A01=Martin Harries
Adaptation
Adrienne Kennedy
Aesthetics
Artistic response
Audience
Author_Martin Harries
Category=ATD
Category=ATF
Category=DS
Category=DSBH
Category=DSG
Cinema
Comparison
Contestation
Critique
Cultural shift
Discourse
Domination
Drama
Engagement
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eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Hegemony
Hyperbole
Influence
Innovation
Media
Medium
Movies
Narrative
Omnipresence
Performance
Popular culture
Postwar
Race
Refusal
Representation
Resistance
Samuel Beckett
Screen
Spectators
Spectatorship
Stage
Tennessee Williams
Theatrical apparatus
Transformation
Visibility
World War II
Product details
- ISBN 9780226838717
- Weight: 426g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 23 May 2025
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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A study of the impact of film and mass culture on drama after World War II.
In Theater after Film, Martin Harries argues that after 1945, as cinema became omnipresent in popular culture, theater had to respond to cinema’s hegemony. Theater couldn’t break that hegemony, but it could provide a zone of contestation. Theater made film’s domination of the cultural field visible through hyperbole, refusal, and other strategies, thereby unsettling its power. Postwar theatrical experiment, Harries shows, often channeled and represented film’s mass cultural force, while knowing that it could never possess that force. Throughout the book, Harries brings critical theory into contact with theories of performance. Although Theater after Film treats the theatrical work of many figures, its central focus falls on Tennessee Williams, Samuel Beckett, and Adrienne Kennedy. Discussions of these dramatists consider their ways of addressing spectators, the politics of race between film and theater, and the place of the theatrical apparatus. Readings of these central figures in twentieth-century theater exemplify the book’s historical engagement with the media surround that drama confronted. This confrontation, Harries shows, was central to the development of some of the most continually compelling postwar drama.
In Theater after Film, Martin Harries argues that after 1945, as cinema became omnipresent in popular culture, theater had to respond to cinema’s hegemony. Theater couldn’t break that hegemony, but it could provide a zone of contestation. Theater made film’s domination of the cultural field visible through hyperbole, refusal, and other strategies, thereby unsettling its power. Postwar theatrical experiment, Harries shows, often channeled and represented film’s mass cultural force, while knowing that it could never possess that force. Throughout the book, Harries brings critical theory into contact with theories of performance. Although Theater after Film treats the theatrical work of many figures, its central focus falls on Tennessee Williams, Samuel Beckett, and Adrienne Kennedy. Discussions of these dramatists consider their ways of addressing spectators, the politics of race between film and theater, and the place of the theatrical apparatus. Readings of these central figures in twentieth-century theater exemplify the book’s historical engagement with the media surround that drama confronted. This confrontation, Harries shows, was central to the development of some of the most continually compelling postwar drama.
Martin Harries is professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Forgetting Lot’s Wife: On Destructive Spectatorship and Scare Quotes from Shakespeare: Marx, Keynes, and the Language of Reenchantment.
