The book series CDE Studies invites monographs (and collections) on issues in contemporary Anglophone dramatic literature and theatre performance. The book series is dedicated to the analysis and ...renegotiation of contemporary writers and plays and their historical, political, formal, theoretical and methodological contexts.
This book reads Martin Crimp's The Treatment (1993), Attempts on her Life (1997), The Country (2000), Face to the Wall (2002), Cruel and Tender (2004) and his adaptation of Chekhov's The Seagull ...(2006) in the context of contemporary, late capitalist societies of control or of 'spectacle', and explores how female collapse in particular works as a form of denunciation of the violence of globalized, technological neo-liberalism. The book contends that Crimp is a post-Holocaust writer, whose dramaturgy is pervaded by the ethical and aesthetic debates that the Holocaust has generated in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Its main claim is that, by interpellating spectators through the defamiliarized language of collapse and testimony, Crimp invites spectators to contribute to detecting the seeds of 'barbarism' as they may detect them in their context, thus warning them about the introduction of violence in supposedly civilized relationships and thereby also contributing to overcoming the contemporary ethical impasse. The book finally argues that female characters who pass on their testimony are shown to the audience in the 'process of becoming' ethical bodies – namely, they are emerge as ethical out of the perceived necessity to integrate both the Other as essential parts of their beings, thus recovering an innate, Baumian sense of responsibility towards the Other.
In a number of contemporary African American novels written by women, like Gayl Jones' Corregidora and Eva's Man, and Toni Morrison's Beloved, we encounter persistent images of female madness in the ...form of hysteria, violence or silence. My main thesis here is that madness works in these texts to reveal the oppressive control the ideologies of racism and sexism effect on the black woman. This use of madness transforms the negative construct of female insanity into a necessary affirmation of the female self. However, not all the works are equally successful in achieving this deconstruction of insanity. While the protagonist in Beloved claims maternal agency on the same terms of possession and ownership as the white patriarchal ideology, and Eva's Man still contemplates violence, not language, as the only possible response to sexism and racism, it is only Corregidora that actually uncovers the lost ground of female desire. Yet in their exploration of tenable, black female identities beyond the limits of white patriarchal structures, the novels put forth an alternative to both the black and white male constructions of identity and difference, thus plunging into crisis the patriarchal ideology that allows for gender and racial exploitation.
