David Mamet : une nouvelle écriture américaine

Abstract

A New Kind of American Writing : David Mamet's Plays. Set in the context of the development of contemporary American Theater, David Mamet's theater is examined here from the standpoint of its writing. By his use of marginal and everyday language in a poetic way, Mamet generates a new form of American theater writing which is both vehicle and theme. He avoids behaviorist psychology ; by resorting to the theater-within-the theater, the writing-within-the writing techniques, he gives its concise, patterned and carefully-wrought language which calls upon crude vocabulary, a truly creative dimension. Beyond its surface simplicity, it refers us to the art of writing and speakind which commits both writer or speaker and addressee within a clearly specified socio-economic and cultural context : capitalist America of the 1970's and 1980's ; a chronology of Mamet's performed plays is appended.