Modernist Subjects’ Transition into Postmodernist Ones in Modern Plays: A Selective Study of Krapp’s Last Tape, Buried Child, and Travesties

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Department of English Language and Literature, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

The present study identifies the features of postmodern subject in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), Sam Shepard’s Buried Child (1978), and Tom Stoppard’s Travesties. These three plays beautifully showcase the sense of belonging and non-belonging of modernist subjects toward essentialism, and that is how such subjects moves toward postmodernism’s belief on lack of commitment to neither absolute belonging nor non-belonging. Dislocated memories, textual and constructed nature of memories, schizophrenic characters, and their inclusive belonging to discursive oppositional points of binaries are the features around which the study will pursue its discussions. While discussing these features, the study utilizes critical insights proposed by two key figures in literary theory and criticism: Linda Hutcheon when it comes to postmodernism in A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988) and Politics of Postmodernism (1989), and Nick Mansfield when one wishes to discuss the issue of subjectivity in Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway (2000). Amir Ali Nojoumian’s A Brief Introduction to Modernism in Literature and A Brief Introduction to Postmodernism in Literature would be utilized to enrich study’s take from modernism and postmodernism too. Absence of even an abstract unified understanding of the past, the uneasy and hectic juxtaposition and superimposition of a series of contradictory narratives out of the past experiences of schizophrenic subjects, and lack of belonging to – or inclusive belonging to – either sides of binaries are the key titles of the study’s findings while it reviews the transitional status of the subjectivity of the plays’ characters.

Keywords

Main Subjects

References

Adler, Thomas. P. “Repetition and Regression in Curse of the Suffering Class and Buried Child.” The Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard. Edited by Matthew Roudane. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 111-122.
Askarzadeh Torghabeh, Rajabali. “Jean Paul Sartre and False Belief in Becket’s Krapp's Last Tape.” Research in Contemporary World Literature [Pazhuhesh-e Zabanha-ye Khareji], vol. 24, no. 1 (July 2019): 221-232.
---. “Postmodern American Drama: A Critical Study of Sam Shepard and His Postmodern Plays.” Conference on Postmodernism, Al-Zahra University, Tehran, Iran (2010): 37-66.
Bigsby, Christopher. “Born Injured: The Theater of Sam Shepard.” The Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard. Edited by Matthew Roudane. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 7-33.
Becket, Samuel. Samuel Beckett: The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber and Faber, 1986.  
Farhadi, Ramin, and Fazel Asadi Amjad. “A Subversive Reading of Ideological Discourse in the Rewriting of Shakespeare: King Lear and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.” Research in Contemporary World Literature [Pazhuhesh-e Zabanha-ye Khareji], vol. 17, no. 1 (January 2013): 109-126.
Ghani, Hana Khalif. “The Play as Intellectual Ping-Pong Art and Politics in Tom Stoppard’s Travesties.” Journal of College of Languages, no. 15 (2006): 17-40.
Hooti, Noorbakhsh, and Samaneh Shooshtarian. “A Postmodernist Reading of Sam Shepard’s The Buried Child.” Canadian Social Science, vol. 7, no. 1 (2011): 76-89.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism. London: Rutledge, 1988.
---. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Rutledge, 1989.
Jenkins, Anthony. The Theatre of Tom Stoppard. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Kawashima, Takeshi. “The Resistance of Seeing in Beckett’s Drama: Self-Perception and Becoming Imperceptible.” Samuel Beckett Today, vol. 15, no. 1 (2005): 133-145.   
Malkin, Jeanette R. “Matters of Memory in Krapp’s Last Tape and Not I.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, vol. 11, no. 2 (1997): 25-40.
Mansfield, Nick. Subjectivity, Theories of Self from Freud to Haraway. New South Wales: Alan and Unwin, 2000.
Nojoumian, Amir Ali. A Brief Introduction to Modernism in Literature. Tehran: Rasesh, 2004.
---. A Brief Introduction to Postmodernism in Literature. Tehran: Rasesh, 2006.
Pooyandeh, Parisa, and Zohreh Ramin. “Metaphorical Analysis of Temporality in Tom Stoppard’s Travesties in Light of Paul Ricour’s Literary Theory.” Language and Translation Studies, vol. 55, no. 2 (2022): 163-191.
Potter, Rachel. Obscene Modernism: Literary Censorship and Experiment, 1900-1940. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Rod, David K. “Carr’s Views on Art and Politics in Tom Stoppard’s Travesties.” Modern Drama, vol. 26, no. 4 (1983): 536-542.
Shepard, Sam. Buried Child. The Norton Anthology of Drama. vol. 2. Edited by Martin Puchner, J. Ellen Gainor, and Stanton B. Garner. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2014. 1293-1322.
Stoppard, Tom. Travesties. Grove Press: New York, 1975.
Strauss, Claudia. “Partly Fragmented, Partly Integrated: An Anthropological Examination of Postmodern Fragmented Subjects.” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 12, no. 3 (1997): 362-404.
Research in Contemporary World Literature
Volume 28, Issue 2
December 2023
Pages 563-588

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics