Abstract
Individual’s identity has always been expressed by abstract terms like culture, beliefs, religion, values etc. In this paper, I argue that modern playwrights show that the generations of the modern era tend to identify more with place, a concrete entity, than they do with the traditional constitutive elements of identity since these abstractions started to lose their glamour and value in an age marked by tremendous advancement in technology and materialism. With the modern generations increasingly associating themselves with place, an identity crisis has emerged since place is contingent to economic and social factors i.e. is not as stable as culture or religion. The vulnerability of modern identity turns it into a notion in flux, with no fixed or clear-cut boundaries. Thus, modern age people may live with multilayered identity or swing between two or more identities. Place, with whatever experience is practiced in it, remains the hinge on which modern identity revolves. To show that the phenomenon is a global one, the paper studies four plays representing different cultures and spheres—Anton Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life, and Wakako Yamuchi’s And the Soul Shall Dance.
Highlights
The concept of identity is a remarkably fertile one, attracting the attention of scholars, sociologists and philosophers, who approach it from differing aspects—individual, group, and national identities and their myriad markers
Until the mid-twentieth century, the term ‘space’ conveyed a strictly geometrical meaning and “the idea it evoked was that of an empty area” (Lefebvre 1)
Commenting on the traditional notion of space, he said that space was perceived as “the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile”. The latter half of the twentieth century witnessed a shift in preference “for the spatial rather than the historical analyses and analogies influential in certain kinds of critical writing” (West-Pavlov 19)
Summary
The concept of identity is a remarkably fertile one, attracting the attention of scholars, sociologists and philosophers, who approach it from differing aspects—individual, group, and national identities and their myriad markers. Until the mid-twentieth century, the term ‘space’ conveyed a strictly geometrical meaning and “the idea it evoked was that of an empty area” (Lefebvre 1) This geometrical notion of space, according to Lefebvre, had its roots in the works of Euclid (300 B.C.)—a Greek mathematician and author of a basic work on geometry—which had ever since defined Western thought. Some of the notable works in the wave of theorizing (phenomenon) about space include the French philosophers Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1958) and Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1991) This emerging perception of space opens new horizons in different disciplines, especially the domain of literary criticism. I argue that place reinforces individual identity to a varying extent depending on the type of experience (space) practiced in that place This notion, I believe, is in harmony with other modern and global streams of thought like “self, autonomy, ownership, and property” (Lee 623). Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (1903), Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949), William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life (1939), and Wakaku Yamauchi’s And the Soul Shall Dance (1974) are salient exemplary plays of how individual’s identity, in the upheaval of 20th century globalization, is depicted in modern drama as a notion in flux, with no fixed or definite markers
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