The Contemporary American Monologue: Performance and Politics

by Eddie Paterson, Enoch Brater (Editor), Mark Taylor-Batty (Editor)

Overview

Talk-show confessions, online rants, stand-up routines, inspirational speeches, banal reflections and calls to arms: we live in an age of solo voices demanding to be heard. In The Contemporary American Monologue Eddie Paterson looks at the pioneering work of US artists Spalding Gray, Laurie Anderson, Anna Deavere Smith and Karen Finley, and the development of solo performance in the US as a method of cultural and political critique. Ironic confession, post-punk poetry, investigations of race and violence, and subversive polemic, this book reveals the link between the rise of radical monologue in the late 20th century and history of speechmaking, politics, civil rights, individual freedom and the American Dream in the United States. It shows how US artists are speaking back to the cultural, political and economic forces that shape the world.

Eddie Paterson traces the importance of the monologue in Shakespeare, Brecht, Beckett, Chekov, Pinter, O'Neill and Williams, before offering a comprehensive analysis of several of the most influential and innovative American practitioners of monologue performance.

The Contemporary American Monologue constitutes the first book-length account of US monologists that links the tradition of oratory and speechmaking in the colony to the appearance of solo performance as a distinctly American phenomenon.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781472585035
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	12/17/2015
Series:	Methuen Drama Engage
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	232
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Eddie Paterson is a lecturer in the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, Australia.
Eddie Paterson is a lecturer in the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, Australia.
Enoch Brater is the Kenneth T. Rowe Collegiate Professor of Dramatic Literature, Professor of English and Theater at the University of Michigan and the series editor of Methuen Drama's Miller scholarly editions. He has written extensively on the work of Samuel Beckett and Arthur Miller.

Enoch Brater is the Kenneth T. Rowe Collegiate Professor of Dramatic Literature, Professor of English and Theater at the University of Michigan. He is series editor of Methuen Drama's Arthur Miller scholarly editions, and with Mark Taylor-Batty of Methuen Drama's Engage series. He has written extensively on the work of Samuel Beckett and Arthur Miller.
Mark Taylor-Batty is Associate Professor of Theatre Studies and Deputy Head of School in the School of English at the University of Leeds, UK. His previous publications include The Theatre of Harold Pinter (Bloomsbury, 2014), About Pinter: The Playwright and the Work (Faber and Faber, 2005), Roger Blin: Collaborations and Methodologies (Peter Lang, 2007) and, he co-authored with his wife, Juliette Taylor-Batty, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (Continuum, 2009).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Foreword by Deborah R. Geis
Introduction
1. Monologue in Western Drama
2. Monologue in American Performance
3. Confessional Monologue
4. Postpunk Monologue
5. Rights Monologue
6. Radical Monologue
7. Future Monologue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Biographical Note

Editorial Reviews

Eddie Paterson presents a unique take on the form. He deftly argues that the contemporary American monologue is inherently political, in form and content … As part of the Methuen Drama Engage series, The Contemporary American Monologue makes an important contribution to the discourse on solo theatre in the United States. Series editors Enoch Brater and Mark Taylor-Batty have shaped a book series that offers a wide variety of critical analyses of modern and postmodern theatre that has been largely ignored or warrants more attention. This volume will prove indispensable to solo performers, educators, and anyone with an interest in avant-garde or solo American theatre. With the contribution of Eddie Paterson’s rigorous study, the conversation on solo performance is now more extensive, while simultaneously inviting continued critical inquiry.” – Jourbanal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism

“Paterson’s work is a significant addition to the critical studies of these four particular artists, the historical framework that contextualizes them, and the monologue form. Those who are led by the title to expect a monologue sourcebook for actors (as I was) will encounter much more.” - The Jourbanal of American Drama and Theatre

From the Publisher