서브메뉴
검색
London, 1988: Premillennial Theater and the Limits of Utopia
London, 1988: Premillennial Theater and the Limits of Utopia
상세정보
- 자료유형
- 학위논문 서양
- 최종처리일시
- 20260202103634
- ISBN
- 9798288800726
- DDC
- 792
- 저자명
- Read, Madeleine.
- 서명/저자
- London, 1988: Premillennial Theater and the Limits of Utopia
- 발행사항
- [Sl] : University of California, Irvine, 2025
- 발행사항
- Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2025
- 형태사항
- 193 p
- 주기사항
- Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 87-01, Section: A.
- 주기사항
- Advisor: Harries, Martin.
- 학위논문주기
- Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Irvine, 2025.
- 초록/해제
- 요약This dissertation argues that the British political and theatrical imagination of the late twentieth century depended on a troubled dialectic between the utopic and the tragic. At the end of a decade of congealing conservative rule, London's left flank struggled to articulate a persuasive alternative to the dismantling of public life. It foresaw catastrophe in the Thatcherite world of corporate consolidation and global capital, in the glare of the oncoming millennium and its promised end of history; it wanted to reclaim the orientation toward an ideal politics-predicated on freedom and plurality, publicness and selfhood-that had been one rosy legacy of the now-defunct Enlightenment. London theaters in 1988 staged challenging, often contradictory works that struggled against the aporias of stagnating political thought. These works try, and sometimes fail, to imagine what kinds of action might be possible against emerging orthodoxies that declare action obsolete. What utopias can be thought, they seem to ask, in a resolutely anti-utopian age? And, approaching a millennium that threatens catastrophe, is thinking utopia of any use?The no-places that take shape in these premillennial plays-always stalled or unstable or fantastical-are part of the search for a politics adequate to the late twentieth century. My project begins in the late postwar period, with the disappointed revolutionaries of Caryl Churchill's 1976 Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, and explores what Raymond Williams called the "widespread loss of the future" that emerged in Britain out of the retrenchment and stagnation of the seventies. Then my three core chapters take up a handful of plays produced in 1988. Howard Brenton's "utopia trilogy," which runs at the Royal Court from April to June, is the first: beginning, but not ending, with the realist conventions that were the mode du jour, it conjures scenes of grim violence next to scenes out of fanciful comedies. It both mourns the loss of events figured by "the end of history," and, simultaneously, wonders if that same loss might be utopian. Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good, also at the Royal Court in September, evinces the will to believe in a renewed leftist politics and in its aspirational utopias, but its optimism is belied by anxieties about the looming specter of the state of exception and by the collapse of the categories of thought that girded leftist humanism. Its ambivalence points toward a fundamental shift in the premillennial imagination, a reevaluation of the political functions of art in a world with a newly awakened sense of catastrophe. Finally, David Hare's The Secret Rapture premieres at the National in October. Legible as a dour response to the other plays, Hare's modern tragedy lays bare the pervasive horizon the Thatcherite world imposes on the imagination, dramatizes the flattening force of its rhetoric and the rapture it promises but never delivers. It imagines its own present to be the limit of utopia.
- 일반주제명
- Theater
- 일반주제명
- English literature
- 일반주제명
- Political science
- 일반주제명
- European history
- 키워드
- Apocalypse
- 키워드
- London
- 키워드
- Millennium
- 키워드
- Neoliberalism
- 키워드
- Utopia
- 기타저자
- University of California, Irvine English
- 기본자료저록
- Dissertations Abstracts International. 87-01A.
- 전자적 위치 및 접속
- 로그인 후 원문을 볼 수 있습니다.
MARC
008260126s2025 us c eng d■001000017358034
■00520260202103634
■006m o d
■007cr#unu||||||||
■020 ▼a9798288800726
■035 ▼a(MiAaPQ)AAI32047349
■040 ▼aMiAaPQ▼cMiAaPQ
■0820 ▼a792
■1001 ▼aRead, Madeleine.
■24510▼aLondon, 1988: Premillennial Theater and the Limits of Utopia
■260 ▼a[Sl]▼bUniversity of California, Irvine▼c2025
■260 1▼aAnn Arbor▼bProQuest Dissertations & Theses▼c2025
■300 ▼a193 p
■500 ▼aSource: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 87-01, Section: A.
■500 ▼aAdvisor: Harries, Martin.
■5021 ▼aThesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Irvine, 2025.
■520 ▼aThis dissertation argues that the British political and theatrical imagination of the late twentieth century depended on a troubled dialectic between the utopic and the tragic. At the end of a decade of congealing conservative rule, London's left flank struggled to articulate a persuasive alternative to the dismantling of public life. It foresaw catastrophe in the Thatcherite world of corporate consolidation and global capital, in the glare of the oncoming millennium and its promised end of history; it wanted to reclaim the orientation toward an ideal politics-predicated on freedom and plurality, publicness and selfhood-that had been one rosy legacy of the now-defunct Enlightenment. London theaters in 1988 staged challenging, often contradictory works that struggled against the aporias of stagnating political thought. These works try, and sometimes fail, to imagine what kinds of action might be possible against emerging orthodoxies that declare action obsolete. What utopias can be thought, they seem to ask, in a resolutely anti-utopian age? And, approaching a millennium that threatens catastrophe, is thinking utopia of any use?The no-places that take shape in these premillennial plays-always stalled or unstable or fantastical-are part of the search for a politics adequate to the late twentieth century. My project begins in the late postwar period, with the disappointed revolutionaries of Caryl Churchill's 1976 Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, and explores what Raymond Williams called the "widespread loss of the future" that emerged in Britain out of the retrenchment and stagnation of the seventies. Then my three core chapters take up a handful of plays produced in 1988. Howard Brenton's "utopia trilogy," which runs at the Royal Court from April to June, is the first: beginning, but not ending, with the realist conventions that were the mode du jour, it conjures scenes of grim violence next to scenes out of fanciful comedies. It both mourns the loss of events figured by "the end of history," and, simultaneously, wonders if that same loss might be utopian. Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good, also at the Royal Court in September, evinces the will to believe in a renewed leftist politics and in its aspirational utopias, but its optimism is belied by anxieties about the looming specter of the state of exception and by the collapse of the categories of thought that girded leftist humanism. Its ambivalence points toward a fundamental shift in the premillennial imagination, a reevaluation of the political functions of art in a world with a newly awakened sense of catastrophe. Finally, David Hare's The Secret Rapture premieres at the National in October. Legible as a dour response to the other plays, Hare's modern tragedy lays bare the pervasive horizon the Thatcherite world imposes on the imagination, dramatizes the flattening force of its rhetoric and the rapture it promises but never delivers. It imagines its own present to be the limit of utopia.
■590 ▼aSchool code: 0030.
■650 4▼aTheater
■650 4▼aEnglish literature
■650 4▼aPolitical science
■650 4▼aBritish & Irish literature
■650 4▼aEuropean history
■653 ▼aApocalypse
■653 ▼aLondon
■653 ▼aMillennium
■653 ▼aNeoliberalism
■653 ▼aUtopia
■690 ▼a0465
■690 ▼a0593
■690 ▼a0615
■690 ▼a0335
■71020▼aUniversity of California, Irvine▼bEnglish.
■7730 ▼tDissertations Abstracts International▼g87-01A.
■790 ▼a0030
■791 ▼aPh.D.
■792 ▼a2025
■793 ▼aEnglish
■85640▼uhttp://www.riss.kr/pdu/ddodLink.do?id=T17358034▼nKERIS▼z이 자료의 원문은 한국교육학술정보원에서 제공합니다.


