Rereading Shepard: Contemporary Critical Essays on the Plays of Sam Shepard

by Leonard Wilcox (Editor)

Overview

Rereading Shepard draws together 13 original theoretical perspectives on one of America's most important contemporary playwrights. Representing a range of critical appraoches - including semiotics, deconstruction, and feminism - the essays address recent debates emerging in Shepard criticism. These include the status of Shepard's texts within the modernist tradition on the one hand and a developing post-modernism on the other, and the feminist debate over Shepard's drama - does it reinforce a masculinist world or does it provide some oppositional stance toward patriarchal 'master narratives'?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781349225118
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	01/01/1993
Edition description:	1st ed. 1993
Pages:	229
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements - Notes on the Contributors - Introduction - Artifacts: The Early Plays Reconsidered; G.Weales - Potential Performance Texts for The Rock Garden and 4-H Club; D.Carroll - The Desert and the City: Operation Sidewinder and Shepard's Postmodern Allegory; L.Wilcox - Memory and Mind: Sam Shepard's Geography of a Horse Dreamer; G.McCarthy - Shepard's Challenge to the Modernist Myths of Origin and Originality: Angel City and True West; S.Rabillard - True Stories: Reading the Autobiographic in Cowboy Mouth, 'True Dylan' and Buried Child; A.Wilson - Shepard's Family Trilogy and the Conventions of Modern Realism; C.R.Lyons - A Kind of Cavorting: Superpresence and Shepard's Family Dramas; D.J.DeRose - Speaking without Words: The Myth of Masculine Autonomy in Sam Shepard's Fool for Love; A.C.Hall - When a Woman looks: The 'Other' Audience of Shepard's Plays; S.Bennett - Lighting out for the Territory within: Field Notes on Shepard's Expressionist Vision; S.Grace - 'I Smash the Tools of my Captivity': The Feminine in Sam Shepard's A Lie of the Mind; J.A.Crum - A Motel of the Mind: Fool for Love and A Lie of the Mind; F.H.Londr - Index

Editorial Reviews

Semiotics, deconstruction, feminism, and other critical approaches are applied to a significant spectrum of American playwright Shepard's work. The 13 original essays address the current debates on whether his plays are modern or postmodern, and whether they only reinforce a masculine world or allow some oppositional stance. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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