Unfinished Drama Research Articles

Percy Shelley's “Unfinished Drama” and the Problem of the Jane Williams Poems

This essay returns to the extensive scholarly debate surrounding the lyrics and fragments which Percy Bysshe Shelley composed for Jane Williams, or with her in mind, during the last six months of his life. It takes its point of departure in what it defines as “the problem of the Jane Williams poems” – the difficulty, faced by biographers, editors, and critics alike, of mapping the relationship between the “Jane” of Shelley's poems and the historical Jane Williams. Drawing on the physical evidence available from Shelley's manuscripts, the essay seeks to establish a secure chronology for the Jane Williams poems and to re-assess, on the basis of that chronology, what those poems might be able to tell us about the course of Shelley's relationship with Jane in the last six months of his life. The essay offers new readings of a number of the Jane Williams poems, including “The Magnetic lady to her patient” and the fragment “We meet not as we parted,” as well as an extended discussion of Shelley's so-called “Unfinished Drama.” It also reflects in more general terms on the potentialities and pitfalls of biographical reading and the attempt accurately to determine the relationship between poetry and lived experience.

Almanzor: drama histórico de Blas Infante

The recent publication of an unpublished and original theatre play by Blas Infante: Almanzor , an unfinished historical drama written in the early 20’s of the last century, opens up possibilities of interpretation in relation to another work written in the same period, The Pedagogical Dictatorship , that has a clear intention of improving the Spain of the Restoration from a historical point of view. Almanzor is also his second play with an Andalusian theme, along with Motamid, the Last King of Seville . The play is primarily an adaptation of the History of the Muslims of Spain until the Conquest by the Almoravids of R.P. Dozy. It belongs to the dramatic form coined as poetic theater by Modernism, but the play has deep romantic roots. Infante once again recreates, the glorious past of Al-Andalus.

Bühnen des Kapitalismus: Der Getreidehandel als Wissensobjekt zwischen den Weltkriegen.

Capitalism on Stage: Grain Trade as Objects of Knowledge During the Interwar Period. Between 1900 and 1930 the worldwide grain markets attained considerable attention in literature (Frank Norris' novel The Pit of 1903), cinema (D. W. Griffith's A Corner in Wheat of 1909), theatre (Bertolt Brecht's unfinished play fragment Jae Fleischhacker in Chikago, 1924-1926), politics (e. g. Report of the Federal Trade Commission on the Grain Trade, 1920-1926) and economics (e. g. Wheat Studies by the Food Research Institute at Stanford University, 1924-1944). The paper discusses grain trade as objects of knowledge in paradoxical situations and entails a parallel reading of these texts by analyzing their epistemic practices and narrative techniques. Bertolt Brecht's comprehensive plan to depict the laws of the allocation and distribution of grain markets on stage failed in 1926 and he turned to Marxism. In the meantime economic research focused on the aggregation of statistics relating to world grain supplies and prices. Studies about the relation between changes in the volumes of stocks and phases of trade cycles served furthermore as material for John Maynard Keynes' abolition of the classical theory around 1930.

Woyzeck and the Birth of the Human Research Subject: Genetic Disposition and the Nature-Nurture Debate Through the Looking-Glass of Fiction

In various writings Michel Foucault has shown how, in the beginning of the 19th century, in settings such as army barracks, psychiatric hospitals and penitentiary institutions, the modern human sciences were 'born' as an ensemble of disciplines (medical biology, psychiatry, psychology, criminology, and the like). From the beginning, the nature-nurture debate has been one of its key disputes. Are human individuals malleable by environmental factors (such as psychiatric treatments or disciplinary regimes), or do they rather display inborn predispositions for delinquency and other forms of antisocial behaviour? In the current era of genetic testing, in behavioural genomics and neuroscience, this issue is as controversial and topical as ever. Buchner’s unfinished drama Woyzeck (written in 1836) is a remarkable anticipation of this debate, staging the birth of the human individual as a research subject. It is the story of a destitute soldier who, according to his superiors, displays errant behaviour and is therefore recruited to serve as a research subject in an experiment. His army physician turns him into a 'case', which can be meticulously monitored and studied so as to record the genesis of a crime. In this paper, Buchner’s unsettling play is analysed in detail as one of the great anticipatory literary documents of the 19th century, exploring the idea of predictive psychiatry and the quest for genetic predispositions: a primal scene as it were of the nature-nurture debate as it unfolds from predictive criminology up to behavioural genomics.

Woyzeck and the birth of the human research subject. Genetic disposition and the nature-nurture debate through the looking-glass of fiction

In various writings Michel Foucault has shown how, in the beginning of the 19 th century, in settings such as army barracks, psychiatric hospitals and penitentiary institutions, the modern human sciences were ‹born› as an ensemble of disciplines (medical biology, psychiatry, psychology, criminology, and the like). From the beginning, the nature-nurture debate has been one of its key disputes. Are human individuals malleable by environmental factors (such as psychiatric treatments or disciplinary regimes), or do they rather display inborn predispositions for delinquency and other forms of antisocial behaviour? In the current era of genetic testing, in behavioural genomics and neuroscience, this issue is as controversial and topical as ever. Buchner’s unfinished drama Woyzeck (written in 1836) is a remarkable anticipation of this debate, staging the birth of the human individual as a research subject. It is the story of a destitute soldier who, according to his superiors, displays errant behaviour and is therefore recruited to serve as a research subject in an experiment. His army physician turns him into a ‹case›, which can be meticulously monitored and studied so as to record the genesis of a crime. In this paper, Buchner’s unsettling play is analysed in detail as one of the great anticipatory literary documents of the 19 th century, exploring the idea of predictive psychiatry and the quest for genetic predispositions: a primal scene as it were of the nature-nurture debate as it unfolds from predictive criminology up to behavioural genomics.

Philip Freneau's Manuscript of "The Spy"

article concerns a manuscript of an unfinished play, The Spy, by Philip Freneau held in Rutgers Library.

Traces of Shakespeare's Cymbeline in Poe's “Politian”

In 1923, Thomas Ollive Mabbott completed a meticulously annotated version of E. A. Poe's unfinished verse drama, “Politian.” Although Mabbott cited numerous allusions to Shakespearean plays, Cymbel...

Dawn’s Light: The Journey of Gordon Hirabayashi (review)

Reviewed by: Dawn’s Light: The Journey of Gordon Hirabayashi Emily Roxworthy Dawn’s Light: The Journey of Gordon Hirabayashi. By Jeanne Sakata. Directed by Jessica Kubzansky. East West Players, David Henry Hwang Theater, Los Angeles. 1 December 2007. Although Dawn’s Light seems most noteworthy for introducing audiences to real-life Nisei civilrights activist Gordon Hirabayashi—a man who has been called the Rosa Parks of Japanese America for resisting the World War II internment—behind this one-man show stands a woman making her playwriting debut in a fairly inhospitable climate for new plays by minority voices. Playwright Jeanne Sakata made her name as an actress of stage and screen: in 2002, she won an LA Ovation Award for Best Lead Actress for her performance as Beijing Opera star Master Hua in Chay Yew’s Red at East West Players; during the 2006–07 season, Sakata defied stereotyped expectations that an Asian actress could not [End Page 661] conjure the fierce passion needed to portray Italian opera diva Maria Callas in East West’s production of Terrence McNally’s Master Class—a veritable oneperson show itself. Red and Master Class represent the two competing though complementary poles that sustain a long-standing ethnic theatre company like East West Players, which commits itself both to celebrating the work of prominent Asian American playwrights such as Yew, and providing opportunities for underemployed Asian American performers (such as Sakata) to take on the prominent roles usually reserved for white actors. Dawn’s Light, on the other hand, represents a quieter mission that guarantees the future of minority theatre in this country: cultivating new playwrights (especially women and artists of color) that larger mainstream institutions have found increasingly easy to abandon. In the wake of her award-winning performance in Red, Yew—who also headed the now-defunct Asian Theater Workshop at LA’s Center Theater Group—decided in 2003 to give Sakata a commission to complete her unfinished play about Hirabayashi, which had not yet coalesced as a one-person show despite Sakata’s decade of intensive research into the topic. In this climate of minority-playwright development (eliminated by Center Theater Group in 2005), Sakata finally realized Dawn’s Light as a solo documentary play. It weaves together her own interviews with Hirabayashi himself, who remains active as he approaches age ninety, although he has long since retired from his position as a professor of sociology at the University of Alberta; wartime letters written by Hirabayashi that are now housed in the University of Washington archives; accounts of his infamous Supreme Court case Hirabayashi v. United States; and oral histories gathered from Hirabayashi’s surviving family, friends, and acquaintances. Yet Dawn’s Light bears stronger resemblance to the interview-based solo plays of Anna Deavere Smith than to the recent wave of multi-actor documentary plays such as Gillian Slovo and Victoria Brittain’s Guantánamo or David Hare’s Stuff Happens, which indict the systemic intolerance and injustice of US policies at home and abroad. These documentary plays may have gathered particular force in the British and American theatre since the disastrous interventions undertaken by the Bush administration in response to 9/11, but documentary playwrights have cut their teeth on earlier transgressions of the US government—not least of which include the World War II evacuation and internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans (two-thirds of whom held US citizenship) from the West Coast. Even so, Sakata’s play about one of the few internment resisters contains little of the strident melodrama or hypertheatricalized caricatures wielded against the US perpetrators in the main vein of contemporary documentary plays. In the place of such easily identifiable theatrical villains, Dawn’s Light gives the audience humanizing, empathetic portraits even of the military leaders, prison guards, and Supreme Court justices who were unapologetically complicit in perpetrating the US internment policy six decades ago. Certainly part of the impetus behind empathizing with the perpetrators comes from the fact that all these characters are played across one performer’s body: that of Korean American actor Ryun Yu, who balanced dozens of portraits with virtuosity and charisma on the evening I saw him perform...

{inverted question}Cuanto falta para Jerusalen?: Lorca's Apocalyptic and the Paradigms of Peace in Poeta en Nueva York and El publico

Many of Federico Garcia Lorca's best readers have noted a distinctly apocalyptic tone in Poeta en Nueva York and drawn inaccurate conclusions from it. This article maintains that a specific set of images from the Apocalypse—constituting an ‘irenic’ discourse concerning peace in the midst of violence—is Lorca's measure or paradigm for what can be said to be most true. What can be said to be most false is any image or reality that confusingly mimics such paradigms of peacefulness. Like the Johannine ‘revelator’, Lorca unveils not only the world's violence but also the curious stance of those who are enduring patiently in the midst of it. Lorca's verse exists so that such people—blacks, impoverished immigrants, dying children at the moment of their deaths—may be envisioned as taking the measure of everyone else.I identify a class of adverbs in these poems (echoing adverbials in Revelation) that seek to give the lie to a universally accepted norm according to which New York's Harlem could never be considered to anticipate the ‘new Jerusalem’.Lorca's imaginative project of a ‘theatre underneath the sand’, announced in the unfinished play El publico, requires that genuine community, like the primitive Christians, go underground in order to ‘play’. The verbs sostenir (to endure) and resistir (to resist, to parry), taken from the irenic lexicon of Revelation, define how the actors must play their parts, enacting ‘an incalculable love’ at the risk of their own lives.

Karl Philipp Moritz in Berlin 1789-1793 by Ute Tintemann, Christof Wingertszahn

MLR, I02.2, 2007 555 context and toLessing's preoccupations at the time ofwriting. The detailed analysis of his postscript to Jerusalem's essays throwswelcome light on Jerusalem's philo sophical determinism and Lessing's own, less radical equivalent. More specifically, the author seeks to demonstrate thatLessing's reference to a 'second system' which might remove some possible objections to thatof Jerusalem isnot to metempsychosis, but to Spinoza's metaphysics. Though this contention may not convince everyone, itdoes put the onus on supporters of the traditional view to argue their case more convincingly. The long section on Die Erziehung desMenschengeschlechts rightly takes issuewith thosewho treat it (togetherwith Ernst und Falk and Nathan der Weise) as part of a trilogyembodying theolder Lessing's definitivewisdom. Instead, itplaces thework in thecontext of his response toReimarus's Fragmente and of theworks which helped to define this response, especially those of the English deist Thomas Morgan, the Christian apologist William Warburton, and the Scottish philosopher Adam Fergu son. Though welcome and appropriate, this initiative isunduly restrictive.Lessing did not simply efface fromhismemory all he had read inearlier years with a bearing on his theme (as theauthor tacitlyacknowledges by including Ferguson, whose Essay onCivil Society Lessing had studied over fiveyears earlier).Most ofLessing's alleged debts toFerguson could inany case equally well be toRousseau, towhom Ferguson's ideas on the transition fromprimitive societies to civilization are decisively indebted. Accounts ofmetempsychosis inTertullian and other Church Fathers, in Wieland's poem Die Natur der Dinge, and inmany other eighteenth-century writers might equally have played a part. On the two late fragments, the author casts new light on theworks by Campe and Bonnet towhich Lessing alludes, and demonstrates conclusively that the second fragment, influenced by Bonnet's physiological theoryof the soul's immortality,has little incommon with Lessing's speculations on terrestrial reincarnation in theother works discussed. The work as awhole iswell informed and accurate. It is,however,mistaken in ac cepting Karl Lessing's erroneous conclusion thatLessing's translation of theopening paragraph ofLeibniz's Nouveaux essais is a plan forawork of his own (p. 341 ). SIDNEY SUSSEX COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE H. B. NISBET Karl Philipp Moritz inBerlin I789-I793. Ed. by UTE TINTEMANN and CHRISTOF WINGERTSZAHN. (Berliner Klassik, 4) Berlin: Wehrhahn. 2005. 337 pp. E28. ISBN 978-3-932324-30-7. Literary-historical treatment sometimes resembles intensive care: the corpus (of the work) lies comatose butwired up to thevarious machines (oferudition) monitoring its vital signs. It is like thathere: a largely technical set of eighteen essays, derived from a conference inDecember 2002, mostly werkimmanent, really for thosewho want to get technical with theMoritz corpus, or ratherwith that part of it singled out for intensive treatment,mainly theworks on aesthetics, linguistics, and stylewritten be tweenMoritz's return toBerlin from Italy and his death. Published in a series called 'BerlinerKlassik. Eine Grol3stadtkultur um i800', thebook and its titlesuggest social history (see the 'Vorwort', p. i), but that really only comes out in the last fiveessays onMoritz's connections with Freemasonry (JiirgenJahnke), theGerman-Jewish En lightenment (Claudia Stockinger), mysticism (ChristofWingertszahn), Jewishcontri butors to the Magazinfiir Erfahrungsseelenkunde (Stefan Goldmann), and an extract from an unfinished play byMaler Muller satirizingMoritz's behaviour during his Italian sojourn (Eckhard Faul). The preceding essays deal with some very specific 556 Reviews specifics: the 'archaeology of perception' in the Italian travelogue (Irmgard Egger), a comparison between Moritz and Piranesi on the role of perspective (Renata Gam bino), theminimalism of the illustrations in theGotterlehre (Ulrike Miinter) as well as their reception in the early nineteenth century (Gertrud Platz-Horster), history painting as the key to interpretingUber die bildendeNachahmung des Schonen (Clau dia Sedlarz), Die neue Cecilia in itsaesthetic context (Alexander Kosenina), Moritz's ideas on the relationship between pictorial representation and its linguistic descrip tion (Tomishige Yoshio), his conception of allegory (Achim Geisenhansliuke), his reflectionson the aesthetic potential of everyday life(Iwan D'Aprile), his Italienische Sprachlehre (Ute Tintemann), and his Vorlesungen iiberdenStyl (Justus vonHartlieb). The emphasis on aesthetics and related issues validates Moritz as a significant literary figure in his own right.But that significance isnot substantiated here, per haps because, as a discipline develops, it breaks its subject's substance down into ever smaller elements, in...

The Referendum in Venezuela: One Act in an Unfinished Drama

Abstract: Venezuelans voted on August 15, 2004 to keep President Hugo Chávez in office. Coming two years after the short-lived coup, the recall took place in an extremely divided society. Although endorsed by international observers, the opposition charged fraud. The government swept subsequent elections for governor and mayors. The government now controls all of the major institutions in the country, while facing a weakened opposition. It can therefore govern without the distraction (or excuse) of continued challenges, but also must avoid the temptation to abuse its dominant position. The opposition has the opportunity to move to a longer-term effort to mobilize and organize its supporters and its message.

Musical Play: A Case Study of Preschool Children and Parents

In this study of a 10-week music education program for preschool children and parents, we observed the musical behaviors of preschool children in free and structured musical play environments to discover how children explore sound alone and with others. Analysis of the data revealed three themes: unfinished play, extinguishing play, and enhancing play. The children communicated their needs for free musical play to adults and other children through statements, requests, gestures, and actions. We identified conditions that interrupted, modified, or enhanced children's musical play. We concluded that children needed extended, uninterrupted time for play episodes as well as appropriate materials in the environment. Adult valuing of all children's musical utterances and flexibility within structured lessons enhanced play.

In and Out of Time (Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Borges)

IN the Western tradition of storytelling, time is as much a mystery as a revelation. Willingly or not, author and reader confront it. It is the writer's, the artist's, and the musician's indispensable abstraction, a recurrent measurement or focal point in their imagination. And the imagination in its basic, creative function manipulates, expands, or (in the Eastern tradition) eliminates time at will. In that enigmatic process human drives that are either difficult or impossible to control-love, hate, dreams, hope, ecstasy, sorrow-become the mind's vital accomplices. Time, in the spirit of Borges, is inevitably our plaything. An exploration of the mysteries of clock, calendar, heritage, and future await the reader in the most revealing episodes of Don Quijote (for example, in the Cave of Montesinos and in the Duke's and Duchess's palace); in the amnesia epidemic and the extended existences of people and things in Cien anos de soledad; in Dostoevsky's deepest thoughts on the perception of death in life in several of his novels; in the ambiguous circumstances of Borges's stories; and in H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, a fantasy in which the Time Traveller describes his view of the world in the year 802,701 A.D. Early in Part I of The Idiot, Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin comments on the intensity and fullness of time experienced by a condemned man in Lyon who is scheduled to die by the guillotine a few minutes later. In his story milagro secreto, and in characteristically circuitous detail, Jorge Luis Borges creates a representative yet unique protagonist who through his circumstances is analogous to the figure mentioned by Prince Myshkin. Jaromir Hladik is a Jewish writer in Prague who is arrested in his apartment by the German Gestapo on March 19, 1939, and imprisoned. Ten days later, he is executed by a firing squad. Is Borges with Hladik taking up where Dostoevsky left off? Whether or not he had the Russian's text in mind, he clearly shared his curiosity over the mental effects of imminent death and came upon the imaginary event he needed as a literary counteraction to one of the terrifying realities of Nazi power before and during World War II. With Borges's timely encouragement, God grants Hladik's special request: a year's writing time to complete his unfinished play, Los enemigos, before the fusillade that will wipe him out within two minutes of that psychologically agitated yet intellectually serene prayer. Singular as it was, Hladik's experience had important antecedents. Two of them are executions referred to in The Idiot. As is well known, Fyodor Dostoyevsky-then a political dissident in his twenties-was escorted to a scaffold in St. Petersburg for his own execution on December 22, 1849; but the sentence was commuted just before the appointed moment and later reduced to four years in a Siberian prison. So the author knew what he and Prince Myshkin were talking about. His reference to the execution in Lyon reflects his commitment to social justice. Dostoevsky's fascination with individual human depravities did not deter him from denouncing institutionalized capital punishment as the worst of crimes. The Prince declares: To kill for murder is an immeasurably greater evil than the crime itself. Judicial murder is immeasurably more horrible than one committed by a robber (23). But judicial murder is also appropriate food for narrative thought (as in three of the best known Hispanic-American novels: Garcia Marquez's El general en su laberinto, Carpentier's El recurso del metodo, and Asturias's El senor Presidente); and, further on in The Idiot, Dostoevsky tells of a case in which a Borgesian kind of motif is clearly discernible. Keeping in mind Jaromir Hladik's postponable death, we hear Myshkin again during his first visit with the Yepanchin family. The episode he recalls this time-that of a 27-year-old prisoner who is reprieved minutes before his scheduled execution-is the author's reliving of his own traumatic experience (and at the same age) in St. …

Alma’s Unfinished Play: Bilingual Playwriting in a Summer School Program

In this article, Waldschmidt discusses one fourth-grade student’s attempt to write a bilingual script, based upon a story told to her by her father, within the context of a bilingual playwriting project.

Performing Justice: The Trials of Olympe de Gouges

Performing Justice: The Trials of Olympe de Gouges Janie Vanpée (bio) The arrest of Olympe de Gouges, author of The Declaration of the Rights of Woman, on July 20, 1793, at the onset of one of the most tumultuous periods of the French Revolution, should not have come as a surprise. For nearly a decade, de Gouges had been courting public controversy as a playwright fighting the theatrical establishment to have her plays produced and to democratize its archaic and patriarchal management practices. Since the outbreak of political turmoil in 1788, she had fearlessly published her opinions in a steady stream of political pamphlets that she distributed widely and often affixed to public walls throughout Paris. At a time when very few women acknowledged writing novels, let alone political tracts, when even fewer women succeeded in having their plays produced, de Gouges’s willingness to engage so publicly in two of the arenas traditionally reserved for men flouted convention and risked reprisal. The immediate cause of her arrest was her attempt to post hundreds of copies of a pamphlet, Toxicodindronn, Combat à mort des trois gouvernements (Three governments’ battle to the death), calling for a plebiscite to choose once and for all among three types of government—monarchy, federalism or republicanism. 1 Did de Gouges ignore that this pamphlet and a second version of it, Les Trois Urnes, ou le salut de la patrie (The salvation of the fatherland), defied the March 29 decree prohibiting the writing or publishing of any texts attempting to reestablish a monarchy? 2 Did she likewise [End Page 47] disregard the Convention’s recent vote to adopt a constitution that officially founded a republican form of government? 3 Or had the lack of response to her earlier, equally risky, political interventions—her offer to defend Louis XVI at his trial, her passionate defense of the recently arrested Girondins, her sharp attacks on Robespierre—inured her to danger and encouraged her to continue voicing her opinion and suggesting solutions to the increasing factionalism? 4 Records from the initial police interrogation show that de Gouges was indeed genuinely surprised to have been arrested and defended herself vigorously by recalling her numerous “patriotic” writings and her avid support of the Revolution and the Republic. Eager to defend her claims with the concrete proof of her texts, she herself led the commissioners voluntarily to her office and storehouse, when they could find none of her papers in her private apartment. Among the hundreds of copies of her pamphlets, plays, posters and correspondence that the authorities inventoried, was the manuscript of an unfinished play, La France sauvée ou le tyran détroné (France preserved, or the tyrant dethroned), that would later become a focus of the prosecutor’s case against her at her trial in November. From the one and a half acts that remain of the projected five-act play, it is clear that de Gouges planned a sweeping historical drama, centered on the desperate machinations of Queen Marie-Antoinette on the eve of August 10, 1792, and on the impending demise of the monarchy. Set in the queen’s chambers in the inner sanctum of the royal palace, the first act sketches out the drama’s driving conflict between the queen plotting defense strategies to uphold a crumbling monarchy and the revolutionary forces ushering in a democratic era represented unwittingly by the dauphin, the bumbling king, the hesitant soldiers of the national guard, Jérôme Pétion, the mayor of Paris, and, most forcefully, by a character named Olympe de Gouges. The act culminates in a confrontation between the queen and Olympe de Gouges, who harangues the queen for her seditious intentions, lectures her on how to lead her people, and finally predicts the imminent destruction of the monarchy. [End Page 48] Although the politically incendiary wall poster that provoked her arrest would serve as primary evidence at her trial, the other text that the prosecutor, Antoine-Quentin Fouquier-Tinville, cites extensively in the official Acte d’accusation is this unfinished, unproduced, unpublished play. 5 Why should this fragment of a play celebrating the fall of the monarchy have been singled out among all her political...

The 'Faust' Draft Notebook: A Facsimile of Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e. 18, Including Drafts of 'Scenes from the "Faust" of Goethe', 'Ginevra', 'Scenes from the "Magico Prodigioso" of Calderón, 'Fragments of an Unfinished Drama', 'Lines: "When the Lamp is Shattered"', 'From the Arabic', 'A Lament' ('O World! O Life! O Time'), 'With a Guitar, To Jane', and Miscellaneous Fragments

The 'Faust' Draft Notebook: A Facsimile of Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e. 18, Including Drafts of 'Scenes from the "Faust" of Goethe', 'Ginevra', 'Scenes from the "Magico Prodigioso" of Calderón, 'Fragments of an Unfinished Drama', 'Lines: "When the Lamp is Shattered"', 'From the Arabic', 'A Lament' ('O World! O Life! O Time'), 'With a Guitar, To Jane', and Miscellaneous Fragments of Verse and Prose, ed. Nora Crook and Timothy Webb, volume XIX of the Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts. New York and London: Garland, 1997. ISBN: 0815311540. Price: £198.. Un article de la revue Romanticism on the Net (Numéro 13, february 1999) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

Pirandello, the Sacred, and the Death of Tragedy

Pirandello, the Sacred, and the Death of Tragedy Nina daVinci Nichols ? When it is noticed at all, Pirandello's last, unfinished play / giganti della montagna (Mountain Giants) is described vaguely: as a culmination of his themes, or an existential manifesto, or a myth about the aesthetic imagination. While these generalizations may apply, they minimize an important set of ideas arising out of the dynamic relation between "inner" and "outer" dramas, that chief structural feature recurring in all of the theater plays. Quite predictably, many of these ideas subsume Pirandello's well known preoccupations with the existence of multiple realities, the theatricality ofconsciousness, and the creative process. They also, however, reflect a purpose more mystical than is implied by the loose term 'myth.' Clues to Pirandello's mystical bent at the time appear in biographical notes; in his strange essay about the sacred origins of Italian theater written as the Preface to a book on the subject;1 as well as in his other late plays on the theme of immortality . Even the submerged models I once identified for Pirandello's mage in this play—Shakespeare's Prospero and Nietzsche's Zarathustra—contribute to a sense of the play's mystical intentions, for Igiganti is atypically and densely allusive to other works, including his own.2 To abbreviate lengthy explication here, let me propose that the play subscribes to the modern mode which Elinor Fuchs has called the "mysterium."3 Named for its roots in the medieval Christian mystery play, the "mysterium" refers specifically to the prototypical form introduced by Strindberg's religious fairy-tale drama Easter and his To Damascus plays (1898-1901) while more generally embracing an otherworldly mood, an attunement to the prophetic, a longing for the "chant of the Infinite" that was audible in turn-of-the-century symbolist drama from which the "mysterium" most immediately springs. On one hand, the mode represents a "modern ana240 Nina da Vinci Nichols24 1 logue to the choric tragedy of ancient theater and comic form of medieval religious theater," two traits germane to Pirandello's premises in / giganti. At the same time, the "mysterium" alludes to its models "with a cunning irony, simultaneously embracing and distancing, even subverting their eschatological force." Twin planes of dramatic reality, one evoking the eternal history of mankind, the other the anecdotal experience of an individual, communicate directly so as to minimize the importance of a material actor and external appearances. As may be inferred, then, the mode includes aspects ofmodernist forms and impulses otherwise associated with expressionism, surrealism, existentialism, and other avant garde movements opposing realistic or naturalistic goals usually identified with, say, the early drama of Ibsen. Finally, the "mysterium" pattern of a journey toward salvation, thwarted and hindered by traffic in the mundane, suggests the quasi-allegorical teleology of redemption implicit in the mode's allusions to the ineffable as well as to the suffering and rejection dramatized in medieval Passion plays. Essentially static, / gigante* begins as a troupe of itinerant professional actors reach the end of long journeying at a ruined villa called Scalogna which is inhabited by aesthetic sprites like Shakespeare's Ariel.5 The troupe had been seeking the simple physical salvation of work in a town with a theater. Instead, the troupe discovers an existentialist utopia presided over by a mage called Cotrone and symbolizing either an eternal "within" or immaterial "beyond"—Scalogna borders on a country ofmaterialistic mountain giants hostile to art. While the two nearly allegorical sets of characters interact to express a constant dialectic between opposites—fancy and form, mind and body, passion and reason— the play's inclusive subject is the meaning of art in a fallen world. Pirandello long before had decided with Schlegel on the superiority ofimagination over reason, which is inadequate to apprehend life's highest values. By 1936, however, he wanted his abstract characters and the play's spectators as well to inhabit "the sacred dark of imagination where titans still live."6 In a word, he like Schlegel sought a mythology whose basis in human nature would at once combine the great mythologies of the past with new scientific knowledge of the psyche. The leader of the troupe, Countess...

Fragments of an unfinished play: a vernal play

Fragments of an unfinished play: a vernal play = Fragmento de una obra inacabada: obra vernal / translated by Brian Hughes and Francisco Javier Torres Ribelles

Pushkin’s “Journey to Arzrum”: The Poet at the Border

“Mne nenadobno puteshestvovať. la puteshestvuiu v svoem voobrazhenii,” said Aleksandr Pushkin, not quite ingenuously, toward the end of his life. Pushkin’s chronic desire for travel had so often been frustrated or deflected that his loudly lamented exile in the early 1820s to the Caucasus, Crimea, Bessarabia, and Odessa later came to represent, faute de mieux, the peripatetic freedom of his youth. When in 1829 Pushkin and Petr A. Viazemskii were refused permission to travel to Paris, Pushkin embarked instead on the illicit trip south that would become the basis for his literary “Puteshestvie v Arzrum” six years later. In 1836, with a rueful backward glance at the orientalist fashion that he himself had helped to launch in Russian poetry, Pushkin wrote, “Vinovat: ia by otdal vse, chto bylo pisano u nas v podrazhanie l.(ordu) Bai(ronu), za sleduiushchie nezadumchivye i ne-vostorzhennye stikhi, v kotorykh poet zastavliaet geroia svoego vosklitsať druz’iam: Druz’ia! Sestritsy! ia v Parizhe! Ia nachal zhit’, a nedyshať!” (12:93). Perhaps the exuberant first words of an unfinished drama, “Cherez nedeliu budy v Parizhe nepremenno” represent a vestige of that never-to-be-realized desire (7:251-253). In short, if the south served as an escape valve for dreams of uninhibited motion and adventure, it was also a surrogate, marking the boundaries rather than the fulfillment of that freedom. Not surprisingly, then, the theme of the seductive border crossing is central to the “Puteshestvie v Arzrum” (8:1, 463):

Playing with your speech organ: An unfinished play in five acts

Presented as an unachieved theater play, 4 this “paper” deals with the evolution of ideas concerning the relationships between the phonetic disintegration of non-fluent aphasics and the phonemic paraphasias of fluent aphasics. Act I summarizes how, soon after the turn of this century, neurologists, relying on half-implicit knowledge of the rule-governed nature of human languages, recognized three types of acquired dysfunctions impairing segmental production: the dysarthrias, anarthria and phonemic paraphasia. Act II underlines the influence of Troubetskoy's unachieved Grundzage der Phonologie and of the monograph by Alajouanine, Ombredane and Durand, entitled Le syndrome de désintégration phonétique dans l'aphasie (both published in 1939). In the context of Act III, psycholinguistics is presented as having given itself the task of testing the functional pertinency of linguistic theories, i.e. as concerned with the ways in which linguistic structures are dynamically processed by the human mind and its subserving brain. The problem of “false evaluation” in IPA transcripts of pathological speech is discussed at the beginning of Act IV; it is suggested that devoicing of voiced consonants, as observed in Broca's aphasia, is a phonetic rather than a phonological dysfunction (co-articulatory processing of segments, i.e. synchronous implementation of articulatory gestures is at fault, whereas underlying phonological targets are flawless). It is proposed, in Act V, that aphasiological dichotomies are bound to be somewhat mendacious. How, for instance, could the metathesis, assimilations and certain other deviation types observed in Broca's aphasia be phonetically constrained? Moreover, acoustical analyses of speech production have revealed the existence of subtle phonetic alterations in the discourse of Wernicke's jargonaphasics: how could these be phonologically constrained? The conclusion takes the form of a péroraison in which a fundamental question is raised as to the meaning of the prefix “neuro” in words such as neuropsychology and neurolinguistics.