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Modern Drama: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies (review)

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DOI: 10.1353/mdr.0.0146

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 Modern Drama: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies
(review)

Piet Defraeye

Modern Drama, Volume 53, Number 1, Spring 2010, pp. 128-131 (Review)

Published by University of Toronto Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mdr.0.0146

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 REVIEWS

forgetting so fundamental to any postmodern view of cultural memory.

Rabillard’s essay, of course, is just one in a long sequence of critical inter-
ventions that help us imagine theatre’s simultaneous engagements with
past, present, and future. Harry J. Elam, Jr.’s essay “Remembering Africa,
Performing Cultural Memory” also jumps out, with his insistence on the
“engram,” or “the permanent trace left in the brain by a remembered
stimulus,” as an interpretive model by which to understand the particular
and palpable traces of African cultural memories in metatheatrical
moments in Raisin in the Sun (34). So, too, does Ric Knowles’s discussion
of “intercultural memory” illuminate the need to consider in more detail
the “transmission and transformation of cultural memory” (50), particu-
larly as they are used to forge “new forms of community” and “reconstitute
diasporic subjectivities” (52) in Toronto’s multiethnic theatre district. And
finally, the editors themselves frame the essays within a set of propositions
inspired by Derrida’s deconstructive analysis of the signature. Because the
signature releases us from the strictures of authenticity, a view of cultural
memory that likens performances to dramatic signatures of the past
compels us to become increasingly sensitive to the tricky identity politics
of postmodern and postcolonial North American theatre. The resulting col-
lection consequently reconstructs the field of Canadian and American cul-
tural memory through an account of “ever-evolving traces of a past . . . [that
is] difficult to articulate, to categorize, to enact and/or to contain” (12).
With essays and an intellectual framework that explore new and innova-
tive points of engagement between theatre and memory, this collection
offers a satisfying summation of some of the most enduring concerns
within memory studies today and recuperates the past into considerations
of North American cultural identity politics in the here and now. With its
emphasis on production, textual analysis, and cultural studies, Signatures
of the Past gives us a full but by no means exhaustive treatment of the
different ways cultural memory in North American anglophone drama is
performed – and is, in itself, performative.

MARTIN PUCHNER, ed. Modern Drama: Critical Concepts in Literary and

Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 2008. 4 vols. $1,250.00 (Hb).

Reviewed by Piet Defraeye, University of Alberta

Martin Puchner’s four-volume, 1600-page anthology of dramatic criticism
is an ambitious project that documents the ideological and theoretical
origins of, and practical and critical responses to, modern drama. The col-
lection combines, in his words,

128 Modern Drama, 53:1 (Spring 2010)

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[the] ample and highly opinionated writings of the modern dramatists themselves,
the choices made by contemporary directors, the perspectives offered by
early theorists and philosophers interested in the emerging canon of modern
drama, the various methodological trends and fashions governing
scholarship from the 1950s to the present, the changing theater landscape
influencing the study of drama, and finally the institutional history of theater
studies as a discipline. (16)

Starting with Richard Wagner’s ardent “The Art-Work of the Future,” in

which the composer pleads for an “all-faculty” kind of art, and ending
with Alan Ackerman’s dispassionate reflection on the hermeneutic poten-
tial of the close-reading of theatre, Puchner covers 120 years of criticism
with a wealth of original material, structured chronologically and
thematically.
Just about every single essay in the first two volumes is required reading
for any serious graduate student of theatre, whether of theory or practice.
These introductory volumes contain standard texts, including selections
from August Strindberg, Adolphe Appia, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and Georg
Lukács, but they also provide access to more uncommon sources like
Kurt Schwitters’s Merz manifesto and T.S. Eliot’s thorough reflection on
poetic drama. They also offer fresh looks at old themes, such as Toril
Moi’s fundamental reassessment and reframing of Ibsen’s role as a moder-
nist figure. Volume three brings together a divergent collection of recent
critical approaches to historical modernist practice, be it through the lens
of gender criticism (Judith Stephens, J. Ellen Gainor), gay studies
(Laurence Senelick), postcolonial studies (Sandra Richards, David
Krasner, Elin Diamond), cultural theory (Shannon Jackson, David
Savran), or performance analysis (Christopher Balme, Julie Stone Peters).
Critical responses to the practice of acting and design complement the
volume nicely.
The fourth volume is rather unique for any collection of theatre theory,
as it juxtaposes philosophical approaches and theories of aesthetics with
performance theory and criticism. Elinor Fuchs’s essay on “theatricalist
anti-theatricalism” (111) and Erika Fisher-Lichte’s commentary on the
avant-garde’s antitextuality are certainly among the central essays in this
volume, as they focus on the crucial question of the performance’s
textual dependency. Puchner has included two of his own contributions,
which deal with the topic of textuality and antitheatricality. Essays by
Francis Ferguson, Herbert Lindenberger, Jacques Derrida, Ackerman,
Savran, and Julia Kristeva give further prominence to the focus on
antitheatricality.
Since Bernard Dukore’s Dramatic Theory and Criticism (1974) and Avant
Garde Drama (1969, with Daniel Gerould) have been out of print, sourcing

Modern Drama, 53:1 (Spring 2010) 129

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reading material for graduate courses on the subject has become challen-
ging. Gerould’s Theatre/Theory/Theatre (2000) filled a void, but Puchner’s
focus on modernism, as well as the scope of his sources, provides an unri-
valled resource for reference, reading, and study. Quite a few of the primary
articles from Dukore’s two collections reappear here (Wagner, Émile Zola,
George Bernard Shaw, Maurice Maeterlinck, Lukács, Stanislaw
Witkiewicz) and are thus made again available. Some of these (like
Maeterlinck’s reflections on modern drama) could have done with an
updated or new translation. At the same time, however, the inclusion of
often difficult-to-access translated sources is precisely what makes the
compilation so valuable. The forty-page extract from Peter Szondi’s
Theory of the Modern Drama is a case in point. An intelligent reflection
on the emergence of epic theatre as a logical response to problems of
realism and naturalism (essentialized in the paralysis of mimesis), the
source is rarely included in critical anthologies.
Puchner’s introductions are lucid and to the point. While avoiding
polemics and simplifications, he engages the reader in the critical
process of understanding the stakes of theory while at the same time allow-
ing us a hint of his own hierarchies. In his preface to the last volume, for
instance, he rightly identifies phenomenology as “perhaps the most influ-
ential for the study of theater” (2), but then he awkwardly reins it in as pri-
vileging “the act of seeing.” (This reductive view re-emerges in his own
otherwise brilliant essay on the theatre’s phenomenological impossibility
as suggested by Gilles Deleuze’s positing of theatricality as a necessarily
antitextual, unmediated form à la Artaud.) Also, by organizing his chronol-
ogy according to the original year of publication, Puchner creates some odd
structuring: we find, for instance, Zola’s and Strindberg’s considerations of
naturalism interspersed with Oscar Wilde’s musings on illusion and stage
masks; Bertolt Brecht’s notes on epic theatre and alienation broken up by
Yurii Olyesha’s and Gertrude Stein’s musings on playwriting; and, more
awkwardly, Antonin Artaud’s call for a theatre of cruelty complemented
by Walter Benjamin’s investigation of epic theatre and Patrice Pavis’s eluci-
dation of Gestus.
As always with anthologies of this kind, choices have been made as to
inclusion and exclusion. The greatest merit of the collection is its bringing
together of standard primary sources on the theory of modern drama in
combination with exciting reflections on developments in critical response
to theory and practice. Puchner offers an extremely relevant collection of
primary sources on the emergence of modernism, complemented by pro-
blematizing and investigative essays on the movement, including names
such as Henri Bergson, Meyerhold, Edward Gordon Craig, Eugène
Ionesco, Theodor Adorno, and Raymond Williams. Yet important sources
like Ortega Y Gasset and Jerzy Grotowski didn’t make the cut. The scope

130 Modern Drama, 53:1 (Spring 2010)

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is decidedly western, with little thought as to what modernism meant in

non-western settings. Selections from Aimé Césaire, Leopold Senghor,
Oswald de Andrade, and Mohan Rakesh, for instance, might have provided
a valuable counter-argument to the very notion that pan- or geo-modern-
ism is to be assumed. While volume four opens the window to contempor-
ary critical responses to modernism, unfortunately, no selection from
Hans-Thies Lehmann’s illuminating Post-Dramatic Theatre made it into
the gallery of sources.
Nonetheless, Puchner’s volumes are testimony to an erudite mind and
a striking capacity to synthesize and highlight revealing connections
among literary theory, philosophy, and dramatic criticism. The collection
offers a great index apparatus; Puchner’s notes, while sparse, provide
accurate bibliographic references and include suggestions about additional
critical sources. The four volumes, published as part of Routledge’s Critical
Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies series, are simply not to be
missed by scholars of theatre and performance theory.

EMILY ROXWORTHY. The Spectacle of Japanese American Trauma: Racial

Performativity and World War II. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008.
Pp. 238, illustrated. $35.00 (Hb).

Reviewed by John D. Swain, California State University, Northridge

In her book The Spectacle of Japanese American Trauma: Racial
Performativity and World War II, Emily Roxworthy re-examines construc-
tions of Japanese American identity and exposes how it is essentialized
through the performance of spectacle. Roxworthy’s analysis of the World
War II Japanese internments as a form of performed spectacle, therefore,
provides an important historical and sociological corrective to the accepted
domestic U.S. narrative of Japanese Americans as the “model minority.”
Roxworthy’s claim is that trauma reduces the victim to passivity, which
can then be read and “spectacularized” by the perpetrator as fatalistic
acceptance. She argues that the stoicism displayed by Japanese
Americans forced unjustly into concentration camps was not a result of
ingrained culture but of trauma inflicted by the United States (115). To
make her case, Roxworthy goes back to nineteenth-century history to
establish the groundwork of the mid-twentieth-century treatment of
Japanese in the United States.
Roxworthy writes about how “in the case of the internment, theories of
trauma and theories of spectacle intersect and converge” (4; emphasis in
original). In her introduction, she lays out how the book will progress,

Modern Drama, 53:1 (Spring 2010) 131

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