Get the Guests: Psychoanalysis, Modern American Drama and the Audience (Wisconsin Project on American Writers) - Softcover

Davis, Walter A.

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9780299141547: Get the Guests: Psychoanalysis, Modern American Drama and the Audience (Wisconsin Project on American Writers)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0299141543 ISBN 13: 9780299141547

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994

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Using psychoanalysis and criticism, this text demonstrates how the theatre expresses the secrets of its audience. The work includes readings of five plays: ""The Iceman Cometh"", ""A Streetcar Named Desire"", ""Long Day's Journey Into Night"", ""Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"" and ""Death of a Salesman"".

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Review:

What is so exciting about this book is the way it goes against so much conventional wisdom on modern drama and the current American theater scene . . . and against so many second-hand ideas about psychoanalytic criticism and academic interpretation. . . . Davis practically demolishes the ritual-based readings of theater, and shows them to be a way of avoiding the kind of individual introspection and ruthless honesty about our psyches that only a tragic outlook can satisfy. Timothy Wiles, Indiana University" In its ability to integrate the knowledgeable interests of a literary critic and theorist of broad disciplinary expertise with the experience and practical know-how of a man of the theater, Get the Guests is unparalleled. Davis is a man of the theater, he reads plays as theatrical events, and he can get at plays in ways that most people of the theater cannot because he is a superb theorist and scholar as well. Frank Lentricchia, Duke University" "What is so exciting about this book is the way it goes against so much conventional wisdom on modern drama and the current American theater scene . . . and against so many second-hand ideas about psychoanalytic criticism and academic interpretation. . . . Davis practically demolishes the ritual-based readings of theater, and shows them to be a way of avoiding the kind of individual introspection and ruthless honesty about our psyches that only a tragic outlook can satisfy."--Timothy Wiles, Indiana University "In its ability to integrate the knowledgeable interests of a literary critic and theorist of broad disciplinary expertise with the experience and practical know-how of a man of the theater, "Get the Guests" is unparalleled. Davis is a man of the theater, he reads plays as theatrical events, and he can get at plays in ways that most people of the theater cannot because he is a superb theorist and scholar as well."--Frank Lentricchia, Duke University

About the Author:

Walter A. (Mac) Davis is professor of English at Ohio State University. He is the author of Inwardness and Existence: Subjectivity in/and Hegel, Heidegger, Marx, and Freud, also published by the University of Wisconsin Press and of Act of Interpretation. Long an actor in regional theaters, he recently completed his first full-length play, The Holocaust Memorial: A Play About Hiroshima."

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