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Dramas of Culture: Theory, History, Performance
Series: TEXTURES: Philosophy / Literature / Culture
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Edited by Wayne Jeffrey Froman and John Burt Foster Jr |
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"For readers interested in drama, performance, and culture, this is a major collection of essays that will be
required reading for some time to come."—Herman Rapaport, Wake Forest University
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Dramas of Culture is shaped by twelve carefully interwoven interdisciplinary essays on the role of performance as inscribed within contemporary cultural debate. Part One addresses the recent cultural turn in scholarship and public affairs and offers three provocative discussions of its genealogy, goals, and shortcomings. Underpinning these arguments are the key dramatic elements of language, performativity, and spectacle. Part Two stresses the constitutive roles of scene and setting, melodrama, and tragic conflict for literary theory, political thought, and dialectical philosophy, each with direct bearings on contemporary cultural studies. Parts Three and Four turn to the intellectual and cultural significance of specific plays in the Western repertoire. Part Three examines several major efforts to rethink the nature of tragedy as a dramatic genre, emphasizing its capacity to reveal the fragility and provisionality of culture, while Part Four focuses on prominent examples of the shifting relations among drama, history, and processes of cultural change.
List of Contributors
Stephen Barker, Gabriela Basterra, Christopher Braider, John Burt Foster, Jr., Wayne Jeffrey Froman, David Halliburton, Geoffrey H. Hartman, Elke Heckner, Catherine Liu, John McGowan, Oliver Marchart, P. Christopher Smith, and Max Statkiewicz.
About the Editors
Wayne Jeffrey Froman is associate professor of philosophy at George Mason University. John Burt Foster, Jr., is professor of English at George Mason University. |
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