Academic literature on the topic 'Stoppard, Tom, 1937-'

At the same time on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain, two avant-garde playwrights decided to remake a 2400-year-old tragedy. Heiner Müller (1929-1996) and Tom Stoppard (1937-) are widely regarded as two of the most innovative dramatists of East Germany and Great Britain and respectively. In 1965, Stoppard submitted a script for a spy thriller to Granada TV and Müller published his first play since being banned from the East German Writers’ Association in 1961. Though unbeknownst to each other and writing for drastically different purposes, media, and audiences, they both lit upon Sophocles’ Philoctetes as the appropriate vehicle for their work. Sympathy has been recognized as central to tragedy since Aristotle’s Poetics, and Philoctetes is the ultimate drama of compassion. The story of the wounded Philoctetes is an Ur-scene for pity in the same way that Ajax’s slaughter of the sheep in his madness is a primal scene for indignation, or Orpheus’ descent to the underworld, for grief. In finding their way to Philoctetes, Stoppard and Müller grapple with a fundamental problem of theatrical art.

13564 Background: Retrospective analyses on elderly people enrolled in clinical trials of adjuvant chemotherapy for colon cancer indicated the maintenance of the efficacy in that subset of patients (pts). However, data on the benefit of the routinely used adjuvant treatment in an unselected population of pts aged more than 65 years are few. Methods: All the charts of pts radically operated for colon cancer from 1996–2001 at Medical Oncology, Padua Hospital, were retrospectively analysed. 147 out of 330 pts consecutively treated with fluorouracil (FU)-based chemotherapy was aged 65 years or more at the time of diagnosis. Kaplan-Meyer progression-free-survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) of stage II and III pts were calculated. Results: Pts characteristics were: males/females: 87/60, median age 71 (range 65–87), ECOG PS 0/1: 124/23, right/left colon primary tumor: 62/85, TNM stage: 24/63/60. 86 out of 147 pts were treated with the following regimen of adjuvant chemotherapy: FU 370 mg/mq + leucovorin (LV) 20 mg/mq day 1–5 q 28 for 6 cycles (Machover regimen, n=69), or FU 500 mg/mq + LV 250 mg/mq weekly × 6 q 56 for 4 cycles (Roswell Park regimen, n=17). Treated pts were staged as follows: TNM stage I/II/III: 1/38/47. No toxic death were observed and only nine of 86 pts (10.4%) stopped the treatment due to acute grade III gastrointestinal toxicity. At a median follow-up of 73.2 months, 19 out of 86 pts (22%) developed cancer recurrence (3-y PFS: 82.2%, 5-y PFS: 80.3%). Seventeen pts (19.7%) died, 13 (15.1%) due to tumor progression, 3 (3.4%) due to acute heart failure, and 1 (1.1%) due to chronic pulmonary disease (3-y OS: 88.8%, 5-y OS: 82.4%). No statistically significant difference in survival was observed comparing pts aged 65–70 (n=41) with pts more than 70 years old (n=45): 5-y OS 84.1% vs 77.8%, respectively (p=2.23, log rank test). A separate survival analysis on stage II pts was performed (n=63). 5 of 38 (13.1) treated pts dead, compared to 9 of 25 (36%) non treated pts; 5-y survival in the two groups were 86.6% and 60.8%, respectively (p= 0.03, log-rank test). Conclusions: The efficacy of adjuvant chemotherapy appears maintained in an unselected population of elderly pts. Surprisingly, our retrospective analysis suggest that even stage II pts may benefit of a fluorouracil-based well tolerated chemotherapy. No significant financial relationships to disclose.

In PilsenTwenty-six Station Road,She climbed to the third floorUp stairs which were all that was leftOf the whole house,She opened her doorFull on to the sky,Stood gaping over the edge.For this was the placeThe world ended.Thenshe locked up carefullylest someone stealSiriusor Aldebaranfrom her kitchen,went back downstairsand settled herselfto waitfor the house to rise againand for her husband to rise from the ashesand for her children’s hands and feet to be stuck back in placeIn the morning they found herstill as stone, sparrows pecking her hands.Five Minutes after the Air Raidby Miroslav Holub(Calder 287) Holding Still Detonation. Affect. During the Second World War, London and other European cities were subjected to the terrors of aerial bombardment, rendered through nightmarish anticipations of the bomber (Gollin 7) and the material storm of the real air-raid. The fall of bombs plagued cities and their citizens with the terrible rain of explosives and incendiary weapons. A volatile landscape was formed as the urban environment was ‘unmade’ and urged into violent motion. Flying projectiles of shrapnel, debris and people; avalanches of collapsing factories and houses; the inhale and exhale of compressed air and firestorms; the scream of the explosion. All these composed an incredibly fluid urban traumatic, as atmospheres fell over the cities that was thick with smoke, dust, and ventilated only by terror (see for instance Sebald 10 and Mendieta’s 3 recent commentary). Vast craters were imprinted onto the charred morphologies of London and Berlin as well as Coventry, Hamburg and Dresden. Just as the punctuations of the bombing saw the psychic as well as the material give way, writers portraying Britain as an ‘volcano island’ (Spaight 5) witnessed eruptive projections – the volleys of the material air-war; the emotional signature of charged and bitter reprisals; pain, anguish and vengeance - counter-strikes of affect. In the midst of all of this molten violence and emotion it seems impossible that a simultaneous sense of quiescence could be at all possible. More than mere physical fixity or geographical stasis, a rather different sort of experience could take place. Preceding, during and following the excessive mobilisation of an air raid, ‘stillness’ was often used to describe certain plateuing stretches of time-space which were slowed and even stopped (Anderson 740). Between the eruptions appeared hollows of calm and even boredom. People’s nervous flinching under the reverberation of high-explosive blasts formed part of what Jordan Crandall might call a ‘bodily-inclination’ position. Slackened and taut feelings condensed around people listening out for the oncoming bomber. People found that they prepared for the dreadful wail of the siren, or relaxed in the aftermath of the attack. In these instances, states of tension and apprehension as well as calm and relief formed though stillness. The peculiar experiences of ‘stillness’ articulated in these events open out, I suggest, distinctive ways-of-being which undo our assumptions of perpetually fluid subjectivities and the primacy of the ‘body in motion’ even within the context of unparalleled movement and uncertainty (see Harrison 423 and also Rose and Wylie 477 for theoretical critique). The sorts of “musics of stillness and silence able to be discovered in a world of movement” (Thrift, Still 50), add to our understandings of the material geographies of war and terror (see for instance Graham 63; Gregory and Pred 3), whilst they gesture towards complex material-affective experiences of bodies and spaces. Stillness in this sense, denotes apprehending and anticipating spaces and events in ways that sees the body enveloped within the movement of the environment around it; bobbing along intensities that course their way through it; positioned towards pasts and futures that make themselves felt, and becoming capable of intense forms of experience and thought. These examples illustrate not a shutting down of the body to an inwardly focused position – albeit composed by complex relations and connections – but bodies finely attuned to their exteriors (see Bissell, Animating 277 and Conradson 33). In this paper I draw from a range of oral and written testimony archived at the Imperial War Museum and the Mass Observation wartime regular reports. Edited publications from these collections were also consulted. Detailing the experience of aerial bombing during the Blitz, particularly on London between September 1940 to May 1941, forms part of a wider project concerning the calculative and affective dimensions of the aeroplane’s relationship with the human body, especially through the spaces it has worked to construct (infrastructures such as airports) and destroy. While appearing extraordinary, the examples I use are actually fairly typical of the patternings of experience and the depth and clarity with which they are told. They could be taken to be representative of the population as a whole or coincidentally similar testimonials. Either way, they are couched within a specific cultural historical context of urgency, threat and unparalleled violence.Anticipations The complex material geographies of an air raid reveal the ecological interdependencies of populations and their often urban environments and metabolisms (Coward 419; Davis 3; Graham 63; Gregory The Colonial 19; Hewitt Place 257). Aerial warfare was an address of populations conceived at the register of their bio-rhythmical and metabolic relationship to their milieu (Adey). The Blitz and the subsequent Allied bombing campaign constituted Churchill’s ‘great experiment’ for governments attempting to assess the damage an air raid could inflict upon a population’s nerves and morale (Brittain 77; Gregory In Another 88). An anxious and uncertain landscape constructed before the war, perpetuated by public officials, commentators and members of parliament, saw background affects (Ngai 5) of urgency creating an atmosphere that pressurised and squeezed the population to prepare for the ‘gathering storm’. Attacks upon the atmosphere itself had been readily predicted in the form of threatening gas attacks ready to poison the medium upon which human and animal life depended (Haldane 111; Sloterdijk 41-57). One of the most talked of moments of the Blitz is not necessarily the action but the times of stillness that preceded it. Before and in-between an air raid stillness appears to describe a state rendered somewhere between the lulls and silences of the action and the warnings and the anticipatory feelings of what might happen. In the awaiting bodies, the materialites of silence could be felt as a kind-of-sound and as an atmospheric sense of imminence. At the onset of the first air-raids sound became a signifier of what was on the way (MO 408). Waiting – as both practice and sensation – imparted considerable inertia that went back and forth through time (Jeffrey 956; Massumi, Parables 3). For Geographer Kenneth Hewitt, sound “told of the coming raiders, the nearness of bombs, the plight of loved ones” (When the 16). The enormous social survey of Mass Observation concluded that “fear seems to be linked above all with noise” (original emphasis). As one report found, “It is the siren or the whistle or the explosion or the drone – these are the things that terrify. Fear seems to come to us most of all through our sense of hearing” (MO 378). Yet the power of the siren came not only from its capacity to propagate sound and to alert, but the warning held in its voice of ‘keeping silent’. “Prefacing in a dire prolepsis the post-apocalyptic event before the event”, as Bishop and Phillips (97) put it, the stillness of silence was incredibly virtual in its affects, disclosing - in its lack of life – the lives that would be later taken. Devastation was expected and rehearsed by civilians. Stillness formed a space and body ready to spring into movement – an ‘imminent mobility’ as John Armitage (204) has described it. Perched on the edge of devastation, space-times were felt through a sense of impending doom. Fatalistic yet composed expectations of a bomb heading straight down pervaded the thoughts and feelings of shelter dwellers (MO 253; MO 217). Waves of sound disrupted fragile tempers as they passed through the waiting bodies in the physical language of tensed muscles and gritted teeth (Gaskin 36). Silence helped form bodies inclined-to-attention, particularly sensitive to aural disturbances and vibrations from all around. Walls, floors and objects carried an urban bass-line of warning (Goodman). Stillness was forged through a body readied in advance of the violence these materialities signified. A calm and composed body was not necessarily an immobile body. Civilians who had prepared for the attacks were ready to snap into action - to dutifully wear their gas-mask or escape to shelter. ‘Backgrounds of expectation’ (Thrift, Still 36) were forged through non-too-subtle procedural and sequential movements which opened-out new modes of thinking and feeling. Folding one’s clothes and placing them on the dresser in-readiness; pillows and sheets prepared for a spell in the shelter, these were some of many orderly examples (IWM 14595). In the event of a gas attack air raid precautions instructions advised how to put on a gas mask (ARPD 90-92),i) Hold the breath. ii) Remove headgear and place between the knees. iii) Lift the flap of the haversack [ …] iv) Bring the face-piece towards the face’[…](v) Breathe out and continue to breathe in a normal manner The rational technologies of drill, dressage and operational research enabled poise in the face of an eventual air-raid. Through this ‘logistical-life’ (Reid 17), thought was directed towards simple tasks by minutely described instructions. Stilled LifeThe end of stillness was usually marked by a reactionary ‘flinch’, ‘start’ or ‘jump’. Such reactionary ‘urgent analogs’ (Ngai 94; Tomkins 96) often occurred as a response to sounds and movements that merely broke the tension rather than accurately mimicking an air raid. These atmospheres were brittle and easily disrupted. Cars back-firing and changing gear were often complained about (MO 371), just as bringing people out of the quiescence of sleep was a common effect of air-raids (Kraftl and Horton 509). Disorientation was usually fostered in this process while people found it very difficult to carry out the most simple of tasks. Putting one’s clothes on or even making their way out of the bedroom door became enormously problematic. Sirens awoke a ‘conditioned reflex’ to take cover (MO 364). Long periods of sleep deprivation brought on considerable fatigue and anxiety. ‘Sleep we Must’ wrote journalist Ritchie Calder (252) noticing the invigorating powers of sleep for both urban morale and the bare existence of survival. For other more traumatized members of the population, psychological studies found that the sustained concentration of shelling caused what was named ‘apathy-retreat’ (Harrisson, Living 65). This extreme form of acquiescence saw especially susceptible and vulnerable civilians suffer an overwhelming urge to sleep and to be cared-for ‘as if chronically ill’ (Janis 90). A class and racial politics of quiescent affect was enacted as several members of the population were believed far more liable to ‘give way’ to defeat and dangerous emotions (Brittain 77; Committee of Imperial Defence).In other cases it was only once an air-raid had started that sleep could be found (MO 253). The boredom of waiting could gather in its intensity deforming bodies with “the doom of depression” (Anderson 749). The stopped time-spaces in advance of a raid could be soaked with so much tension that the commencement of sirens, vibrations and explosions would allow a person overwhelming relief (MO 253). Quoting from a boy recalling his experiences in Hannover during 1943, Hewitt illustrates:I lie in bed. I am afraid. I strain my ears to hear something but still all is quiet. I hardly dare breathe, as if something horrible is knocking at the door, at the windows. Is it the beating of my heart? ... Suddenly there seems relief, the sirens howl into the night ... (Heimatbund Niedersachsen 1953: 185). (Cited in Hewitt, When 16)Once a state of still was lost getting it back required some effort (Bissell, Comfortable 1697). Cautious of preventing mass panic and public hysteria by allowing the body to erupt outwards into dangerous vectors of mobility, the British government’s schooling in the theories of panicology (Orr 12) and contagious affect (Le Bon 17; Tarde 278; Thrift, Intensities 57; Trotter 140), made air raid precautions (ARP) officers, police and civil defence teams enforce ‘stay put’ and ‘hold firm’ orders to protect the population (Jones et al, Civilian Morale 463, Public Panic 63-64; Thomas 16). Such orders were meant to shield against precisely the kinds of volatile bodies they were trying to compel with their own bombing strategies. Reactions to the Blitz were moralised and racialised. Becoming stilled required self-conscious work by a public anxious not to be seen to ‘panic’. This took the form of self-disciplination. People exhausted considerable energy to ‘settle’ themselves down. It required ‘holding’ themselves still and ‘together’ in order to accomplish this state, and to avoid going the same way as the buildings falling apart around them, as some people observed (MO 408). In Britain a cup of tea was often made as a spontaneous response in the event of the conclusion of a raid (Brown 686). As well as destroying bombing created spaces too – making space for stillness (Conradson 33). Many people found that they could recall their experiences in vivid detail, allocating a significant proportion of their memories to the recollection of the self and an awareness of their surroundings (IWM 19103). In this mode of stillness, contemplation did not turn-inwards but unfolded out towards the environment. The material processual movement of the shell-blast literally evacuated all sound and materials from its centre to leave a vacuum of negative pressure. Diaries and oral testimonies stretch out these millisecond events into discernable times and spaces of sensation, thought and the experience of experience (Massumi, Parables 2). Extraordinarily, survivors mention serene feelings of quiet within the eye of the blast (see Mortimer 239); they had, literally, ‘no time to be frightened’ (Crighton-Miller 6150). A shell explosion could create such intensities of stillness that a sudden and distinctive lessening of the person and world are expressed, constituting ‘stilling-slowing diminishments’ (Anderson 744). As if the blast-vacuum had sucked all the animation from their agency, recollections convey passivity and, paradoxically, a much more heightened and contemplative sense of the moment (Bourke 121; Thrift, Still 41). More lucid accounts describe a multitude of thoughts and an attention to minute detail. Alternatively, the enormous peaking of a waking blast subdued all later activities to relative obsolescence. The hurricane of sounds and air appear to overload into the flatness of an extended and calmed instantaneous present.Then the whistling stopped, then a terrific thump as it hit the ground, and everything seem to expand, then contract with deliberation and stillness seemed to be all around. (As recollected by Bill and Vi Reagan in Gaskin 17)On the other hand, as Schivelbusch (7) shows us in his exploration of defeat, the cessation of war could be met with an outburst of feeling. In these micro-moments a close encounter with death was often experienced with elation, a feeling of peace and well-being drawn through a much more heightened sense of the now (MO 253). These are not pre-formed or contemplative techniques of attunement as Thrift has tracked, but are the consequence of significant trauma and the primal reaction to extreme danger.TracesSusan Griffin’s haunting A Chorus of Stones documents what she describes as a private life of war (1). For Griffin, and as shown in these brief examples, stillness and being-stilled describe a series of diverse experiences endured during aerial bombing. Yet, as Griffin narrates, these are not-so private lives. A common representation of air war can be found in Henry Moore’s tube shelter sketches which convey sleeping tube-dwellers harboured in the London underground during the Blitz. The bodies are represented as much more than individuals being connected by Moore’s wave-like shapes into the turbulent aggregation of a choppy ocean. What we see in Moore’s portrayal and the examples discussed already are experiences with definite relations to both inner and outer worlds. They refer to more-than individuals who bear intimate relations to their outsides and the atmospheric and material environments enveloping and searing through them. Stillness was an unlikely state composed through these circulations just as it was formed as a means of address. It was required in order to apprehend sounds and possible events through techniques of listening or waiting. Alternatively being stilled could refer to pauses between air-strikes and the corresponding breaks of tension in the aftermath of a raid. Stillness was composed through a series of distributed yet interconnecting bodies, feelings, materials and atmospheres oriented towards the future and the past. The ruins of bombed-out building forms stand as traces even today. Just as Massumi (Sensing 16) describes in the context of architecture, the now static remainder of the explosion “envelops in its stillness a deformational field of which it stands as the trace”. The ruined forms left after the attack stand as a “monument” of the passing of the raid to be what it once was – house, factory, shop, restaurant, library - and to become something else. The experience of those ‘from below’ (Hewitt 2) suffering contemporary forms of air-warfare share many parallels with those of the Blitz. Air power continues to target, apparently more precisely, the affective tones of the body. Accessed by kinetic and non-kinetic forces, the signs of air-war are generated by the shelling of Kosovo, ‘shock and awe’ in Iraq, air-strikes in Afghanistan and by the simulated air-raids of IDF aircraft producing sonic-booms over sleeping Palestinian civilians, now becoming far more real as I write in the final days of 2008. Achieving stillness in the wake of aerial trauma remains, even now, a way to survive the (private) life of air war. AcknowledgementsI’d like to thank the editors and particularly the referees for such a close reading of the article; time did not permit the attention their suggestions demanded. Grateful acknowledgement is also made to the AHRC whose funding allowed me to research and write this paper. ReferencesAdey, Peter. Aerial Geographies: Mobilities, Bodies and Subjects. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010 (forthcoming). 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IntroductionThe existential question today is not whether to be or not to be, but how one can become what one truly is. (Golomb 200)In contemporary Western culture the ideal of living authentically, of being “true to yourself,” is ubiquitous. Authenticity is “taken for granted” as an absolute value in a multitude of areas, from music, to travel to identity (Lindholm 1). A core component of authentic selfhood is to find an occupation that is a “passion:” work that is “really you.” This article draws on recent qualitative interviews with Australians from a range of occupations about work, identity and meaning (James). It will demonstrate that for these contemporary individuals, occupation is often closely linked to perceptions of authentic selfhood. I begin by overviewing the significance and presence of authenticity as a value in contemporary culture through discussions of reality television and self-help literature focussed on careers. This is followed by a discussion of sociological theories of authenticity, drawing out the connections between the authentic self, modernity and work. The final section uses examples from the interviews to argue that the ideal of work being an extension of the authentic self is compelling because in providing direction and purpose, it helps the individual avoid anomie, disenchantment and other modern malaises (Taylor).The Authentic Self and Career Guidance in Contemporary Popular CultureThe prevalence of authenticity in contemporary Western popular culture can be seen in reality television programs like Master Chef (a cooking competition) and The Voice (a singing competition). Generally, contestants take part in the show in order to “follow their dreams” and pursue the career they feel they were “destined” for. When elimination is immanent, those at risk of departure are given one last chance to tell the judges what being in the competition means to them. This usually takes the form of a tearful monologue in which the contestant explains that the past few weeks have been the best of their life, that they finally feel “alive” and that they have found their “passion.” In these shows, finding work that is “really you”—that is an extension of your authentic-self—is portrayed as being a fundamental component of fulfillment and self-actualization.The same message is delivered in self-help media and texts. Since the 1970s, “finding your passion” and “finding yourself” have been popular subjects for the genre. The best known of these books is perhaps Richard Bolles’s What Color is Your Parachute?: a job-hunting manual aimed primarily at people looking for a career change. First published in 1970, a new edition has been released every year and there are over 10 million copies in print. In 1995 it was included in the Library of Congress’s Center for the Book’s 25 Books That Have Shaped Readers’ Lives, placing Bolles in the company of Cervantes and Tolstoy (Bolles).Bolles’s book and similar career guidance titles generally follow a pattern of providing exercises for the reader to help them discover the “real you,” which then becomes the basis for choosing the “right” occupation, or as Bolles puts it, “first deciding who you are before deciding the kind of work you want to pursue.” Another best-selling self-help writer is Phil McGraw or “Dr. Phil,” better known for his television program than his books. In his Self Matters—Creating Your Life from the Inside Out, McGraw begins bytelling the story of his own search for his authentic “passion.” Before moving into television, McGraw spent ten years working as a practicing psychiatrist. He recalls:So much of what I did—while totally okay if it had been what I had a passion for—was as unnatural for me as it would be for a dog. It didn’t come from the heart. It wasn’t something that sprang from who I really was ... I wasn’t doing what was meaningful for me. I wasn’t doing what I was good at and therefore was not pursuing my mission in life, my purpose for being here … You and everyone else has a mission, a purpose in life that cannot be denied if you are to live fully. If you have no purpose, you have no passion. If you have no passion, you have sold yourself out (7–12).McGraw connects living authentically with living meaningfully. Working in an occupation that is in accordance with the authentic self gives one’s life purpose. This is the same message Oprah Winfrey chose to deliver in the final episode of the The Oprah Winfrey Show, which was watched by more than 16 million viewers in the U.S. alone. Rather than following the usual pattern of the show and interview celebrity guests, Winfrey chose to talk directly to her viewers about what matters in life:Everybody has a calling, and your real job in life is to figure out what that is and get about the business of doing it. Every time we have seen a person on this stage who is a success in their life, they spoke of the job, and they spoke of the juice that they receive from doing what they knew they were meant to be doing [...] Because that is what a calling is. It lights you up and it lets you know that you are exactly where you're supposed to be, doing exactly what you're supposed to be doing. And that is what I want for all of you and hope that you will take from this show. To live from the heart of yourself.Like McGraw, Winfrey draws a link between living authentically—living “from the heart”—and finding a “calling.” The message here is that the person whose career is in accordance with their authentic self can live with certainty, direction and purpose. Authenticity may act as a buffer against the anomie and disenchantment that arguably plague individuals in late modernity (Elliott & du Gay).Disenchantment, Modernity and Authenticity For many sociologists, most famously Max Weber, finding something that gives life purpose is the great challenge for individuals in the modern West. In a disenchanted society, without religion or other “mysterious incalculable forces” to provide direction, individuals may struggle to work out what they should do with their lives (149). For Weber the answer is to find your calling. Each individual must discover the “demon who holds the fibers of his very life” and obey its demands (156).Following Weber, John Carroll has argued that in modern secular societies, individuals must draw on their inner resources to find answers to life’s “fundamental questions” (Ego 3–4). As Carroll stresses, it is not that the religious impulse has disappeared from contemporary society, but it is expressed in new ways. Individuals still yearn for a sense of purpose but they are “more likely to pursue their quests for meaning on their own, in experimental ways and with their main resource being their ontological qualities” (Carroll, Beauty 221).Other Australian academics, like Gary Bouma and David Tacey, argue that rather than a decline in religiosity in Australia, what we are seeing is a change in the way people pursue the spiritual. Tacey suggests that while many Australians may “slink away” from the idea of God as something external to our lives, they may find more resonance with a conception of God as a “core dimension” of the person (167). Contemporary Australians continue to yearn for guidance, but they are more likely to look within to find it.There is a clear link between this process of turning inward to pursue the spiritual, the prevalence of authenticity in contemporary Western culture, and modernity. With the breakdown of traditional structures, individuals become more “free to self-create” (Bauman, Identity 3). As Charles Lindholm describes it: “The inclination toward a spontaneous mode of expressive self-revelation correlates with the collapse of reliable and sacralised institutional frameworks that once offered meaning and succour” (65–66).For Charles Taylor, the origins of this “massive subjective turn of modern culture” (26) lie in the 18th-century romantic period with the idea that each individual has an intuitive moral sense. To determine what is right, the individual must be in touch with their “inner voice” and act in accordance with it. It is in this notion that Taylor identifies the background to the belief, which is so prominent today, that “There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else’s” (28–29). Lindholm points to Rousseau as the “inventor” of this ideal, with his revelatory Confessions becoming “the harbinger of a new ideal in which exploring and revealing one’s essential nature was taken as an absolute good” (8). According to Rousseau, social norms suppress the individual’s true nature, and so it is only possible for one to be authentic if they break these chains and act in accordance with their inner depths. For employees in today’s service-oriented knowledge economy, there are significant risks involved in following Rousseau’s advice and expressing one’s “true feelings.” As many researchers have noted, in the new capitalism, workers are increasingly required to regulate their emotions and present themselves as calm, agreeable and above all positive (Hochschild; Sennett; Ehrenreich). To offer criticism or express frustration, to drop the “mask of cooperativeness” (Sennett 112), may mean risking one’s employment.Nevertheless, while it is arguably becoming more difficult to express authentic feeling at work, for contemporary workers, choice of occupation is still often closely linked to perceptions of authentic selfhood. In fact, in a time of increasingly fragmented careers and short-term, episodic work, it becomes more necessary to create a meaningful narrative to link numerous and varied jobs to a core sense of self. As Richard Sennett argues, today’s flexible employees—frequently moving from one workplace to the next—are at risk of “drift:” a sensation of aimless movement (30). To counter this, individuals must create a convincing story that provides a rationale for career changes and can thereby “form their characters into sustained narratives” (31).In the next section, drawing on recent empirical research, I argue that linking authentic selfhood to work provides individuals with a way to make sense of the trajectory of their work lives and to accept change. Today’s employees are able to interpret even the most unexpected career changes as a beneficial occurrence—something that was “meant to be”—by rationalising that such changes are part of a process of finding work that is an expression of the authentic self.The Authentic Self at Work: Being True to Your EssenceThe following discussion focuses on how authenticity as an ideal influences individuals’s work identity and career aspirations. It draws examples from recent qualitative interviews with Australian workers from a range of occupations (James 2012). A number of interviewees described a search for an occupation that was authentically “them,” a task that was well-suited to their capabilities and came “naturally:”I have a feeling that I was sort of a natural teacher. (Teacher, 60)Medical is what I like, that’s me. (Paramedic, 49)I found my thing, I stick to it. (Farrier, 27) These beliefs are quite clearly influenced by the idea of vocation, in that there is a particular task the individual is most suited to, but they do not invoke the sense of duty that a religious “calling” entails. Often, the interviewees had discovered the occupation that was “really them” by working in other jobs that were not their “true passion.” Realising that performing a particular role felt inauthentic helped them to define their authentic self and encouraged them to pursue more fulfilling work. This process often required experimentation, since “one knows what one is only after realising what one is not” (Golomb 201).For instance, Olivia, a 33-year old lawyer had begun her career in a corporate law firm. She had never felt comfortable in the corporate environment: “I always thought, ‘They know I don’t belong here’.” Her performance at work felt inauthentic: “I was never good at smiling and saying yes.” This experience led her to move into human rights, which she found more fulfilling. Similarly Hazel, a 50 year-old social worker, had started her career in what she described as “boring administration jobs.” Although she had “always wanted” to work in the “caring sector” her family’s expectations and her low self-confidence had stopped her from applying for university. When she finally quit the administration work and began to study it was liberating: “a weight had come out off my shoulders.” In her occupation as a social worker she felt that her work fitted with her authentic self: “the kind of person I am,” and for the first time in her life she looked forward to going to work. Both of these women, and many of the other interviewees, rationalised their decision to work in a particular field by appealing to narratives of authentic selfhood.Similarly, in explaining why they enjoyed their work, a number of interviewees looked back to their childhood for signs of what was “meant to be.” For instance, Tim, a 27 year-old farrier, justified his work with horses: “Mum came from a farming background, every school holidays I was up there…I followed my grandpa around like a little dog, annoyed and pestered him and asked him ‘Why’ and How?’ I’ve always been like that … So I think from an early age I was destined to do something like this.” Ken, a 50 year-old electrician, had a similar explanation for his choice of occupation: “Even as a little kid I was always mucking around with batteries and getting lights to work and things like that, so I think it was just a natural progression.”This tendency to associate childhood interests with authentic selfhood is perhaps due to the belief that childhood is a time of innocence and freedom, where the individual had not yet been moulded by society. As Duschinsky argues, childhood is often connected with an “originary natural essence.” We are close here to Rousseau’s “sentiment of being,” or its contemporary manifestation the “real you.” Of course, the idea that the child is free from external influence is problematised by ideas of socialisation. From birth the infant learns by copying “significant others” and self-conception is formed through interaction (Cooley; Mead). Therefore, from the very beginning, an individual’s interests, dispositions and tastes are influenced by family and culture.Shane, a 29 year-old real estate agent, had resisted working in property because it was the family business and he “didn’t want to be as boring as to follow in Dad’s footsteps.” He saw himself as “academic” and “creative” and for a number of years worked as a writer. Eventually though he decided that writing was not his calling: it was “not actually me … I categorise myself as someone who has the ability to write but not naturally.” When Shane began working in real-estate however, it felt almost automatic. Like the other members of his family he had the right skills and traits to thrive in the business and was immediately successful. Interestingly, Shane’s conception of his authenticity includes both a belief in an essential, pre-social “true” self and at the same time an understanding of the importance of the influence of family in the formation of the self.Regardless of whether the idea of a natural, inner-essence discernable in childhood pastimes can be disproven, it is clear that the understanding of authentic selfhood as an “immediate expression of our essence” continues to influence how individuals conceive of their work identities. However, at the same time, the interviewees’ accounts of authenticity also acknowledged the role of parents in influencing traits and dispositions. In these narratives of the self, authenticity encompasses opposing understandings of childhood as being both free from social influences and highly influenced by primary agents of socialisation. That individuals are willing to do the necessary mental and emotional work to maintain these contradictory beliefs suggests that there is a strong incentive to frame work identity as an expression of authentic selfhood.Authenticity Provides PurposeThe great benefit of being able to convincingly rationalise one’s work as a manifestation of the true self is that it gives the individual direction and purpose. Work then provides answers to Carroll’s fundamental questions: “who am I?” and “What should I do with my life?” A number of the interviewees recalled their attempts to secure a sense of purpose by linking their current occupation to their inner essence. As Greg, a 36-year-old fitness consultant described it:You just gotta think ‘What do you really wanna do, what makes you happy, what are you about?’ … I guess the strengthening and conditioning work, the fitness, has been the constant right the way through. It’s probably the core of what I’ve done over the years, seeing individuals and teams get fit. It’s what I do. That’s my role, if you put it in a nutshell. That’s what I’m about … I was sort of floating around a little bit … I need to go ‘This is what I am.’ By identifying his authentic self and linking it to his work, Greg was able to make sense of his past. He had once been a professional runner and after an injury was forced to redefine himself. He now rationalised that his ability to run had led him into the fitness field: You look at what is your life mission and basically what are you out here for … with athletics it’s allowed me to deal with any sport, made me flexible in my career … if I was, therefore born to run? Yeah, quite possibly, there had to be a reason. Like many of the interviewees, Greg had been forced to change his plans, but he was able to rationalise that this change was positive by forming a narrative that connected both his current and previous occupations to his perception of his authentic self. As Sennett describes it, he is able to from his character into a “sustained narrative” (31). Similarly, Trish, a 42 year-old retail coordinator, connected both her work as a chef and her job in a hardware store back to her sense of authentic self. Both occupations, she thought, were “down and dirty” and she linked this to her family “roots” and her identity as a “country girl.” In interpreting these two substantially different occupations as an expression of her true self, Trish is able to create a narrative in which unexpected career changes are as seen as something beneficial that was “meant to be.” These accounts of career trajectories suggest that linking authenticity to work identity is a strategy individuals employ to cope with the disorienting effects of fragmented work lives. Even jobs that are unfulfilling and feel inauthentic can be made meaningful by interpreting them as necessary steps leading towards the discovery of one’s “ true passion”. This is quite different to the ideal of a life-long calling in one occupation, which as Bauman has noted, has become a “privilege of the few” in late-modernity (Work 34). In an era of insecure and fragmented work, the narrative of an authentic self becomes particularly appealing as it allows the individual to create a meaningful work-narrative that can accommodate the numerous twists and turns of contemporary “liquid” existence (Bauman, Identity 5) and avoid “drift” (Sennett). Conclusion Drawing on qualitative research, this paper has analysed the connections between authenticity, work and modern selfhood. I have shown that in an era of flexible and fragmented working lives, work-identities are often closely tied to understandings of authentic selfhood. Interpreting particular kinds of work as being expressions of the authentic self provides individuals with a sense of purpose and in some cases assists them in coming to terms with unexpected career changes. A meaningful career narrative acts as a buffer against disorientation, disenchantment and anomie. It is therefore no wonder that authentic selfhood is such a prominent theme in reality television, self-help and other forms of popular culture, since it is taps into an existential need for a sense of purpose that becomes increasingly elusive in late-modernity. It is clear from the accounts presented in this paper that the pursuit of authenticity is not merely a narcissistic endeavor, and is employed by individuals to work through fundamental existential questions. Future work in this area should continue to make use of empirical research to add depth and complexity to theoretical accounts of authentic selfhood. References Bauman, Zygmunt. “Identity in the Globalizing World.” Identity in Question. Ed. Anthony Elliott and Paul du Gay. London: Sage, 2009. 1–12. Bauman, Zygmunt. Work, Consumerism and the New Poor. Buckingham: Open UP, 1998. Bolles, Richard. What Colour Is Your Parachute 2015. 23 Jan. 2015 ‹http://www.jobhuntersbible.com/books/view/what-color-is-your-parachute-2015›. Bolles, Richard. What Colour Is Your Parachute. Berkley: Ten Speed, 1970. Bouma, Gary. Australian Soul: Religion and Spirituality in the 21st Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Carroll, John. “Beauty contra God: Has Aesthetics Replaced Religion in Modernity?” Journal of Sociology 48.2 (2012): 206–23. Carroll, John. Ego and Soul: The Modern West in Search of Meaning. Melbourne: Scribe, 2008. Cooley, Charles Horton. Human Nature and the Social Order. New York: Scribner’s, 1902. Duschinsky, Robbie. “Childhood Innocence: Essence, Education, and Performativity.” Textual Practice 27.5 (2013): 763–81. Elliott, Anthony, and Paul du Gay. “Editors’ Introduction.” Identity in Question. Eds. Anthony Elliott and Paul du Gay. London: Sage, 2009. xi–xxi. Ehrenreich, Barbara. Bright-Sided : How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. New York: Henry Holt, 2009. Golomb, Jacob. In Search of Authenticity: From Kierkegaard to Camus. London: Routledge, 1995. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Managed Heart: Commercialization Human Feeling. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983. James, Sara. “Making a Living, Making a Life: Contemporary Narratives of Work, Vocation and Meaning.” PhD Thesis. La Trobe U, 2012. Lindholm, Charles. Culture and Authenticity. Malden: Blackwell, 2008. McGraw, Phil. Self Matters—Creating Your Life from the Inside Out. London: Simon and Schuster, 2001. Mead, George Herbert. Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1934. Sennett, Richard. The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, New York: WW Norton, 1998. Tacey, David. Edge of the Sacred: Jung, Psyche, Earth. Sydney: Daimon, 2008. Taylor, Charles. Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991. Weber, Max. “Science as a Vocation.” From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Ed. Hans Heinrich Gerth and Charles Wright Mills. London: Routledge, 1991. 129–56. Winfrey, Oprah. The Oprah Winfrey Show Finale. 23 Jan. 2015 ‹http://www.oprah.com/oprahshow/The-Oprah-Winfrey-Show-Finale_1#ixzz3PbhBrdBs›.

L'oeuvre theatrale du dramaturge tom stoppard est une oeuvre essentiellement difficile, complexe et ambigue. On peut appliquer l'image du prisme a sa vision de la realite particuliere en analysant un certain nombre des fils lumineux diffractes a travers ses pieces par le prisme dans le but de degager plus clairement la valeur dramatique de cette lumiere blanche generatrice d'un theatre original et unique
The dramatic work of the playwright tom stoppard is essentially a difficult, complex and ambiguous work. We can apply the image of a prism to his particular vision of reality and analyse a certain number of the rays or strands refracted throughout his plays in the hope of evaluating more clearly the dramatic value of the white light which generates such an original and unique theatre

L’œuvre dramatique de Tom Stoppard est souvent considérée comme caractéristique du postmoderne. Les techniques d’écriture qui régissent le texte théâtral de Stoppard, étudiés dans cette thèse, participent à une véritable mise en scène de l’écriture. Ils sont aussi, selon nous, un moyen de détourner et parodier les codes du postmoderne. Collages, fragments et réécriture, caractéristiques de l’œuvre de Stoppard, traduisent aussi une vision patrimoniale de la littérature, et permettent une approche originale et critique du postmodernisme, renouvelant ainsi le discours sur le moderne. La présente étude se propose tout d’abord de montrer comment, à travers les références aux œuvres picturales de Magritte et Duchamp, Stoppard met en scène le signe. Puis, elle cherche à mettre en évidence la manière dont Stoppard utilise le collage et l’emprunt musical pour construire et structurer certaines de ses pièces. Elle envisage enfin le collage comme l’expression d’une herméneutique littéraire et philosophique, en examinant notamment l’influence de l’écriture de James Joyce sur le processus scripturaire du dramaturge. Le théâtre, seule forme d’expression artistique qui peut emprunter à tous les autres arts (Beaux-Arts, musique et littérature), est le lieu idéal où se déploient le foisonnement, la complexité et la richesse de l’écriture de Stoppard. Mais l’utilisation de citations et de fragments n’implique pas la fragmentation du sens : le théâtre de Stoppard, loin d’être l’expression d’une vision détachée du monde, propose aussi une véritable réflexion ontologique et politique sur notre société
Tom Stoppard’s plays have often been viewed as the epitome of the postmodern. The writing techniques which inform Stoppard’s dramatic texts and which are studied in the present thesis play an essential part in the way in which the playwright stages his own writing process. This study also postulates that those techniques stand as a means of subverting and parodying the codes of the postmodern. The collages, fragments and rewriting which inform Stoppard’s works, reflect a patrimonial conception of literature and allow for an original approach and critique of postmodernism thus renewing the discourse on the modern. While considering the various references to the works of Magritte and Duchamp, the present study seeks to unveil the way in which Stoppard stages the sign. It will then shed light on the way in which Stoppard uses musical collages and quotations, which dot the playwright’s work, to shape and construct some of his plays. Finally, this dissertation will envisage collage as the expression of literary and philosophical hermeneutics as it examines James Joyce’s crucial influence on the playwright’s writing technique. Theatre stands probably as the only form of art which can borrow from all the other forms of art (painting, sculpture, music and literature). As such, it is the ideal locus for Stoppard’s subtle and complex writing techniques to proliferate. However, using quotations and fragments does not necessarily imply a fragmentation of meaning. Far from conveying a detached view of the world, Stoppard’s dramatic works provide the audience with an ontological and political thought-provoking view on our contemporary society

Este trabajo de investigación se propone examinar la influencia que ejerció el pensamiento de Ludwig Wittgenstein y, en particular, su analísis del lenguaje, en la reflexión sobre el lenguaje y las estructuras teatrales que ha sido una característica del teatro de la modernidad. Se investiga cómo las ideas de Wittgenstein fueron asimiladas o reinterpretadas al incorporarse a la obra de autores teatrales de la segunda mitad del siglo XX. La obra de Wittgenstein, con su radical revisión de los métodos y objetivos de la filosofía misma y su riguroso análisis del funcionamiento del lenguaje, ha dejado una importante huella en la filosofía del siglo XX. Fuera del ámbito filosófico, la obra de Wittgenstein también ha tenido una importante repercusión en determinados movimientos artísticos de la segunda mitad del siglo XX. De la literatura a las artes visuales, se han efectuado diferentes y variadas lecturas de la obra del filósofo austríaco. Dichas lecturas pueden calificarse de excéntricas, en tanto que adoptan una perspectiva ajena al debate filosófico que dió origen a dicha obra y porque con frecuencia la extraen de su contexto original para incorporarla al discurso artístico. Para comprender el contexto en que se sitúan estas re-lecturas de la obra de Wittgenstein, en la primera parte de este trabajo se analiza la difusión de dicha obra, especialmente fuera de los ámbitos académicos. Encontramos que este proceso de difusión fue tardío y muy desigual. Aunque la primera edición del Tractatus data de 1922, este texto tuvo por muchos años una difusión limitada y no fue sino hasta los años cincuenta, tras la muerte del filósofo, cuando tanto el Tractatus como el resto de la obra de Wittgenstein comenzaron a divulgarse más allá de los ámbitos académicos. Fue en Austria donde Wittgenstein tuvo mayor impacto y de manera más temprana. Inicialmente, a través de Ingeborg Bachmann, quizá la primera en hacer una lectura poetica del Tractatus. A partir de ahí, el pensamiento de Wittgenstein estuvo continuamente presente en la literatura austríaca, primero en las propuestas experimentales del Grupo de Viena y posteriormente en el movimiento cultural que surgió en los años sesenta en la ciudad de Graz. Contrastando con lo anterior, en Francia la recepción del pensamiento de Wittgenstein fue muy tardía. Esto se debió en parte al rechazo que despertó el logicismo de Frege y Russell y el positivismo lógico, así como a la hegemonía que ejerció el pensamiento estructuralista en el panorama intelectual francés durante las décadas de los sesenta y setenta. En el ámbito puramente teatral, encontramos que fue en Austria e Inglaterra donde las ideas de Wittgenstein repercutieron de manera significativa. En particular, la obra de Wittgenstein ha dejado una huella importante en la obra de tres autores: Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke y Tom Stoppard. Realizamos un análisis crítico de la producción teatral de estos autores, examinando los diferentes elementos del pensamiento de Wittgenstein que cada uno de ellos incorpora a su producción dramática, y efectuamos un estudio comparativo de las diferentes interpretaciones que cada uno de estos autores llevo a cabo.
The goal of the Doctoral Thesis is to examine the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein on the revision of dramatic and language structures which is a characteristic of modern theatre. The work of Wittgenstein, with its radical revision of the methods and aims of philosophy, and its analysis of language and of its limits, has been very influential in the 20th century philosophy. Outside the philosophical domain, his work has also had a significant impact on artistic movements of the second half of the past century. From literature to the visual arts, multiple reflections have emerged around Wittgenstein’s work and we frequently find his ideas incorporated into the artistic discourse. These revisions are eccentric, to the extent that they are held from a perspective which is different from the strictly philosophical one and they extract the work out from its original context. To understand the general setting, we analyze the diffusion process of Wittgenstein ideas, especially their spill-over into the non-academic world. We find that this process was slow and uneven. In fact, it was not until the 50s, after the death of the philosopher, when his work began to spread outside the academic circles, mainly in Austria and England. In other countries, like France or Spain, it took much longer for Wittgenstein to enter into mainstream philosophy, let alone the artistic domain. In particular, when we look at theatrical activity, we assess how Wittgenstein left an important imprint, mainly in the work of three European writers: Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke and Tom Stoppard. We perform a critical study of their work, examining the elements from Wittgenstein’s work that each one of these authors incorporate into their own dramatic proposals and we make a comparative study around the ways in which those elements were assimilated.

Despite the broadening of the subject matter of English drama in its ???new wave??? period from the late nineteen fifties, it is striking to see how much of enduring mainstream English drama has a domestic focus. The purpose of this thesis is to provide the first full-length study of marriage on the English stage from 1930-1990. The thesis examines the way in which a number of important playwrights have fashioned drama from the conflict between the public, or institutional, functions of marriage and the private, or relational, functions of marriage. The thesis places this conflict into historical context. This will show that the conflict between the private and public aspects of marriage is not one of clearly opposed opposites but one that is made dynamic by significant social and legal changes to the status, function and conventions of marriage. The thesis also demonstrates that this conflict is further complicated by class considerations and by the particular circumstances of each marital partnership. From the wealth of material available, I have chosen to examine in detail the work of seven playwrights who have made significant contributions to domestic drama or domestic comedy. Playwrights have been selected because their plays gained a strong audience on first performance and because, through numerous revivals and through publication of scripts, they have earned an enduring place in English drama. John Osborne???s Look Back in Anger, which in 1956, ushered in the ???new wave???, is pivotal play for discussion. The previous generation is represented by Noel Coward, J. B. Priestley and Terence Rattigan. The ???new wave??? and its aftermath are represented by Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard and, finally Alan Ayckbourn. Despite a wide variety of approaches to the topic of marriage, these writers tend to assume a middle class audience and to follow or adapt the traditions of realism or comedy of manners. This thesis argues that despite real, even radical, changes to marriage, to accepted sexual practices and to the status of women in the sixty years under discussion, the mainstream theatre has tended to be conservative in its presentation of marital and sexual matters, especially in continuing to reinscribe a public/private opposition determined by gender.

by Wong Suk Yin, Edith.
Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1995.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 94-104).
Chapter Chapter One --- The Eternal Triangle --- p.1
Chapter Chapter Two --- Harold Pinter --- p.16
Chapter Chapter Three --- Peter Nichols --- p.45
Chapter Chapter Four --- Tom Stoppard --- p.71
Chapter Chapter Five --- Conclusion --- p.91
Works Cited and Consulted --- p.94

Text in English
Although initially dismissed as superficial, Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, and Patrick Marber’s Closer use the theme of marital betrayal as a trope to investigate metatheatrical and epistemological issues. This study aims to demonstrate how these three plays define and explore the concept of authenticity within the fictional as well as the actual world; how arbitrary the construction and mediation of the characters’ identities are, not only from their own perspective, but also from the audience’s; the significance of the audience’s role in these plays and how issues of authenticity, fictionality and dishonesty impact on a genre that depends on illusion. This study intends to provide a new interpretation of these three texts through an analysis drawn from postmodern and poststructuralist theories, concerning the concept of authenticity within art and language. This study finds that the fictional worlds in these plays are created through mediation, which includes everyday language as well as complex works of art. Authenticity is shown to be an elusive concept. Language is either unsuccessfully used to force authentic responses from characters, or as a shield. In Betrayal, language functions as a protective barrier, preventing the characters from knowing one another. The Real Thing suggests that although inauthenticity may be established, the inverse is not necessarily true. In Closer, the characters try in vain to access authenticity through different registers of language. Furthermore, neither the body nor the mind is shown to be the locus of authenticity in Closer. Within the postmodern context where originality is impossible, mimicry is not seen as something external and inauthentic, but as inextricably part of human existence. The audience is drawn into the fictional world of these plays as its members are able to identify with the disillusionment of the characters and their inability to form a definitive view of each other. Simultaneously, the audience is ousted from the fictional world by being reminded of the author’s presence through metatheatrical devices. These plays take advantage of the fictional status of theatre to explore issues of authenticity, positioning them in direct opposition to postdramatic and verbatim plays.
Afrikaans & Theory of Literature
D. Litt. et Phil. (Theory of Literature)

Text in English
Although initially dismissed as superficial, Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, and Patrick Marber’s Closer use the theme of marital betrayal as a trope to investigate metatheatrical and epistemological issues. This study aims to demonstrate how these three plays define and explore the concept of authenticity within the fictional as well as the actual world; how arbitrary the construction and mediation of the characters’ identities are, not only from their own perspective, but also from the audience’s; the significance of the audience’s role in these plays and how issues of authenticity, fictionality and dishonesty impact on a genre that depends on illusion. This study intends to provide a new interpretation of these three texts through an analysis drawn from postmodern and poststructuralist theories, concerning the concept of authenticity within art and language. This study finds that the fictional worlds in these plays are created through mediation, which includes everyday language as well as complex works of art. Authenticity is shown to be an elusive concept. Language is either unsuccessfully used to force authentic responses from characters, or as a shield. In Betrayal, language functions as a protective barrier, preventing the characters from knowing one another. The Real Thing suggests that although inauthenticity may be established, the inverse is not necessarily true. In Closer, the characters try in vain to access authenticity through different registers of language. Furthermore, neither the body nor the mind is shown to be the locus of authenticity in Closer. Within the postmodern context where originality is impossible, mimicry is not seen as something external and inauthentic, but as inextricably part of human existence. The audience is drawn into the fictional world of these plays as its members are able to identify with the disillusionment of the characters and their inability to form a definitive view of each other. Simultaneously, the audience is ousted from the fictional world by being reminded of the author’s presence through metatheatrical devices. These plays take advantage of the fictional status of theatre to explore issues of authenticity, positioning them in direct opposition to postdramatic and verbatim plays.
Afrikaans and Theory of Literature
D. Litt. et Phil. (Theory of Literature)

In March 1937, the Italian voluntary corps CTV began an offensive operation towards Guadalajara. Its aim was to cut the Madrid connection with Valencia and thus to close the ring of encirclement around the capital of the republican Spain. The guarantee of success was to be surprise, the use of motorized infantry and the support of armored weapons and aviation. The errors of the Italian command, heavy rain and snowfall did not make it possible to achieve the assumed success and after 2 weeks the offensive was stopped.

The Fifth Congress of Soviet Filmmakers represented a cataclysmic moment of change, but also the onset of a serious crisis for the entire film industry. Filmmakers in the studio had only a vague sense of what the new slogans, “glasnost” and “perestroika,” would mean for them. In the summer of 1986, a frustrating period of stop-start reform began: no sooner were structural and managerial changes achieved in the studio than they were rendered obsolete by fresh directives from the top. In 1987 began the process of setting up new “creative units” that, unlike the old ones, now had financial and managerial autonomy. These rapidly developed their own character, with German’s “First and Experimental Film Studio” championing avant-garde aspirations, while Maslennikov’s “Trinity Bridge” and Tregubovich’s “Ladoga” pursued a more market- and audience-oriented approach. Within a few years, however, younger film artists had outgrown the old mentoring tradition—a landmark was the departure of one of the most talented newcomers, Aleksei Balabanov, to run his own production company. From now on, Lenfilm was to act mainly as a facility for outside companies. However, these changes in the management of production were in the end less significant and less damaging than the impact of commercial distribution. Film production never stopped, and indeed, during the early 1990s, encouraged by influxes of private funding, often from money-laundering, it became easier than ever before to make movies. What became increasingly difficult was reaching the public, as cinema owners and distributors turned their sights on foreign-produced movies.

Having seen pictures of the devastation did not prepare me for the reality of New Orleans. Mile after mile of wrecked houses, demolished cars, piles of debris, twisted and downed trees, and dried mud everywhere. We stopped every so often to look into abandoned houses in the 9th Ward and along the shore of Lake Pontchartrain to see things close up: mud lines on the walls, overturned furniture, moldy clothes still hanging in closets, broken toys, a lens from a pair of glasses . . . once cherished and useful objects rendered into junk. Each house had a red circle painted on the front to indicate the results of the search for bodies. Some houses showed the signs of desperation, such as holes punched through ceilings as people tried to escape rising water. The musty smell of decay was everywhere, overlaid with an oily stench. Despair hung like Spanish moss in the hot, dank July air. Ninety miles to the south, the Louisiana delta is rapidly sinking below the rising waters of the Gulf. This is no “natural” process but rather the result of decades of mismanagement of the lower Mississippi, which became federal policy after the great flood of 1927. Sediments that built the richest and most fecund wetlands in the world are now deposited off the continental shelf—part of an ill-conceived effort to tame the river. The result is that the remaining wetlands, starved for sediment, are both eroding and compacting, sinking below the water and perilously close to no return. Oil extraction has done most of the rest of the damage by crisscrossing the marshlands with channels that allow the intrusion of saltwater and storm surges. Wakes from boats have widened the original channels considerably, further unraveling the ecology of the region. The richest fishery in North America and a unique culture that once thrived in the delta are disappearing, and with them the buffer zone that protects New Orleans from hurricanes. “Every 2.7 miles of marsh grass,” in Mike Tidwell’s words, “absorbs a foot of a hurricane’s storm surge” (2003, p. 57).