Relations with/to the Text: Four Plays on the Move

Kerstin Schmidt

doi:10.1515/jcde-2023-0027

Article

Relations with/to the Text: Four Plays on the Move

Kerstin Schmidt
is Professor of English and Chair of American Studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University’s Amerika-Institut in Munich. She studied at the Universities of Freiburg and Massachusetts/Amherst and taught at the Universities of Freiburg, Bayreuth, Siegen, Eichstätt-Ingolstadt as well as at Weber State University in Ogden. Scholarships and research stipends have brought her to Yale University, to Indiana University/Bloomington, the University of Wyoming, to the CUNY Graduate Center, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Life, and the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City as well as to the Universities of Toronto and British Columbia/Vancouver. In over ten monographs/edited volumes and over thirty essays, she has written on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature and culture, focusing on American drama and theater, race and diaspora studies, theories of space/place in American culture as well as on media theory and documentary photography. She is on the board of directors of the Bavarian American Academy (BAA) and serves on the advisory board of US American and Canadian journals. Since 2023, she is President of the German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English (CDE).

Published/Copyright: November 23, 2023

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From the journal Journal of Contemporary Drama in English Volume 11 Issue 2

Abstract

The Caribbean philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant is not known for his work on theater; rather, he has been influential for a postcolonial reconceptualization of Caribbean spaces and the ways in which they are intertwined with a history of colonization. His theory of relation has been paramount for a rethinking of a concept of connection, theorizing the layered, complex, and often surprising relations between peoples and cultures that have shaped, questioned, imagined, and often also jumbled up the Caribbean as a world in transformation. Glissant views relation as a skein of networks and not as essentialist recovery of an authentic and true point of origin. This article addresses the theoretical transformative possibilities that this approach helps elucidate. I will mainly focus on the production of Simon Stephens’s 2012 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, an inventive adaptation of Mark Haddon’s 2003 novel that was staged in New York City between 2014 and 2016 to much critical acclaim. Finally, in a comparative approach, I would like to read this production with an eye towards Susanne Kennedy’s 2018 adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel The Virgin Suicides (1993) for the Munich Kammerspiele and acclaimed Australian theater director Simon Stone’s 2016 rewrite of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters (1901) for the theater in Basel as well as Ulrich Rasche’s inventive 2017 production of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck.

Keywords: Édouard Glissant; relation; Simon Stephens; Marianne Elliott; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time ; Simon Stone; Three Sisters ; Susanne Kennedy; The Virgin Suicides ; Ulrich Rasche; Woyzeck

About the author

Kerstin Schmidt

is Professor of English and Chair of American Studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University’s Amerika-Institut in Munich. She studied at the Universities of Freiburg and Massachusetts/Amherst and taught at the Universities of Freiburg, Bayreuth, Siegen, Eichstätt-Ingolstadt as well as at Weber State University in Ogden. Scholarships and research stipends have brought her to Yale University, to Indiana University/Bloomington, the University of Wyoming, to the CUNY Graduate Center, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Life, and the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City as well as to the Universities of Toronto and British Columbia/Vancouver. In over ten monographs/edited volumes and over thirty essays, she has written on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature and culture, focusing on American drama and theater, race and diaspora studies, theories of space/place in American culture as well as on media theory and documentary photography. She is on the board of directors of the Bavarian American Academy (BAA) and serves on the advisory board of US American and Canadian journals. Since 2023, she is President of the German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English (CDE).

Works Cited

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Published Online: 2023-11-23

Published in Print: 2023-11-08

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/jcde-2023-0027

Keywords for this article

Édouard Glissant; relation; Simon Stephens; Marianne Elliott; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time; Simon Stone; Three Sisters; Susanne Kennedy; The Virgin Suicides; Ulrich Rasche; Woyzeck