
Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater
W. B. Worthen(Author)
University of California Press
Will be published approx. on 30. January 2015
Book
Paperback/Softback
240 pages
978-0-520-28687-0 (ISBN)
Description
The history of drama is typically viewed as a series of inert "styles." Tracing British and American stage drama from the 1880s onward, W. B. Worthen instead sees drama as the interplay of text, stage production, and audience. How are audiences manipulated? What makes drama meaningful? Worthen identifies three rhetorical strategies that distinguish an O'Neill play from a Yeats, or these two from a Brecht. Where realistic theater relies on the "natural" qualities of the stage scene, poetic theater uses the poet's word, the text, to control performance. Modern political theater, by contrast, openly places the audience at the center of its rhetorical designs, and the drama of the postwar period is shown to develop a range of post-Brechtian practices that make the audience the subject of the play. Worthen's book deserves the attention of any literary critic or serious theatergoer interested in the relationship between modern drama and the spectator.
More details
Edition
First Edition, None
Language
English
Place of publication
Berkerley
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 18 mm
Weight
363 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-520-28687-0 (9780520286870)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

W. B. Worthen
Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater
E-Book
02/2015
1st Edition
University of California Press
€39.49
Available for download
Person
W. B. Worthen is Alice Brady Pels Professor in the Arts, and Professor and Chair of the Department of Theatre at Barnard College, Columbia University; he also serves as Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia, and as co-chair of the Ph.D. in Theatre Program.