Talk-show confessions, online rants, stand-up routines, inspirational speeches, banal reflections and calls to arms: we live in an age of solo voices demanding to be heard. In The Contemporary American Monologue Eddie Paterson looks at the pioneering work of US artists Spalding Gray, Laurie Anderson, Anna Deavere Smith and Karen Finley, and the development of solo performance in the US as a method of cultural and political critique. Ironic confession, post-punk poetry, investigations of race and violence, and subversive polemic, this book reveals the link between the rise of radical monologue in the late 20th century and history of speechmaking, politics, civil rights, individual freedom and the American Dream in the United States. It shows how US artists are speaking back to the cultural, political and economic forces that shape the world. Eddie Paterson traces the importance of the monologue in Shakespeare, Brecht, Beckett, Chekov, Pinter, O'Neill and Williams, before offering a comprehensive analysis of several of the most influential and innovative American practitioners of monologue performance. The Contemporary American Monologue constitutes the first book-length account of US monologists that links the tradition of oratory and speechmaking in the colony to the appearance of solo performance as a distinctly American phenomenon.

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Yes, you can access The Contemporary American Monologue by Eddie Paterson, Enoch Brater, Mark Taylor-Batty in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Medien & darstellende Kunst & Theater. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher

Methuen Drama

Year

2015

ISBN

9781472585042

Edition

Topic

Medien & darstellende Kunst

Subtopic

Theater

Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction
Chapter 1 Monologue in Western Drama
Chapter 2 Monologue in American Performance
Chapter 3 Confessional Monologue and the Legacy of Spalding Gray
Chapter 4 Post-punk Monologue and the Performances of Laurie Anderson
Chapter 5 Rights Monologue and the Work of Anna Deavere Smith
Chapter 6 Radical Monologue and the Performances of Karen Finley
Chapter 7 Future Monologue
Notes
Bibliography
About the Author
Index