Noh A-kyoung

One among a series of Beckett’s English plays from the late 1950s through the 1960s produced after a decade of his French writings, Happy Days engages with English tradition, which seems relevant to the writer’s return to the language. Yet the play’s cultural geography is rather ambiguous, particularly when compared with All That Fall, a radio play set in an Irish town and the first in the aforementioned series of plays written first in English. While critics have ascribed the play’s heroine to

Noh, AegyungThis essay defines primarily what is political in Samuel Beckett's work and life, hence offering a certain corrective to the imbalance in current Beckett criticism, which has often dismissed the writer's political dimension as a marginal and even irrelevant topic for serious critical discussions. Reading through such plays as Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Catastrophe, and the posthumously published Eleuth ria, it suggests working in Beckett's oeuvre is 'individualism' resisting the pot

Combined with the timing of its premiere, which was a little more than a decade after the end of the Second World War, Endgame, featuring a family and community of four last survivors paralyzed in the wretched hole of a shelter, invites historical approaches. Beckett withholds much information on the nature of the disastrous event which left mother nature and the majority of human life destroyed, but its trauma surely remains to be felt strong. A symptom of historical trauma is found in the surv

This essay investigates the intersection between gender and pedagogical relation in Ibsen’s drama, finding in his representation of gender-inflected pedagogical dynamic between men and women the earliest modern prototype of the pedagogical relation between a hegemonic male teacher and a female student that has been frequently dramatized on modern stage. The essay discusses the pedagogues and academics played by fathers, husbands, and male companions in Ibsen’s plays, including Torvald Helmer’s p

The most scandalously well-known ingredient in Oscar Wilde's life and art must be the unconventional sense of sexuality that ended up ruining his career. This essay aims to illuminate the sexual politics he was taking on against the fin de sicle Victorian society increasingly concerned about the ongoing anomalies of sex and gender--a profoundly decadent phenomenon--by reading Salome(1894), a biblical adaptation, in the context of the battle between the Victorian sexual conservativism and the New

A disparity in the tenors of Susan Glaspell and “Jig” Cook’s modernist projects seems inevitable due to the hierarchical gender relation underneath the “companionate” façade of their marriage. A conspicuous sign of this disparity is the clashing historiographies between male and female characters in Tickless Time (1918) and Alison’s House (1930). A collaborative short comedy by Glaspell and Cook, Tickless Time presents a male visionary named Ian, immersed in the task of replacing the “tick” soun

The earliest wholly secular Interlude that still survives, Henry Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucres invites vigorous scholarly attempts to reconstruct the contexts behind its first staging in 1497. The play’s secular and humanistic concerns of marriage and true nobility, its political function as a diplomatic entertainment, and last of all, its indoor setting unique to the genre of Interlude necessitate the examination of the contextual circumstances that led to its composition and performance, such a

Samuel Beckett reportedly read Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s autobiographies, Confessions (1781) and Reveries of the Solitary Walker (1782), praising him “as a champion of the right to be alone and as an authentically tragic figure” in a letter sent to his friend Thomas MacGreevy. James Knowlson tells in his biography that it contains a “remarkable” critique of the philosopher. Reading Beckett’s stories and plays along with Rousseau’s autobiographies and political writings, this article proposes that

The pedagogical dynamic dramatized in Shaw’s Pygmalion, which sets man as a distinct pedagogical authority and woman his subject spawning similarly patterned plays many decades later, has been relatively overlooked in the play’s criticism clouded by its predominantly mythical theme. Shaw stages Eliza’s pedagogical subordination to Higgins followed by her Nora-esque exit with the declaration, “I’ll go and be a teacher.” The central premise of this article is that the pioneering modern playwright

In a departure from previous critical approaches to Alison’s House, this study aims to move beyond their core premise that the play mainly retells the life of Emily Dickinson, redirecting its focus to the playwright Susan Glaspell invested in the play. “The play was in no way founded on the life of Dickinson,” the writer said, as “it grew out of a feeling for her work and character.” Glaspell’s empathic portrayal of Dickinson is more than a mere participation in the nationwide centennial celebra

An Irish born exile, Samuel Beckett with his experience of dislocation is well comparable with James Joyce, another expatriate Irish writer. Beckett's most important distinction from the other stems from the often resolute expulsion of Irish contexts from his work. Despite the obsessional memories of Irish landscapes and sounds he cherished from his childhood, his repulsion for the ethos of Ireland results in a contradiction in the way he handles his Irish inheritance. This essay looks into Beck

Written as her last collaboration with the Provincetown Players, SusanGlaspell’s The Verge is an exceptional play in that its formal experimentand modernist theme are clear of her general modernist ambivalencewhich combines a uniquely American and feminist expression of themodernist spirit with rather conventional forms. Following critics’ briefand generalizing comments on the play’s protagonist embodying modernistformalism and alienation, this paper offers a full and concrete surveydetailing th

As a children’s fantasy ushering in the Golden Age of Children’s Literature, Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby (1863) has been much remarked as regards its ‘natural theology’ which finds religious teleology in Nature. Kingsley’s moralization of Nature which renders his fantasy ‘pedagogical’ necessitates the intervention of literary instruction in its narrative. The observational, essentially scientific learning of an unschooled chimney sweep turned a water-baby is

A writer with his aesthetic principle highly influenced by that of the literary modernism of 1920s through 40s, Samuel Beckett shares in common with the historical movement unswerving emphasis on the individual as opposed to the social and collective. The stress on the individual in Beckett's case, however, goes further than other modernist writers such as James Joyce as his characters tend to pursue the state of ultimate solipsism. Their severest self-immersion, most times joined by the impulse

This paper locates Patrick Shanley’s Doubt: A Parable in the context of a series of modern plays, which problematize accusation and its factual basis through their peculiar uses of the realist convention of revelation. Following suit from Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour and David Mamet’s Oleanna which dramatize the accusations made at school, Doubt makes an issue of verifying the factual foundation of an accusation but sets itself apart from the two predecessors by its idiosyncratic abando