Dramatic closure : reading the end
In Dramatic Closure, author June Schlueter explores closure within both a traditional Aristotelian paradigm and contemporary reader-response theory, necessarily revising narrative insights to accommodate the special features of drama as a literary and performance form. Examples of plays from Oedipus to the present appear throughout the book, and individual chapters are dedicated to sustained discussions of William Shakespeare's King Lear, Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Arthur Miller's The Ride Down Mount Morgan, and Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire. The author emphasizes Shakespeare and, especially, modern drama in the belief that these plays provide salient models of the theoretical principles of reading toward closure. A chapter on tendencies in modern plays covers a wide range of material, suggesting ways in which twentieth-century drama disrupts the Aristotelian model and defers to the provisional or unsettling end
Print Book, English, ©1995
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press ; Associated University Presses, Madison [N.J.], London, ©1995
Criticism, interpretation, etc
144 pages ; 24 cm
9780838635834, 0838635830
31374027
1. The Promised End
2. The Meaning of the End
3. The Reader's Role
4. The Conventional End
5. The End of Dialogue
6. The End of Character
7. (Con)testing the End: Tendencies in Modern Plays
8. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: A Postmortem
9. The Ride Down Mount Morgan: Scripting the Closing Scene
10. Prospective and Retrospective Reading
11. Reading Toward Closure: A Streetcar Named Desire
12. The Performance Text
13. Staging the Promised End
14. Curtain Call: Theatrical Closure