The Identitary Dinamics in Contemporary Theatral Culture: The Dramaturgy of the Absurd Cover Image

Dinamica identitară în cultura teatrală contemporană: dramaturgia absurdului
The Identitary Dinamics in Contemporary Theatral Culture: The Dramaturgy of the Absurd

Author(s): Inocentiu Duşa
Subject(s): Theatre, Dance, Performing Arts, Cultural history, Library and Information Science, Recent History (1900 till today), Romanian Literature, History of Art
Published by: Biblioteca Județeană Mureș
Keywords: Eugen Ionescu; theater of the absurd; identity crises; characters; author; alter ego;

Summary/Abstract: The purpose of this study is to analyse the manner in which the issues of identity have been delineated for the theater of absurd representatives, by insisting over the way the playwrights have been falling upon hard times, of difficulties and crisis, close connected to the loss of identity and recover a new one. These biographical details thus become interpretative keys of the playwright works, the obsession of the biographic being reflected in the writen pages. We have started our analissys by an incursion in the term identity semantics and we have concluded that any comment concerning the identity can not skip its dialogical essence, the identitary construction being made only by using the dialogue to the others. Thus, any “self image” must be recognized by the others, it needs a comparative context. Thus, the close relation between identity and culture can be explained, because the cultural diversity represents the main laboratory that allows this comparison. During the last decades, the identity as a separate notion, has successfully grabed the attention of the researchers representing various domains, such as sociology, antropology, politology and history. The literary one, along with its segments, the theory of literature, dramaturgy, has been preoccupied by this aspect. The dramaturgy of the absurd is a very interesting territory to explore the identity aspects, especially because between the parents of the absurd theater we may find playwrights of various origins: an Irish, Samuel Beckett; an Armenian Russian, Arthur Adamov; a French, Jean Genêt; a Romanian, Eugen Ionescu. It is an important and significant theme, as long as the identity dilema of those personalities we have mentioned, has spread for several decades. We must consider the positive aspect that allows us too to retrace the identity dilema by using the playwrights own confessions, diaries, or the interviews they have offered at the age of absolute maturity; it is simptomatically that, in its public revelation, the starting point was represented by the playwrights themselves, that were in close connection to the literary critics. Thus, we have in front of our eyes a real and complex “file” of playwrights identity, consisting of their own confessions, of their family reflections and finally by information offered by the contemporary critics.

  • Issue Year: VII/2008
  • Issue No: 7
  • Page Range: 270-279
  • Page Count: 10
  • Language: Romanian
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