scholarly journals The Maniac as the Apocryphal Intervento: How Form Determines Substance in Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist

2022 ◽  
pp. 67-75
Author(s):  
AISHWARYA ALLA
Keyword(s):  
Boiling Point ◽  
The Political ◽  
Commedia Dell'arte ◽  
Accidental Death ◽  
Cultural Hegemony ◽  
Rhetorical Device ◽  
Dario Fo ◽  
Stylistic Elements

The Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1970) is one of famed Italian play-wright Dario Fo, written as a response the neo-fascist tension that reached a boiling point in during the ‘Hot Autumn.’ A period of immense turmoil in late 20th -cemtury Italy. The play draws from the conventions of the Brechtian form and commedia dell’arte, aptly transforming them into mechanisms that can help both the play and spectators subvert the high cultures of Gramscian cultural hegemony, absorbed into ADA’s comic microcosm. This essay explores how political and theatrical realms are immortalised and then pit against each other through the course of the play, with the character of the Maniac acting as a rhetorical device acting as the connection between the two. In essence, this paper believes that Style is considered over substance in many of the styles of theatre Accidental Death operates within; the stylistic elements that quantitatively constitute the Brechtian form, commedia dell’arte, and farce allow them to subvert the ‘high cultures’ that are held culpable in Gramscian cultural hegemony, all of which ADA absorbs into its comic microcosm. This leads to a sustained paradox between the political and theatrical dimensions of the play, where the theatrical lends credence to the political though the use of fictional formal elements.

Plays from a Marxist Perspective: Interpretations and Misinterpretations of Dario Fo

2017 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 188-193
Author(s):  
R. G. Davis
Keyword(s):  
San Francisco ◽  
Bertolt Brecht ◽  
The Political ◽  
Accidental Death ◽  
Adverse Conditions ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
Dario Fo ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Epic Theatre ◽  
The 1960S

R. G. Davis directed the first commercial productions of Dario Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist and We Won't Pay We Won't Pay!, both in Canada and the USA. In the context of the original close relevance of the plays to the political situation in Italy, he looks at how in the USA especially their force has been diluted if not extinguished by the imperative to conform to the inherent anti-communsm of American culture. R. G.Davis founded and directed the San Francisco Mime Troupe in the 1960s, and the Epic West Center for the Study of Bertolt Brecht and Epic Theatre at Berkeley in 1975. Later he returned to academia to study science and ecology, and visited Cuba to examine the culture of organic farming. He has contributed previously to New Theatre Quarterly and its predecessor, specifically on Fo in two articles for the original Theatre Quarterly: ‘Seven Anarchists I Have Known: American Approaches to Dario Fo’, in TQ 8 (1986), and ‘Dario Fo Off-Broadway: the Making of Left Culture under Adverse Conditions’, in TQ 40 (1981).

LANGUAGE, CULTURE, AND POWER IN GUILLEM DE TORROELLA’S LA FAULA

2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
JILL ROSS
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
French Language ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Appropriation ◽  
Cultural Hegemony ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
The Third ◽  
Cultural Power

This article examines the role of French language and culture in the fourteenth-century Arthurian text, La Faula, by the Mallorcan, Guillem de Torroella. Reading the appropriation of French language and literary models through the lens of earlier thirteenth-century Occitan resistance to French political and cultural hegemony, La Faula’s use of French dialogue becomes significant in light of the political tensions in the third quarter of the fourteenth century that saw the conquest of the Kingdom of Mallorca by that of Catalonia-Aragon and the subsequent imposition of Catalano-Aragonese political and cultural power. La Faula’s clear intertextual debt to French literary models and its simultaneous ambivalence about the authority and reliability of those models makes French language into a space for the exploration of the dynamics of cultural appropriation and political accommodation that were constitutive of late fourteenth-century Mallorca.

Anti-Colonialism

2018 ◽  
pp. 416-452
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Lee
Keyword(s):  
Political History ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Political ◽  
Empirical Content ◽  
Rhetorical Device ◽  
The Past ◽  
Significant Phenomenon ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Phenomenon

Anti-colonialism as a historical phenomenon defies easy categorization. Despite its use as an expression across a range of academic disciplines, it resists simple definitions of practical form, political scope, and empirical content due to the ubiquity of anti-colonial thought and activism across time and geography. It is arguably one of the oldest forms of political conduct in the basic sense of opposing foreign domination. Yet, in most cases, it has primarily served as a generic rhetorical device to describe that which is against colonialism. This chapter offers a reassessment of anti-colonialism. Its reservations about monolithic approaches to colonialism and anti-colonialism reflect a common appraisal formulated by many scholars over the past several decades. Anti-colonialism must be recognized and understood as a significant phenomenon in defining the political history of the modern world. However, it must also be considered in many cases as indiscrete from the colonialism it confronted.

Leon Battista Alberti’s Porcaria coniuratio

2020 ◽  
pp. 72-112
Author(s):  
Marta Celati
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political View ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Political Perspective ◽  
Stylistic Elements ◽  
Classical Models ◽  
Political Background ◽  
Shed Light

The second chapter focuses on Leon Battista Alberti’s Porcaria coniuratio, the historical epistle on Stefano Porcari’s conspiracy against pope Nicholas V written immediately after the thwarted plot in 1453. The political perspective underlying Alberti’s text does not reflect a merely propagandistic view, but conversely is the expression of a complex and ambiguous political reading of the events. The analysis aims to shed light on Alberti’s unsettled political view, by examining not only the ideological standpoint that emerges in the epistle, but also the rhetorical and stylistic elements that permeate this work. In particular, specific attention is paid to both the choice of the epistolary genre, which is employed to produce a historiographical work and is combined with other literary forms, and the studied use of various classical models (Sallust, satirical authors, Cicero, etc.). The examination of this text, which is read in connection with other works by Alberti, reveals the humanist’s view on historiography, which occupies a pivotal position in the lively fifteenth-century debate on historical writing. Moreover, the analysis shows how the complex rhetorical and stylistic framework of the Porcaria coniuratio implicitly conveys Alberti’s uneasy political thought, which proves to be completely distant from any sympathy with the plotter. Although the epistle is informed by a questioning approach, it reveals the humanist’s disapproval of any attempt at overthrowing established governments. It also betrays Alberti’s problematizing attitude towards political power and his unresolved view on the intricate Roman political background.

AUTOMATIC WRITING AND GRAMMELOT IN CLAUDE VIVIER'S LANGUE INVENTÉE

Tempo ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 68 (270) ◽  
pp. 15-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryan Christian
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Commedia Dell'arte ◽  
French Canadian ◽  
General Introduction ◽  
Two Stage ◽  
Dario Fo ◽  
Automatic Writing ◽  
Final Work ◽  
Nonsense Syllables

AbstractFrench-Canadian composer Claude Vivier (1948–1983) is one of the few composers, perhaps the only one, to use an invented language throughout his entire compositional career. Vivier's use of what he called his langue inventée (‘invented language’) spanned the first vocal work in his catalogue – Ojikawa (1968) – to his final work, Glaubst du an die Unsterblichkeit der Seele (1983), completed only shortly before his murder in March 1983. Despite the pervasiveness of this technique – in fact, it is the only technique that remains a constant across all of Vivier's stylistic periods – relatively little attention has been given to the langue inventée in scholarship. This article presents a description of Vivier's langue inventée in three parts, beginning with a general introduction. The second part presents the langue inventée as a product of automatic writing and engages directly with Vivier's sketches to propose a method that Vivier likely used to write much of his langue inventée text. The final section of the article presents Vivier's langue inventée as a form of grammelot – a term revived by playwright, actor and director Dario Fo (1926–), which is associated with the dialect theatre of the Commedia dell'arte tradition. This article aims to demonstrate that Vivier's langue inventée is not a just a string of unintelligible nonsense syllables, but rather a very purposeful grammelot, freely composed in a two-stage approach to automatic writing, that reaches beyond linguistic semantics.

The Red Theatre under the Bed

1987 ◽  
Vol 3 (11) ◽  
pp. 195-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard Brenton
Keyword(s):  
New South ◽  
New South Wales ◽  
The Political ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
South Wales ◽  
Dario Fo ◽  
Political Impact ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
The University

Howard Brenton began his theatrical career in the late 'sixties as one of the ‘Portable playwrights’, but quickly felt the need to utilize the resources available on larger stages-without compromising the political impact of his plays. Now established as one of the leading playwrights of his generation, Brenton works regularly with the National Theatre, and in the interview which follows the discussion ranges from his feelings about the ‘scandal’ worked up by the production there of The Romans in Britain to how his feelings about Brecht were affected by preparing their version of The Life of Galileo, and also covers his recent collaboration with David Hare, creating a monstrous press baron, in Pravda. Touching on other recent plays such as The Genius and Bloody Poetry, the discussion thus complements an earlier Theatre Quarterly interview with Howard Brenton, included in TQ17 (1975) and reprinted in New Theatre Voices of the Seventies, edited by Simon Trussler (Methuen, 1981). The interviewer, Tony Mitchell, currently teaches in the School of Theatre Studies at the University of New South Wales, and is the author of Dario Fo: People's Court Jester (Methuen. 1984). His Methuen ‘Writer-File’ on Howard Brenton is due for publication in 1988.

scholarly journals A insanidade crônica: ironia e indeterminação em “O alienista”, de Machado de Assis / The Chronic Insanity: Irony and Indeterminacy in “The Alienist”, by Machado de Assis

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 199
Author(s):  
Antônio Joaquim Pereira Neto ◽  
Marcello Moreira
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
The Political ◽  
Machado De Assis ◽  
Rhetorical Device ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The 19Th Century

Resumo: Este artigo analisa a ironia no conto “O alienista”, de Machado de Assis, entendendo-a como figura retórica que, ao produzir o efeito de incongruência na representação pressuposta pela relação entre as palavras e as coisas formalizadas nos enunciados, cujas imagens são fantásticas, ridiculariza as opiniões que constituem os valores defendidos pelos personagens dessa narrativa, inclusive as do sujeito que as enuncia. Contra a ideia segundo a qual existiria uma verdade da ironia, uma razão como causa dos seus efeitos, evidencia-se que a ironia machadiana é artifício de uma narrativa que satiriza os valores políticos, religiosos, científicos e morais do mundo oitocentista brasileiro marcado pela imitação dos regimes de verdade do ocidente.Palavras-chave: ironia; Machado de Assis; loucura; razão; indeterminação.Abstract: This article analyzes the irony in “O alienista” (The alienist), by Machado de Assis, understanding it as a rhetorical device that, by producing the effect of incongruence in the representation presupposed by the relation between words and things formalized in statements, whose images are fantastic, ridicules the opinions that constitute the values defended by the characters of this narrative, including those of the subject that expresses them. Going against the idea that there would be a truth of irony, a reason as a cause of its effects, Machado’s irony proves to be the skill of a narrative that satirizes the political, religious, scientific and moral values of the 19th century Brazilian world marked by the imitation of Western truth regimes.Keywords: irony; Machado de Assis; madness; reason; indeterminacy.

Pranks, Tropes and Raspberries: The Dialogic Demeanour of Satire’s Creative Horizon

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-60
Author(s):  
John Baldacchino
Keyword(s):  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Nobel Laureate ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
The Political ◽  
The People ◽  
Dario Fo ◽  
The World ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
The Ideal

Abstract This essay starts off with a modern-day court jester (Nobel laureate Dario Fo) praising a Pope (Albino Luciani, who became John Paul I). Fo presents us with an historic moment: Luciani scandalises his Church by calling God “Mother.” With utmost seriousness, Fo appreciates the Pope’s kindness and warmth by which the artist perceives a way of scandalising the world out of complacency. In their idealised and situated presentations of the world, the sacred and the profane return the necessary to the contingent (and vice-versa) as moments of equal attention and distraction. Likewise, irony and satire mark our situated sense of the ideal by an inability to unlearn the certainties by which we are urged to construct our world. This is done by first presenting a situated pedagogical context that refuses to provide solutions presumed on measurement, certainty or finality. Secondly this begins to lay claim to the political, aesthetic and moral values that are gained through art’s ironic disposition. Thirdly, through our contingent states of being we begin to understand how education is culturally conditioned and why we need to shift it to another gear – that of unlearning through a weak pedagogy. An atheist, Fo suggests that thanks to Pope Luciani, we now could endear to the Holy Spirit as a spirito ridens, a spirit that laughs. Here one finds a kenotic sense that gives us a glimpse in how an ironic disposition owes its strength and effectiveness to a weak pedagogy. By dint of such weakness, the jester’s pedagogical disposition becomes a form of resistance, exiting the Court in order to be with the people and consequently transformed by the people.

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