The mind's stage: Monodrama as historical trend and interpretive strategy.
Item
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Title
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The mind's stage: Monodrama as historical trend and interpretive strategy.
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Identifier
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AAI3187377
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identifier
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3187377
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Creator
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Taroff, Kurt.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Daniel C. Gerould
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Date
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2005
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Theater
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Abstract
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This dissertation examines the concept of monodrama, a term often employed rather carelessly and without context, seeking a definition that takes into account the somewhat obscure history of the term, as well as the theoretical context in which the term often appears today. The first half of the study explores the history of monodrama, beginning with Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 1766 music-theatre work, Pygmalion. While some have seen the form initiated by Pygmalion as disappearing by 1815, there is considerable evidence that monodrama was imported to England through the work of Robert Southey and Matthew "Monk" Lewis among others, and elements of monodrama have been identified by modern scholars in the dramatic work of the major English Romantics, such as Wordsworth's The Borderers and Byron's Manfred. Similar elements of monodrama appear in Romantic music, particularly Hector Berlioz's 1831--183?, which he referred to as a "monodrame lyrique" in 1855. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, monodrama came into its own as a fully theorized genre. In the theories of French symbolist Saint-Pol-Roux and Russian symbolist Nikolai Evreinov, monodrama was cast as a form centrally concerned with the external expression of the internal experience of a single protagonist, an element that was always inherent in the form, but now the focus in its modern conception and definition. Monodrama, these theorists argue, aims to align the spectator as closely as possible to the protagonist, allowing the viewer to share the protagonist's experience at the moment it occurs. The second half of the dissertation looks at the continuing influence of these theories and of the form itself by analyzing three distinct types of monodrama: single-character monodrama, seen in works such as Arnold Schoenberg's Erwartung; divided-self monodrama, depicting the fragmented parts of an individual psyche at war within an individual, as seen in works by playwrights as varied as Evreinov, Beckett, and Shepard; and finally, multi-character monodrama, in which we see the world filtered through the consciousness of the protagonist, with all people, places and things on stage through the hero's subjective lens. The dissertation has three central aims: to set forth the history of monodrama; to arrive at a definition of monodrama that appropriately reflects that history as well as the contextual context in which the term is most often used; and finally, to demonstrate ways in which monodrama has been and can be utilized as an interpretative tool in the writing, production, and reading of dramatic texts.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
