Vol. II. Issue. III September 2011 - The Criterion: An International ...

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www.the-criterion.com The Criterion: An International Journal in English ISSN 0976-8165 –––. et al. Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. –––. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993; New York: Vantage Books, 1994. –––. “Invention, Memory and Place”. Critical Inquiry. 26.2. (2000):175-192. Shlaim, Avi. The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. Slater, D. On The Borders of Social Theory: Learning From Other Regions. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 10.3 (1992): 307-27. Smith, N. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space. 1984. 2nd Ed. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990. Smith, N. and Katz, C. “Grounding Metaphor: Towards a Spatialized Politics”. In M. Keith and S. Pile, eds, Place and the politics of culture. London: Routledge, 1993.67-83. Taylor, Peter J. “The State as Container: Territoriality in the Modern World-System.” Progress in Human Geography. 18. 2 (1994): 151-162. Withers, Charles W. J. Geography, Science and National Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Zerubavel, Yael. Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. 26 Vol. II. Issue. III 140 September 2011
www.the-criterion.com The Criterion: An International Journal in English ISSN 0976-8165 Language, Character and History in Postmodern Drama: Towards Formulating a Poetics Mufti Mudasir The present paper is an attempt towards formulating a poetics of postmodern drama, based on the theoretical insights of some of the foremost postmodern critics and dramatists. It seeks to underline the importance of a poetics of postmodern drama keeping in view that unlike other genres of literature, especially the novel, postmodern drama has received little critical attention. Drawing upon the works of Linda Hutcheon, Jeanette Malkin and Deborah Geis, the paper tries to examine the bearing of their insights on our appreciation of postmodern dramatic practice. It argues, contrary to some contemporary voices which regard all forms of postmodern art as hermetically sealed and hence devoid of referential value, that postmodern drama foregrounds the notion of ‘ self-reflexive referentiality’ by challenging the conventional notions of language, character and history. Although the term postmodern drama has been in use for quite some time now, there are still those who dismiss it as an empty signifier. One of the main reasons often cited for this is that postmodernism implies a rejection of mimetic status of the drama and thus strikes at the roots of representation through it. An example of this attitude is Stephen Watt’s Postmodern/Drama: Reading the Contemporary Stage (1998) in which the author uses a slash in the title between postmodern and drama to indicate that the relation between the two is at best oxymoronic. Watt announces the “failure of the term postmodern drama,” (Watt 25) and is of the opinion that it is largely “an empty intellectual marker,” (39) This, he believes, is due to the fact that postmodernism challenges the privileging of the play and the playwright and undermines the essential difference of drama from other forms of literature and art. Despite this he, ironically perhaps, laments the lack of consideration for contemporary drama by postmodern theorists. Watt’s somewhat dismissive attitude toward postmodern drama as a valid term is, however, not shared by certain other writers who have taken up the study of contemporary drama with a recognition that an identifiable shift has taken place in the foundational dramatic categories of character, language and representation since modernism. Some of these works include Deborah Geis’s Postmodern Theatric[k]s: Monologue in Contemporary American Drama (1993), Jeanette Malkin’s Memory Theatre and Postmodern Drama (1999), and Nick Kaye’s Postmodernism and Performance (1994), to name a few very important critical examinations of postmodern drama. The present paper aims to combine some of the insights provided by these critics with the theoretical framework of postmodernism presented by Linda Hutcheon to examine the possibility of a poetics of postmodern drama. The purpose is to see how recent changes in the contemporary drama can be examined in the light of postmodern theory and hence, an attempt is made to identify the specific areas of conflation between postmodern theory and drama. In the 1980s, C W E Bigsby had remarked that the English theatrical scene of the late 1950s presented an anxiety that found expression in ontological and epistemological questions and reflected a condition where “the social order, character and language are shown in a state of disrepair” (Bigsby, “Politics of Anxiety” 393). In a somewhat similar vein, Ruby Cohn noted that since the 1950s, a departure from “the mimetic representation of contemporary middle class reality” (Cohn 1) is to be witnessed in the British theatre. The two elements she finds most noticeable are “theatre in the theatre and split character” (18). Although both Bigsby and Cohn acknowledge that a shift has occurred in the contemporary drama, neither relates it to the critical category of postmodernism. As we shall see below, these changes are more rigorous and fundamental than Vol. II. Issue. III 141 September 2011
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