ANTHONY NEİLSON’UN SANSÜRCÜ İSİMLİ OYUNUNUN ZYGMUNT BAUMAN’IN AHLAK SOSYOLOJİSİ IŞIĞINDA YENİ BİR OKUMASI

Abstract

New writing, In-Yer-Face theatre, rising masculinity, grunge, the rave scene, and hip-hop dominated the world of music, literature, and drama in the nineties. The nineties also displayed that one could reach sexual affairs not only in the political world and on TVs, but also on theatre stages. Anthony Neilson whose works are associated in criticism with the phenomenon variously described as In-Yer-Face Theatre put The Censor on the stage in 1997. The Censor is not the playwright and director Anthony Neilson’s first experiential play; however, it was his most sensational and taboo-breaking one thanks to its infamous pornographic scene and a theme around sexual trauma, affection, loss, and death. It is a fact that there is a limitation of studies that focus on the relationship between Anthony Neilson’s dramaturgy and postmodernism. Therefore, this work aims to explore Neilson's Censor from a new perspective that will enable the postmodern elements and features of Neilson's work to be viewed from a moral point of view, which envisages analysing the postmodern situation through Zygmunt Bauman's views. To do this, firstly, this work limits its analysis to the discovery of the playwright’s in-yer-face drama via The Censor. Secondly, after presenting the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s views over morality, it analyses morality behind the notion of fluid in The Censor through the focus on ordinary postmodern man and his/her moral and ethical condition by following the postmodernist zeitgeist around Zygmunt Bauman’s moral sociology.