Overview

Grounded equally in discussions of theatre history, literary genre, and theory, Martin Puchner's study explores the conflict between avant-garde theatre and modernism. While the avant-garde celebrated all things theatrical, a dominant strain of modernism tended to define itself against the theatre, valuing lyric poetry and the novel instead. Defenders of the theatre dismiss modernism's aversion to the stage and its mimicking actors as one more form of the old ""anti-theatrical"" prejudice. But Puchner shows that modernism's ambivalence about the theatre was shared even by playwrights and directors and thus was a productive force responsible for some of the greatest achievements in dramatic literature and theatre. A reaction to the aggressive theatricality of Wagner and his followers, the modernist backlash against the theatre led to the peculiar genre of the closet drama - a theatrical piece intended to be read rather than staged - whose long-overlooked significance Puchner traces from the theatrical texts of Mallarme and Stein to the dramatic ""Circe"" chapter of Joyce's ""Ulysses"". At times, then, the anti-theatrical impulse leads to a withdrawal from the theatre. At other times, however, it returns to the stage, when Yeats blends lyric poetry with Japanese Noh dancers, when Brecht controls the stage with novelistic techniques, and when Beckett buries his actors in barrels and behind obsessive stage directions. The modernist theatre thus owes much to the closet drama whose literary strategies it blends with a new ""mise en scene"". While offering an alternative history of modernist theatre and literature, Puchner also provides an account of the contradictory forces within modernism.

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Reviews

<p>A provocative reassessment of modernism and the post-Wagnerian theater. Stage Fright is well written, clearly argued, and nicely organized, with a diction that is authoritative without being stuffy... Those interested in the history of the theater will find in Puchner's emphasis on the value and devaluing of theatricality a means of re-reading a century. Scholars of modernism may find this value and its articulation in Stage Fright equally useful for approaching other texts and genres.--Geoffrey Baker Comparative Literature (01/01/0001)

After this study, a lot of polemic energy spent in debate between pro-theatricalists and anti-theatricalists, between adherents of modernism and those of the avant-garde, can be spared. The fault lines between solipsistic and elitist modernism on the one side, and a collaborative and political avant-garde on the other, must be drawn anew. As Puchner brilliantly demonstrates, the radical difference must be thought, first and foremost, along the parameters of anti-theatrical modernism versus the theatrical avant-garde... By doing justice to the minute details of... the dramas and theories of MallarmA(c), Joyce, Stein, Yeats, Brecht and Beckett, Puchner makes a compelling case for the central thesis of the book. Moreover, Puchner... provides a new vocabulary to analyze modernism's 'hate affair' with the theater. -- Klaus Mladek, Modernism/modernity

<p>A capital addition to the history of theater as well as an innovative theoretical approach rooted in literary history.--Anne V. Cirella-Urrutia The Comparatist

Author Information

Martin Puchner is a professor of English and comparative literature at Harvard University and author of The Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in Theater and Philosophy.

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