Doomed Mythic Artist: Sam Shepard’s Angel City

Abstract

Sam Shepard is one of the most popular postmodern playwrights. His plays have a mythic quality. The myths he creates are considered as postmodern; they are parodic by nature and emblematic of American pop culture. “Myth of the artist” is highlighted in many of his plays concerned with the notion of art. Angel City hinges on the corruption of the artistic imagination and the doom of the American dream; on the whole, it is a postmodern sublime-- a parody of the modernist apocalyptic vision or dystopia. This play, like Shepard’s other plays, is considered historiographic in that it deals with the past representations and attempts at reviewing and questioning the past. This article addresses the historiographic quality of Shepard’s Angel City, with emphasis on Linda Hutcheon's poetics of postmodern historiography and Roland Barth’s conception of modern myths in relation to patterns of culture. The parodic aspect of the play, it is argued, poses a critical stance vis-a-vis the past representations of the myths and the elitist approach of modernist art. In this study, the aim is to show how Shepard has questioned notions such as the myth of capitalism, myth of origin, myth of the savior, myth of the American dream, and myth of mission in the context of art and how the old myths of hero turn into myths of anti-hero in postmodern drama.