Overview

Impossible Performances: Duras as Dramatist argues that Marguerite Duras is one of the most important figures on the landscape of twentieth-century theater. Like Artaud and Beckett, she is exemplary of the most radical inquiry into the limits of performance. Duras used theater against itself and dramatized the failure of mimetic realism to represent the post-colonial, post-atomic moment. Unlike Artaud's and Beckett's, Duras's metaphysics of performance were motivated by a desire to make audible the subjectivities of femininity, to unstage the representational structures that have (re)produced the docile female body of western discourse. Duras's drama consistently features female protagonists who exist in a relationship of struggle with the representational frame and who speak back to the viewing authorities of a masculine symbolic. In this sense, her performance texts and mental dramas can be said to epitomize the move away from the problematics of modernist revolt to one of the most salient rhetorical concerns of post-modern feminism: the impossibility of representation.

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9780820444857

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Gabrielle H. Cody has achieved the, indeed, seemingly 'impossible' task of writing a book on Duras that brilliantly illuminates the most difficult questions her work poses for feminist and performance scholars. Passionate, poetic, and endlessly provocative, this book articulates with stunning precision the 'lived realities' of feminist consciousness. (Lynda Hart, Professor of English, The University of Pennsylvania)

Author Information

The Author: Gabrielle H. Cody is Associate Professor of Drama at Vassar College. She received her doctorate in dramatic criticism from the Yale School of Drama. Cody has published articles in The Drama Review, The Performing Arts Journal, The Journal of Women and Performance, Theater Journal, and Theater. She is the co-editor of Directing Reconsidered: Essays on 20th Century Theater, and the editor of Hard-Core from the Heart: The Pleasures, Profits, and Politics of Creative Sexual Expression, Annie Sprinkle Solo (forthcoming).

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