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 The American University in Cairo
School of Humanities & Social Sciences
 

The Pursuit of Absence:
Dramaturgy and the Interface
between the World and the Text

by Hazem Mohamed Azmy El-Tonsy

Under the supervision of Dr. James Waller Stone


Abstract


 
  This thesis is an attempt to detect how the application of concepts from contemporary post-structuralist literary theory (i.e., deconstruction, new historicism, and Bakhtinian dialogism) can lead to a better understanding of what the researcher calls "the dramaturgical paradigm": the creative implications of the interface between the dramatic and the theatrical but also, more paradigmatically, between the play (as written text and/or performance) and the world(s) in which it finds itself.  In this sense, the thesis is also an attempt to fathom the practical productive consequences of "literary" theory, and literary study in general, as distinct from its more philosophical resonances.  The function and praxis of the dramaturg is thus studied as the site of such a happy marriage between the mundane and the intellectual in the theater.

To illustrate this argument, two Arabic one-act plays by contemporary Egyptian writer Mohammad Salmawy serve as case study. The two plays were staged by the AUC Theater company in March 1998 with the researcher as dramaturg; hence, the choice of the two plays.

The researcher proposes, and demonstrates, three inextricably linked procedures as practicable conceptual points of departure for any dramaturg or whoever is performing the dramaturgical function (stage director, theater critic, or a teacher of dramatic texts). These procedures are: re-/de-constructing the narratives suggested by the text, questioning the binary oppositions that these narratives posit, and empowering as many voices as possible -- in the text, production setting, or classroom -- to create a more dialogic engagement with the text at hand.  What should emerge through the application of these procedures is further questioning of the time-honored authorial autonomy as well as a fresh awareness of how a given theatrical performance inevitably supplements, in Derrida's sense of the word, the text with which it engages.
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URL: http://victorian.fortunecity.com/postmodern/242/abstract.htm