W. B. Worthen

Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater W. B. Worthen First Edition, None edition

Marc Notes: The history of drama is typically viewed as a series of inert 'styles.' Tracing British and American stage drama from the 1880s onward, W. B. Worthen instead sees drama as the interplay of text, stage production, and audience. How are audiences manipulated? What makes drama meaningful? Worthen identifies three rhetorical strategies that distinguish an O'Neill play from a Yeats, or these two from a Brecht. Biographical Note: W. B. Worthen is Alice Brady Pels Professor in the Arts, and Professor and Chair of the Department of Theatre at Barnard College, Columbia University; he also serves as Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia, and as co-chair of the Ph. D. in Theatre Program. Jacket Description/Flap: "Strikingly original. . . . The first study of modern drama that takes the implicit or explicit presence of the audience into constant consideration."--Simon Williams, author of "Shakespeare and the German Stage ""Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater ""is a book of unusual depth and rare intelligence... What decisively distinguishes Worthen's project from all others is the importance it accords to the audience, thereby extending one of the premises of theatre semiotics far beyond its usual, rather mechanical applications."""""--Una Chaudhuri, "The Drama Review"

Contributor Bio:  Worthen, W B W. B. Worthen, Alice Brady Pels Professor in the Arts, is Professor and Chair of the Department of Theater at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is the author of Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2003) Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge University Press, 1997), Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater (University of California Press, 1992), The Idea of the Actor: Drama and the Ethics of Performance (Princeton University Press, 1984), Modern Drama: Plays, Criticism, Theory (Wadsworth, 1995), and of many articles on modern drama, Shakespeare, and theories of performance. Professor Worthen received his B. A. in English from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and his Ph. D. in English from Princeton University, and has held research fellowships form the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment of the Humanities. He is past editor of Theatre Journal and current coeditor of Modern Drama.