This essay critiques a diverse selection of theatre pieces as a means to explore the development and performative persistence of what geographer Jamie Linton calls "the modern water paradigm": the ...management regime whereby water is treated in isolation, as a volumetric abstraction, rather than as an integral part of inhabited environments. Using a theoretical basis drawn from Linton and Bruno Latour, the essay considers the political-ecological implications of this paradigm, and the need to move toward what Latour calls a "nonmodern constitution" that reintegrates nature and society rather than holding them apart conceptually. Henrik Ibsen's naturalist drama An Enemy of the People (1882) is examined first, as a playtext symptomatic of the rise of the modern water paradigm; here, the purification of water supplies provides the pretext and metaphor underpinning a technocratic narrowing of the body politic. Greg Kotis and Mark Hollmann's Broadway musical Urinetown (2001), a dystopian comedy about water scarcity, is then read as signaling the existential crisis into which the modern water paradigm had fallen by the turn of the millennium. Finally, the author examines his own site-specific, practice-as-research pieces Seven Bridges (2015) and Weir Science (2017), both of which were made for the Leeds Waterfront Festival in the United Kingdom. These attempted a performative reading of the specifics of place, and an examination of the city's relationship with its river, as a means for reconsidering water as a meeting point for an expanded political collective comprising both human and nonhuman actors.
Lee Edelman's No Future quickly became both seminal and controversial throughout queer theory and cultural studies. The queer figures Edelman analyzes in No Future are fictional characters from ...literature and film; they don't have to "make the choice to accede" to figuring the drive as queer because they simply are such figures. This is where the question of medium might begin to make a difference. The characters' turns within No Future are anomalous, not only in that they come from plays, but more strikingly in that they are the only female queers to appear in the book. I want to suggest that this conjuction of gender and genre opens onto an especially promising mode of pursuing Edelman's ethical project. To show this, I'll bring a third theatrical female into play and give her more stage time than her two predecessors get in No Future: Hedda Tesman née Gabler, the iconic antiheroine of Henrik Ibsen's 1890 drama.
The article is about Henrik Ibsen's enigmatic play, The Masterbuilder (1892), which is being read and interpreted via two Ibsen prose texts; his first letter to George Brandes (1867), and his ...autobiographic fragment, "Childhood Memories" (1881). In the play, as well as in the texts, a strange, dramatic, deadly fall occurs. A closer investigation of the tragic events shows that falling is related to guilt in all the cases. The tandem reading of the play and the prose texts shows the recurrent motif of "edge" situations in his authorship, and presents another reading of the ending of The Masterbuilder.
Al terminar la carrera de derecho y recibir su licenciatura, reconoció que ése no era su camino: "Sin embargo, después de la primera reacción jubilosa -confesó- me puse a contemplar el futuro con un ...sentimiento mezclado entre perplejidad y autocuestionamiento. ¿Qué voy a ser ahora? ¿Abogado? ¿Fiscal? Mis inclinaciones no iban en esa dirección".6 Por este motivo intentó emprender una carrera literaria en Egipto, pero su padre lo persuadió, con el consejo de su amigo el escritor y político Aḥmad Luṭfi al-Sayyid (1873-1963), de que debía continuar estudios superiores en el extranjero. Sin embargo, sabemos por él mismo que fue su primer trabajo dramático extenso. De este modo, es notable la declaración en torno a la política que hace Tawfīq al-Hakīm en su obra Min al-burŷ al-‘āŷī (Desde la torre de marfil), en la que señala "que su alejamiento del tumulto y de los partidos políticos no se debe a una indiferencia ante la sociedad y sus problemas, sino a una necesidad de elevarse por encima de la realidad y de los intereses particulares".10 En París, al-Hakīm no abandonó su preocupación por la realidad social y política de su país, de tal modo que en 1927 escribió su primera novela, ‘Awdat al-rūḥ (El regreso del espíritu), publicada en 1933.11 En ella describe, con elementos alegóricos, la vida y los problemas de la clase media egipcia, así como su participación en el movimiento nacionalista que envolvió a su país en 1919.12 Después de su estancia en Francia y el regreso a Egipto en 1928, sus inclinaciones políticas fueron atemperándose, al tiempo que afinó el espíritu de reformador social que había animado sus primeras obras.
As nineteenth-century realism became more and more intrepid in its pursuit of describing and depicting everyday life, it blurred irrevocably into the caustic and severe mode of literature better ...named satire. Realism's task of portraying the human became indistinguishable from satire's directive to castigate the human. Introducing an entirely new way of thinking about realism and the Victorian novel, Aaron Matz refers to the fusion of realism and satire as 'satirical realism': it is a mode in which our shared folly and error are so entrenched in everyday life, and so unchanging, that they need no embellishment when rendered in fiction. Focusing on the novels of Eliot, Hardy, Gissing, and Conrad, and the theater of Ibsen, Matz argues that it was the transformation of Victorian realism into satire that granted it immense moral authority, but that led ultimately to its demise.
Previous research has shown that the New Woman was a global phenomenon and that fiction was crucial to the emergence of this New Woman. One work that was of particular importance was Henrik Ibsen's A ...doll's house. This article examines the rise of the New Woman in early twentieth century Thailand. It traces the campaigns for gender equality that Thai women waged in local newspapers and magazines. It also examines the reactions towards these campaigns by three major authors, all of whom turned to Ibsen's play in their engagement with the New Woman phenomenon.
An Enemy of the People Rotter-Weller, Nick
The Arthur Miller Journal,
04/2020, Letnik:
15, Številka:
1
Journal Article, Book Review
An Enemy of the People Hugo Young Theatre, Ashland University Ashland, OH 11-19 October 2019 Directed by Teresa Durbin-Ames Miller's adaptation of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People seems to serve almost ...as an ideological scaffolding, a parable that points out to us the deep questions and concerns, the clouds of uncertainty, that surround ideas like democracy, truth, economy, family, and education. What in your ideology solves this dilemma?" Teresa Durbin-Ames's production of An Enemy of the People for the Ashland University Theatre Department takes up this questioning and brings it into the now, applying Miller's lionization (or, at least, centralization) of the scientist, the powerful observer of phenomena, to the question of climate change. Here, the framing of this production becomes its conclusion, and in the pivotal town meeting scene, hands are projected onto these images of water, the insertion of the people into the extremes, grasping at the water to apply what becomes their truth to it, constructing what must be perceived for the livelihood of the town.
PDF
