Abstract
In the opening chapter, Lachman presents key features and themes which characterise the presentation of the human protagonist in the period of modernist, postmodernist and contemporary philosophy and literature. Modernist literature and drama often represented the human protagonist as fragmented, dispersed and multi-layered, searching for the best way of verbalising his or her experience on different levels of metafictional narrative. The post-war period continued some of these earlier preoccupations, placing a particular emphasis on the use and misuse of language. Many post-war writers viewed language as a dangerous field of communication in which senses and meanings multiply, deforming the vision of reality. Lachman argues that for the last three decades contemporary drama has been characterised by a dominant presence of three concepts: technological performance, visuality and immersion. Employing these three elements to discuss human and non-human relations, Lachman attempts to argue that contemporary dramatic characters face the challenge of living in a world dominated by post-humanist protocols and scenarios.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
I am taking these dates—1890–1930—as historical boundaries of modernism after Malcolm Bradbury’s canonical anthology of texts on modernism (Bradbury and McFarlane 1991).
- 2.
Bergson himself expresses a similar view in Matter and Memory, concerning images which can belong to two systems: “one belonging to science, wherein each image, related only to itself, possesses an absolute value; and the other, the world of consciousness, wherein all the images depend on a central image, our body, the variants of which they follow” (1929, 13–14).
- 3.
Literature of modernism is dominated in Fuchs’s words by the real dilemma which “repeatedly introduces as a humanistic problem its own very questioning of the human image on the stage ” (Fuchs 1996, 33).
- 4.
With Wyndham Lewis , the opposition against Bergsonian vitalist impulse was particularly dogmatic, even fascist. As Frank Kermode observed, Lewis was obsessed with the idea of “a closed society of ‘abstraction’ – an anti-kinetic, anti-humanistic society of rigid hierarchy”. He proclaimed the “cult of deadness” (2000, 110).
- 5.
These concepts are naturally connected with Eliot’s general theory of the “objective correlative” which he formulated in his essay on Hamlet (1919).
- 6.
Again, as Ferry clearly formulates this idea: “subjectivism means disappearing of the world” (1993, 9). Or, more metaphorically, the world becomes a “heap of broken images” from Eliot’s The Waste Land .
- 7.
Martin Jay calls the shift in visual perception that happened around the turn of the ninetieth and twentieth century a collapse of “scopic regimes”—that is, a multiplication of points of seeing evident in art and literature of the period (1988).
- 8.
Cf . Rorty (1992).
- 9.
See, for instance, a complex analysis of the “antitheatrical prejudice” in modernist and postmodernist art and theatre in Barish (1981).
- 10.
Carlson also sees the theatre of the 1950s and 1960s as associated with a “rigid” aesthetics of the “pre-determined structures” (2002, 241).
- 11.
As Anne Britt Gran observes “the end of theatricality was the beginning of the absorption”. The absorption meant a totally different model of engagement with the stage reality (Brit-Gran and Oatley 2002, 258).
- 12.
Feral also observes that “performativity is meaningless if not enriched by theatricality” (2002, 5).
- 13.
In the same interview, Phelan says that “visibility is a trap” (2003, 293).
- 14.
In Phelan’s case and very much so in the case of a significant group of performance artists in the 1970s, the philosophy of performance was strongly connected with their struggle against the consumerist culture and the domination of the object of art turned into a marketable product. The theory of disappearance and invisibility possible through the uncoded performance was a strategy leading to eliminating the financial aspect of artistic creativity (2003).
- 15.
Cf. Richard Schechner and his Performance. An Introduction.
- 16.
It is interesting to quote in this context a statement introducing a Minnesota University Press series “Posthumanities” that goes as follows: “humanism is no longer adequate to understand the human’s entangled, complex relations with animals, the environment, and technology” (https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/series/posthumanities [21.05.2017]).
- 17.
One of such myths—the Celtic Revival—remains in need of redefinition, because it was conceived as a political narrative that owes much to dream and fantasy. As Fintan O’Toole observes, casting a contemporary, global perspective on the historical revivalist past: “The revival was a writing that pretended to be a reading, an act of invention that pretended to be an act of restoration” (1997, 84).
References
Auslander, Philip. 2008. Liveness. Performance in Mediatised Culture. London/New York: Routledge.
Barish, John. 1981. The Antitheatrical Prejudice. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Barthes, Roland. 2001. The Death of the Author. In Modern Literary Theory, edited by Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh, 185–189. London/New York: Arnold, Oxford University Press.
Bergson, Henri. 1929. Matter and Memory. Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W Scott Palmer. London/New York: George Allen & Unwin Ltd./The Macmillan Company.
Bertens, Hans. 2011. Literary Theory. The Basics. London/New York: Routledge.
Bradbury, Malcolm, and James McFarlane, eds. 1991. Modernism. A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930. London: Penguin.
Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Brit-Gran, Anne, and Diane Oatley. 2002. The Fall of Theatricality in the Age of Modernity. SubStance 31 (2/3): 251–264.
Butler, Christopher. 1994. Early Modernism. Literature, Music, and Painting in Europe 1900–1916. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Carlson, Marvin. 1984. Theories of the Theatre. A Historical and Critical Survey, from the Greeks to the Present. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press.
———. 2002. The Resistance to Theatricality. SubStance 31 (2/3): 238–250.
Daiches, David. 1997. A Critical History of English Literature. Volume II: The Restoration to the Present Day. Mandarin: The Ronald Press Company.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1991. Bergsonism. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books.
Diamond, Elin. 1996. Introduction to Performance and Cultural Politics, edited by Elin Diamond, 1–12. London/New York: Routledge.
Eliot, Thomas Stearns. 1934. Tradition and Individual Talent. In Selected Essays, by Thomas Stearns Eliot, 13–22. London: Faber and Faber.
Feral, Josette. 2002. Foreword. SubStance 31 (2/3): 3–13.
Ferry, Luc. 1993. Homo Aestheticus. The Invention of Taste in the Democratic Age. Translated by Robert de Loaiza. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press.
Fuchs, Elinor. 1996. Death of Character. Perspectives on Theatre After Modernism. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Harvey, David. 1992. The Condition of Postmodernity. An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, MA/Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Heidegger, Martin. 1999. The Way to Language. In Basic Writings, by Marin Heidegger, edited by David Farrell Krell, 393–427. London: Routledge.
Herbrechter, Stefan. 2013. The Roar of the Other Side of Silence…or, What’s Left of the Humanities? Review of The Posthuman, by Rosi Braidotti. Culture Machine April 2013: 1–13. http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewFile/495/516. Accessed 21 May 2017.
Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism. History, Theory, Fiction. New York/London: Routledge.
Jay, Martin. 1988. Scopic Regimes of Modernity. In Vision and Visuality, ed. Hall Foster, 3–23. Seattle: Bay Press.
Kenner, Hugh. 1969. The Invisible Poet: T.S. Eliot. London: Methuen.
Kermode, Frank. 2000. The Sense of Ending. Studies in the Theory of Fiction with a New Epilogue. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Martland, T.R. 1975. On “The Limits of My Language Mean the Limits of My World.”. The Review of Metaphysics 29 (1): 19–26.
McFarlane, James. 1991. The Mind of Modernism. In Modernism. A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930, 71–93. London: Penguin.
McKenzie, Jon. 2001. Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. London/New York: Routledge.
Nichols, Peter. 1995. Modernisms. A Literary Guide. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1996. Human All Too Human. Translated by Reginald John Hollingday. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
O’Toole, Fintan. 1997. Perpetual Motion. In Arguing at the Crossroads. Essays on a Changing Ireland, edited by Paul Brennan and Catherine de Saint Phalle, 77–97. Dublin: New Island Books.
Phelan, Peggy. 1993. Unmarked. The Politics of Performance. London/New York: Routledge.
———. 2003. “Performance, Live Culture and Things of the Heart”, Peggy Phelan interviewed by Marquard Smith. Journal of Visual Culture 291 (2): 291–302.
Rabaté, Jean-Michel. 1994. Roland Barthes. In The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, edited by Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth, 68–72. Baltimore/London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Rorty, Richard M., ed. 1992. The Linguistic Turn. Essays in Philosophical Method. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press.
Ruppo Malone, Irina. 2010. Ibsen and the Irish Revival. London: Palgrave.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2015. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by C.K. Ogden, F.P. Ramsey, D.F. Pears, and B.F. McGuinnes. Pdf. (n.p.).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Lachman, M. (2018). Introduction. In: Performing Character in Modern Irish Drama. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76535-8_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76535-8_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-76534-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-76535-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)