Paula Vogel And The Modern American Female Playwrights

Reading and analyzing Paula Vogel’s plays, the readers can attest that she achieves success in drama or theater because she is passionate about theater. Vogel is a modern American playwright who won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for drama. Her success and insight in playwriting or in adapting do not come all of a sudden; she is influenced by many writers. Vogel is influenced by many American dramatists, including Eugene O’ Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee, and by other non-American writers, including August Strindberg, Anton Chekhove, and Bertolt Brecht. Certainly, there were female playwrights who wrote preeminent plays and they influence Vogel as well. Nevertheless, dramas by female writers, as a matter of fact, remain marginalized. This paper focuses on the influence of some female playwrights on Vogel.

Untangling Darwinian Confusion around Lust, Love, and Attachment in the Scandinavian Modern Breakthrough

The myth of true, lifelong love promoted low divorce rates among farmers who depended on each other for survival. In the urban ecology after industrialization, it became increas­ingly clear that long-term monogamy goes against human nature. In the Scandinavian Modern Breakthrough, a late-1800s literary movement, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and others clashed in a battle over modern mating morality. Each interpreted Darwin to fit their own agenda, suggesting naturalistic understandings of “free love” and “true mar­riage,” some of which were laughable while others landed authors in prison. Evolutionary theory from our present era suggests that human mate choice is guided by three brain systems: erotic lust, romantic love, and feelings of deep attachment; our species thus evolved for serial pair-bonding with extra-pair copulation. Using these and other evolutionary insights, this article evaluates narratives from the Modern Breakthrough, which laid the foundation for today’s gender-equal and sexually liberal Nordic societies.

The survival of the “weakest” among the fittest: A critical reading of Miss Julie (1889) in relation to social Darwinism

The play Miss Julie is about the portrayal of the new image of feminist woman in the Victorian period. The playwright August Strindberg is mainly considered to be a misogynist as evidenced in his preface to Miss Julie, in which he defines miss Julie as man-hating and half woman with a “degenerate brain”. This representation of Miss Julie by a male author is likely to promote the idea that Strindberg presents the new ‘feminist’ woman as inferior and weak with a downfall in the end. However, the paper will dwell into the play by employing reader-response criticism to interpret the play to discover its multiple meanings rather than following the mainstream readings that rely on characteristics of the Victorian period. By employing a critical reading method, the paper will attempt to problematize social Darwinism in relation to gender roles as represented in the play, and by doing so it will challenge if not transform the social constructions of “weak women” that ideologically pertains today.

« La lutte des sexes », ou les stéréotypes sur les femmes dans Une vie secrète de Lenormand, La Valse des toréadors d’Anouilh et Capitaine Bada de Vauthier

August Strindberg is considered the herald of modern drama. His protean work, which goes from naturalism to mystical aesthetics, anticipating surrealism and the theater of the absurd, even today defies, as it did in his epoch, by its brutal or cruel aspects. Without any doubt, the origin of a certain mistrust towards the author of Inferno would be his declared misogyny. It could be criticized on this subject for disclosing prejudices against women, which in the form of stereotypes, survive to this day. Nevertheless, many French playwrights are inspired by the infernal conflict between man and woman that the Swede describes with a stripping frenzy. Indeed, by analyzing the plays of the French theater of the first half of the 20th century, we notice that some authors take up the motive of the “struggle of the sexes” that will be reworked or “modernized” in their own way. It is interesting in this regard to study the vehicular discourse of clichés on women, found in the works of writers such as Henri-René Lenormand (A Secret Life), Jean Anouilh (Waltz of the Toreadors) and Jean Vauthier (Captain Bada). While none of these playwrights has ever openly declared their hostility to the so-called weaker sex, their texts provide a valuable reservoir of common ground on male-female relationships, which in most cases have not lost their actuality.

Dublin na (tekstualnej) scenie. O dramatyzacji przestrzeni w Ulissesie Jamesa Joyce’a

The author investigates how James Joyce stylizes the space in his novel Ulysses for drama. For this purpose he carries out a comparative analysis of some episodes in this book. This analysis leads to the conclusion that Joyce transposes some dramatic genres and specifically dramatic writing techniques, especially associated with August Strindberg. Kozłowski emphasizes the dramatic character of some motifs that create spatial conditions in Joyce’s novel. Furthermore, he compares these motifs with the literary works of the greatest modern dramatists.

A filosofia em cena: crítica e afirmação da teatralidade em Nietzsche

Resumo O propósito deste artigo é mostrar a contribuição de Nietzsche à revolução nas práticas da encenação que ocorreram no Século XX, bem como sua relevância como crítico apaixonado pelo potencial de uma forma de arte que ele sentia que era interpretada em sua época de forma diminuída. A partir de seu estudo do teatro grego na obraO nascimento da tragédia, sublinha a importância da encenação na tragédia antiga, a qual estava para além do texto escrito por seu autor. Oferece com isso uma análise da ideia de teatro como arte, a qual é consubstancial realizar-se em três dimensões: a do ator, a do poeta ou escritor do texto e a do espectador. Nietzsche defende a especificidade desses três papéis para toda realização teatral e o sentido filosófico que tem o teatro como autêntica forma artística. Conclui-se o artigo mostrando a recepção do pensamento teatral de Nietzsche em autores como August Strindberg, George Bernard Shaw e Eugene O'Neill, que buscarão novas formas e novos significados para sua arte.

Sigurd Wettenhovi-Aspa, August Strindberg and a dispute concerning the common origins of the languages of mankind 1911–1912

This article is about the notions of history and language of a Finnish artist and writer Sigurd Wettenhovi-Aspa (née Sigurd Asp, 1870–1946), and the Swedish writer August Strindberg (1849–1912), and their interaction. Wettenhovi-Aspa and Strindberg knew each other from Paris, where both lived in the 1890s. In the 1910s they both published books and articles on their respective linguistic views. According to both of them, the languages of mankind had a common origin. Strindberg had a more traditional view, as according to him Hebrew was the original language of the world. For Wettenhovi-Aspa, the original language was Finnish. These ideas may seem eccentric, but I argue that they both reflect the intellectual currents of their own time and are connected with a long tradition as well.