Kaspar and Other Plays

Roloff Michael Handke Peter

ISBN 10: 0809015463 / ISBN 13: 9780809015467

Published by MacMillan, 1970

About this Item

Print on Demand pp. 152.

Seller Inventory # 7983036

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Kaspar and Other Plays
• Publisher: MacMillan
• Publication Date: 1970
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0809015463
• ISBN 13: 9780809015467
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke's first full-length drama, hailed in Europe as "the play of the decade" and compared in importance to Waiting for Godot

Kaspar is the story of an autistic adolescent who finds himself at a complete existential loss on the stage, with but a single sentence to call his own. Drilled by prompters who use terrifyingly funny logical and alogical language-sequences, Kaspar learns to speak "normally" and eventually becomes creative--"doing his own thing" with words; for this he is destroyed.

In Offending the Audience and Self-Accusation, one-character "speak-ins," Handke further explores the relationship between public performance and personal identity, forcing us to reconsider our sense of who we are and what we know.

About the Authors

Peter Handke was born in Griffen, Austria, in 1942. His many novels include The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay, and Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, all published by FSG. Handke’s dramatic works include Kaspar and the screenplay for Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire. Handke is the recipient of many major literary awards, including the Georg Büchner, Franz Kafka, and Thomas Mann Prizes and the International Ibsen Award. In 2019, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience.”

Michael Roloff contributed to Peter Camenzind from Picador.