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Phd Thesis CAPITANI UNIVERSITA’ DEGLI STUDI DI PARMA Dottorato di ricerca in Filologia Greca e Latina (e Fortuna dei Classici) Ciclo XXVIII THE POLITICS OF RE-(EN )VISIONING : CONTEMPORARY BRITISH REWRITINGS OF GREEK AND ROMAN TRAGEDIES Settore Scientifico-Disciplinare: L-LIN/10 Letteratura Inglese Coordinatore: Chiar.mo Prof. Giuseppe Gilberto Biondi Tutor: Chiar.mo Prof. Diego Saglia Dottoranda: Maria Elena Capitani ii THE POLITICS OF RE-(EN )VISIONING : CONTEMPORARY BRITISH REWRITINGS OF GREEK AND ROMAN TRAGEDIES TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii PREFACE ix INTRODUCTION STATE OF PLAYWRITING / STATE OF THE NATION : CONTEMPORARY BRITISH THEATRE AND SOCIETY (1990-TODAY ) 1. NEW WRITING FOR THE STAGE : AN OVERVIEW 1 2. STAGING THE NINETIES 7 3. STAGING THE NEW MILLENNIUM 15 4. REWRITING FOR THE STAGE 27 THEORY I: THE POETICS OF REWRITING 1. LITERATURE AS A (D YNAMIC ) SYSTEM : THE URGE TO REWRITE 35 2. INTERTEXTUALITY : THE HISTORY OF A SLIPPERY TERM 39 2.1. Reworking Theory: Kristeva Re-reads/Re-writes Saussure and Bakhtin 39 2.2 The Pleasure of Unmaking the Text: Barthes 41 2.3 Genette’s Relations Palimpsestueuses 43 iii 2.4 The Phenomenology of Reading: Riffaterre 46 2.5 Bloom’s Intertextual Conflicts 48 3. A NEW ACADEMIC DISCIPLINE : ADAPTATION STUDIES 50 3.1 Linda Hutcheon’s Theory (and Practice) of Adaptation 52 3.2 Julie Sanders: Adaptation and/or Appropriation? 54 3.3 Adaptation as Scholarly Cross-pollination 56 3.3.1 Adaptation and Cultural Studies 57 3.3.2 Adaptation and Translation Studies 58 3.3.3 Adaptation and Reception Studies 59 THEORY II: TRAGEDY , THE TRAGIC , PHILOSOPHY , AND TRAGIC THEORY 1. TRAGEDY AND THE TRAGIC 61 2. TRAGEDY AND PHILOSOPHY 68 3. TRAGIC THEORY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 74 BETWEEN THEORY AND PRACTICE : THE POLITICS OF REWRITING ANCIENT TRAGEDY 83 1. REWORKING TRAGEDY : THREE POSSIBLE STRATEGIES 84 1.1 Rewriting and Restaging 85 1.2 Relocating 96 1.3 Remediating 98 2. T RAGEDY AND POLITICS 101 2.1 Theatre and Politics 101 2.2 Greek Tragedy and Politics 103 2.3 Roman Tragedy and Politics 106 2.4 Contemporary ‘Tragedy’ and Politics 109 iv CASE STUDIES : 1. DISMEMBERING SENECA : SARAH KANE ’S PHAEDRA ’S LOVE (1996) 117 1. TEXTUAL BODY AND HYBRIDIZATION 119 1.1 “I've Always Hated Those Plays”: Kane and Ancient Tragedy 119 1.2 (Inter)Textual Cross-pollination: Brecht and Camus 133 2. BODIES ON STAGE : GENERIC AMBIGUITY AND CONTEMPORARY POLITICS 139 2.1 When Funny Means Redeeming: The Tragic, The Comic, and The Grotesque 139 2.2 Corrupted Bodies: The Politics of Dismemberment 148 3. SARAH KANE : “A CONTEMPORARY WRITER WITH A CLASSICAL SENSIBILITY ” 157 2. DEMYSTIFYING AND REMEDIATING AESCHYLUS : TONY HARRISON’S PROMETHEUS (1998) 159 1. PLACE : THE POLITICS OF RELOCATION 161 2. LANGUAGE : THE POLITICS OF REWRITING 171 3. GENRE : THE POLITICS OF REMEDIATION 177 4. THE PROMETHEAN POLITICS OF TONY HARRISON 182 3. REFRAMING SOPHOCLES : MARTIN CRIMP ’S CRUEL AND TENDER (2004) 189 1. “S OPHOCLES AT THE AIRPORT ”: (D IS )P LACING GREEK TRAGEDY 195 2. “A LL THIS INTRACTABLE GREEK STUFF – CHORUSES , MYTHS , CENTAURS , HEROES ”: CRIMP ’S REWRITING /RESTAGING STRATEGIES 199 3. GENDER (ED ) WARS : WHEN THE PUBLIC ENTERS THE DOMESTIC 204 4. FE/M ALE BODIES AND /AT WAR : EFFECTS AND AFFECTS 214 4.1 Disciplining Female Bodies 214 4.2 Unsexing and Re-Gendering the Male Body 218 v 5. INTERNATIONAL WAR (S): MEDIATISED TERROR IN THE AGE OF GLOBALISATION 222 6. MARTIN CRIMP ’S POLITICS OF REWRITING 231 CONCLUSION 233 BIBLIOGRAPHY 241 vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A PhD is what you make of it, and mine was an exciting research journey across Europe, blending my roots with new routes . This doctoral project was made possible by a three-year scholarship awarded by the Dipartimento di Antichistica, Lingue, Educazione, Filosofia (A.L.E.F.) at the University of Parma, my alma mater , and I am extremely grateful to the Head of the Department and Coordinator of the PhD Programme, Professor Giuseppe Gilberto Biondi, for giving me the opportunity to pursue my research proposal. Writing this thesis would not have been possible without the intellectual and emotional support of my mentor, Professor Diego Saglia, who has supervised me since my BA degree. Embodying several qualities of the academic that I would like to become, he is a constant source of inspiration and stimulating ideas. I owe him a huge debt of gratitude for his extraordinary insight, for always being enthusiastic about my research and writing, for enhancing my productivity, for encouraging me to study abroad and travel so much, in other words, for providing me with the highly demanding and intense kind of PhD I needed to push my limits and progress as a scholar. I would like to thank the academic staff working in the Section of Foreign Languages and Literatures for welcoming me with open arms and treating me more like a young colleague than a student. Among them, special thanks go to Professor Gioia Angeletti, for her encouragement and enthusiasm, and for sharing her office with me, and to Professor Laura Bandiera, for her kindness and scholarly rigorousness. I am also grateful to our librarian Elisabetta Paratico, who helped me locate useful materials unavailable in Parma. In the Classics section of the Department, Professor Massimo Magnani was very generous with his knowledge of Greek tragedy. This dissertation has enormously benefited from a research stay in the Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Alemanya at the Universitat de Barcelona between March and April 2014, during which I worked within the framework of the research group Contemporary British Theatre Barcelona (CBTBarcelona; http://www.ub.edu/cbtbarcelona/), headed by Dr Mireia Aragay. I have been incredibly fortunate to have her as supervisor during my stay and external reader of my manuscript, and I am extremely grateful for her invaluable help. The intense and fecund period at Barcelona University, where I have been warmly welcomed, has shown me what it means to be part of a scholarly community. Moltes gràcies to Dr Enric Monforte, for his kindness, generosity, and support, to Dr Clara Escoda Agustí, with whom I share a long-standing interest in the theatre of Martin Crimp, and especially to my fellow PhD students, officemates, and close friends Verónica Rodríguez, Marta Tirado, and Elisabeth Massana, for their lovely company and for being amazingly supportive throughout. I am looking forward to reading their work on David Greig, Sarah Kane, and the performance of terror and precariousness. My research has greatly benefited from a second, highly productive research stay in England over the summer of 2015. Many thanks to Professor Peter Robinson, the former Head of the Department of English Literature at the University of Reading, for accepting me as a visiting scholar and for putting me in touch with a specialist in the area of my research. I want to express my gratitude to Kate Bassett for enthusiastically supervising this thesis, for being incredibly generous with her time, and for her meticulous and committed comments on my manuscript. During my stay in England, I vii also had the opportunity to spend some time and discuss my research with Professor Graham Saunders, a leading scholar in the field of contemporary British drama, as well as a dedicated teacher, and extremely kind and generous person. I am delighted that he has accepted to become a member of my thesis committee. I am also grateful to Dr Aleks Sierz, who has always been there to share his knowledge and generously included my publications in the bibliography of the second edition of his seminal book on Crimp. This research has spanned borders, having also benefited from a Summer School on contemporary British literature at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and conferences in various countries, including Italy, England, Spain, France, Germany, and Czech Republic. In particular, the PhD Forum of the German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English (CDE), preliminary to our annual conferences, was extremely thought-provoking. I am thankful to Professor Clare Wallace (Charles University, Prague) and Professor Martin Middeke (Universität Augsburg), who regularly chair this postgraduate workshop, for their invaluable feedback, for stimulating lively discussions, and for constantly probing further. Thanks to CDE, I have met some brilliant PhD students who have become good friends, with whom I have shared all the ups and downs of the doctoral journey: Cyrielle Garson (Université d’Avignon et des Pays de Vaucluse), Sarah Jane Ablett (Technische Universität Braunschweig), Ariane de Waal (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), Dr Daniel Schulze (Universität Würzburg), Nils Wilkinson (Universität Siegen), Jan Suk and Dr Hana Pavelková (Charles University, Prague). Also, I would like to thank the French research group RADAC (Recherche sur les Arts Dramatiques Anglophones Contemporains), of which I am a member. Last but not least, my most heartfelt thanks go to my parents, for their unwavering support while I worked on this project. viii PREFACE This doctoral thesis originates from the intersection between my long-standing interest in twentieth- and twenty-first-century British literature and culture, and especially drama and theatre, and the research area promoted by our Department’s PhD programme, that is the fortune of the classics in modern and contemporary literatures. I must admit that it has been highly demanding for a young scholar with a background in English Studies to approach an extremely complex and ‘overwhelming’ topic such as tragedy, whose epistemological uncertainty and ontological resonance tend to discourage even classicists. Despite the inherent difficulties in dealing with this kind of material, the examination of the fractured and, at the same time, close relationship between Greek and Roman tragedies and their contemporary British appropriations has proven to be extremely thought-provoking and timely.
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