Shakespeare, Ibsen, and the Staged Future of Robots
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Birte Wege
Birte Wege is Assistant Professor for North American Literature at the John F. Kennedy Institute Berlin. She earned her PhD at the Graduate School of North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, with a dissertation on the graphic narrative documentaries of Emmanuel Guibert, Ho Che Anderson, Art Spiegelman, and Joe Sacco; it was published asDrawing on the Past by Campus Verlag in 2019. Her current research focuses on robots and performance in American theatre.
Abstract
Using two case studies – Elizabeth Meriwether’s 2006 play Heddatron, and Nick O’Donohoe’s 1989cyberpunk novel Too Too Solid Flesh– this article examines iterations of continuity in canonical drama. It analyzes how each work employs the figure of the Robot in its adaptation of a classic play – Ibsen’s Hedda Gablerand Shakespeare’s Hamlet, respectively – as a means of exploring how the dominant themes of the original are restaged and renegotiated to address contemporary concerns, especially those surrounding the posthuman.
Abstract
Using two case studies – Elizabeth Meriwether’s 2006 play Heddatron, and Nick O’Donohoe’s 1989cyberpunk novel Too Too Solid Flesh– this article examines iterations of continuity in canonical drama. It analyzes how each work employs the figure of the Robot in its adaptation of a classic play – Ibsen’s Hedda Gablerand Shakespeare’s Hamlet, respectively – as a means of exploring how the dominant themes of the original are restaged and renegotiated to address contemporary concerns, especially those surrounding the posthuman.
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Acknowledgments
- Table of Contents VII
- Introduction: Forms of Narrative Continuation 1
- Continuation and the Novel: Open Context and the Problem of Closure 15
- Clotels: Bad Beginnings, Instructive Continuations 31
- “He Keeps Happening”: Character and Situation in W. D. Howells’s A Modern Instance 61
- Serial Singularity: Reading for the Project Form in the Business Romance 83
- Genre-Bending Literary Fiction and the Pleasure of Immersion in Fictional Worlds 113
- The Eternal Draft: Authorial Revision and Philip Roth’s Construction of the Oeuvre 141
- Nicole Krauss’s To Be a Man: Implications of Continuity in the Jewish American Short Story Collection 165
- Ali Smith and the Unfinished Book: Novels, Middles, and Serialization in an Electronic Age 197
- Of Masks and Men: Percival Everett’s James 221
- Eclogue: The End of History in Verse (Continued) 247
- Shakespeare, Ibsen, and the Staged Future of Robots 267
- The Remake as Fetish Art: On Gus Van Sant’s Psycho and Other Psychos 293
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Acknowledgments
- Table of Contents VII
- Introduction: Forms of Narrative Continuation 1
- Continuation and the Novel: Open Context and the Problem of Closure 15
- Clotels: Bad Beginnings, Instructive Continuations 31
- “He Keeps Happening”: Character and Situation in W. D. Howells’s A Modern Instance 61
- Serial Singularity: Reading for the Project Form in the Business Romance 83
- Genre-Bending Literary Fiction and the Pleasure of Immersion in Fictional Worlds 113
- The Eternal Draft: Authorial Revision and Philip Roth’s Construction of the Oeuvre 141
- Nicole Krauss’s To Be a Man: Implications of Continuity in the Jewish American Short Story Collection 165
- Ali Smith and the Unfinished Book: Novels, Middles, and Serialization in an Electronic Age 197
- Of Masks and Men: Percival Everett’s James 221
- Eclogue: The End of History in Verse (Continued) 247
- Shakespeare, Ibsen, and the Staged Future of Robots 267
- The Remake as Fetish Art: On Gus Van Sant’s Psycho and Other Psychos 293
