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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
List of contents
Introduction: Fond Records: Metaphors of Drama
Chapter 1. More than is Dreamt of: Between Literature and Performance Studies
Chapter 2. The Name of Action: Thinking through the Plot
Chapter 3. Words, Words, Words: Thinking through Poetry
Chapter 4: The Censure of Seeming: Thinking through Character
Chapter 5: The Faculty of Eyes and Ears: Thinking through Spectacle
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).
Summary
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.
