Storytelling in Apocalyptic Times: Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 282-294
Author(s):  
Laura Snyder
Keyword(s):  
Source Material ◽  
Theater Arts ◽  
Thematic Content ◽  
The Simpsons ◽  
Cape Fear ◽  
Low Culture

AbstractThis article analyzes Anne Washburn’s wildly popular, and often controversial, Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play (2012) by focusing on the principal retellings that shape Mr. Burns and delineating how Washburn’s adaptations produce the thematic content of the play. Washburn deftly interweaves a variety of high and low culture source material within the plot. Pandemic and apocalyptic tropes provide the ecofictional narrative base to adaptations of Stephen King’s The Stand (1978), Euripides’s Orestes, Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear (1991), and a variety of episodes of The Simpsons (1989–). Through these retellings, Mr. Burns metatheatrically chronicles how stories shape listeners and their cultures. When the stories told simply pander to the materialism, greed, and commodification that permeate contemporary global capitalist culture, then society proliferates those solipsistic values. Washburn ultimately argues that, in what may seem like apocalyptic times, storytelling as embodied in the theater arts must instead advocate humanitarian collectivist values.

Unpopular Culture

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Natural Disasters ◽  
Ernest Hemingway ◽  
David Foster Wallace ◽  
The Simpsons ◽  
Low Culture

This volume introduces a new concept that boldly breaks through the traditional dichotomy of high and low culture while offering a fresh approach to both: unpopular culture. From the works of David Foster Wallace and Ernest Hemingway to fanfiction and The Simpsons, from natural disasters to 9/11 and beyond, the essays find the unpopular across media and genres, analysing the politics and aesthetics of a side to culture that has been overlooked by previous theories and methods in cultural studies.

‘For We Are American’: Postmodern Pastiche and National Identity in Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-145
Author(s):  
Camille Barrera
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Source Material ◽  
National Pride ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Simpsons ◽  
Shared Culture ◽  
Inoperative Community

AbstractThe final act of Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play features a Greek tragedy-like distillation of the “Cape Feare” episode of The Simpsons, performed many decades after an unspecified catastrophe has left the former United States in a state of post-apocalyptic ruin. After the first two acts’ depiction of an earlier generation’s struggles to both survive and connect with each other through the preservation of some elements of their previous shared culture, the third act’s culmination in a display of treadmill-powered electric lights accompanied by an inspirational anthem has often been interpreted as a celebration of the timelessness and tenacity of the human storytelling impulse. But while earlier versions of the play structured this final moment within a pastiche expression of American patriotism (sung to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “For He Is an Englishman”), subsequent versions have expunged this final reference to national pride, as well as any reference to the satirically nationalistic source material from which it stemmed, opting instead to trace the development of a more ‘empty’ G&S quotation into its post-apocalyptic future. This paper will examine the implications of this change in regards to the play's pastiche portrayal of what Jean-Luc Nancy calls the “myth of myth” and the role of its interruption in imagining an “inoperative community” beyond or to the side of nation-based constructions of identity.

Charles Williams’s Arthuriad: Mythic Vision and the Possibilities of Belief

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-46
Author(s):  
J. G. Bradbury
Keyword(s):  
Religious Faith ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Christian Belief ◽  
Devotional Poetry ◽  
Religious Worldview ◽  
Intellectual Milieu ◽  
Charles Williams ◽  
Narrative Mode ◽  
Intellectual Environment

This essay explores Charles Williams’s use of the Arthurian myth to sustain a religious worldview in the aftermath of sustained attacks on the relevance and veracity of Christian belief in the early twentieth century. The premise to be explored is that key developments in science and philosophy made during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries resulted in a cultural and intellectual milieu in which assertions of religious faith became increasingly difficult. In literary terms this became evident in, amongst other things, the significant reduction in the production of devotional poetry. By the late 1930s the intellectual environment was such that Charles Williams, a man of profound religious belief who might otherwise have been expected to produce devotional work, turned to a much older mode, that of myth, that had taken on new relevance in the modern world. Williams’s use of this mode allowed him the possibility of expressing a singularly Christian vision to a world in which such vision was in danger of becoming anathema. This essay examines the way in which Williams’s lexis, verse structure, and narrative mode builds on his Arthurian source material to allow for an appreciation of religiously-informed ideas in the modern world.

A Structured Method for the Recognition of Complex Historical Tables

1997 ◽  
Vol 9 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 58-77
Author(s):  
Vitaly Kliatskine ◽  
Eugene Shchepin ◽  
Gunnar Thorvaldsen ◽  
Konstantin Zingerman ◽  
Valery Lazarev
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Character Recognition ◽  
Optical Character Recognition ◽  
Complex Structure ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Tax Assessment ◽  
Optical Character ◽  
Algorithmic Model ◽  
Machine Readable

In principle, printed source material should be made machine-readable with systems for Optical Character Recognition, rather than being typed once more. Offthe-shelf commercial OCR programs tend, however, to be inadequate for lists with a complex layout. The tax assessment lists that assess most nineteenth century farms in Norway, constitute one example among a series of valuable sources which can only be interpreted successfully with specially designed OCR software. This paper considers the problems involved in the recognition of material with a complex table structure, outlining a new algorithmic model based on ‘linked hierarchies’. Within the scope of this model, a variety of tables and layouts can be described and recognized. The ‘linked hierarchies’ model has been implemented in the ‘CRIPT’ OCR software system, which successfully reads tables with a complex structure from several different historical sources.

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