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The eighth season of the American medical drama series Chicago Med (2015–) represented the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in a hospital environment with multiple storylines. Born in the 1950s, medical dramas are among the most popular forms of serial television. Traditionally, the genre aims for a certain amount of accuracy and has educational goals. Former studies investigated the entertainment education and cultivation effects of these series, concluding that these dramas have the potential to contribute information and shape viewers' opinions on various health-related topics. Chicago Med is a long-running broadcast production with a worldwide audience and considerable viewership. This paper analyzes the series' representation of medical AI and discusses how this portrayal potentially shapes the audience's opinion. The research started by identifying artificial intelligence-related storylines in the 22 episodes of the season. The analysis focused on the reasons and outcomes of AI applications, the character's attitudes, and the ethical issues, including transparency, selective adherence, automation bias, responsibility gap, hallucination, unequal access, and political dimensions. The storyline analysis concluded that Chicago Med provided thought-provoking positive and negative scenarios about applying different types of AI in the surgical and emergency departments. The complex portrayal included groundbreaking opportunities, challenges, dangers, and ethical considerations. The main characters' attitudes varied, from strong support or opposition to more nuanced, shifting opinions. The educative and engaging content has a potential for knowledge transfer and encourages critical thinking about medical AI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, four members of the Tyrone family make some choices about their careers and family life. It is apparent that the adverse outcomes of Tyrones' respective decisions that they have reached hold sway and torment the rest of their lives. Although James Tyrone, the head of the family, announces his credo as keeping his family together and healthy, his two sons Jamie and Edmund and his wife Mary suffer from different types of addiction, from not being able to position themselves in a respectable environment and to develop healthy relationships. The play takes place on a single day, starting from 8.30 in the morning to midnight, which is quite parallel with the descending mood of the characters and events. Each of these characters' tragedies can be traced not only in their seemingly conscious choices but in their collective unconscious which can be anatomized with some Lacanian conceptual backcloths. This paper forms its basis on discovering the ulterior motives of the characters' actions and the way they speak language by scrutinizing their unconscious, which reveals itself in a structure of language in Lacanian outlook. Thus, this study aims to create a hermeneutical frame by laying the underlying reasons for why the Tyrone family suffer, which can be traced in how these family members fail to identify themselves with the symbolic father which is a functional metaphor for rules and regulations in the society and by highlighting what kind of master signifiers the Tyrone family keep using to substitute the Name-of-the-Father. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concepts of inclusivity and diversity are socially and discursively constructed through a variety of contexts, including televisual/streaming series. Undoubtedly, televisual/streaming products strongly impact how individuals (especially younger generations; Bednarek 2017; Trudgill 1986) are exposed to and have experience with construed situations, since they broaden the range of different positions in contexts. In fact, certain themes are problematized in dramas and are successively negotiated in dialogues, favoring different viewpoints and attitudes. In ongoing screen interactions, therefore, the audience participates in the enactment and alignment of meanings that challenge the different representations of reality (Bednarek 2018; Dewulf, Bouwen 2012). In the context of the socio-political input that favours inclusivity, this paper investigates the type of diversity that is framed and in what way it is negotiated within fictional interactions in teen drama. The analytical tools of Critical Discourse Studies are combined with the interaction-oriented ones to investigate the discursive strategies of identity constructions in interaction (Stamou 2018). Exchanges from three American teen dramas, representing the audiovisual experience that would best fit the age group of adolescents, are investigated to explore fictionalization within and throughout dialogues, and to study how specific identities are constructed (as in normalized/accepted/rejected), and what discourses are drawn for these constructions. Results show that some differences in how specific (stereotypical) identities are treated occur and that certain exchanges in dialogues strategically sustain, support or reject particular messages about diversity to frame "group identity" meanings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lying is a common but controversial verbal phenomenon in human society. This paper aims to uncover the motivation and mechanism of lying as regards its definition, classification and operation by analyzing both the speaker's production and the addressee's interpretation process. The Relevance-Adaptation Model is adopted as its theoretical framework. Lying cases, retrieved from an American TV drama Lie to Me , are analyzed from different perspectives to provide concrete evidence for the theoretical assumptions. The findings are two-fold: Theoretically, this paper formulates a working diagram of the Relevance-Adaptation Model with some modifications to the original to be better applied to the field of lying. Empirically, it supports the claim that the presumption of relevance motivates both the speaker to lie and the addressee to process lying in the first place. Then, both communicators will enter a relevance-adaptation phase through making structural choices inter-adapt with relevant contextual correlates. An optimal lie is one which is maximally relevant and maximally adapted to the context to benefit the speaker and/or the addressee. • Adopt the Relevance-Adaptation Model to accommodate both the speaker's and the addressee's stance in the speech act of lying. • Propose an operational definition and classification which functions as a criterion for identifying cases of lying. • Construct a hypothesis regarding the production and interpretation of lying, andthe status of an optimal lie. • Formulate a revised version of the Relevance-Adaptation Model and test its applicability in verbal communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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American dramatists arrived in the Spanish theaters rather late, in the 1950s. In the beginning they were generally represented by non-professional theater groups (exemplified here by Dido Pequeño Teatro) that aimed to challenge the obsolete plays produced on the mainstream stages during Franco's dictatorship (1939-1975). Thanks to these companies that were an alternative to the commercial theaters, Spanish audiences gradually discovered many contemporary playwrights whose plays were being staged in the rest of Europe at the time. This article focuses on three American authors who were the first significant ones to be staged in Spain: Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams and the American-born T.S. Eliot, and were chosen by Dido Pequeño Teatro. This paper briefly presents the three authors and their theater, together with their success in the United States, in order to then concentrate on their first appearance in Spain. We highlight four plays that were produced by one of the most significant Spanish non-professional groups of that era, Dido Pequeño Teatro. The article then takes a closer look at how the plays were received by the critics and the general audience and analyze their success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is an attempt at demonstrating how the language used by fictional dramatic characters contributes to their characterization, that is, how the readers (audiences) perceive them based on inferences drawn from a variety of textual cues. These cues include explicit selfand other-presentation as well as implicit hints retrieved from conversation structure, aspects of turn-taking or features of the language used by the character. In this paper, Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski from Tennessee Williams’ play The Streetcar Named Desire are analyzed and characterized as being polar opposites.

Copyright of Journal of Tikrit University for Humanities is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The paper focuses on the analysis of humour as a means of doing American identities in the first American comedy, Royall Tyler's "The Contrast" (1789) (Downer 1960) which introduced to the American stage the archetypal Yankee in the character of Jonathan. I will show that Tyler's stage portrait of the Yankee, as well as other portraits of Americans in the play, are not one-sided caricatures but rather complex and engaging representations. I will follow the General Theory of Verbal Humour (henceforth GTVH) (Attardo and Raskin 1991; Attardo 1994, 2001) taking a close look mostly on the target(s) of "jab lines". Other "knowledge resources" will be addressed as well, so that the humour of the selected extracts is fully demonstrated. Among other theoretical tools, the GTVH can prove a valuable tool for the analysis of a comedy in that it will enable me to pronounce clearly the playwright's targets of humour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with the influence of context on cotext, presenting the critical universe of author Mihnea Gheorghiu, with a focus on his analyses regarding the work of American dramatist Eugene O'Neill. In the historical-cultural framework of the period 1940's-1960's, Gheorghiu's literary analyses are loaded with the significance of the times, without losing their brilliance, which is the result of refined intelligence and distinguished culture. I will study the ways in which Gheorghiu negotiates the Marxist critical canon in order to make relevant commentaries regarding the works and personality of Eugene O'Neill - a world renowned author, who had been awarded the Nobel for literature in 1936, but who represented a culture condemned by the Communist authorities The genre addressed in my paper is, obviously, the critical text, whose historicity is marked by the political context which conditions it, threatening to exclude certain texts from public scrutiny on the basis of their cultural affiliation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several plays by William Saroyan written in the mid-1930s reached the Soviet stage only during the Khrushchev Thaw, in the early 1960s. The paper focuses on the first Soviet productions of Saroyan’s play My Heart’s in the Highlands, premiered in Armenian (Yerevan) in 1961, and in 1962 staged in Russian by the Mayakovsky Moscow Theatre. The paper analyses the reasons for such a late appearance of Saroyan’s dramas on the Russian stage, traces how Saroyan’s trip to the USSR in 1960 prompted the staging of his work in Armenia’s capital, which thereon paved the way for its Moscow production. The theatrical history of Saroyan’s work in the USSR is viewed in a wide social, political and cultural Soviet-American macro-context during the Cold War. The paper based on the rare materials from the museum of the Mayakovsky Moscow Theatre, focuses on the reception of the play and its production in the Soviet Union. The director Ya.S. Tsitsinovski strove to transmit the elevated, poetic spirit of Saroyan’s work and find a vivid expressive form, which was not typical for the Mayakovsky Theatre of N.P. Okhlopkov’s time. Its appearance on the Moscow stage in 1962 marked the beginning of the scene history of the American author’s drama in our country. The paper is aimed at reconstructing the theatrical history of Saroyan’s plays in the USSR.

As Edward Albee has been regarded as one of the most provocative playwrights of the 20th century, his works have been the subject of heated discussions. Theater criticism has had a special focus on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a drama about the encounter of two married couples. This play has been given several labels: the work of a genius, pornographic, extremist, cynical, pessimistic, etc. - but after the premiere some critics came up with a special category for such works: homosexual theater. According to their point of view these works have a hidden agenda, namely, to attack the foundations of the "normal" (that is: heterosexual) society. My paper examines the sociological/political circumstances among which such criticism could have emerged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hickey, the Iceman, has gained a legendary status in the history of modern American drama and has been portrayed on stage by some of the finest actors of their generation (Jason Robards, Lee Marvin, Kevin Spacey, Nathan Lane). O'Neill has given his charismatic, flamboyant protagonist a task of great magnitude: to disenchant dreams and illusions, for they distort reality causing an ultimate "fragmentation of personalities". However, the line between a dream and reality, the real and the ideal self, reason and desire, is a fine and delicate one. Thus, Hickey -- the self-appointed Savior, by openly spelling out the facts, unintentionally causes a great disturbance in the private world those around him have created. This paper will analyze the notion of the complex interdependence between dreams and reality, the impossibility of their harmonious coexistence, along the major role and inner mechanisms of a pipe dream in some of O'Neill's best work, mainly in reference to a conviction that "The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to a the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober" (Larry Slade in The Iceman Cometh). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philip Barry is best remembered as a comedy writer, very successful on Broadway. While his serious plays often failed on stage, his comedies enjoyed great popularity among theatre goers. An Irish-American, he was a very religious Catholic and a man preoccupied with a spiritual search. Barry's Here Come the Clowns (1938), a serious play with autobiographical overtones, focuses on the problem of free will and of human suffering in the world. It is a dramatization the biblical story of Job, as the protagonist is a man who has been inflicted with physical and emotional suffering. Now he wants to ask God "Why?", because he cannot find any justification or explanation of his traumatic experiences. The purpose of this paper is to examine how the play responds to the problem of theodicy, a term which may be understood in two ways: as a justification of the existence of evil and suffering in the face of benevolent and powerful God on the one hand, and as an accusation of God who allows evil and suffering, on the other. The discussion is conducted in reference to a claim made by a German philosopher, Odo Marquard, that theodicy is possible only in modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article throws light on dramatic approaches of Arthur Miller, who is one of the topmost American playwrights, successfully judging together the social and the psychological aspects in his plays and his approach to playwrights and dramas itself is organic and his plays may be called realities which are also naturalistic and expressionistic. This paper neatly portrays the conflict between the individual and the society as visualized by Arthur Miller during his life span of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the American Theatre and Drama Society (ATDS) celebrated its thirty-fifth anniversary at ATHE 2022, the group hosted the roundtable "Imagining New Possibilities: Career Diversity and Doctoral Education in Theatre and Performance Studies," welcoming faculty and graduate students to think expansively about the present and future of doctoral education. Co-organizers Michelle Granshaw (University of Pittsburgh) and Mia Levenson (Tufts University), along with panelists Courtney Colligan (University of Pittsburgh), Mac Irvine (Tufts University), Victoria LaFave (University of Pittsburgh), Noe Montez (Tufts University), and Elizabeth W. Son (Northwestern University), reflected on pressing questions and exciting opportunities surrounding career diversity. Faculty and students highlighted issues including how to shift program and field cultures to erase stigma and elitism and create an openness to career diversity conversations; incorporate career diversity and fields like the public humanities into programs and curriculum to serve students' individualized career paths; contextualize and understand the job market and career trajectories to help us consider ways to improve career planning and mentorship; understand how graduate education and career diversity impact student labor; and prioritize and implement equitable practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blending personal narrative and ethnographic interviews with Asian American transformative justice practitioners, this piece of creative nonfiction brings an abolitionist perspective to bear onto recurrent debates concerning the a/political content of Asian American intergenerational conflict. Asian Americanists have rigorously outlined the political and historical foundations of intergenerational harm. Yet discussions about how we are to heal from that harm often remain at the level of the interpersonal, obscuring connections between our approaches to domestic conflict and broader political commitments. Building on erin Ninh's (2011) argument that focusing on the Asian American familial drama is not an apolitical or ahistoric distraction from, but rather central to articulating an Asian American cultural materialist critique, I demonstrate how transformative justice approaches to intergenerational harm are central to efforts to move towards a horizon that is at once Asian American, feminist, and abolitionist. I do this by first interrogating the simultaneous irresistibility and insufficiency of dominant discourses about how children are to heal from parental abuse—discourses that prioritize clean breaks through mechanisms like reporting, leaving, changing, or inventing palatable narratives about abusers. I contrast these narratives with transformative justice approaches that delicately challenge structural forces motivating harm, while allowing survivors to claim anger and pursue diffuse, multiscalar, and imperfect forms of justice-seeking. While I ultimately argue that intergenerational healing must extend beyond the interpersonal, I demonstrate how experiments in healing within the familial realm are both reflective and generative of abolitionist efforts to bring into being worlds structured by transformation rather than disposability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The National Security Act of 1947 was neither the first nor the last legislative word on intelligence coordination. Instead, it was the second of three formative, although not formidable, acts of Congress that have provided models for U.S. intelligence coordination: the Contingent Fund for Foreign Intercourse, the National Security Act of 1947, and the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004. This article reveals how the debate over intelligence coordination in the United States reaches back further than existing accounts that examine the origins of the Central Intelligence Agency. This article also uses the theme of intelligence coordination to introduce a new chronology for U.S intelligence history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Foreign Literature Studies is the property of Foreign Literature Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article is an introduction to Volume 42 of Theatre History Studies, written by Lisa Jackson-Schebetta, the editor of the journal. She reflects on her four-year term as editor and expresses gratitude for the colleagues and contributors who have enriched her experience. The volume includes three general articles that explore various topics and methods in theatre history, as well as a special section titled "Care" that features critical responses to the field's histories and possible futures. The article concludes by emphasizing the importance of attending to recent and long histories in order to bring about change in the field. [Extracted from the article]

Few would dispute the classic status of Zola's manifesto for dramatic Naturalism: a translation of one particular section - which outlines his theory - appears in almost every anglophone anthology devoted to Modern drama.[2] Yet the second half of the book is much less well-known, the "Examples", in which Zola analyses numerous categories of his contemporary theatre (tragedy, comedy, historical drama, patriotic drama, vaudeville and pantomime). But in one of these sections, "Revivals", Zola discusses a number of recent productions, and these include I Jean la Poste i , an adaptation of Dion Boucicault's I Arrah-na-Pogue i . Zola's dismissive account of I Jean la Poste i is unintentionally evocative, particularly of the performers' gestural acting and the production's romantic scenic effects. [Extracted from the article]

This article is focused on Eugene O’Neill’s failed artistic collaborations with outstanding directors, actors and singers. It is the first attempt, in the Russian theatre studies, to get to the truth behind the playwright’s unrealized tandem with the legendary opera singer Feodor Chaliapin. The creative destiny of O’Neill’s play Lazarus Laughed (1927) is tracked from the attempts to stage it in New York, Chicago, Berlin and Moscow, all the way to the long-anticipated premiere at the Pasadena Playhouse in Pasadena, California. Special attention is paid to the Kamerny Theatre shows in Paris and Buenos Aires. Also under scrutiny is the American playwright’s private correspondence — in particular, with literary agent Richard Madden, translator Alexander Berkman and theatre producer Kenneth Macgowan. Particular emphasis is put on the playwright’s work behind the scenes and his active contribution to the translation of his ideas to the stage. The article reflects O’Neill’s approach to picking actors for lead roles in the stage productions of his plays, and also gives a logical conclusion to his failed meeting with two-time Academy Award winner Spencer Tracy at the Tao House in Danville, California. The paper provides a review of Ingrid Bergman’s acting performance in the Anna Christie production (Lobero Theatre, Santa Barbara, 1941) and in Jose Quintero’s Broadway production More Stately Mansions (Broadhurst Theatre, New York, 1967) based on Eugene O’Neill’s late unfinished play.

Eco-translatology is a theory of translation put forward by Professor Hu Genshen, which regards translation as a process of "selective adaptation" and "adaptive selection". The popularity of American TV dramas has aroused a huge demand for subtitle translation, resulting in the rapid growth of subtitle translation by fansub groups and increasing enthusiasm for subtitle translation studies in China. While there is no accordant idea about the understanding of subtitle translation of TV dramas on the internet translated by fansub groups. Based on the theoretical framework of Eco-translatology theory, this study examines the subtitle translation of The Big Bang Theory to analyze translators' "selection" and "adaptation" on linguistic, cultural, and communicative dimensions. It also pays attention to the inappropriate selection of translation techniques made by the fansub groups. The analysis shows that in the translation process of The Big Bang Theory's subtitles, the translators adopted various translation techniques which include the applications of buzzwords, Chinese idioms, annotations, and free translation to implement adaptive selection in linguistic, cultural, and communicative dimensions. And the fansub groups make some inappropriate selections as abusing the Chinese dialect in translation. These findings attempt to provide a reference for subtitle translation of American TV dramas available on the internet, as well as evidence of the explanatory power of Eco-translatology theory in subtitle translation studies, in order to supplement a new perspective on subtitle translation and more attention on this developing translation theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The genre of musicaI theatre began as an American form of light music-drama--mostly romantic comedies with music. However, music can be added to any literary or dramatic genre, and when more serious subjects are tackled in musicals, themes such as violence that have long been present in other media are explored in new ways. This paper examines instances of violence in four Canadian musicals: Billy Bishop Goes to War (1978), Jacob Two Two Meets the Hooded Fang (1983), The Shooting of Dan McGrew (1983) and Evil Dead: The Musical (2003). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Voice is one of the means through which fictional people are characterised in audiovisual products. Through their voice characters reveal their thoughts and personalities, including external and internal elements, such as their age, geographical and social origins, gender and sexuality, among others. The linguistic variety analysed in this article is the audiovisual fictional representation of gayspeak, which is used to index characters' homosexuality. This is a case study that focuses on the subtitling and dubbing of the 2020 Netflix adaptation of The Boys in the Band, which is an American drama film based on the homonymous play written by Mart Crowley in 1968; it can be considered a seminal work for gay literature, in that it is allegedly one of the first plays to address homosexuality openly, something that had never been seen before. The original script in English, the Italian subtitles and the script of the Italian dubbing will be analysed in parallel, with particular attention to some scenes which will be selected and discussed on the basis of their relevance in the use of gayspeak and its translation. This research focuses on the excerpts that creatively deviate from the original text, at least in one of the two audiovisual modalities analysed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Culture, Language & Representation / Cultura, Lenguaje y Representación is the property of Universitat Jaume I and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

As Carey McWilliams notes in Southern California Country: An Island on the Land (1946), theatricality has persisted as a central tactic of empire in the U.S. borderlands--from the rituals Spanish missionaries used to attract Native Americans to the historical dramas of Anglo-American boosters. The early decades of the twentieth century saw a number of plays that, in the words of Chelsea K. Vaughn, "romanticized the Spanish and Mexican periods of California history before assigning them comfortably to the past." These include John S. McGroarty's The Mission Play (1912) and Garnet Holme's adaptation of Ramona (1923) as well as his original drama The Mission Pageant of San Juan Capistrano (1924). Such dramas were anticipated by ceremonial pageants that took place at Mission Revival hotels throughout the early twentieth century--to wit, Governor Theodore Roosevelt's visit to the 1899 Rough Riders Reunion at the Castañeda Hotel in Las Vegas, New Mexico, and President William Howard Taft's 1909 Columbus Day sojourn at the Glenwood Mission Inn, in Riverside, California. Each of these "hospitality pageants" casts the visiting dignitary as a typological protagonist--the Anglo-American "antitype" of the Spanish "type" embodied in conquistadores and/or missionaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Postmodern American drama of the 1980s and 1990s is commonly defined by its abundant distrust in authenticity and the 'real.' Since around 2000, the emergence of a new type of documentary drama, in turn, has begun to recall and renegotiate postmodernism's scepticism of the 'real' and the theatrical conventions that resulted from it. As theatre scholar Carol Martin notes, contemporary theatre addresses the "larger cultural obsession with capturing the 'real'" in an age of mediatization as it poses questions about the iconography of the visual, the body, and dramatic and performative epistemes of representation (Martin, "Introduction" 1). This article examines the role of the 'real' in two examples of recent American documentary theatre, Moisés Kaufman and Tectonic Theater Project's The Laramie Project (2001) and Lynn Nottage's Ruined (2008). Both plays are characterised by their use of verbatim and documentary techniques alongside a heightened emphasis on modes of narrativity. Drawing on Carol Martin's conception of the "theatre of the real" (2010; 2013) as a new type of American documentary theatre in American visual and literary culture in the twenty-first century, I argue that these two documentary plays aim to establish a poetics of 'the real' as an elemental ethical and theatrical category in their representations of war, citizenship, and cultural ideologies. I argue that both plays turn towards the ethical rather than - as postmodern theatre did - the epistemological repercussion of their stagings of the 'real.' These examples of recent American documentary theatre respond to, renegotiate, and challenge postmodernism's aversion to authenticity and complicate the idea that "truth is contextual, multiple, and subject to manipulation" (Martin, "Introduction" 3) as they investigate different scenarios and epistemes of truth through novel poetic techniques (embodiment, amateurism, the public sphere). Both plays elucidate how American documentary theatre in the twenty-first century negotiates the category of the 'real' at the nexus of spectatorship dramatic mode, and the ethics of performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter focuses on the concepts of precarity and precariousness, which prominently figure in critiques of neoliberalism. In particular, it establishes connections between precarity and precariousness, on the one hand, and the much older notions of tragedy and the tragic, on the other. Thus, it argues for the relevance of tragedy to contemporary political drama, while examining a neglected aspect of the prehistory of precarity studies. The first section of the chapter discusses the concepts of precarity, precariousness, tragedy, and the tragic, and it outlines some of the relationships among these notions. In the second part, the chapter considers the contemporary plays Topdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks and Sweat by Lynn Nottage. Both plays examine precarity, and the chapter maintains that it is important that they be regarded as tragedies. The chapter closes by reflecting on the political significance of the question of who or what qualifies as tragic and by locating at the center of tragedy a fundamental ambivalence. Approached in a skillful and careful manner, this ambivalence can become the wellspring of the force of politically powerful tragedies like Topdog and Sweat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is devoted to the problem of translating bad language in cases when the target audience recipient has direct access to the source text and the impact translational and editorial choices have on the overall meaning of the work. As an illustration of this point, it discusses a voice-over translation, in which case it is common practice to censor vulgarities, mainly by means of under-translating certain phrases, which are considered taboo, or omitting them completely. Such choices are justified for a number of reasons, including protecting vulnerable audiences or reducing semantic density because most taboo words exercise a phatic function. However, in certain cases censoring bad language has an impact on the semiotic make-up of the work and thus, changes the meaning intended by the original author. A good illustration is provided with the analysis of particular scenes from the Canadian drama American Heist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zelda Fitzgerald's lone play, Scandalabra , is traditionally dismissed either as a minor literary curiosity that followed the critical and commercial failure of her only published novel, Save Me the Waltz , or as a source of domestic conflict during a turbulent, contentious time in the Fitzgeralds' marriage when the husband accused his wife of poaching upon his artistic territory. As a result, the play has not yet been subject to proper study or commentary. A closer reading of it, however, reveals that this forgotten piece offers a fascinating, and even innovative, exercise in dramatic language, especially in its use of stage directions. By reading Scandalabra first as a text relevant to a specific movement within the tradition of theatrical realism, second as a further development of the voice its author was crafting in her short stories, and finally as a play that can benefit from a new theatrical context that understands stage directions as a place for formal and linguistic innovation, it is possible to understand the play not as an extravagance of an artist unaccustomed to writing for the theater, but rather as a conscious effort in Fitzgerald's development as a writer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with Tony Kushner’s plays Perestroika and Slavs!, which consider the questions of Russian history. Perestroika is Part II of Kushner’s Angels in America, and the play is not actually devoted to the ‘Russian theme’, but forms parallels between ‘national themes’ in the USA of 1980–1990s and Russian Perestroika of the same period. Slavs! is a play about the 1980–1990s as well, but it is often called “a chronicle of a Russian Revolution” (J. Fisher). T. Kusher is interested in Revolution as a longstanding problem. The playwright investigates the impact of several ideological systems on the history of Russia.

Philip Barry is best remembered as a comedy writer, very successful on Broadway. While his serious plays often failed on stage, his comedies enjoyed great popularity among theatre goers. An Irish-American, he was a very religious Catholic and a man preoccupied with a spiritual search. Barry’s Here Come the Clowns (1938), a serious play with autobiographical overtones, focuses on the problem of free will and of human suffering in the world. It is a dramatization the biblical story of Job, as the protagonist is a man who has been inflicted with physical and emotional suffering. Now he wants to ask God ‘Why?’, because he cannot find any justification or explanation of his traumatic experiences. The purpose of this paper is to examine how the play responds to the problem of theodicy, a term which may be understood in two ways: as a justification of the existence of evil and suffering in the face of benevolent and powerful God on the one hand, and as an accusation of God who allows evil and suffering, on the other. The discussion is conducted in reference to a claim made by a German philosopher, Odo Marquard, that theodicy is possible only in modernity.

In 2014, Karen Tei Yamashita - award-winning playwright and author of novels such as Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, Brazil-Maru, Tropic of Orange, and I Hotel - published Anime Wong: Fictions of Performance with Coffee House Press, "a memory book" featuring her collected plays, musicals, and performances. At the 25th Annual CDE conference in Eichstätt, she spoke about the artistic inspirations, themes, and experiences that fuelled her theatrical work. The following keynote and the ensuing conversation with Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns, a dramaturg and associate professor in the Asian American Studies Department at the University of California Los Angeles, took place on 28 May 2016. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1920) is the first ever projection of a black protagonist on Broadway who carries the imprints of white ideals. While the playwright presents the title character Brutus Jones as a kleptocrat, he seems to corroborate the fact that the streetwise black Jones’ growing up in New York has a lot to do with his rule as a despot on the island. This paper explores O’Neill’s projection of the American mercantile psyche as seen on the island’s experience of colonial capitalism and the enactment of original sin in America by a journey through Brutus’ personal and racial memory lanes. This article also investigates to what extent Jones is a by-product of the American capitalist system which considers greed as good and money as the bottom line of success.