The Drama of the Double - (What Is Theatre?) by Katherine H Burkman (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

In this book, the author interrogates how narcissistic disturbances lead to the fragmentation and duplication that occur in the minds of mythic heroes and the fictional protagonists of modern drama, literature, and film. This examination focuses mostly on modern drama and exploring how Greek myths inform the literature.

From the Back Cover

This book explores the way in which doubling takes place in several novels, films, and dramas, primarily focusing on modern drama and exploring how five Greek myths - Oedipus, Narcissus, Dionysus, Orestes, and Demeter - inform the literature. Taking a psychological/mythical approach, this book explores the inner divisions that lead to boundary loss and the search for the self that may lead to boundaries found. The contention of the book is that the oedipal search for self has been replaced in modern literature by individuals caught up in a narcissistic culture. Katherine H. Burkman explores plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Henrik Ibsen, Eugene O'Neill, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, David Mamet, Sam Shepard, Marsha Norman, and Will Eno.

Review Quotes

"Katherine H. Burkman doubles down on doubling, looking again at the resonances between modern drama and patterns of ancient myth. Her work not only revisits versions of mythical doubles as they reappear in plays by Beckett, Pinter, O'Neill, Shepard, Norman, and Ibsen, but also echoes the mythic in the original verse that frames the study's analytic excursions. The Drama of the Double clarifies and complicates modern western drama's links to the past, while enacting contemporary insights about drama's fundamental repertoire." - Judith Roof, William Shakespeare Chair in English, Rice University, USA

"The Drama of the Double may not be long, but it is a surprisingly big book in that it deals with a wide range of literary texts, ancient and modern, written by a vast number of major (and some minor) authors in a startling array of forms and genres (drama, film, prose fiction, and more), usually in a manner that is detailed, focused and anything but cursory or glancing. At any rate, I suspect I am not alone in rejoicing when I see any literary critic or scholar focus on what the text has to say on its own - on, that is, the textual representations of character, action, thought, feeling, and ethical quality that are the necessary conditions of every text's intelligibility and worth, as is the case with Burkman's book." - James Battersby, Professor Emeritus, The Ohio State University, USA

About the Author

Katherine H. Burkman is Professor Emerita in the Department of English at The Ohio State University, USA. She has published eleven books and numerous articles on modern drama, and has also published various plays, poems, and short stories. She founded and served as Artistic Director of Women at Play for twelve years, is presently a member of Wild Women Writing, and continues to act and direct.