Text & Presentation, 2014

Text & Presentation gathers some of the best work presented at the 2014 Comparative Drama Conference in Baltimore. The subjects explored in this volume range from ancient to contemporary and encompass great cultural and intellectual diversity. The highlight of the conference was a presentation by award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang. A transcript of Hwang’s conversation is the lead piece, followed by twelve research papers, one review essay and ten book reviews. This volume accurately represents the diversity of the annual conference, and represents the latest research in the fields of comparative drama, performance and dramatic textual analysis.

Graley Herren is a professor of English at Xavier University in Cincinnati and an executive board member for the Comparative Drama Conference. He has published widely on modern literature, with an emphasis upon the drama of Samuel Beckett and the fiction of Don DeLillo.

Edited by Graley Herren
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 264
Bibliographic Info: 28 photos, notes, bibliographies, index
Copyright Date: 2015
pISBN: 978-0-7864-9461-3
eISBN: 978-1-4766-2025-1
Imprint: McFarland
Series: The Comparative Drama Conference Series

Table of Contents


Acknowledgments v

Preface 1

A Conversation with David Henry Hwang (Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.) 7

Translating Tempests: A Reading of Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête in Translation (Giuseppe Sofo) 23

Telemachos, the Odyssey and Hamlet (Bruce Louden) 33

Cognitive Misappraisal in Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan  (Todd O. Williams) 51

Primal, Pure or Something in Between? Aida Walker, Dance and

Sexuality (Elizabeth M. Cizmar) 66

Mediating ­East-West Binarisms: A Study of ­Al-Hakim’s Hybrid

Plays (Ahmed Mohammed Ghaleb) 84

Fragments Shored: Some Remarks on T. S. Eliot’s Drama and the Uses of Hugh Grant’s Vacancy (Doug Phillips) 99

Cabaret and the ­Avant-Garde (Brigitte Bogar and Christopher Innes) 115

Fifty Years of Ariane Mnouchkine and the Théâtre du Soleil: The Director as Dramaturge, Theater Historian and Public Intellectual (Allen J. Kuharski) 132

Norodom Sihanouk: The “Unfinished” Story of American Global

Totalitarianism by Hélène Cixous and the Théâtre du Soleil (Les Essif) 151

Oedipus King / Oedipus Pig: Nanos Valaoritis’s Ludic Politics (Vassiliki Rapti) 164

Friends Dying Before Our Eyes in Annie Baker’s The Aliens (Thomas Butler) 179

A Comparative Analysis of Three Plays on Disasters: Omnium Gatherum, Carried Away on the Crest of a Wave, and Radio 311 (Yuko Kurahashi) 192

Perceptions of Memory and Mechanisms of Power: Beckett,

Williams and Pinter (Doug Phillips) 209

Review of Literature: Selected Books

Penny Farfan and Lesley Ferris, eds. Contemporary Women

Playwrights (Michael Y. Bennett) 217

Arturo J. Aldama, Chela Sandoval and Peter J. García, eds. Performing the US Latina and Latino Borderlands (Suzanne M. Bost) 220

Tony Jason Stafford. Shaw’s Settings: Gardens and Libraries (Rebecca S. Cameron) 223

Michael Y. Bennett. Narrating the Past through Theatre: Four

Crucial Texts (Alex Feldman) 225

Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. Black Medea: Adaptations in Modern Plays (Mathias Hanses) 228

Marianne Novy. Shakespeare and Outsiders (Peter Kanelos) 231

Ryan Claycomb. Lives in Play: Autobiography and Biography on the Feminist Stage (Amelia Howe Kritzer) 234

Andrew Sofer. Dark Matter: Invisibility in Drama, Theater and Performance (Jeffrey B. Loomis) 237

Philip C. Kolin and Harvey Young, eds. Suzan-Lori Parks in Person:

Interviews and Commentaries (Jaye Austin Williams) 240

Siyuan Liu. Performing Hybridity in ­Colonial-Modern China (Leo Shingchi Yip) 243

Index 247

“edited with care…preserves the conference experience by extending its scholarly dialogue to the wider reading community…many fine essays”—New England Theatre Journal (on a past volume).