Drama Panel A
Lance
Norman Chair
Michigan
State Univ.
Paper #1
Dissecting Opposition: The Romantic Dialectic on its Last Legs in Zacharias Werner and Heinrich von Kleist
This paper explores
dismemberment as an image for incapacitated dialectical movement in two plays
by Zacharias Werner and Heinrich von Kleist.
Dramatists Werner and Kleist are the sore thumbs of German Romanticism.
They are outsiders as dramatists in a movement that valorized the novel, and
their plays wrest romantic forms and themes into extreme figurations. Two works in particular reflect on their radical
practice through images of dismemberment. Disembodied heads and limbless bodies haunt
Werner’s Die Söhne des Thals (The Brotherhood of the Valley,
1803-4) and Kleist’s Das Käthchen von
Amy Emm
PhD Candidate, Germanics
Paper #2
From
Ibsen to Kane: Baby Steps Toward a Modern Theory of Dramatic Dismemberment
In this paper I will suggest that the dead child emerges a modern dramatic emblem in the late nineteenth-century and that the dead child continues to proliferate in contemporary drama. From Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler to Sarah Kane’s Blasted, and many dramas in-between, such as Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms, Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author and Edward Albee’s The American Dream, to name just a few examples, demonstrate the proliferation of representations of dead children within Modern Drama. Strikingly, the wide variety of dramatic styles which return to the image of the dead child suggest that the image has little to do with dramatic genre. The dead child is found in realist, symbolist, and absurdist drama as well as the theatre of extremes. Equally striking is the sheer number of canonical modern plays which grapple with the emblem of the dead child. Previous discussions of the dead child as a dramatic emblem has tended to focus on the dead child as an American emblem. However, as the previous listing suggests, such a characterization is unnecessarily restrictive.
I argue that the
dead child emerges within modern drama as a metonymic emblem demonstrating
the dismemberment of drama as a form. Between phenomenological and semiotic dramatic
theories there is a gap, and this gap is the space where the dead child emerges.
The dead child announces the very failure of dramatic signifying systems.
The fecundity of Modern Drama’s dead children is, the paradoxical proliferation
of the dead, in which the drama repeatedly returns to the iterating sign of
the dead child as a means of addressing the failure of signifying networks.
Lance Norman
Paper #3
"Statues, Jars, and other Stored Treasures"
This paper examines displacement in theatre as a kind of
performative “drift” that may imbue
the performative female body with unexpected agency and power. It considers
the ways in which the peripheral figures of either sculptured busts or dismembered
pickled body parts—enacted by live voices and/or bodies of young female actors—evoke
the circulation of power and the possibilities for change. Adrienne Kennedy’s
A Lesson in Dead Language (1968)
employs life-size statues of Jesus, Joseph, Mary, two Wise Men, and a Shepard
as objects that hover above and around the set of a one-room school where
a great white dog—the teacher—and seven girl pupils embark on a lesson of
generations, life, death, and knowledge. The statues transform from religious figures
to Roman ones, and are enacted by off-stage voices.
Johanna Frank
Drama Panel B
Lance
Norman – Chair
Michigan
State Univ.
Split the Difference:
Third Legs and Incest in Later-Twentieth-Century Irish Drama
Sexual transgression in the plays of Marina
Carr and Frank McGuinness demonstrates an anti-essentialist
turn and evokes the crisis of representation (i.e. What is Irish?) in later-twentieth-century Irish drama. Imbedded tales of a Papist whore’s amputated
third leg and of incestuous twins severed by community mores enact the splitting
of the “Irish” subject and evade the all too resilient iconoclasm associated
with Irish theatre. While tropes of
splitting and dismemberment easily recall the political partitioning of the
Rather
than recycling and inverting representations of Irishness—moves
initiated in the dramatic projects of black pastoralism
and urban realism which simply replay anew Irish drama’s steadfast preoccupation
with issues of Irish nation and history—Carr’s Portia Coughlan
and McGuinness’ Observe the Sons of Ulster
Marching Towards the Somme “play” with gender and sexual difference effectively
dislodging the political terrain of Ireland from issues of nation and partition.
Recalibrating the division(s) of
Kristina Quynn
ReDismemberment
Q:
Why does Sparagmos sound so much like Asparagus? A: Because both make
an animal so much easier to eat.
But
if you're one of the fifty-percent of the human population whose urine smells
like sulphur after eating asparagus, you may want to skip the asparagus
and stick with the sparagmos. Hence, a theory, sparagmos
is the asparagus of S-methyl-thioacrylate secreters.
Not
surprisingly, 3500 years of Western drama have not failed to register this
issue. Among those characters who chose sparagmos
over asparagus are Medea and Clytaemnestra, Ian (in
Sarah Kane's BLASTED), Len and his friends (in Edward Bond's SAVED), and Stevie (in Edward Albee's THE GOAT, OR, WHO IS SYLVIA?).
This
paper sets out to explore the tradition of ritual dismemberment, and poses
the question of whether characters engaging in sparagmos
are, in fact, S-methyl-thioacrylate secreters--a
hitherto uninvestigated possibility--or dismemberment brokers
desire through forgetting, repression, and trauma--a dead horse deserving
a first carving rather than a second beating.
Craig N. Owens
DisRememberment
We tend
to focus our models of dramatic tragedy on Oedipus, given the primacy of patriarchal
models in our culture. But The Bacchae's dismemberments
offer a different economy of tragedy which may compete not so much as tragedy but as a model for a different
way of understanding dramatic genres. Our inability to "remember"
Bachus's Dismemberment has everything to do with
our inability to see alternatives to binary tropes of emotion in drama itself.
Our "disrememberment" of Bacchus dismemberment,
thus, underwrites an unremembering of tragedies
alternatives. What happens when we "remember" Bacchus?
Judith
Roof