BOOK NEWS: Listening to Gertrude Stein's plays as radio theater

 Radio Free Stein: Gertrude Stein's Parlor Plays

by Adam J. Frank

Northwestern UP, 2024

ISBN: 9780810148062

https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810148062/radio-free-stein/

What happens when we listen to Gertrude Stein’s plays as radio and music theater? This book explores the sound of Stein’s theater and proposes that radio, when approached both historically and phenomenologically, offers technical solutions to her texts’ unique challenges. Adam J. Frank documents the collaborative project of staging Stein’s early plays and offers new critical interpretations of these lesser-known works. Radio Free Stein grapples with her innovative theater poetics from a variety of disciplinary perspectives: sound and media studies, affect and object relations theory, linguistic performativity, theater scholarship, and music composition.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

"With dazzling online recordings and scripts, Radio Free Stein takes readers backstage to reveal the inventive workshop process Adam Frank has used in productions of Gertrude Stein’s early voice plays. The 1934 NBC radio interview Stein gave on her US tour resonated with her playwriting “by making audience available as feeling” and Frank brilliantly renders this insight in productions that capture the plays’ strange and arresting illocutionary force."—Linda Voris, American University

“Radio Free Stein’s fluent roving across considerations of performance, psychoanalytic theorization of the radio, and philosophical and queer theories of the performative is brilliant and compelling. This is a significant contribution to both Stein studies and modern theater studies, as well as media and modernist studies.”—E. L. McCallum, Michigan State University

ADAM J. FRANK is a professor of English at the University of British Columbia. His books include Transferential Poetics, from Poe to Warhol and, coauthored with Elizabeth Wilson, A Silvan Tomkins Handbook. He is the creator and producer of the Radio Free Stein critical sound project, available at radiofreestein.com.

BOOK NEWS: Interviews with Tony Award-winning playwright Terrence McNally

Conversations with Terrence McNally

EDITED BY RAYMOND-JEAN FRONTAIN

UP of Mississippi

ISBN: 9781496843227

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/C/Conversations-with-Terrence-McNally

Arriving in New York at the tail end of what has been termed the “Golden Age” of Broadway and the start of the Off-Broadway theater movement, Terrence McNally (1938–2020) first established himself as a dramatist of the absurd and a biting social critic. He quickly recognized, however, that one is more likely to change people’s minds by first changing their hearts, and—in outrageous farces like The Ritz and It’s Only a Play—began using humor more broadly to challenge social biases. By the mid-1980s, as the emerging AIDS pandemic called into question America’s treatment of persons isolated by suffering and sickness, he became the theater’s great poet of compassion, dramatizing the urgent need of human connection and the consequences when such connections do not take place.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Conversations with Terrence McNally collects nineteen interviews with the celebrated playwright. In these interviews, one hears McNally reflect on theater as the most collaborative of the arts, the economic pressures that drive the theater industry, the unique values of music and dance, and the changes in American theater over McNally’s fifty-plus year career. The winner of four competitive Tony Awards as the author of the Best Play (Love! Valour! Compassion! and Master Class) and author of the book for the Best Musical (Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ragtime), McNally holds the distinction of being one of the few writers for the American theater who excelled in straight drama as well as musical comedy. In addition, his canon extends to opera; his collaboration with composer Jake Heggie, Dead Man Walking, has proven the most successful new American opera of the last twenty-five years.

"Important and outstanding.... This highly recommended collection will be an essential addition to all libraries with theater collections." - Herbert E. Shapiro, Library Journal

 

Raymond-Jean Frontain is an independent scholar who has published eight books and over 100 scholarly articles on the Bible as literature, gay literature, Renaissance poetry, the Indian novel, and modern drama. His previous works on Terrence McNally include The Theater of Terrence McNally: Something about Grace (2019) and an edition of McNally’s writings about theater, Muse of Fire (2021). He is currently at work on a study of Tennessee Williams’s sexual ethic.

Book News: Uniting art, writing, and protest in the 1960s Black Arts Movement

Start a Riot!

Civil Unrest in Black Arts Movement 

Drama, Fiction, and Poetry

BY CASARAE LAVADA ABDUL-GHANI

30% off during February

UP of Mississippi, 2022

ISBN: 9781496840455

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/S/Start-a-Riot

While the legacy of Black urban rebellions during the turbulent 1960s continues to permeate throughout US histories and discourses, scholars seldom explore within scholarship examining Black Cultural Production, artist-writers of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) that addressed civil unrest, specifically riots, in their artistic writings.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Start a Riot! Civil Unrest in Black Arts Movement Drama, Fiction, and Poetry analyzes riot iconography and its usefulness as a political strategy of protestation. Through a mixed-methods approach of literary close-reading, historical, and sociological analysis, Casarae Lavada Abdul-Ghani considers how BAM artist-writers like Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Ben Caldwell, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, and Henry Dumas challenge misconceptions regarding Black protest through experimental explorations in their writings. Representations of riots became more pronounced in the 1960s as pivotal leaders shaping Black consciousness, such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. , were assassinated. BAM artist-writers sought to override the public's interpretation in their literary exposés that a riot’s disjointed and disorderly methods led to more chaos than reparative justice.

Start a Riot! uncovers how BAM artist-writers expose anti-Black racism and, by extension, the United States' inability to compromise with Black America on matters related to citizenship rights, housing (in)security, economic inequality, and education—tenets emphasized during the Black Power Movement. Abdul-Ghani argues that BAM artist-writers did not merely write literature that reflected a spirit of protest; in many cases, they understood their texts, themselves, as acts of protest.

"Start a Riot! will forge new directions in the study of art, political activism, and contemporary African American culture. Analyzing neglected or overlooked texts, Abdul-Ghani unveils the recurrent attention to the idea of the riot and sheds light on the complexity of thought during the Black Arts era, proving we might not know the Black Arts Movement and its key texts as well as we thought. "

-- GerShun Avilez, author of Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism

Casarae Lavada Abdul-Ghani is a scholar of African American literary cultural studies and owner of Africana Instructional Design.

Book News: Risk as the crux of theatre

When Life Gives You Risk, Make Risk Theatre: Three Tragedies and Six Essays

BY EDWIN WONG

Friesen Press, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-03-913509-3 

https://books.friesenpress.com/store/title/119734000213016212/Edwin-Wong%2C-Gabriel-Jason-Dean-and-Nicholas-Dunn-%26-Emily-McClain-When-Life-Gives-You-Risk%2C-Make-Risk-Theatre

Wong’s first book upended tragic literary theory by arguing that risk is the dramatic fulcrum of the action. It also launched an international playwriting competition (risktheatre.com). His second book expands on how chance directs the action, both on and off the stage.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Inside you will find three risk theatre tragedies by acclaimed playwrights: In Bloom (Gabriel Jason Dean), The Value (Nicholas Dunn), and Children of Combs and Watch Chains (Emily McClain). From the poppy fields of Afghanistan to the motel rooms and doctors’ offices lining interstate expressways, these plays, by simulating risk, show how theatre is a dress rehearsal for life.

Six risk theatre essays round off this volume. In a dazzling display from Aeschylus to Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy, and Arthur Miller, Wong reinterprets theatre through chance and probability theory. After risk theatre, you will never look at literature in the same way.

Edwin Wong is a classicist and theatre researcher specializing in the impact of the highly improbable. He has been invited to talk at venues from the Kennedy Center and the University of Coimbra in Portugal to international conferences held by the National New Play Network, the Canadian Association of Theatre Research, the Society of Classical Studies, and the Classical Association of the Middle West and South. His first book, The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy, is igniting an international arts movement. He was educated at Brown University and lives in Victoria, Canada.

Book News: Analyzing the understudied women playwrights of the US South

Marginalized: Southern Women Playwrights Confront Race, Region, and Gender

BY CASEY KAYSER

UP of Mississippi, 2021

ISBN 978-1-4968-3591-8

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/M/Marginalized

Winner of the 2021 Eudora Welty Prize

In contrast to other literary genres, drama has received little attention in southern studies, and women playwrights in general receive less recognition than their male counterparts. In Marginalized: Southern Women Playwrights Confront Race, Region, and Gender, author Casey Kayser addresses these gaps by examining the work of southern women playwrights, making the argument that representations of the American South on stage are complicated by difficulties of identity, genre, and region.

Through analysis of the dramatic texts, the rhetoric of reviews of productions, as well as what the playwrights themselves have said about their plays and productions, Kayser delineates these challenges and argues that playwrights draw on various conscious strategies in response. These strategies, evident in the work of such playwrights as Pearl Cleage, Sandra Deer, Lillian Hellman, Beth Henley, Marsha Norman, and Shay Youngblood, provide them with the opportunity to lead audiences to reconsider monolithic understandings of northern and southern regions and, ultimately, create new visions of the South.

“Nuanced and tempered throughout, Marginalized: Southern Women Playwrights Confront Race, Region, and Gender is a provocative study that greatly extends our understanding of the various minefields that southern women writers navigate when they write for the stage.”

—Will Brantley, author of Feminine Sense in Southern Memoir: Smith, Glasgow, Welty, Hellman, Porter, and Hurston

"Its greatest contribution, I think, is its advice to critics, readers, and consumers of American theatre: the American South is not a monolith, indivisible and uniform, and southern women’s plays should neither be overlooked nor misread. They are far too smart for that."

—Amy R. Martin, Southern Review of Books

CASEY KAYSER is assistant professor at University of Arkansas. She is coeditor of Carson McCullers in the Twenty-First Century and Understanding the Short Fiction of Carson McCullers. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Medical Humanities, Pedagogy, Mississippi Quarterly, and Midwestern Folklore.

Book News: Exploring Flann O'Brien's dark comedy

 Flann O’Brien: Gallows Humour

EDITED BY RUBEN BORG AND PAUL FAGAN

Cork University Press, 2020

ISBN: 9781782054214

https://www.corkuniversitypress.com/Flann-O-Brien-p/9781782054214.htm

The essays collected in this volume draw unprecedented critical attention to the centrality of politics in Flann O’Brien’s art. The organizing theme of Gallows Humour focuses these inquiries onto key encounters between the body and the law, between death and the comic spirit in the author’s canon. These innovative analyses explore the place of biopolitics in O’Brien’s modernist experimentation and popular writing through reflections on his handling of the thematics of violence, justice, capital punishment, eugenics, prosthetics, skin, prostitution, syphilis, rape, reproduction, illness, auto-immune deficiency, abjection, drinking, Gaelic games, and masculinist nationalism across a diverse range of genres, intertexts, contexts.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Ruben Borg is associate professor and chair of the department of English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Prior to Gallows Humour, he co-edited two volumes on Flann O’Brien for Cork University Press: Contesting Legacies (with Paul Fagan and Werner Huber: 2014), and Problems with Authority (with Paul Fagan and John McCourt: 2017).

Paul Fagan is senior scientist at Salzburg University, as well as a lecturer at the University of Vienna and co-founder of the Vienna Irish Studies and Cultural Theories Summer School. As well as co-editing the Cork University Press collections Flann O’Brien: Contesting Legacies (2014) and Flann O’Brien: Problems with Authority (2017), Fagan is a co-founder of the International Flann O’Brien Society and is presently completing a monograph on the Irish Literary Hoax Tradition.