ENH245 - J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: Battling Modernism: Playwrights/Screenwriters

A seminal work of twentieth-century drama, Waiting for Godot was Samuel Beckett’s first professionally produced play. It opened in Paris in 1953 at the tiny Left Bank Theatre de Babylone, and has since become a cornerstone of twentieth-century theater. The story line revolves around two seemingly homeless men waiting for someone--or something--named Godot. Vladimir and Estragon wait near a tree on a barren stretch of road, inhabiting a drama spun from their own consciousness. The result is a comical wordplay of poetry, dreamscapes, and nonsense, which has been interpreted as a somber summation of mankind’s inexhaustible search for meaning. Beckett’s language pioneered an expressionistic minimalism that captured the existentialism of post-World War II Europe. His play remains one of the most magical and beautiful allegories of our time.

"The comprehensive cinematic interpretation of Beckett's plays."
Waiting for Godot / Not I / Rough for theatre I / Ohio impromptu / Documentary / Krapp's last tape / What where / Come and go / Act without words I / Happy days / Catastrophe / Rough for theatre II / Breath / That time / Endgame / Act without words II / A piece of monologue / Play / Rockaby

Arguing that Beckett's understanding of subjectivity cannot be reduced to that of phenomenology or existential humanism, Thomas Trezise offers a major reinterpretation of Beckett in light of Freud and such post-modernists as Bataille, Blanchot, and Derrida.

Since his death in 1989, it has become difficult to imagine that Samuel Beckett was once a virtually unknown writer. Born in 1906 into a respectable middle-class family in a Dublin suburb, he came late to fame in the early 1950s with the ground-breaking play, Waiting for Godot. Since Godot, Beckett's writings have been translated, published, and staged throughout the world.

This study presents a comprehensive and original argument about the fundamental literary value and the underlying psychological meaning of Beckett's work. John Keller explores Beckett's work, not only for its importance on a personal, human level for many readers, but its place in elaborating the origins of human emotional life, and of creative fiction.

In an old and slightly seedy house in North London there lives a family of men: Max, the aging but still aggressive patriarch; his younger, ineffectual brother Sam; and two of Max's three sons, neither of whom is married -- Lenny, a small-time pimp, and Joey, who dreams of success as a boxer. Into this sinister abode comes the eldest son, Teddy, who, having spent the past six years teaching philosophy in America, is now bringinghis wife, Ruth, home to visit the family she has never met. As the play progresses, the younger brothers make increasingly outrageous passes at their sister-in-law until they are practically making love to her in front of her stunned but strangely aloof husband.

Harold Pinter is one of our most profound poets and playwrights, with work ranging from his plays The Caretaker, The Homecoming, and Betrayal to such poems as "The Bombs" and "Death." A writer known for his searing exploration of power, Pinter gives us an electrifying look into the often uncomfortable relationships between people -- whether family members or political opponents. The Essential Pinter, which includes key plays, poetry, essays, and screenplays, is an indispensable companion for anyone wishing to delve into the astonishingly dazzling and frequently ominous world of Harold Pinter. In voyaging in, we not only come to fully appreciate the breadth of a body of work spanning over fifty years, but acquire a better understanding of human interaction.

Harold Pinter is one of the most important writers in English of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century. This brief biography offers fresh insights into his life and work, concentrating on the themes, patterns, relationships, ideas and language common to his life and creative output. Placing Pinter's life and work alongside each other, the study illuminates Pinter's vision of society, politics, gender, sex, violence and human relationships.

This collection of seventeen critical essays commemorates 25 years of writing by Harold Pinter. The essays are original pieces by many of the leading contemporary drama scholars in American and Britain which, taken together, present a fuller picture of the dramatist's canon and a better understanding of what he tries to do and how he tries to do it.

The Frankfurt School's discourse on modernism has seldom been linked to contemporary drama, though the questions of aesthetics and politics explored by T.W. Adorno and others seem especially germane to the plays of Harold Pinter, which span high and low cultural forms and move freely from hermetic modernism to political engagement. Examining plays from 1958 to 1996, Varun Begley'sHarold Pinter and the Twilight of Modernism argues that Pinter's work simultaneously embodies the modernist principle of negation and the more fluid aesthetics of the postmodern. Pinter is arguably one of the most popular and perplexing of modern dramatists writing in English. His plays prefigured, then chronicled, the crumbling divide between modernism and its historical 'others:' popular entertainment, politically committed art, and technological mass culture. Begley sheds new light on Pinter's work by applying the methods and problems of cultural studies discourse. Viewing his plays as a series of responses to fundamental aesthetic and political questions within modernism, Begley argues that, collectively, they narrate a prehistory of the postmodern.

The book is a study of Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard, arguably the two most eminent British playwrights of the past sixty years or so, from a perspective of what it describes as a poetics of postmodern drama.

Originally released as a motion picture in 1990.
Special features include interviews with Tom Stoppard, Gary Oldman, Richard Dreyfuss and Tim Roth.

In a large country house in Derbyshire in April 1809 sits Lady Thomasina Coverly, aged thirteen, and her tutor, Septimus Hodge. Through the window may be seen some of the '500 acres inclusive of lake' where Capability Brown's idealized landscape is about to give way to the 'picturesque' Gothic style: 'everything but vampires', as the garden historian Hannah Jarvis remarks to Bernard Nightingale when they stand in the same room 180 years later. Bernard has arrived to uncover the scandal which is said to have taken place when Lord Byron stayed at Sidley Park. Tom Stoppard's absorbing play takes us back and forth between the centuries and explores the nature of truth and time, the difference between the Classical and the Romantic temperament, and the disruptive influence of sex on our orbits in life - 'the attraction', as Hannah says, 'which Newton left out'.

The play begins with Max and Charlotte, a couple whose marriage seems about to rupture. But nothing one sees on a stage is the real thing, and some things are less real than others. Charlotte is an actress who has been appearing in a play about marriage by her husband, Henry. Max, her leading man, is also married to an actress, Annie. Both marriages are at the point of rupture because Henry and Annie have fallen in love. But is it the real thing? In The Real Thing, Tom Stoppard combines his characteristically brilliant wordplay and wit with flashes of insight that illuminate the nature--and the mystery--of love, creating a multi-toned play that challenges the mind while searching out the innermost secrets of the heart.

This collection of fifteen essays offers both student and theatergoer a guide to the stage plays, novel, and screenplays of one of the most celebrated British dramatists since Noel Coward. Readers will find that the general and accessible description and analyses in these essays makes the large body of Stoppard's writing clear and approachable while preserving its rich humor. This is the first collection of essays to appear in many years addressing all of Stoppard's major work.

With a writing career spanning over half a century and encompassing media as diverse as conferences, radio, journalism, fiction, theatre, film, and television, Tom Stoppard is probably the most prolific and significant living British dramatist. The critical essays in this volume celebrating Stoppard's 75th birthday address many facets of Stoppard's work, both the well-known, such as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and Shakespeare in Love, as well as the relatively critically neglected, including his novel Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon and his short stories, "The Story," "Life," "Times: Fragments," and "Reunion." The essays presented here analyze plays such as Arcadia, The Invention of Love, The Real Thing, and Jumpers, Stoppard's film adaptation of J. G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun, his television adaptation of Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End, and his stage adaptations of Chekhov's plays Ivanov, The Seagull, and The Cherry Orchard, as well as his own theatrical trilogy on Russian history, The Coast of Utopia (Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage). Also included is an interview with Tom Stoppard on the 16 November 1982 debut of his play The Real Thing at Strand Theatre, London, and a detailed account of the Stoppard holdings in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. From his fascination with Shakespeare and other historical figures (and time periods) to his exploration of the connection between poetic creativity and scholarship to his predilection for word play, verbal ambiguity and use of anachronism, Stoppard's work is at once insightful and wry, thought-provoking and entertaining, earnest and facetious. The critical essays in this volume hope to do justice to the brilliant complexity that is Tom Stoppard's body of work.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward Albee is one of our most important American playwrights. And nowhere is his dramatic genius more apparent than in two of his probing early works, The American Dream and The Zoo Story.The New Yorker hailed The American Dream as "unique ... brilliant ... a comic nightmare, fantasy of the highest order." The story of one of America's most dysfunctoinal families, it is a ferocious, uproarious attack on the substitution of artificial values for real values-a startling tale of murder and morality that rocks middle-class ethics to its complacent foundations. The Zoo Story is a harrowing depiction of a young man alienated from the human race-a searing story of loneliness and the desperate need for recognition that builds to a violent, shattering climax. Together, these plays show men and women at their most hilarious, heartbreaking, and above all, human-and demonstrate why Edward Albee continues to be one of our greatest living dramatists.

Based on the book by Edward Albee.
Produced on the stage by Richard Barr and Clinton Wilder.
Originally released as a motion picture in 1966.

Criticism of Edward Albee's works.

This volume offers a major selection of Bertolt Brecht's groundbreaking critical writing. Here, arranged in chronological order, are essays from 1918 to 1956, in which Brecht explores his definition of the Epic Theatre and his theory of alienation-effects in directing, acting, and writing, and discusses, among other works,The Threepenny Opera, Mahagonny, Mother Courage, Puntila,andGalileo. Also included is "A Short Organum for the Theatre," Brecht's most complete exposition of his revolutionary philosophy of drama. Translated and edited by John Willett,Brecht on Theater is essential to an understanding of one of the twentieth century's most influential dramatists.

Brutal, scandalous, perverted, yet humorous, hummable, and with a happy ending- Bertolt Brecht's revolutionary masterpiece The Threepenny Opera is a landmark of modern drama that has become embedded in the Western cultural imagination. Through the love story of Polly Peachum and "Mack the Knife" Macheath, the play satirizes the bourgeois of the Weimar Republic, revealing a society at the height of decadence and on the verge of chaos. Complemented with music by Kurt Weill, it was one of the earliest and most successful attempts to introduce jazz into the theater, and the song "Mack the Knife" became one of the most popular and widely recorded songs of the twentieth century. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

This colorful account of Bertolt Brecht's move from Germany to America during the Hitler era explores his activities as a Hollywood writer, a playwright determined to conquer Broadway, a political commentator and activist, a social observer, and an exile in an alien land. Originally published in 1980. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Not long after the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City, Bertolt Brecht's name was on the lips of many writing about Broadway. Invoked knowingly-but not always knowledgeably-Brecht became something between marketing strategy and erudite justification for another season of Broadway musicals, another ignominy endured by the German playwright whose epic theater has only seldom been understood in the United States.

A guide to all of Brecht's key plays that sets them in their historical, dramaturgical and political contexts Stephen Unwin provides a clear and readable guide to Brecht's plays that will prove invaluable to the student, teacher and theatre practitioner. Grouping and analysing plays chronologically according to their context, Unwin also considers Brecht's theory and looks at his impact and the legacy that he left. The Guide covers: * Three Early Plays and Expressionism * Two Music Theatre Pieces and Kurt Weill * Marxism and the Theatre * Opposition Plays * Five Great Plays * A Late Masterpiece * Theory and Practice * Brecht's Legacy Written by the Artistic Director of English Touring Theatre and the author of a range of theatre studies books, this is a perfect companion to the plays of Brecht for the student and theatre practitioner.

First published in 1933, Miss Lonelyhearts remains one of the most shocking works of 20th century American literature, as unnerving as a glob of black bile vomited up at a church social: empty, blasphemous, and horrific. Set in New York during the Depression and probably West's most powerful work, Miss Lonelyhearts concerns a nameless man assigned to produce a newspaper advice column — but as time passes he begins to break under the endless misery of those who write in, begging him for advice. Unable to find answers, and with his shaky Christianity ridiculed to razor-edged shards by his poisonous editor, he tumbles into alcoholism and a madness fueled by his own spiritual emptiness. During his years in Hollywood West wrote The Day of the Locust, a study of the fragility of illusion. Many critics consider it with F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished masterpiece The Last Tycoon (1941) among the best novels written about Hollywood. Set in Hollywood during the Depression, the narrator, Tod Hackett, comes to California in the hope of a career as a painter for movie backdrops but soon joins the disenchanted second-rate actors, technicians, laborers and other characters living on the fringes of the movie industry. Tod tries to seduce Faye Greener; she is seventeen. Her protector is an old man named Homer Simpson. Tod finds work on a film called prophetically “The Burning of Los Angeles,” and the dark comic tale ends in an apocalyptic mob riot outside a Hollywood premiere, as the system runs out of control.

The dream life of Balso Snell -- Miss Lonelyhearts -- A cool million -- The day of the locust -- Other writings -- letters.

This study of apocalyptic writer Nathanael West examines his body of work, exploring his distinctive method of negation. Locating him in an American avant-garde tradition, the author considers the possibilities and limitations of dada and surrealism as modes of social criticism.

In this book, Susan Edmunds explores he relationship between modernist domestic fiction and the rise of the U.S. welfare state. This relationship, which began in the Progressive era, emerged as maternalist reformers developed an inverted discourse of social housekeeping in order to call forstate protection and regulation of the home. Modernists followed suit, turning the genre of domestic fiction inside out in order to represent new struggles on the border between home, market and state. dmunds uses the work of Djuna Barnes, Jean Toomer, Tillie Olsen, Edna Ferber, Nathanael West, andFlannery O'Connor to trace the significance of modernists' radical reconstitution of the genre of domestic fiction. Using a grotesque aesthetic of revolutionary inversion, these writers looped their depictions of the domestic sphere through revolutionary discourses associated with socialism,consumerism and the avant-garde. These authors used their grotesque discourses to deal with issues of social conflict ranging from domestic abuse and racial violence to educational reform, public health care, eugenics, and social security. With the New Deal, the U.S. welfare state realizedmaternalist ambitions to disseminate a modern sentimental version of the home to all white citizens, successfully translating radical bids for collective social security into a racialized order of selective and detached domestic security. The book argues that modernists engaged and contested thishistorical trajectory from the start. In the process, they forged an enduring set of terms for understanding and negotiating the systemic forms of ambivalence, alienation and conflict that accompany Americans' contemporary investments in "family values."

The story of what happens when a serious writer goes to Hollywood has become a cliche: the writer is paid well but underappreciated, treated like a factory worker, and forced to write bad, formulaic movies. Most fail, become cynical, drink to excess, and at some point write a bitter novel that attacks the film industry in the name of high art. Like many too familiar stories, this one neither holds up to the facts nor helps us understand Hollywood novels. Instead, Chip Rhodes argues, these novels tell us a great deal about the ways that Hollywood has shaped both the American political landscape and American definitions of romance and desire. Rhodes considers how novels about the film industry changed between the studio era of the 1930s and 1940s and the era of deregulated film making that has existed since the 1960s. He asserts that Americans are now driven by cultural, rather than class, differences and that our mainstream notion of love has gone from repressed desire to abnormal desire to, finally, strictly business. "Politics, Desire, and the Hollywood Novel "pays close attention to six authors Nathanael West, Raymond Chandler, Budd Schulberg, Joan Didion, Bruce Wagner, and Elmore Leonard who have toiled in the film industry and written to tell about it. More specifically, Rhodes considers both screenplays and novels with an eye toward the different formulations of sexuality, art, and ultimately political action that exist in these two kinds of storytelling. "