Memory in Play: From Aeschylus to Sam Shepard (Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0230604641 ISBN 13: 9780230604643

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009

Memory in Play makes evident that memory, though critically neglected, is as significant as race, gender, and class as a feature of dramatic character construction. Favorini skillfully argues that dramatic models of memory need to be reckoned along with the constructions of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience in order to render a full account of the history of memory. Through this lens, the work of Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Goethe, Ibsen, and Strindberg, as well as such pillars of twentieth-century drama as Pirandello, O’Neill, Wilder, Sherwood, Williams, Miller, Anouilh, Beckett, Pinter, Friel, Shepard, Kennedy, and Wilson are explored. By offering a vantage point for recognizing how dramatists have contributed to the conception of memory alongside other "memographers," irrespective of discipline, a lingua franca emerges for discussing a phenomenon studied from the perspectives of so many theoretical bases.

About the Author:

Attilio Favorini is Professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Pittsburgh, where he founded the Department of Theatre Arts and served as its Chairman for many years. He is the founder of the Three Rivers Shakespeare Festival, for which he was the Producing Director 1980-1992. He is the editor of Theatre Survey, 1969-79, Voicings: Ten Plays from the Documentary Theatre and has published widely in journals ranging from Maske und Kothurn and Theatre Journal, to Cognition, Literature, and the Arts. As a playwright, his Steel/City was voted Best Production of 1992 by the Pittsburgh City Paper, and his In the Garden of Live Flowers won the national David Mark Cohen award in 2002.

Review:

"Favorini's approach not only provides fresh and provocative readings of familiar works, but striking new interconnections between them."--Theatre Journal "These studies concretize the somewhat cerebral recounting of cognitive science and its varied views of memory construction while also explicating how constructions of memory in Western theater have been a part of dramatic representations since ancient Greece. Accordingly, the book will be useful to both theoreticians and practitioners of theater and cognitive scientists . . . the study is certainly provocative, and it adds fresh insights regarding several plays in the Western theater canon."--CHOICE

"This book will be the benchmark for the exploration of the fascinating correlations between memory’s constructions and theatre’s representations."--Gary Williams, Professor Emeritus of Drama, Catholic University

“This is an extraordinary study of memory in its finest filigree structures, as well as its most dramatic outreach. It is at once subtle and forceful, original and true to the master texts it puts into entirely new lights. Favorini shows memory to be a deep ingredient in parts of everyday life where we would not suspect its presence and, carrying forward this presence, in the theatre from its most ancient Greek exemplars to contemporary expressions. Throughout, the author’s sure hand guides the reader into ever novel vistas of the memorial dimensions of our lives, both as these lives are directly experienced and as they are presented in dramatic form.”-- Edward S. Casey, Distinguished Professor at SUNY, Stony Brook and author of Remembering: A Phenomenological Study