The Evolution of Modern English Drama

AUTHOR : Hwang Hoon-sung
ISBN : 9788952129123
PUBLISHER : 서울대학교출판문화원
PUBLICATION DATE : February 20 ,2020,
SPINE SIZE : 1.2 inches
PAGES : 360
SIZE : 6.1 * 8.9 inches
WEIGHT : 1.5 pounds
CATON QTY : 20
PRICE : $99.45
In theorizing the failure of the Enlightenment and the rise of the postmodern Sublime, this work encompasses all the major thinkers from Hegel, Nietzsche, Derrida, Žižek, Jameson, Adorno, Lyotard, Bauman to Baudrillard thereby tracing out the evolution of modernity to postmodernity substantiated in the dramatic works by Shaw, O’Neill, Synge, Joyce, Pledger, Pinter and Beckett.


Hwang Hoon-sung

Hoon-sung Hwang is a professor in English at Dongguk University in Seoul Korea, where he teaches courses on Modern and Postmodern Drama, Theater and Performance. He got Ph. D at English Dept. of UC Davis under Prof. Ruby Cohn with the dissertation, “One Mirror is Not Enough in Beckett’s Drama.” He has published essays in Modern Drama (1993), Degrés (2005) and a book Death in Western Literature (2014), which awarded him Wooho Prize for human science.

1. Janelle Reinelt (Emeritus Professor of Theatre and Performance University of Warwick)
Hoon-sung Hwang’s excellent systematic study of modern drama captures the historical, political, and aesthetic context of the great shift from modernity to postmodernity. In theorizing the failure of the Enlightenment and the rise of the postmodern Sublime, Hwang encompasses all the major thinkers from Hegel to Jameson, and from Derrida and Lyotard to Bourdieu. The (English) drama highlights the major shifts in human thinking about these concepts and also, according to Hwang is itself illuminated through these concepts. The genealogy traced through Shaw and O’Neill to Pinter and Beckett is compelling and insightful, and the volume will help specialists and non-specialists alike develop an understanding of the seismic changes in the philosophy and art of the last and present century.

2. Elaine Kim (Emeritus Professor of Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies UC Berkeley)
Professor Hoon-sung Hwang’s study of modern British drama in the context of Western thought from the Enlightenment to the present provides us with not only brilliant close readings of the work of playwrights from Shaw to Beckett but also valuable insights into the limits of our belief in “progress” and the possibilities of postmodern cultural critique.
Acknowledgements
Introduction

Theoretical Groundworks
1. Modern Drama as a Project of Enlightenment
2. A Theoretical Excursion into the Postmodern Sublime

Book I
I. Modern Drama of Enlightenment
1. The Plot Structure of Bernard Shaw's Didactic Drama
2. he Dramatization of Habitus: A Bourdieun Reading of Pygmalion
3. Eugene O'Neill's Dramatization of Nietzsche's Idea of the Anti-Bourgeois Spirit
4. Political Unconscious Staged in J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World
5. "Circe": A Modernist's Gesture to Stage the Sublime in the Human Psyche

Book II
II. Postmodern Drama of the Sublime
1. The Postmodern Drama as mise-en-scène of the Sublime
2. The Postmodern Politico-technological Sublime Staged in David Pledger's K
3. The Textual Sublime: Samuel Beckett's Endgame as A Postmodern Allegory on the Relationship between Man and Nature
4. The Political Sublime Staged in Harold Pinter's Late Plays
5-1. The Sublime Universe of Simulation in Beckett's Stage: Reflexivity as the Exchange of Signs within the Text
5-2. Theatereality as a Way of Simulating Virtual Reality on Stage

III. Conclusion

Select Bibliography
Index