This article explores the central role of religion in Gertrude Stein’s 1938 libretto, Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights. Relative to other modern Faust plays, Stein emphasizes the religious character of pre-modern life, demonstrating how it is entangled with gendered ways of existing and moving in space. I argue that Stein extends modern investigations of Faustus’s pursuit of knowledge by harnessing the pragmatic philosophy of William James, who makes a crucial distinction between knowledge of acquaintance and “knowledge-about.” Examining the Faust narrative through these epistemological categories, Stein finds that Faust’s failures arise from an excessively narrow understanding of the knowledge that he seeks. Stein’s Doctor Faustus, then, recuperates a broader range of embodied and sensory understandings for modernity. The article thus suggests that representations of religion played a larger role in dramatic modernism than has been previously acknowledged or understood.
Playing God is an engaging and resonant work of scholarship, one that makes a significant contribution to theories of adaptation and enriches critical conversations on theatre and religion by extending them to the profane space of the commercial theatre.
In Beckett's Ireland, the practice of censorship was bound up with the workings of literary genre. The fact that printed matter was subject to censorship, while theatre was not, meant that the censor played a role in maintaining the distinction between dramatic and nondramatic writing. Many Irish authors responded to these conditions by remediating censored narratives as theatre. Beckett adopted an alternative strategy, rejecting the legal premises of Irish censorship and crafting his literary style around a critique of the censor's reading practices. Beckett's responses to the Irish censor track his turn from the novel to the drama. Across genres, Beckett's writing in English was shaped by the climate of post-publication censorship in Ireland, the effects of which are legible even in works that were never banned. Beckett's rejoinder to the censor was articulated using terms set out by the Irish Free State's Committee on Evil Literature, which held that censors could prohibit a text based on one ‘indecent’ passage, rather than evaluating that excerpt in the context of the work as a whole. For Beckett, the literary trope of synecdoche—that is, the rhetorical substitution of a part for the whole—became associated with the censor's mode of reading. Beckett harnesses the trope of synecdoche to impugn Irish censorship practices, a pattern evident from the direct address to the censor in Murphy to the dramaturgical evocation of self-censorship in Not I. The use of synecdoche illuminates Beckett's reckoning with his cultural inheritance as an Irish writer and indexes his shift towards a cosmopolitan literary identity.
The year 2018 was an especially fruitful and wide-ranging one for theater and performance studies. Several major monographs deepened discussion in established subject areas within the field, while new methodological approaches emerged, opening fresh directions in scholarship. This review focuses on four major areas of conversation that shaped the field in 2018: 1. Expanding Performance Aesthetics; 2. Economic and Material Contexts of Performance; 3. Enacting Public Justice; and 4. Performance on the Move.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.