In the years before the First World War, when the century was less than a dozen years old, an upheaval that would have cultural and artistic repercussions across the country was taking place in an ...obscure corner of New York City. Here, Kramer takes a look at the history and accomplishementsof the Washington Square Players as an outgrowth of its own time and a harbinger of the future.
The purpose of this study is to place Lili Boulanger's song cycle Clairières dans le ciel in a new context. Elements of mélodie were the vehicle by which Boulanger synthesized the styles of her ...teacher Gabriel Fauré and composer Claude Debussy. The influence of both composers is seen throughout the work in the way she approached text setting, her use of their harmonic language, and how she treated the piano/voice relationship. Additionally, Boulanger employed elements of the popular music which surrounded her in Paris during the early twentieth-century by making use of rhythmic elements found in cakewalk, ragtime, and bal musette. The study also places the poetic cycle Tristesses by Francis Jammes, the text of Clairières dans le ciel, within the framework of symbolism and modernism. Jammes served as a bridge between the two styles. In his poems Tristesses, Jammes employed nature images as overt representations of ideas or emotion (modernism) as well as color imagery to veil others (symbolism). Through exploration of the composer's and writer's lives, the genesis of the work and analysis of selected musical elements of the songs and their texts, the context of Clairières dans le ciel within the musical and literary world becomes apparent.
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This dissertation investigates the discourse of “suggestion” in the fields of literary practice and experimental psychology at the French fin-de-siècle. Both fields, I argue, used language in a ...highly rhetorical manner to produce specific and intended effects in the body. I show how ideas about language and subjectivity popularized by the field of experimental psychology enabled writers to think about readers’ bodies in formal aesthetic terms. This study thus re-examines the proliferating literary movements of the French fin-de-siècle, often considered heterogeneous and reactionary by scholars, as progressive attempts to re-imagine the relationship between text and reader. I trace the development of this relationship from the decadents’ address of the reader’s body as a source of poetic inspiration, to the more central role of the body as a site of aesthetic experimentation in works by writers and critics associated with symbolism, free verse, and scientific aesthetics. Studies that have explored the link between psychology and literature of this period tend to focus primarily on literary representations of hysteria and other pathologies. In contrast, my study shows that writers’ preoccupations with the suggestive dimensions of language were shaped by the techniques and findings of normal psychology. Psychologists deployed suggestive language in their experiments to produce the embodied states of “cerebral exaltation,” “hyperesthesia,” and “hyper-receptivity,” and they published relevant work in literary journals alongside poems and reviews. I show how this discourse on the workings of the normal, functioning mind inspired writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé, René Ghil, and Remy de Gourmont to re-imagine the implications of their practice by experimenting with and writing about the suggestive properties of language. The discursive intersection of literary practice and experimental psychology, I argue, allows us to see that literary practitioners embraced a horizontal model of “communicability” that differed radically from the vertical model of geniuscritic-public that mediated literary reception throughout the Romantic era. This shift essentially changed what it meant to read literature, for this new premium on literary communicability inspired writers and critics to shun the task of interpretation and to privilege instead the experience of reading as a dynamic encounter between author, text, and reader.
In the light of recent interdisciplinary critical approaches to landscape and space, and adopting phenomenological methods of sensory analysis, this dissertation explores interconnected or ...synesthetic sensory “scapes” in contemporary British playwright Harold Pinter’s theatre. By studying its dramatic landscapes and probing into their multi-sensory manifestations in line with Symbolist theory and aesthetics, I argue that Pinter’s theatre articulates an ecocritical stance and a micropolitical critique. Chapter One explains the dissertation’s theoretical framework (landscape theory, Symbolist theory, ecocriticism, phenomenology, and sensory analysis), while arguing for an ecophilosophical reading of Pinter’s landscapes that engages not only with spatial patterns but also with the bodyscapes and psychic ecology of his characters. Chapter Two examines the theoretical/aesthetic Symbolist qualities of Pinter’s dramaturgy. Chapter Three connects Pinter's sensory scapes to the theories of space and time developed by Henri Bergson, revealing how they are concerned with subjective time as it is lived, with the spatiotemporal circularity of past, present, and future (related to the ouroboros symbol), and with the way one can imaginatively re/create one's own self through life. Chapter Four discusses how Pinter’s apocalyptic landscapes evoke the horror of the Holocaust, and denounce the tradition of oppression (or the structures of uncontrolled violence) that repeatedly produces new social and ecological catastrophes. Chapter Five draws upon feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray’s concepts of sexual difference to demonstrate the negative ecological effects of a monological patriarchal system of moral values upon family and conjugal life, as expressed in Pinter’s oppressive and abusive homescapes. Throughout this study I activate an interdisciplinary dialogue between Pinter’s landscapes and those found in works by Symbolist (and Decadent) artists/thinkers (Mallarmé, Rilke, Briusov, Maeterlinck, Rachilde, Patrício, Yeats, Munch, Sacher-Masoch, and Kafka.). Adopting phenomenological views of subjectivity (suggested by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gaston Bachelard, and Stanton Garner, among others), I invoke Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of micropolitics, as well as the latter’s concept of a combined ecology—mental, social, and environmental—to discuss how a study of sensory scapes reveals the presence of ecophilosophical and political concerns all through Pinter’s dramatic oeuvre.
Ronald Firbank (1886-1926) produced a body of work which is unique in both its thematic concerns and its stylistic innovations. His peculiar sexuality and difficult relationship to his physical body ...contributed to both the visual preoccupations in, and the formal aspects of, his work. His development of an aesthetic of highly ornate surface reconfigured his troubled desires and corporeal limitations as complex images, which both acknowledge, and deny the repercussions of, his deepest challenges as a social body. In addition, his daily performances of self produced highly theatricalized public versions of many of those challenges, often arresting inquiry into his health and sexuality, and instead producing a cult of eccentricity and minor celebrity around "the Firbank body." The most radical aspects of Firbank's contribution to aesthetic history blur the distinction between his physical body and his body of work. Attempting to rehabilitate Firbank from a critical legacy which has relegated him to the status of a minor writer, I read these two bodies together, using their points of intersection as the germs of my own critical project. Interpreting the Firbank body through both psychoanalytical accounts and cultural histories of masochism, auto-eroticism, and narcissism, I argue that Firbank's aesthetic of skin constitutes a significant, and hitherto under-valued, contribution to Anglo-European Modernism. Drawing on my own attempts to stage Firbank's 1920 play The Princess Zoubaroff, I conclude that the full realization of Firbank's legacy may be found in the development of a Firbankian theatre. While his own experiments with the form of theatre were largely unsuccessful, his work produces important challenges to the ways we conceive of, and create, the phenomenon of performance. In its formal investigation of the surface relations between human bodies, costumes, and objects, his work offers essential contributions to the history of anti psychological dramatic character. In the light of recent international developments in "postdramatic" and dance-influenced theatre, a reevaluation of Firbank's work offers a way of returning to the notion of dramatic character, without recourse to regressive models of a cohesive, humanistic psychic subject.
This thesis deals with stage adaptation of Emile Zola's novel L'Assommoir. Adapted for the stage in 1879 by William Busnach, L'Assommoir was a hit, especially with the working class. Despite this, ...because of its supposed weak aesthetic value, the theatrical adaptation has not been recognized by literary history. Notwithstanding, the analysis of the characters and staging of this adaptation bring some interesting points to light. The representation of people at work, daily life, the clever transposition to stage of some of the novel's more daring passages, the use of slang and the choice of realist costumes and décor are novelties that signal a change in the established dramatic code and announce the realism of Andre Antoine.
"Sem resumo feito pelo autor"; What when words gone? None for what then. But say by way of somehow on somehow with sight to do. With less of sight Still dim yet-. No. Nohow so on. Say better worse ...words gone when nohow on. Still dim and nohow on. All seen and nohow on. What words for what then? None for what then. Samuel Beckett INTRODUÇÃO - O presente trabalho propõe uma análise ao estudo do silêncio nos textos dramáticos de Harold Pinter e à forma como a importância do não dito foi trabalhada, em alguns desses textos, nas encenações para televisão e em quatro filmes, sob o signo da ameaça, do enigma e da memória. Uma dissertação em Literatura Inglesa, no contexto da dramaturgia de um autor aliada a uma temática específica, pressupõe, à partida, uma concentração na análise do texto e na importância dos seus conteúdos semânticos, a par com uma contextualização do tema proposto. Ao optar por centrar a reflexão sobre o silêncio, escolhi um objecto que tem estado pouco enfatizado, no âmbito da análise crítica contemporânea, que tem vindo a denotar uma orientação mais voltada para a faceta política de Pinter. Porém, o estudo do silêncio, nas peças do autor, foi um dos primeiros pontos realçados na abordagem de 1970, quer de Esslin, quer de Hollis, quando ainda era indefinida a denominação deste teatro, rico em espaços de silêncio. O que, posteriormente ficou conhecido como género "pinteresco" encontra a sua matriz no uso do silêncio e na introdução das pausas férteis. Assim, o que pre tendo com es te es tudo é uma r equal i f icação da te rminologia usada para de fi n i r os t ipos de si lêncio que Pinte r materializa. Para que o tema possa ser explorado pertinentemente a divisão em quatro capítulos afigura-se como a mais adequada para traçar uma rota precisa que se concentre em Pinter, no silêncio e na perspectiva da escr i ta e da t ransmutação par a o pa lco e para o cinema , não obstante contemple as vias que foram contr ibuindo, a o longo de vários momentos na história da literatura, para a presente época. Como t e r e i o p o r t u n i d a d e d e d e s e n v o l v e r , o s i l ê n c i o contemporãneo é abrangente, aglutinou diversas áreas, que não se reduzem ao domínio artístico. O mutismo nasce de uma pulsão que pede um intervalo, no meio do ruído, que implora um espaço próprio, sem voz. É, cada vez ma i s , uma f o r ça que se que r "ouvi r " e é , igualmente, algo que f az par te da exi stência, num contexto não deliberado. Vivemos a época que redimensionou o valor do silêncio, assumindo sem complexos o cansaço das palavras, o esforço pela tor r en t e ine s got á ve l d e s i gni f i c ant e s que p a r e c em v a z ios d e significados, por excesso de nomeação. Ao mesmo tempo, o silêncio mantém uma aura de mistério. Ao contrário do aforismo, quem cala quase nunca consente, pois o silêncio é o propulsor do desconforto e da vontade por parte do int e r l ocu tor em encont r a r uma soluç ão, t ent a r d a r voz aos pensamentos que ficam por dizer, criando alternativas para que o discurso irrompa e, apazigúe a sensação de vazio deixada. Eduardo Prado Coelho, em Maio de 2004, admite algo que traduz com exactidão este sentir, que poderia ser aplicado à forma como o silêncio é empregue por Pinter: Sinto que as palavras - que sempre foram amigas e fiéis - funcionaram por vezes como um refúgio. Continuo a usar as palavras e a tratá-las o melhor que sei, mas estou muito cansado delas. Procuro cada vez mais o silêncio que poderá vir depois das palavras. E por isso mesmo não devo nesta matéria dizer mais nada. Tal questionar, apesar de não ser novo - encontramo-lo quer na poesia de Mallarmé, de Jorge de Sena, ou de Hõlderlin, quer nos dramas de Maeterlinck e Beckett, para citar alguns exemplos - veio accionar um processo de aquiescência da qualidade preponderante do silêncio, na divulgação que é dada ao fenómeno de permanecer calado, não porque nada se tem a dizer, mas numa perspectiva mais trágica da vida, porque já nada se tem a dizer de novo, ou já nada vale a pena ser dito, utilizando as mesmas palavras de sempre.
