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Title details for Theater, War, and Memory in Crisis by John Ireland - Available

Theater, War, and Memory in Crisis

Vichy, Algeria, the Aftermath

by John Ireland
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Theater, War, and Memory in Crisis explores how French and Algerian dramatists have engaged with two traumatic events that continue to haunt France: the German occupation and Vichy government from 1940 to 1944 and the Algerian War from 1954 to 1962. John Ireland's investigation is guided by one central question: can theater take on issues of violence, war trauma, and conflicted memory in a fundamentally different way from archival forms of culture such as memoirs, narrative fiction, and film? Throughout the twentieth century, French cultural anthropologists, classicists, and social scientists repeatedly revisited links between archaic religious ritual, the practice of sacrifice, and Greek tragedy as attempts to understand, regulate, and mitigate the violence of human conflict and war. Ireland argues that contemporary French playwrights dealing with war trauma and contested memory were influenced by aspects of this research that foregrounded the core virtues of oral culture: presence and the present, the "here and now" that also regulate theatrical performance. That connection to the present encouraged dramatists and performance artists to make "live" historiographical contributions to reverberating, unresolved history but also revived perennial therapeutic values of oral culture that evolved in ancient Greece. Theater, War, and Memory in Crisis brings original readings of canonical authors like Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet, Bernard-Marie Koltès, and Kateb Yacine into dialogue with non-canonical dramatists such as Armand Gatti, Liliane Atlan, and Noureddine Aba.

  • Creators

  • Series

    Theater: Theory/Text/Performance

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    March 11, 2025

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9780472904891

    • Open EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9780472904891
      • File size: 1199 KB
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  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Library Journal

      February 1, 2025

      Ireland (French and Francophone studies, Univ. of Illinois, Chicago) links commentators on two notably repressive periods of mid-20th-century French history--the civil wars during the Vichy government (1940-44) and the Algerian War of Independence (1954-62). He asserts that theater, a continuation of the oral tradition of ancient Greece, with a lifespan older than that of the written word, can better explain shifting, contested memories. Drawing upon the contributions of anthropology and sociology, Ireland addresses concepts such as memory, whereby people analyze experiences after the actual events, thereby producing more realistic evaluations with the benefit of hindsight. He's less of a fan of institutional theater bound to scripts (a form of capture), preferring interactive, constant adaptational storytelling where there is no rigid separation between actors and audience. There is an entire chapter (and more) on Sartre, the first dramatist to address the cataclysms of both the Vichy period and the Algerian revolution, and explications of the work of Genet, Bernard-Marie Koltes, Liliane Atlan, Armand Gatti, and indigenous Algerian artists such as Kateb Yacine and Noureddine Aba. VERDICT Best for serious students of theater or colonialism and violence studies, but may be challenging for general audiences.--Frederick J. Augustyn Jr.

      Copyright 2025 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • Open EPUB ebook
Kindle restrictions

subjects

Languages

  • English

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