The Contemporary Political Play: Rethinking Dramaturgical Structure
- Submitting institution
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The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- SGRO1
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
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10.5040/9781472588500
- Publisher
- Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
- ISBN
- 9781472588500
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2017
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
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- Research group(s)
-
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- ‘The Contemporary Political Play: Rethinking Dramaturgical Structure’, an 85,000-word monograph, is a study of the politics of dramatic form, offering an approach to reading and analysing plays in which the political stance articulated by the work’s dramatic structure is considered alongside the politics of its content. The nature of dramatic form is often overlooked in the reading of a piece of drama as its structures are considered to be ‘universal’. This is problematic, as it normalises a particular set of late nineteenth-century dramatic structures — relating to understandings of time, space, causation and human nature — as representative of corresponding structures in the modern world, ignoring the increasingly networked and liquid nature of contemporary social structures. The first chapter in the book historicises these so-called universal structures tracing their origin to the work of George Bernard Shaw. The second chapter analyses the politics of such structures using Frederic Jameson’s concept of the political unconscious as a theoretical framework. The final four chapters deal with specific aspects of dramatic structure — time, space, plot and character — examining the politics of their ‘universal’ forms, alongside offering examples of alternative approaches to their structuring in contemporary British plays and considering the political potential of these new approaches. The monograph is the culmination of over nine years of research, which included: extensive research in historical texts on dramatic theory in three different languages from Aristotle to the present day; an extensive survey of contemporary British plays written between 1991 and 2012; and the deep reading of key philosophical works by philosophers including Aristotle, Marx, Althusser, Jameson, Lefebvre and Bauman. The book also draws on Grochala’s own embodied understanding of dramatic structure, gained through over fifteen years as a professional playwright. The monograph was shortlisted for the TAPRA Early Career Research Prize in 2018.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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