Showing papers on "Postmodern theatre published in 1991"

Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations

Abstract: In this timely volume, the authors systematically analyze postmodern t heory to evaluate its relevance for critical social theory and radical politics today. The authors claim that while postmodern theory provi des insights into contemporary developments, it lacks adequate methodo logical and political perspectives to provide a critical social theory and radical politics for the present age.

The Postmodern Urban Condition

Abstract: Preface. Acknowledgements. Introduction. 1. Taking Los Angeles Seriously. 2. Mapping the Postmodern. 3. Postmodern Bloodlines: From Lefebvre to Jameson. 4. The Premature Demise of Postmodern Urbanism. 5. Reading the Modern City: A Colonial History of Los Angeles 1781--1991. 6. Deconstructing Urban Planning. 7. Postmodern Urbanism. 8. A Tale of Two Cities 1. Tijuana. 9. Film, Architecture and Filmspace. 10. A Tale of Two Cities 2. Las Vegas. 11. From Sidewalk to Cyberspace (and Back to Earth Again). 12. The Personal Politics of Postmodernity. 13. The Power of Place. 14. The Geopolitics of Postmodernity. 15. Epistemological Politics. Epilogue: Beyond Postmodernism. A Beginnera s Guide to Postmodernism. Index.

Public memorializing in postmodernity: The Vietnam veterans memorial as prototype

Abstract: This essay argues for a reading of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as a postmodern discourse. Beginning with a contrast of modernist and postmodern rhetorics of architecture, the authors suggest that the Memorial reflects the typical gestures of postmodern architecture. Moreover, they suggest that a consideration of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as a postmodern discourse accounts for differences among other critical accounts, highlights the Memorial's political stance, and bears implications for a postmodern monumentality. The essay concludes with a discussion of the critical assumptions that are placed at issue in a postmodern reading.

Images of Postmodern Society: Social Theory and Contemporary Cinema

Abstract: PART ONE: THE POSTMODERN Defining the Postmodern Terrain Postmodern Social Theory Takes on the Postmodern Baudrillard, Lyotard, and Jameson Learning from Mills PART TWO: LEARNING FROM CINEMA Wild About Lynch Blue Velvet Nouveau Capitalists on Wall Street Crimes and Misdemeanors in Manhattan The Postmodern Sexual Order Sex, Lies, and Yuppie Love Do the Right Thing Race in the USA Paris, Texas Mills and Baudrillard in America In Conclusion The Eye of the Postmodern

The end of sociological theory: The postmodern hope

Abstract: Sociological theory has gone astray. It has lost most of its social and intellectual importance; it is disengaged from the conflicts and public debates that have nourished it in the past; it has turned inward and is largely self-referential. Sociological theory today is produced and consumed almost exclusively by sociological theorists.1 Its social and intellectual insularity accounts for the almost permanent sense of crisis and malaise that surrounds contemporary sociological theory. This distressing condition originates, in part, from its central project: the quest for foundations and for a totalizing theory of society.2 To revitalize sociological theory requires that we renounce scientism-that is, the increasingly absurd claim to speak the Truth, to be an epistemically privileged discourse. We must relinquish our quest for foundations or the search for the one correct or grounded set of premises, conceptual strategy, and explanation. Sociological theory will be revitalized if and when it becomes "social theory. " My critique of sociological theory and advocacy of social theory as a social narrative with a moral intent will be advanced from the standpoint of postmodernism.3 Anticipating the end of sociological theory entails renouncing the millennial social hopes that have been at the center of modernist sociological theory.4 Postmodernism carries no promise of liberation-of a society free of domination. Postmodernism gives up the modernist idol of human emancipation in favor of deconstructing false closure, prying open present and future social possibilities, detecting fluidity and porousness in forms of life where hegemonic discourses posit closure and a frozen order. The hope of a great transformation is replaced by the more modest aspiration of a relentless defense of immediate, local pleasures and struggles for justice. Postmodernism offers the possibility of a social analysis that takes seriously the history of cruelty and constraint in Western modernity without surrendering to the retreat from criticalness that characterizes much current conservative and liberal social thought.

The "Difference" of Postmodern Feminism

Abstract: As feminism has sought to contest patriarchy in ever more diverse sites of culture and increasingly to interrogate power/knowledge relations in a variety of disciplines, its languages have become more complex and difficult. This creates the paradox of a feminism much more capable of reunderstanding reality-and thus changing it-in profoundly different ways and yet much less accessible and understandable to those whose lives it seeks to affect. In other words, a widening gap is developing between the advanced languages and discourses of feminism-especially postmodern feminist theory-and its main constituency: those women (and men) who rely on its insights and the movement it articulates to orient their lives in more egalitarian and non-exploitative ways-in sexual relations, in raising children, in the politics of the work place and domestic arrangements. In fact, the difficulty of recent (postmodern) feminist theory has led many to reject it altogether as too remote and politically ineffective. But I believe that postmodern feminist theory is necessary for social change and that, rather than abandon it as too abstract, we need to reunderstand it in more social and political terms. I have thus attempted in this essay to rearticulate some of the main theoretical concepts of contemporary feminism in a more available language and, more important, to offer a political rewriting of these concepts. My text, therefore, is a series of explanatory speculations on feminist theory, its main concepts and the way these concepts enable a feminist rewriting of patriarchy. In doing so, it points to the emergence of what I call "postmodern materialist feminist theory." In feminism, as elsewhere, "postmodern" has become a loaded and politically volatile word. Many feminists are opposed to it, worried that such a term may trivialize the serious import of feminism, which is intervention and social change. Underlying such mistrust is the common misunderstanding of postmodernism as a fad based on passing desires and trivial pursuits. This may be true of some aspects of postmodernism, but it is not at all characteristic of postmodernism in general; it is a significant political, cultural, and historical development. Teresa L. Ebert teaches postmodern critical theory and feminism at the State University of New York at Albany. She has completed a book on postmodern materialist feminism called Patriarchal Narratives and is at work on another on feminist theory and postmodern politics. In 1990 she organized and directed the conference on "Rewriting the (Post)modern: (Post)colonialism/Feminism/Late Capitalism" at the University of Utah where she was a Fellow in the Humanities Center.

Critical rhetoric and postmodern theory

Abstract: (1991). Critical rhetoric and postmodern theory. Quarterly Journal of Speech: Vol. 77, No. 1, pp. 67-70.

Explorations at the Edge of Time: The Prospects for World Order

Abstract: Acknowledgments Introduction: Why Postmodern? Why Explorations at the Edge of Time? Why Rooted Utopianism? Part I: The Postmodern Frontier of International Relations 1. In Pursuit of the Postmodern 2. Religion and Politics: A Second Postmodern Possibility 3. Culture and International Relations: A Third Postmodern Possibility Part II: Planning the Journey Ahead 4. Solving the Puzzles of Global Reform 5. Transition to Peace and Justice: The Challenge of Transcendence without Utopia 6. The Global Promise of Social Movements: Explorations at the Edge of Time Part III: Rooted Utopianism as Political Option 7. The Extension of Law to Foreign Policy: The Next Constitutional Challenge 8. Can Culture Tame Nuclearism? 9. Evasions of Sovereignty 10. The Realist School and Its Critics: Interpreting the Postwar World Notes Index

Postmodern Anxiety: The Politics of Epistemology

Abstract: My programmatic postmodern polemic, "The End of Sociological Theory," received four provocative replies. Lemert and Richardson are clearly friends of the postmodern intervention. They each advance their own novel theses, and their contributions merit a close reading on their own terms. I trust that readers will consult their essays to find variant concepts of a postmodern social inquiry. Given the intended audience of this discussion-a sociological theory crowd either ignorant or anxious about post-modernism-I have decided to focus my reply on clarifying the social meaning of postmodernism and further articulating its significance, as I see it, for sociology. Accordingly I will attend at least to the key objections raised by Alexander and Antonio, whereas I must wait for another occasion to address the postmodern variations offered by Lemert and Richardson.

The Postmodern Crisis: Discourse, Parody, Memory

Abstract: In writing about the baroque Trauerspiel, the mourning play, the play of melancholy, Walter Benjamin (1977:177-178) notes that the allegorical physiognomy of history conjoined with nature-"The word 'history' stands written on the countenance of nature in the characters of transience"-is present in reality in the form of the ruin. "In the ruin history has physically merged into the setting." Today, in an age that has been declared postmodern-indeed, by some, in Spain for example, as neo-Baroque-the ruin has been replaced by the quotation, the trace, really a pseudo-trace, a detritus, a re-ferent, a carrying back to/from a past, which is so completely decontextualized, so open to recontextualization, that it. the quotation, the trace, becomes at once an emblem of a past evacuated of history (history understood as a somehow meaningful account of the past) and a signal of the artifice of any such account, any history. Ironically, demonically, the denial of the possibility of a "real" mimetic account, of any master narrative, proclaimed by the relentless signals of artifice does in fact announce an overarching narrative of-a consuming obsession with-artifice. As baroque mourningconstituted on the experience of transience, death and the corpse-gives way (I need not pass, I suppose, through the defiles of neoclassicism and romanticism) to today's (ideologically bruited) jouissances, constituted on the experience of change, of difference, diffirance, of rupture, the bit, the flickering image, the digital sound, no doubt masking a postcoital emptiness, nostalgia, and the longing for repetition and reunion, so allegory, whose artifice, at least during the baroque, was mournfully relished, surrenders to artifice, whose allegorical possibility is playfully denied. There is in all play a danger that the truth alluded to (from the Latin ludere, to play) will break through and arrest the play. I will be concerned with putative discursive changes associated with postmodernism and with their relationship to memory understood as a structural precipitate of any dialogical engagement in which a change of perspective, or the illusion of a change of perspective, occurs. This "new" discourse, at least in

In the wake of theory

Abstract: A critique of the politics and practice of intellectuals and disciplines in postmodern society.

Literary Fantasy and Postmodern Theology

Abstract: AN IMPORTANT ASPECT of the modem search for identity has been the mapping to the limits and structures of human consciousness and experience by the humanities and the sciences. This exploration employs a modernist metaphysics, which posits the fundamental duality of the real and the fantastic. According to this metaphysics, to identify an entity as fantasic-a character in a fictional story, a monster in a nightmare'is to give it a special relationship to reality. For modernism, the fantastic belongs to the realm of the non-real, to which nonbelief is the appropriate response. This exclusion of the fantastic (the dream, the fiction, the lie) from reality makes modernist truth possible. This metaphysics establishes an authority in terms of which proper critical discourse can occur.

Postmodernism, symbolicity, and the rhetoric of the Hyperreal: Kenneth Burke, Fredric Jameson, and Jean Baudrillard

Abstract: Postmodern discourse might be said to be governed by a fundamental insistence upon the textual nature of every context. For some theorists, this assumption is basic to the subversive claim of much postmodern thought; for others, it is merely symptomatic of the cultural rhetoric of late capitalism. The latter view is best articulated by Fredric Jameson, but Jameson's critique of postmodernist culture read beside his critique of the work of Kenneth Burke reveals the ways in which it is perhaps Burke who better understands the necessity of postmodern discourse. Considered in this context, the Burke of Language as Symbolic Action provides a thorough anticipation of the rhetorical situation of postmodern discourse, and the later Burke might also be read as a thoroughgoing critique of the postmodern positions of Jameson and Jean Baudrillard.

The History of World Theater: From the English Restoration to the Present

Abstract: Felicia Londre explores the world of theatre as diverse as the Entertainments of the Stuart court and Arthur Miller directing Chinese actors at the Beijing People's Art Theatre in "Death of a Salesman". Londre examines: Restoration comedies; the Comedie Francais; Italian "opera seria"; plays of the "Surm und Grand" movement; Russian, French, and Spanish Romantic dramas; American minstrel shows; Brecht and dialectical theatre; Dighilev; Dada; Expressionism, Theatre of the Absurd productions, and other forms of experimental theatre of the late-20th century.

Contemporary American Theatre

Abstract: Introduction, Bruce King textual drama - women playwrights on Broadway - Beth Henley, Tina Howe, Marsha Norman and Wendy Wasserstein - Barbara Kachur not-quite mainstream male writers - John Guare, Christopher Durang and David Rabe - Dennis Carroll the new realism - articulating the double agent, David Mamet, Emily Mann, Richard Nelson - David Savran black theatre into the mainstream and August Wilson - Holly Hill David Hwang - the sound of a voice - Gerald Rabkin theatre collectives in the 1980s - Elizabeth LeCompte and the Wooster Group - Alexis Greene Lee Breuer and the Mabou mines - S.E.Gontarski other forms of theatre - beyond the broadway musical - crossovers, confusions and crisis - Glenn Loney once upon a time in performance art - Lenora Champagne Laurie Anderson - performance artist/art performer - Mel Gordon contemporary American dance theatre - Martha Clarke, Joe Goode, and Sara Shelton Mann - Ted Shank from C-R to P.R. - feminist theatre in America - Alisa Solomon further new directions - poets of Bohemia and Suburbia - the postliterary dramaturgies of Laura Farabough, Laura Harrington, and Adele Shank - Jim Carmody not/either/or but and - fragmentation and consolidation in postmodern theatre, or Peter Sellars and "Picking up the Pieces" - Don Shewey.

The authentic, the everyday and the postmodern in landscape research: a note

Abstract: (1991). The authentic, the everyday and the postmodern in landscape research: a note. Landscape Research: Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 8-18.

Beyond Modernity's Meanings: Engaging the Postmodern in Cultural Anthropology

Abstract: Drawing upon literature in cultural studies, the author argues that the concept of the postmodern challenges the discipline of cultural anthropology in a number of ways. Interpretive anthropology is an interpretive exercise - one with untenable premises and limitations that are increasingly evident in the condition of postmodernity. Exploring the intersections between culture and power in local contexts, cultural anthropologists engage the postmodern by investigating the cultural politics of everyday life.

Director Peter Sellars: Bridging the Modern and Postmodern Theatre

Abstract: backdrop; a mildly humorous, but overly didactic production of Idiot's Delight (1986) starred Stacey Keach; and, finally, Sophocles's Ajax (1986) featured deaf-mute actor Howie Seago from the National Theatre for the Deaf. Although Ajax was not very successful in Washington (one audience filled only 18 of the 1100 seats in the Eisenhower theatre), it received great success in subsequent productions on its American and European tours. With a new adaptation by Robert Auletta, Sellars contemporized the Greek text and placed it simultaneously on the loading dock at the rear of the Pentagon and on the beach where American General Ajax commits suicide. Auletta and Sellars set the action in the near future after an American war in Latin America. Ajax, a war hero, is betrayed by his peers, and, in delusion, slaughters farm animals believing they are his enemies. The production focused on an inquest at which Ajax testified before a jury presided over by the goddess Athena. After Ajax's suicide on the beach, his enemies try to deny him a warrior's burial. Sellars's unconventional staging was evident from the opening scene that revealed an anguished Ajax in a plexi-glass booth, ankle-deep in blood and screaming gutterally as he re-enacted his killing frenzy. Later, as Ajax surrendered his will to live, an angelic messenger with huge, white wings descended, singing a chilling, black-spiritualized version of "Down By the Riverside," while extending a sword. Another unique effect, a video monitor showed a crashing surf moments before the corrugated doors of the Pentagon garage opened to release a flood of cleansing water, simultaneously linked the beach and the loading dock scenes. Further, a complex sound plot helped create the many layers of images the director wanted. In a later interview, Sellars stated, "the realism can be in the sound and free the visual to go completely elsewhere" (Calhoun 41).

Reading Lists of Plays, Early Modern, Modernist, Postmodern

Abstract: Corpus Christi cycle plays, saints' plays, morality plays Senecan tragedies, Roman comedies interludes-Tudor, Marian, Edwardian, Elizabethan, moral, humanist, and other courtly masques, civic entries, countryhouse entertainments St. George plays, sword dances, the Fool's wooing rite, Robin Hood plays, plays in which the men of a village, town, or city dress up in costumes, take sides, and spend several hours taunting each other with speeches and thwacking each other with sticks

Like a critique: A postmodern essay on Madonna's postmodern video like a prayer

Abstract: (1991). Like a critique: A postmodern essay on Madonna's postmodern video like a prayer. Popular Music and Society: Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 59-68.