CDE Proceedings

Thomas Rommel, Mark Schreiber, eds.
Mapping Uncertain Territories – Space and Place in Contemporary Theatre and Drama

Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2006.
ISBN 3-88476-826-3, 216 S., kt., EUR 23,00 (2006)

The volume contains 15 papers given on the occasion of the fourteenth annual conference of CDE at the University of Bremen in 2005.

1. Mark Schreiber: Introduction
2. Aleks Sierz: Alternative or Mainstream? London Fringe Theatre in Image and Reality
3. Michael Raab: The West End – an Increasingly Marginal Place?
4. Una Chaudhuri: Hell in the Heartland: Mapping Post-Abu Ghraib America
   in Sam Shepard’s The God of Hell
5. Kathleen Starck: Current Global Conflict and the Invasion of the Private in
   The Pull of Negative Gravity and When the Bulbul Stopped Singing
6. Graham D. White: Compelled to Appear: The Manifestation of Physical Space Before the Tribunal
7. Ursula Canton: Guantanamo: Documenting a Real Space?
8. Susan Blattès and Betrand Koszul: From Page to Stage: Construction of Space in Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis
9. Christina Wald: „What discoveries do we bring back from that alien terrain?“ The Spatialisation of Trauma and the Exploration of the
   Paedophile’s Mind in Bryony Lavery’s Frozen
10. Alyce von Rothkirch: „Art can save culture:“ Welsh Stagings of Place
    in Selected Works by Eddie Ladd and Ed Thomas
11. Donald Pulford: Staging Past and Present Simultaneously: Andrew Bovell’s Holy Day (The Red Sea)
12. Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe: The Space of Consciousness: New Possibilities
    for Contemporary Theatre
13. Terry L. Price: Shifting Place
14. Neal Harvey and Joanne Tompkins: Virtual Reality and Negotiating Problems of Real Theatre Space
15. Reade W. Dornan: Screen to Stage: Positioning the Subject in Murakami’s The Elephant Vanishes
16. Michelene Wandor: A Dramatic Writing Workshop: Mapping the Territories
    form Imagination to Page to Stage and Back Again

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Christoph Henke, Martin Middeke, eds.
Drama and/after Postmodernism

Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2007.
ISBN 978-3-88476-936-2, 396 pp., EUR 35,00 (2007)

The eighteen essays collected in this volume address a wide range of topics and examine the work of various contemporary playwrights. The essays investigate how and to what extent the aesthetics of contemporary drama reflect upon the postmodern preference for difference, plurality, uncertainty, ambiguity, hybridity, fragmentation, or performativity; for the deconstruction of teleological history and the subject; for carnivalesque playfulness and irony; but also for the non-representable sublime in art. The essays reveal how vital postmodernist discourse and poetics are in the field of contemporary theatre and drama in English, and they also set out to prove how productive contemporary Anglophone playwrights are in producing new narratives and cutting-edge images which interact with our readings.

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Ellen Redling, Peter Paul Schnierer, eds.
Non-Standard Forms of Contemporary Drama and Theatre

Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2008.
ISBN 978-3-86821-040-8, EUR 26,00

The essays collected in this volume add up to a morphology of contemporary drama in English. They investigate unusal formats and experimental texts as well as innovative performance practices. Many of the fourteen international contributors, however, acknowledge the pervasise and persistent influence the well-made play exerts even in the twenty-first century.

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Monika Pietrzak-Franger, Eckart Voigts-Virchow, eds.
Adaptations – Performing Across Media and Genres

Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2009.
ISBN 978-3-86821-148-1, EUR 32,50

The papers collected in this volume address the complex issue of stage adaptation. The essays enquire into the processes involved in theatrical adaptation, highlighting the multi-layering, hybridity and palimpsestuous character of onstage adaptations. They attend to a wide spectrum of problems which include issues of classification, the question of media and generic transpositions as well as the intra- and intertextuality of onstage adaptations. Various papers also address the processes and problems of transculturation and indigenization. This collection, therefore, offers a platform for a positive reconsideration of stage plays and live theatre in adaptation studies. In reverse, the study of adaptation also proves vital to the field of contemporary theatre and drama studies as it helps to deconstruct problematic notions of fidelity and originality, emphasizing instead the complexity of adaptive processes on the stage and beyond.

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Werner Huber, Margarete Rubik, Julia Novak, eds.
Staging Interculturality

Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2010.
ISBN 978-3-86821-148-1, EUR 32,00

The articles collected in this volume have come out of the 18th international CDE conference (Vienna, 2009) and set out to examine how contemporary drama and theatre in English engage in the discourse of interculturality. Apart from autobiographically-oriented keynote lectures by playwrights Tanika Gupta and Simon Stephens these papers address the themes of interculturality and multiculturalism across a wide range of topics, ethnicities, and methodologies. They deal not only with the obvious themes of ethnic encounters and intercultural conflicts but also with issues of hybridity, globalisation, immigration, and the diaspora experience.

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Merle Tönnies, Christina Flotmann, eds.
Narrative in Drama

Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2011.
ISBN 978-3-86821-315-7, EUR 27,50.

The papers collected in this volume were first presented at the 2010 CDE conference at Paderborn and address the forms and functions of narrative elements in English-language drama and theatre from the 1990s onwards. The contributions focus especially on questions of authenticity in theatrical discourse, on the relationship between performed stories and their audiences and on the potential of stage narratives to construct (different versions of) subjectivity. The dramatic forms that are studied range from documentary and autobiographical works to ‚in-yer-face‘ plays, monodrama, Black British drama and post-dramatic theatre. Thus, the volume as a whole offers a comprehensive overview of the ways in which playwrights and performers are increasingly using storytelling formats in times when ‚grand narratives‘ have long lost their power.

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Mark Berninger, Bernhard Reitz, eds.
Ethical Debates in Contemporary Theatre and Drama

Contemporary Drama in English 19.
Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2012.
ISBN 978-3-86821-377-5, EUR 26,50.

The scholarly essays collected in this volume illuminate the renewed interest of contemporary theatre and drama in English in discussions of ethical dilemma. They address questions posed by numerous recent plays about the nature of ethical decisions in complex circumstances at the beginning of the 21st century. Taken together, they show in great detail how, in opposition to the political drama of the 1960s and 70s, contemporary theatre and drama finds it difficult to identify positions of moral superiority and rather engages in performances of open debates about just war, the drawbacks of humanitarian aid, the entanglements of global economic crisis, or the multi-layered ethics of memory. This also includes, as the articles further illustrate, an inquiry into the ethics of theatrical representation and the moral implications of spectatorship. The collection is rounded off by contributions by three British playwrights (Rona Munro, Julia Pascal, and Alistair Beaton) who explain the ethical dimension which informs their writing.

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