Gender and Genre Essays on David Mamet

by Hudgins, Christopher; Kane, Leslie

• ISBN13: 9780312238698
• ISBN10: 031223869X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-06-02
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Critical and popular debate about Mamet's work often centers on the meanings of his misogynist, unloving character. The essays in this collection approach these controversial topics of gender and genre with verve, ranging from those which cast Mamet as a misogynist to those which understand his work as deeply ironic and even feminist. The contributors examine plays from the early Sexual Perversity in Chicago to the recent Jolly, two films, House of Games and Homicide, and Mamet's first novel, The Village.

Author Biography

Christopher Hudgins was Chair of the English Department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas for nine years.

Leslie Kane is Professor of English at Westfield State College. She is the author of The Language of Silence: On the Unspoken and the Unspeakable in Modern Drama and Weasels and Wisemen: Ethics and Ethnicity in the Work of David Mamet.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Mamet's Three Children's Plays: Where the Wilder Things Are	p. 15
Plowing the Buffalo, Fucking the Fruits: (M)others in American Buffalo and Speed-the-Plow	p. 27
Disguise in Love: Gender and Desire in House of Games and Speed-the-Plow	p. 41
Prophecy and Parody in Edmond	p. 61
Demotic Male Desire and Female Subjectivity in David Mamet: The Split Space of the Women of Edmond	p. 77
Oleanna, or, The Play of Pedagogy	p. 95
A Few Good Men: Collusion and Violence in Oleanna	p. 109
Women on the Verge, Unite!	p. 125
"It's the way that you are with your children": The Matriarchal Figure in Mamet's Late Work	p. 143
Reinscribing "the Fairy": The Knife and the Mystification of Male Mythology in The Cryptogram	p. 175
Mamet's Novelistic Voice	p. 191
"A small price to pay": Superman, Metafamily, and Hero in David Mamet's Oedipal House of Games	p. 209
Man Without a Gun: Mamet, Masculinity, and Mystification	p. 235
Contributors	p. 255
Index	p. 259
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