«Lemma»: Jay Wright’s Idiorrhythmic American Theater

This essay presents Jay Wright’s play Lemma as a historiographical challenge and also as a piece of idiorrhythmic American theater. Consonant with his life’s work of poetry, dramatic literature, and philosophical writing, Lemma showcases Wright’s expansive intellectual framework with which he constructs vivid, dynamic, and complex visions of American life. The “America” conjured here is steeped in many traditions, traditions typically kept distinct by academic discourse, such as West African cosmology, Enlightenment philosophy, jazz music theory, Ancient Greek theater, neo-Baroque modifications of Christian theology, pre-Columbian indigenous ways of knowing, etymological connections between Spanish and Gaelic, the materiality of John Donne’s poetry, and the lives of enslaved Africans in the New World. What is the purpose of Wright’s theatrical conjuration? How do we approach a text with such a diverse body of intellectual and literary sources? The author answers these questions and ends with a call to treat Lemma as a much needed point of view that opens lines of sight into Black and American theater far outside the well-worn territory of the Black Arts Movement.

Who is afraid of the Gods? Rethinking escapism in Nigerian dramatic literature

Escapism can mean different things to diverse sets of people in various fields of study. To some people, it can mean escape to reality, while some can denote it as an escape to entertainment or distraction from boredom. Escapism in this paper takes a different turn and adopts the term to identify how different decisions can be influenced in any socio-cultural setting. Using South Western Nigeria as a case study, this paper questions the possible interpretations of escapism and the extent to which leaders, especially, identify with them. This paper uses Ahmed Yerima's Sacred Mutters and Iyase to explore the issue of misinterpretation and human machination to escape punishment from the gods. "Sacred Mutters" and "Iyase" highlight leaders' plight before their ascension into power, and the issue of human carelessness, and how he or she is misguided by his or her own intellectual and spiritual interests. The paper argues that modernization and Westernisation had crippled most of the significant and core aspects of African norms, values, and traditions. This degradation has affected the criminal justice system of the people. Against this background, the paper adopts Olawole Famule's connective cultural theory to explore escapism, misinterpretation, and machination in Nigerian discourse. The paper concludes that escapism is the main cause of corruption in the socio-political landscape of Nigeria and calls for a return to traditional African system.

Intercultural adapturgy : twenty-first century women adapting Spanish golden age plays

Transferring work from one culture to another through translation or adaptation is a delicate process which requires careful consideration of both the positionality of the adapter and the intertextual reaction of the adapted work's target audience. In addition to traditional adaptation theories like intertextuality, the theatrical field of dramaturgy offers helpful insight into the adaptation process, especially as it relates to plays. This dissertation examines the ways that the combination of adaptation studies and dramaturgy, which Jane Barnette calls adapturgy, can inform intercultural adaptaitons of dramatic literature to create performable and effective theatre experiences for twenty-first century audiences. I achieve this goal by first examining two adapted plays: A Little Betrayal Among Friends by Caridad Svich, adapted from La traicion en la amistad by Maria de Zayas y Sotomayor, and Fever/Dream by Sheila Callaghan, adapted from La vida es sueno by Pedro Calderon de la Barca. I look at how dramaturgical and adapation theories can be applied to these plays via script analysis and contextual questioning. Then, using the skills gleaned from those two examples, I create my own translation and adaptation of Los empenos de una casa by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, and I reflect on my adapturgical process of doing so. In creating both a translation, titled How to Build a Noble House, and an adaptation, titled With the Temptation, a Way of Escape, I both preserve the unique traits of the Spanish Golden Age for performance in the twenty-first century and amplify Sor Juana's comedic and social intentions for a contemporary society. I believe that both of these considerations, alongside a reflection on the adapter's positionality and the intentions of the producing organization and production team for a live production, are invaluable to both the field of adaptaiton studies and of dramaturgy.

Alterliteraturas (Los 100 ojos de la Educacion literaria en la era poscovid)

A panoptic (Foucault) and not synoptic vision of literature, and of literary education in particular, is needed. This is in order to “tear down” the categories or rigid borders that surround the “center” of the canon and so called marginal literature, which is full of prejudices, and from a time in the history of education anchored in stereotypes of national literature or in eurocentrism that decolonial thought is correctly taking apart. It is necessary to visualize diversity by integrating all the richness of expression from the artistic word, from ancestral orality, through classical written culture, and up to ciberculture, which has overcome the classical margins from the oral or written realm, to enter the terrain of multimodality. Of all the concurrent codes with the word that now, beyond theater or cinema, are also expressed literarily through new alphabets. In the same way that dramatic literature is discussed, now the field must be opened to television, anime and many other audiovisual expressions from the digital world. The change is that not only the margins of reading formats have been overcome (Chartier) but also the themes and genres and what was a “marginal” or “marginalized” literature (like LIJ) today moves to the center of the literary-educational universe. This is what is symbolized with the figure of the monster Argos Panoptes and the need of the 100 eyes of literary education, and didactic instruments, which has been symbolized in three parts: sharing the imaginary, creating “compasses” for reading itineraries, and promoting alternative methodologies.

DUGME: POETIKA SIMBOLIČKE MINIJATURE U DNEVNIKU O ČARNOJEVIĆU MILOŠA CRNjANSKOG I HAMLETU VILIJAMA ŠEKSPIRA

The paper analyzes the narrative and symbolic values of the button in Miloš Crnjanski’s novel The Journal of Čarnojević. In the perturbation that occurs when the hero, during the meeting with his beloved, angrily but inadvertently tears the buttons off her dress, traces of the gap that will determine their marital relationship can be recognized. The button that falls and exposes the girl is a sign of overstepping and destabilization of the ontological union of two beings. This destabilization – the rudeness of the hero, the agitation, the withdrawal and fall of the woman – is determined by the self-challenging forces of the subject itself. The crisis as a state of the modern subject in Crnjanski’s novel is viewed against the relationship between Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Ophelia. The button in Shakespeare’s dramatic literature, a sign of disruption of order and of the negation of action, is a sign of theatricality and dissembling; the unbuttoned Hamlet seduces Ophelia, and others through her, painting a coldness falling quite short of the lyricism of Crnjanski. In fact, it seems that only against this tense lyricism can Hamlet be made ready to be read as a lyrical misinterpretation of arid theatrical coldness. The lyrical force of modernity in Crnjanski’s novel transforms the torn off buttons into marks of nightmarish existences, upheavals of old ideas and concepts, the dismantling of the categories of subject, identity, history, metaphysics, language. A symbolic miniature, a button is a scene on which an entire poetics presents itself.

Cultural Displacement and Palliative Measures: An Exploration of Dramatic Literature

ABSTRACT One of the realities and experiences of contemporary African people is the continual cultural conflict and eventual displacement of their culture in the process of struggling to find a balance in getting the best of modern life or experience without losing the indigenous legacies. This study aims at examining symbolic representation of cultural conflict as well as exploring the possibility of coexistence of the culture of both the coloniser and the colonised using Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman. The study concludes that in order to minimise conflicts the respect for other people’s culture is imperative. However, African people must put their culture first above any other conflicting culture, re-embrace the best Yoruba cultural heritage, and imbibe the best of Western culture to make the society a better place.

Text, Image, and the Performance of Satire

This chapter considers the relationship between text and image in De Hooghe’s satires: how it functions and what it tells us about how the satires were produced and who their intended audience/s might have been. De Hooghe’s satires were issued in the form of broadsheets, the typeset text appearing beneath the print in the form of a spoken (or sometimes sung) dialogue accompanied by letters or numbers identifying the figures in the scene. Neither text nor image is effective alone: the viewer is required to cross-reference them repeatedly in order to understand the satire. While the textual component of De Hooghe’s satires may seem to suggest a relationship to newspaper and pamphlet production, their emphatic rejection of narrative in favour of the discursive places them in the realm of dramatic literature and the theatre, genres more readily suitable to conveying the fictive and often whimsical violence of satire. This discussion includes material considerations, among them the format of the satires and how they were produced, and considers the satires in light of other contemporary printed media, among them the pamphlet, the news sheet, and the ballad. The particular relationship between text and image in De Hooghe’s satires and the distinctly performative quality it engenders shed critical light on their audience and function.

Staging Intimacy in Guillén de Castro

Guillén de Castro’s dramatic rewriting of “El curioso impertinente” provides a unique window onto the formal differences between prose narrative and theatrical approaches to the representation of perfect friendship. Key to the analysis of this chapter is the inherent hybridity of the Spanish early modern comedia, the tendency within one and the same work to engage in hyperbolic displays of emotional excess alongside more muted representations of feeling that feed an emerging interest in verisimilitude, especially as the basis for a new kind of audience identification within the theater. In practice, Castro´s play dramatizes the stark contrast between the exaggerated discourse of perfect friendship and other modes of personal intimacy not so much as a mode of critique of the Aristotelian ideal, but rather as two strategies that function simultaneously within the same work of dramatic literature.