True West (1986)

Playwright: Sam Shepard Director: Jeff Richards Set Design: Matt Gordon Costumes: Eliza Chugg Academic Year: 1985-1986https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/productions_1980s/1057/thumbnail.jp

Fool for Love (1987)

Playwright: Sam Shepard Director: Joseph Chistensen Academic Year: 1986-1987https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/productions_1980s/1061/thumbnail.jp

Buried Child (1985)

Playwright: Sam Shepard Director: Jeff Richards Set Design: Roy Harline Costumes: Audrey Walker Academic Year: 1985-1986https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/productions_1980s/1039/thumbnail.jp

The Investigation of Identity Construction: a Foucauldian Reading of Sam Shepard's Buried Child

Shepard is peculiarly powerful in his symbolic family problem plays: True West, Buried Child and Curse of the Starving Class. He allegorizes the American experience and undermines the myth of America as the New Eden. The present study seeks to critically explore Sam Shepard's Buried Child in terms of Foucauldian conception of identity construction. Shepard is depicting a dystopian world with its bewildered characters; however he has still got a romantic view of individuals trying to grapple with the society in order to get unity and order. This Shephardian attitude towards human beings is seemingly a free agent that overlaps the Foucauldian view which establishes a philosophy focusing on the relationship between the self and the society. The present essay attempts to demonstrate the complicated relationship between the self and the opposing forces

Spezielle Anatomie von Lunge, Brusthöhle und Zwerchfell bei Hund und Katze

The interrelatedness of text and performance is a feature of semiotic approaches to drama and semioticians’ interest in processes of signification, decodification and interpretation. In recent years theater semioticians have turned their attention from texts to contexts, from descriptive and theoretical approaches towards socio-cultural methodologies that consider intertextuality as an important factor in the process of analysis. Dramatic texts are among the most complex of written works and highly sensitive to socio-cultural context. A dramatic text is ‘staged’ in readers’ imaginations, in contexts which may differ greatly from the playwright’s context. The interaction of real and not-real in the text, along with references to different sign-systems outside the written text, confronts readers with a complex and multifaceted but communicative semiosphere full of paradox. This thesis considers how dramatic texts anticipate and interact with this embedding of theater in context. In order to investigate the sophisticated dramatic writing by the contemporary American playwright, Sam Shepard, the thesis develops an eclectic semiotic approach based on a restricted Lotmanian notion of the semiosphere in the play world, as a simulacrum of the real world in which communication is possible between characters who are defined by their individual Mit-welts. Mit-welt is a term formulated specifically for this thesis to explain characters’ conceptualization of the world, how they model the outside world and respond to it within a play. The thesis uses Mit-welt to suggest that there is a socio-semiotic interaction which takes place because of the environments that characters ‘bring with them’ in their interaction with others. The thesis also recognizes the problem of dealing with primarily dramatic texts by reviving and extending the semiotic notion of foregrounding, which is used to analyze how the text embodies the playwright’s choices. In particular, this raises the issue of how stage directions function as a focalizing element of the text. This thesis argues that, rather than just being a thin metonymy of the complex signification of the performed text, stage directions are already important to the interpretive possibilities of a play and deserve greater attention than they normally receive. The second half of the thesis is an analysis of four plays by Sam Shepard from a semiotic perspective, concentrating on the dramatic texts as versatile and complex forms of communication. The four selected plays span the four decades of Shepard’s prolific writing career: The Unseen Hand (1969), Buried Child (1978), True West (1980) and Kicking a Dead Horse (2007). Shepard is a semiotically aware playwright whose plays have a distinctive richness in their use of sign-systems. The thesis demonstrates how Shepard makes innovative use of social, cultural and mythical codes in his plays. In them familiar elements of everyday life appear to co-exist paradoxically with defamiliarizing or hyper-real elements. The thesis argues that a new semiotic approach to the dramatic text can thus identify distinctive features of Shepard’s writing

Negotiating Reality: Sam Shepard’s States of Shock, or “A Vaudeville Nightmare”

In the course of a career that spans half a century, from the Vietnam era to the America of Barack Obama, Sam Shepard has often been labelled as a “quintessentially American” playwright. According to Leslie Wade, “[d]rawing from the disparate image banks of rock and roll, detective fiction, B-movies, and Wild West adventure shows,” Shepard’s texts “function as a storehouse of images, icons, and idioms that denote American culture and an American sensibility” (Sam Shepard 2). The article addresses Shepard’s work in the 1990s, when—as suggested by Stephen J. Bottoms—the writer’s prime concern was with depicting “a Faustian nation mired in depravity and corruption” (245). The discussion centres primarily upon a brief anti-war play first presented by the American Place Theatre in New York City on 30 April 1991, States of Shock, whose very title appears to sum up much of the dramatist’s writing to date, aptly describing the disturbing atmospheres generated by his works and the sense of disorientation frequently experienced by both Shepard’s characters and his audiences. The essay seeks to provide an insight into this unsettling one-act play premiered in the wake of the US engagement in the First Gulf War and deploying extravagant, grotesque theatricality to convey a sense of horror and revulsion at American military arrogance and moral myopia. It investigates how Shepard’s haunting text—subtitled “a vaudeville nightmare” and focusing on a confrontation between a peculiar male duo: an ethically crippled, jingoistic Colonel and a wheelchair-using war veteran named Stubbs—revisits familiar Shepard territory, as well as branching out in new directions. It demonstrates how the playwright interrogates American culture and American identity, especially American masculinity, both reviewing the country’s unsavory past and commenting on its complicit present. Special emphasis in the discussion is placed on Shepard’s preoccupation with the aesthetics of performance and the visual elements of his theatre. The essay addresses the artist’s experimental approach, reflecting upon his creative deployment of dramatic conventions and deliberate deconstruction of American realism

Modelling of laboratory data of bi-directional reflectance of regolith surface containing Alumina

Bidirectional reflectance of a surface is defined as the ratio of the scattered radiation at the detector to the incident irradiance as a function of geometry. The accurate knowledge of the bidirectional reflection function (BRF) of layers composed of discrete, randomly positioned scattering particles is very essential for many remote sensing, engineering, biophysical applications and in different areas of Astrophysics. The computations of BRF's for plane parallel particulate layers are usually reduced to solve the radiative transfer equation (RTE) by the existing techniques. In this work we present our laboratory data on bidirectional reflectance versus phase angle for two sample sizes of 0.3 and 1 $\mu m$ of Alumina for the He-Ne laser at 632.8 nm (red) and 543.5nm(green) wavelength. The nature of the phase curves of the asteroids depends on the parameters like- particle size, composition, porosity, roughness etc. In our present work we analyse the data which are being generated using single scattering phase function i.e. Mie theory considering particles to be compact sphere. The well known Hapke formula will be considered along with different particle phase function such as Mie and Henyey Greenstein etc to model the laboratory data obtained at the asteroid laboratory of Assam University.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures [accepted for publication in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia (PASA) on 8 June, 2011

Barnes Hospital Bulletin

https://digitalcommons.wustl.edu/bjc_barnes_bulletin/1204/thumbnail.jp