Drama: Between Poetry and Performance - Softcover

Worthen, W. B.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1405153423 ISBN 13: 9781405153423

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010

Synopsis

An engaging book spanning the fields of drama, literary criticism, genre, and performance studies, Drama: Between Poetry and Performance teaches students how to read drama by exploring the threshold between text and performance.

• Draws on examples from major playwrights including Shakespeare, Ibsen, Beckett, and Parks
• Explores the critical terms and controversies that animate the performance and study of drama, such as the status of language, the function of character and plot, and uses of writing
• Engages in a theoretical, disciplinary, and cultural repositioning of drama, by exploring and contesting its position at the threshold between text and performance

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Using the work of Kenneth Burke to develop an original critical perspective on the dual identity of drama, this engaging new book offers a way to read plays ‘between poetry and performance’, exploring and contesting the threshold between text and performance. The author offers both a critical account of literary criticism and performance studies, and suggests a means for seizing dramatic writing as an instrument for performance.

Drama: Between Poetry and Performance discusses major plays, drawing on examples from playwrights including Shakespeare, Ibsen, Beckett, and Parks, and asks how they offer a critical perspective on the drama's relation to books, to the process of embodiment, and to the mapping of space in the theatre. Exploring the critical terms and controversies that animate the performance and study of drama, such as the status of language, the function of character and plot, and uses of writing, this is an ideal text which not only teaches students how to read drama, but also explores the key questions that have occupied the earliest playwrights through to today’s most distinguished literary and cultural critics.

This book will appeal both to the professional and academic audience in drama and performance studies, as well as to a wider audience of theatregoers interested in the relationship between writing and performance.

About the Author:

W. B. Worthen is Professor and Chair of the Department of Theatre at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is the author of The Idea of the Actor (1984), Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater (1992), Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (1997), Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (2003), and Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama (2006). He is also the editor of several volumes, including A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance (with Barbara Hodgdon, Wiley-Blackwell 2005), and the Wadsworth Anthology of Drama, 5th edition (2006).

About this edition

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1405153423
• ISBN 13: 9781405153423
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304