Storytelling, War Trauma and Aporias of History on Stage: Richard Kalinoski's "Beast on the Moon" and José Rivera's "Cloud Tectonics"

El artículo se centra en los esfuerzos respectivos y diferenciados de los dramaturgos richard kalinoski y josé rivera por analizar la recepción de ciertos aspectos del trauma de guerra, recurriendo de manera efectiva a las modalidades exclusivas a travésThe article focuses on the respective and distinctive efforts of playwrights richard kalinoski and josé rivera to examine the reception of particular aspects of war trauma, resorting effectively to the exclusive modes in which drama and theater accommoda

Mediating Acts of War/Staging Crises of Sensibility: David Rabe's Sticks and Bones, Eve Ensler's Necessary Targets, and Sam Shepard's The God of Hell

The article focuses on the efforts of three outstanding contemporary American dramatists to address identified parameters of socio-political and cultural crises brought about by the diverse, yet intricately related, historical instances of the Vietnam War, the Bosnia-Herzegovina War, and the war on terror. In Sticks and Bones (1971), David Rabe discerns multiple layers of trauma on the face of a Vietnam veteran and thus finds chance to question the impossibility of gaining access to a healing process within the boundaries of a topos that proves even more disorienting than the battlefield itself. In Necessary Targets (2001), Eve Ensler, responding creatively to peculiarities spawned by the Bosnia-Herzegovina War and its aftermath, tackles adequately the question whether trauma is translatable. In addition, she examines the issue of positioning one's own stance towards the other's suffering, exploring modes in which the targeted people may help the observer become aware of her own crisis of self-placement. In The God of Hell (2004), Sam Shepard directs his efforts at capturing in stage images the feeling of bewilderment prevalent in post-9/11 America, where the appropriation of the national by a newly-conceived type of order is attempted via directed attacks on the people's understanding. In all three cases, attention is given to the artists' desire to shake audiences out of the familiarity of widely-shared and firmly-established representations of crises, highlighting that what should be seen and studied as the most serious facet of "crisis" is the very failure the subject encounters in attaining a thorough understanding of the moment itself

Ronald D. Cohen, Depression Folk: Grassroots Music and Left-Wing Politics in 1930s America

Ronald D. Cohen, Depression Folk: Grassroots Music and Left-Wing Politics in 1930s America Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Pp. 201. ISBN: 9781469630465. Konstantinos Blatanis National and Kapodistrian University of Athens This most recent installment of Ronald D. Cohen’s authoritative research career in American folklore history provides readers with a detailed account of the course folk music followed during the years of the Great Depression. The author’s wide exp..

The Politics of Violence and the Mediatisation of Urban Spaces on Stage: Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 and José Rivera’s Marisol

Interest in this paper centres on two exemplary cases of two entirely different modes of dramatisation and theatrical practice which, nonetheless, share a common goal. The two works studied here aim at a critical reconsideration of the political issues which surround intensely violent events that have marked American mega cities over the past three decades. Furthermore, both plays aspire to articulate an original statement on the ways in which these issues routinely fall prey to the hegemony of monolithic and sterile media representations of urban spaces. Anna Deavere Smith’s vigorous exploration of the reserves of documentary drama and theatre in Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1993) is read alongside and juxtaposed to José Rivera’s innovative and exceptional use of magic realism for the stage in Marisol (1992). The question of political efficacy in both cases is thoroughly examined here in relation to how profitably these works showcase acts of interrogating mass media appropriations of identified city riots and instances of social unrest. Attention is devoted to the ways in which Smith’s verbatim documentation of the city in turmoil as well as Rivera’s surreal and dystopian account of liminal experiences of disenfranchised urban constituents may lead audience members to reassess their own habits of negotiating political demands and relating to moments of crisis

Kristin S. Seefeldt and John D. Graham, America’s Poor and the Great Recession

In this concise yet highly informative study, Kristin Seefeldt and John Graham examine the multiple ways in which the Great Recession of the period from December 2007 to June 2009 and its aftermath affected the lives of low-income Americans. Appropriately enough, the authors set out to explain the terms in which poverty is defined in contemporary U.S. before they can first consider the efficacy of federal anti-poverty programs and then conclude the work with their own suggestions on how the g..

Inquiries and Challenges of Current Politics on the Contemporary American Stage: Sam Shepard’s Kicking a Dead Horse and David Mamet’s November

This paper centers on two plays written and presented for the first time at the end of the George W. Bush eight-year presidency and which, to a great extent, constitute inventive responses to this particular era and its political climate that pervaded not only the US but the entire world. While differing markedly from each other, not merely in style and tone but more importantly in their respective scopes, their aims and targets, Sam Shepard’s Kicking a Dead Horse, a dark monologic parable—often received as a sharp tirade against America’s present state—and David Mamet’s November, a seemingly light-hearted satire—conceived by its author as a love-letter to his country— invite a comparative reading. Both plays offer not just a profitable insight into the limitations and restrictions of the contemporary American stage once it is faced with the challenge of accommodating the political, but also an engaging view into what remains exceptional and inexhaustible about its reserves whenever it strives to grapple with the present moment when the line between what is cast as anti-American and what is not proves more difficult to be clearly drawn than ever before. 

Rosen Carol, Sam Shepard: A 'Poetic Rodeo.'; Callens Johan, Dis/Figuring Sam Shepard

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Alan M. Wald. American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War.

Alan Wald completes his trilogy on the history of the American literary Left during the middle decades of the twentieth century with a careful and original study of the period ranging from the mid-1940s to the late 1950s. Following the first part, Exiles from a Future Time (2002), in whichattention is primarily given to the early years of the Great Depression, and the second Trinity of Passion (2007), centered around responses in life and art developed through the course of World War II, this..

Henry Heller, The Capitalist University: The Transformations of Higher Education in the United States since 1945.

Henry Heller, The Capitalist University: The Transformations of Higher Education in the United States since 1945. London: Pluto Press, 2016. Pp. 252. ISBN: 9780745336589 Konstantinos Blatanis Henry Heller’s candid historical account and astute institutional analysis of the evolution of American higher education over the past seventy years constitutes a significant and timely contribution to the relevant current debate. Indeed, at present, the grave and far-reaching repercussions of academic ..