Irish Tradition or Postdramatic Innovation? Storytelling in Contemporary Irish Plays
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Jürgen Wehrmann
Abstract
Storytelling in Irish drama has traditionally been perceived as evidence for a continuity between Irish theatre and a pre-modern, distinctly Irish oral culture. Hans-Thies Lehmann’s theory of Postdramatic Theatre, however, allows one to describe the exhibition of the act of narration in contemporary Irish plays as a break with both Epic Theatre and the drama of the Irish Literary Revival. In contrast with the alienation effects of Epic Theatre, contemporary Irish theatre texts create intense relation-ships between narrator and story on the one hand and between narrator and audience on the other. Yet the acts of narration also differ from those in the drama of the Irish Literary Revival in that oral storytelling takes the form of intimate confessions and focusses not on collective but individual memory. At the same time, the Irish example casts a critical light on some of Lehmann’s concepts, particularly the avantgarde character of the so-called ‘post-epic’ narration and its inherent criticism of the mass media.
© 2014 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co.
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- Buchbesprechungen
- Bucheingänge
- Die Autoren dieses Heftes
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- INHALT
- EDITORIAL
- “A Woman Could (Not) Do It” – Role-Play as a Strategy of ‘Feminine’ Self-Empowerment in L.M. Alcott’s “Behind a Mask,” “La Jeune,” and “A Marble Woman”
- The Darker Islam within the American Gothic: Sufi Motifs in the Stories of H.P. Lovecraft
- Irish Tradition or Postdramatic Innovation? Storytelling in Contemporary Irish Plays
- Reconciling Humans with Nature through Aesthetic Experience: The Green Dimension in Australian Poetry
- ‘Putting Things up against Each Other’: Media History and Modernization in Adam Thorpe’s Ulverton
- ‘History is about to crack wide open’: Identity and Historiography in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America
- Buchbesprechungen
- Bucheingänge
- Die Autoren dieses Heftes
