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; ONeill 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.
#583219 in eBooks 2009-06-15 2009-06-15File Name: B013YA5HPA
Review
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful. Good InfoBy DGS in NHGot as a gift. Recipient said that it had information not available elsewhere. Pictures and illustrations were very good. Useful for identification.1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. Four StarsBy george crosgroveGreat book.
