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Paula Deubner
„Into the Light“: Selbst und Transzendenz in den Dramen Sarah Kanes
Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2012.
ISBN 978-3-86821-371-3, 254 S., kt., € 27,50 (2012)
Vergewaltigung, Verstümmelung und Selbstmord – die Bilder der Gewalt in den Dramen Sarah Kanes sind drastisch. Sie sind Teil einer Dramaturgie der figuralen Durchdringung, die hier unter dem Stichwort „Transfiguralität“ systematisch interpretiert wird. Kane thematisiert mit der Transfiguralität die Suche nach einer ultimativen Identität, die nicht in der Identifikation mit dem Anderen, sondern in der Transzendenz ihren Zielpunkt findet. Damit entwirft Kane in ihrer Dramaturgie eine moderne Mystik, in der das Selbst nur in seiner Überwindung und Auflösung gelingt. Der geschundene Leib wird mit einer negativen Religiosität und mit Vorstellungen romantischer Liebe konnotiert. Aus dieser Dramatisierung von Leiblichkeit, Liebe und Religiosität entwickelt Kane eine Teleologie des Selbst, die auf transzendierende Grenzerfahrungen zielt. Mit dieser Studie liegt erstmals eine umfassende Analyse des Nexus von Selbst und Transzendenz in den Dramen Kanes vor.
Elżbieta Baraniecka
Sublime Drama: British Theatre of the 1990s
Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2013.
ISBN 978-3-11-030993-5, 254 S., geb., € 99,95 (2013)
British drama of the 1990s is most commonly associated with the term in-yer-face theatre, which was coined by Aleks Sierz to describe the shocking and provocative work of emerging playwrights such as Mark Ravenhill or Sarah Kane. Taking a cue from Sierz’s own suggestion that what still remains to be researched more thoroughly in this field is the particular relationship between the stage and the audience, this monograph undertakes precisely that task.
Rather than use the term offered by Sierz, however, the study proposes a different concept to account for the dynamics of communication within the particular theatre of the 1990s, namely the aesthetic category of the sublime. Coupled with elements of Reader Response Theory, the sublime proves to be a more fruitful term, as it provides more precise tools for the analysis of the audience’s aesthetic response than does in-yer-face theatre.
With the help of four representative plays by four key playwrights of that time, Closer by Patrick Marber, Normal by Anthony Neilson, Faust is Dead by Mark Ravenhill and 4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane, the book details the consecutive stages in the process of the plays‘ reception that the members of the audience go through while forming their aesthetic response to them. Looking through the prism of the sublime, the study not only offers a detailed analysis of each play but also suggests an entirely new approach to British drama of the 1990s.
Clara Escoda Agusti
Martin Crimps’s Theatre: Collapse as Resistance to Late Capitalist Society
Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2013.
ISBN 978-3-11-030995-9, 336 pp., hardb., € 99,95 (2013)
This book reads Martin Crimp’s The Treatment (1993), Attempts on her Life (1997), The Country (2000), Face to the Wall (2002), Cruel and Tender (2004) and his adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull (2006) in the context of contemporary, late capitalist societies of control or of ’spectacle‘, and explores how female collapse in particular works as a form of denunciation of the violence of globalized, technological neo-liberalism.
The book contends that Crimp is a post-Holocaust writer, whose dramaturgy is pervaded by the ethical and aesthetic debates that the Holocaust has generated in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Its main claim is that, by interpellating spectators through the defamiliarized language of collapse and testimony, Crimp invites spectators to contribute to detecting the seeds of ‚barbarism‘ as they may detect them in their context, thus warning them about the introduction of violence in supposedly civilized relationships and thereby also contributing to overcoming the contemporary ethical impasse.
The book finally argues that female characters who pass on their testimony are shown to the audience in the ‚process of becoming‘ ethical bodies – namely, they are emerge as ethical out of the perceived necessity to integrate both the Other as essential parts of their beings, thus recovering an innate, Baumian sense of responsibility towards the Other.