Dramas of Culture Theory, History, Performance

by Froman, Wayne Jeffrey; Foster Jr, John Burt; Barker, Stephen; Basterra, Gabriela; Braider, Christopher; Foster, John Burt, Jr.; Halliburton, David; Hartman, Geoffrey H.; Heckner, Elke; Liu, Catherine; McGowan, John; Marchart, Oliver; Smith, P Christopher;

• ISBN13: 9780739124109
• ISBN10: 0739124102
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-10-08
• Publisher: Lexington Books

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations	p. vii
General Introduction	p. 1
Second Thoughts on the Cultural Turn
Introduction	p. 13
A Culture of Inclusion: Politics and Poetry	p. 17
The Narrative of Culture: "Burkean" Perspectives	p. 31
The Spectacle of Cultural Studies: Marcel Duchamp and the Return of the Repressed	p. 55
Dramatic Categories in Cultural Discourse
Introduction	p. 65
Setting the Scene: Judging Kenneth Burke Judging	p. 69
Politics as Melodrama: Revolutions, Empty Signifiers, and the Political Sublime	p. 77
Gendering Tragic Conflict: Hegel's Antigone and the Vicissitudes of the Dialectic	p. 87
Rethinking Tragedy
Introduction	p. 107
Heidegger's Antigone: From Agonistic Nietzscheanism to Reconciliation with Otherness	p. 111
Characterless Tragedy: The Limits of Philosophical Catharsis	p. 125
Choreography of Fate: Lorca's Reconfiguration of the Tragic	p. 135
Staging History, Posthistory, Parahistory
Introduction	p. 151
Shakespeare's Richard II: History as Shadowplay	p. 155
Moliere's Don Juan: Breaking Promises, But Not a Date with History	p. 169
Heiner Muller's Parahistory: Beyond Marx and Brecht	p. 181
Notes	p. 193
Bibliography	p. 227
Index of Names	p. 235
Index of Topics	p. 239
Contributors	p. 243
Editors	p. 245
Series Editor	p. 247
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