Modern Drama And The Rhetoric Of Theater

The history of drama is typically viewed as a series of inert "styles." Tracing British and American stage drama from the 1880s onward, W. B. Worthen instead sees drama as the interplay of text, stage production, and audience. How are audiences manipulated? What makes drama meaningful? Worthen identifies three rhetorical strategies that distinguish an O'Neill play from a Yeats, or these two from a Brecht. Where realistic theater relies on the "natural" qualities of the stage scene, poetic theater uses the poet's word, the text, to control performance. Modern political theater, by contrast, openly places the audience at the center of its rhetorical designs, and the drama of the postwar period is shown to develop a range of post-Brechtian practices that make the audience the subject of the play. Worthen's book deserves the attention of any literary critic or serious theatergoer interested in the relationship between modern drama and the spectator.

In Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater, W.B. Worthen examines how the dynamic interplay between dramatic text and stage production shapes the audience's experience in the modern theater. Dividing the "rhetoric" of theatrical performance into three modes--realistic, poetic, and political--Worthen traces the course of British and American drama from the 1880s through the 1980s, showing how textual conventions and performance practices direct the interpretive performance of the theater audience. The realistic theater translates the objectivity associated with science into a vehicle for treating social class. Worthen examines realism's onstage representation of social "others" for an invisible, privileged offstage audience; he discusses the problem drama of the turn of the century (Robins, Shaw, Galsworthy, Glaspell), the experiments of O'Neill, Rice, and the American Method, and the contemporary realism of Pinter, Shepard and Bond. Where realistic theater relies on the "natural" qualities of the stage scene, poetic theater uses the poet's word, the text, to control performance. The plays of Yeats, Auden, Eliot, and Beckett explore the kinds of authority--over actors and audiences--that poetic theater can achieve. Modern political theater, by contrast, openly places the audience at the center of its rhetorical designs, and the drama of the postwar period (Barnes, Brenton, Churchill, Fornes, Nichols, Osborne, Soyinka) is shown to develop a range of post-Brechtian practices that make the audience the subject of the play. Treating a wide variety of plays and drawing extensively on performance history, Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater outlines the strategies that have produced both the modern drama onstage and the modern audience in the theater.

In Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama, W. B. Worthen asks how the print form of drama bears on how we understand its dual identity.

This book looks at Shakespeare through performance, capturing the dialogue between performance, Shakespeare, and contemporary concerns in the humanities.

Proving fruitful in various applications throughout its two millennia of predominance, the rhetorical téchne appears to have entertained a particularly symbiotic interrelation with drama. With contributions from (among others) a Classicist, historical, linguistic, musicological, operatic, cultural and literary studies perspective, this publication offers interdisciplinary assessments of specific reciprocities between the system of rhetoric and dramatic works: tracing the longue durée of this nexus—highlighting its Ancient foundations, its various Early Modern formations, as well as certain configurations enduring to this day—enables describing shifting degrees of rhetoricity; approaching it from an interdisciplinary viewpoint facilitates focusing on the often sidelined rhetorical phenomena located beyond the textual plane, specifically memoria and actio; tackling this interchange from various viewpoints and with diverse emphases, a long-lasting and highly prolific cross-fertilization between drama and rhetoric is rendered visible. In tendering a balanced panorama of both detailed case studies and descriptive overviews, this volume also points toward terrain yet to be charted in the scholarship to come. The volume was prepared in co-operation with the ERC Advanced Grant Project Early Modern European Drama and the Cultural Net (DramaNet).

Using examples ranging from nineteenth-century Viennese comedy to Friedrich Dürrenmatt's atomic-age theater, Benjamin Bennett explores what is at stake in the theory of drama; what sort of questioning makes up that theory; and in what direction such questioning leads. Bennett takes as his starting point the inescapably literary nature of theater in the European tradition, theater in its most concrete dimensions: as an institution, as a tradition of ritual or stylized behavior, as a particular type of physical space, as an economic venture. He maintains that, precisely because of its radical categorical disjunction from the domain of the literary, theater in the European tradition has been appropriated as the principal vehicle by which literature repeatedly problematizes itself. Theater, he says, is "the church of literature." Although he is concerned with drama as a literary type, therefore, Bennett does not treat the theory of drama as part of the theory of literature. For the special relation of drama to literature calls into question the whole idea of literary theory as a stable discourse divisible into parts. Bennett considers plays by Nestroy, Schnitzler, Ibsen, Strindberg, Brecht, Ionesco, Genet, Pirandello, Artaud, and Dürrenmatt. He focuses on such theoretical issues as the idea of generic boundaries; the relation between drama and the culture of reading; the relevance between drama and the culture of reading; the relevance of hermeneutic and semiotic views of literature to drama; and the operation of fascism as a literary phenomenon. In conclusion, he frames a problem that his readings have brought to light: at least two separate historical accounts of modern drama are necessary—theories that imply each other, yet remain irreconcilable.

Part 1. Rhetorical dimensions of drama: the classical context: The enthymeme and the invention of troping in Greek drama / August W. Staub. Theorizing the spectacle: a rhetorical analysis of tragic recognition / Tom Heeney. Exile and the kingdom: reason as nightmare in the Aeschylean vision / John Arthos -- Part 2. The rhetorical in renaissance and neoclassical drama: Epideictic pastoral: rhetorical tensions in the staging of Torquato Tasso's Aminta / Maria Galli Stampino. Shakespeare's rhetoric versus the ideology of Ian McKellen's Richard III / George L. Geckle. And now for application: Venice preserv'd and the rhetoric of textual application / Odai Johnson -- Part 3. War, politics, and the drama: Federalist and republican theatre in the 1790s / Steve Wilmer. Uncle Tom's Cabin and the rhetoric of gradualism / Charles Wilbanks. Dario Fo's angry farce / Stanley Vincent Longman -- Part 4. Contemporary culture: Stain upon the silence: Samuel Beckett's deconstructive inventions / Leigh Anne Howard. Still angry after all these years: performing the language of HIV and the marked body in The normal heart and The destiny of me / Peter Michael Pober.