, but above all, he is one of the greatest contemporary American playwrights. To date, he has written over fifty plays, many of which have won awards and have been performed in theatres across the United States of America as well as Europe. In the thesis I am focused on the last three of his family plays, which Shepard wrote in the first half of the 1980s, perhaps in an attempt to get a better insight into his own problematic family dynamics and thus find his own identity. These plays contain many autobiographical elements as Shepard drew inspiration from his own personal life. True West tells the story of two very different brothers. It is an Old West tale of the good versus the bad and deals with the duality present in all of us. In the next pay, Fool for Love, Shepard explores the masculine and feminine side present in all of us through the final confrontation between two lovers who turn out to be half-brother and sister. A Lie of the Mind, the last of his family plays, is a synthesis of the previous two. In it, we are presented with two families who come from completely different environments, joined by the marriage of the two protagonists and torn apart by male violence inflicted upon women. In this play, Shepard deals with male machismo and its devastating effect on women and consequently the family itself. The three major topics present in all these plays are generation gap, shown by the differences and similarities between the parents and the children; family antagonism, visible in the rivalry and animosity between the different members of the family; and rootlessness of characters, made evident by the clear (dis)connection of the characters to the land or more importantly, family. Shepard's characters are all victims of a past they cannot escape. The men almost religiously follow in the footsteps of their fathers. The latter are either drunken hermits who abandoned their families to live in the desert or reclusive hunters preying on deer from a shack in the woods. Their sons, not having appropriate role models, continue the vicious circle of neglect and abuse of the women, thus trying to assert themselves as real man in the way they were taught by their fathers. They are all weak and consequently succumb to the curse of heredity, as they do not know any better. All this machismo leads to female victimisation. The mothers are broken, numb and have given up on love. They were disillusioned by their men, who abandoned them physically or emotionally. They inevitably pass this bitterness and anger on to their daughters, who in turn continue their path by choosing abusive, philandering men who either leave them or beat them so severely that they end up in hospital. Nevertheless, at the end, the women are stronger. Unlike the men, who seem to blindly follow the path predetermined by their fathers, the women at least attempt to break the vicious circle they are caught in and free themselves of the shackles of the past. They either find a better version of their previous mate or simply pack up their bags and leave in search of their roots, their own happiness. The men as well as the women are lost, rootless, in constant search of their own identity, which they try to find in their own shattered families without success. This can be clearly seen in the rivalry amongst siblings as well as the children and their parents. They are completely disconnected from each other. Therefore, they move from place to place like nomads, wandering around aimlessly in the hope of a better tomorrow. As the author himself and the rest of us, they are just trying to get "through the night to get to the day" (Roudané, 31).
    Vrsta gradiva - diplomsko delo ; neleposlovje za odrasle
    Založništvo in izdelava - Ljubljana : [M. Starina], 2016
    Jezik - angleški
    COBISS.SI-ID - 61196898

Knjižnica/institucija Kraj Akronim Za izposojo Druga zaloga
FF, Osrednja humanistična knjižnica, Ljubljana Ljubljana FFLJ v čitalnico 1 izv.
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