Salman Rushdie's work has been highly influential, so much so that it is sometimes alleged that many younger writers have caught 'Rushdieitis'.
No.: 094598 Hauptseminar 2 SWS Blocktermine Rushdie and Rushdieitis: Cultural Capital and Anxieties of Influence The focus is predominantly on post-Second World War writing, but some earlier texts will also be considered. It includes a selection of diasporic writers with Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi or Sri Lankan backgrounds who are based in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific as well as in the UK and North America. This lecture course provides a survey of South Asian Diaspora literature. 10:00 - 12:00 room: Sch5 Scharnhorststraße Soziologie Mark Stein Literature of the South Asian Diaspora (2) During this slight little sketch, the Famous American Playwright of the post-World War II generation-probably William Inge, one of the "over-psychologizing" dramatists of the 1950s that Engler sees Kopit reacting against-comes face to face with the Young American Playwright of the nascent avant-garde off-Broadway movement, almost certainly.Prof. According to that interpretation, Albee himself might, in fact, be seen to have written a parallel text to Oh Dad in his "Fam and Yam: An Imaginary Interview" (1960). condemned to endlessly 're-present' the tradition, either by slavishly imitating it or by rebellion against it" (283). That being said, Engler presents a refreshingly provocative reading of Kopit's Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin So Sad (1960), by proposing that it comments on the predicament of the emerging dramatist who suffers an anxiety of influence in the face of "pre-existing texts" or "pre-texts," "tryfing] to overcome the stifling heritage of his predecessors and. But 1959 itself did witness a significant work in Sweet Bird of Youth, one of Williams's two or three most metatheatrical plays and in 1961 came a truly major work, The Night of the Iguana, a beautifully written summation of much that had come before. in the late 1950s" (280) he actually kept writing and saw into production new work, often experimental in nature though, granted, frequently rejected by popular audiences and critics, almost right up to his death in 1983, including Outcry (1973), The Red Devil Battery Sign (1975), and Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980). Second, Tennessee Williams had hardly "retreat from the literary arena. had been propagated by the Broadway system" (288) is certainly, as he must recognize, overly broad when one remembers such classic American dramas as those he cites in note 2 (289) of his article. First, his generalization that "an aesthetics of escapism. Two of the points in Engler's rapid overview need qualification, however.
So Engler is to be thanked for adding to the discourse in a thought-provoking manner.Īs Engler hints in sketching out the historical context for Kopif s appearance as a kind of enfant terrible, the year 1959-with first plays by Jack Gelber and Jack Richardson and Lorraine Hansberry and, of course, Edward Albee-was almost as much an annus mirabilis for a rebirth of a liberated-and liberating-American drama (indeed, there had been an earlier rebirth a half-century before with the Provincetown group) as it was for cinema in France with the New Wave directors Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, and Francois Truffaut. Although Bernd Engler's claim that Arthur Kopit has been subjected to "unanimous critical neglect" is something of an overstatement (admittedly, articles by Gautam Dasgupta, Steven Gale, Don Shewey, and myself may have been unavailable to him at the time), (1) assuredly it remains true, as Engler says, that this playwright's substantial contribution to contemporary American theatre "has not gained the critical attention it deserves" (279).
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