Scrutinizing the critical tendency to label texts or writers as "postmodern", scholar Stephen Watt argues that "reading post modernly" merely implies reading culture more broadly. In contemporary drama, Watt considers postmodernity less a question of genre or media than a mode of subjectivity shared by both playwright and audience. 6 illustrations.

Provides a new way of defining--and understanding--postmodern drama

The book is a study of Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard, arguably the two most eminent British playwrights of the past sixty years or so, from a perspective of what it describes as a poetics of postmodern drama. Arguing for the application of Linda Hutcheon’s model of postmodernism to the study of drama, Towards a Poetics of Postmodern Drama shows that postmodern drama should be seen as a self-consciously contradictory and double-coded phenomenon, one which simultaneously inscribes and subverts the conventional categories of dramatic representation. In spite of its indebtedness to Beckett’s Absurdist and Brecht’s Epic theaters, postmodern drama should not be conflated with either. This is primarily because postmodern drama retains a critical edge towards contemporary reality in a manner which Hutcheon very aptly terms as a ‘complicitous critique’. The book demonstrates that both Pinter and Stoppard are pre-eminently postmodern in their treatment of issues such as the human subject, the notion of truth, historical verifiability and linguistic reference. Pinter’s preoccupation with non-referential modes of language-use, the role of power in the construction of the subject, and unreliable memories is as potent a way of disrupting the representational status of drama as Stoppard’s repeated recourse to devices such as parody, theater-within-theater and the fictional treatment of history.

Different symbolic traditions have different ways of describing the shift of awareness toward sacred events. While not conforming to familiar states of phenomenality, this shift of awareness corresponds to Turner's liminal phase, Artaud's metaphysical embodiment, Grotowski's “translumination,” Brook's “holy theater,” and Barba's “transcendent” theater—all of which are linked to the Advaitan taste of a void of conceptions. This book argues that, by allowing to come what Derrida calls the unsayable, the theater of Tom Stoppard, David Henry Hwang, Caryl Churchill, Sam Shepard, Derek Walcott and Girish Karnad induces characters and spectators to deconstruct habitual patterns of perception, attenuate the content of consciousness, and taste the void of conceptions. As the nine plays discussed in this book suggest, the internal observer lies behind all cultural constructs as a silent beyond-ness, and immanently within knowledge as its generative condition of unknowingness. The unsayable (and the language used to convey it) that Derrida finds in literature has clear affinities with the Brahman-Atman of Advaita Vedanta. Derridean deconstruction contains as a subtext the structure of consciousness that it both veils with the undecidable trappings of the mind and allows to come as an unsayable secret through a play of difference. Although Derrida views theater and the text as mutually deconstructing and claims that presence or unity “has always already begun to represent itself,” the six playwrights discussed here show that cultural performance indeed points through its universally ambiguous and symbolic types toward a trans-verbal, trans-cultural wholeness.