Research Catalog

Title

The theater of trauma : American modernist drama and the psychological struggle for the American mind, 1900-1930 / Michael Cotsell.

Author

Cotsell, Michael.

Publication

New York : Peter Lang, [2005], ©2005.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

xv, 377 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Summary

"The Theater of Trauma is a groundbreaking rereading of the relations between psychology and drama in the age of Eugene O'Neill, Susan Glaspell, and their many brilliant contemporaries. American modernist Theater of Trauma drew its vision from the psychological investigation of trauma and its consequences - among them hysteria and dissociation - made by French and American psychiatrists such as the great Pierre Janet, Alfred Binet, William James, Morton Prince, and W. E. B. Du Bois; the European and American "dissociationist culture" that developed around their work; and the resulting trauma of World War I. American dramatists' deep resistance to Freud's suppression of trauma challenges the equation of Freud and modernism that has become commonplace in modernist criticism."--BOOK JACKET.

Subject

• American drama > 20th century > History and criticism
• Modernism (Literature) > United States
• Drama > Psychological aspects
• Psychology in literature

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. [329]-349) and index.

Contents

i. Trauma and modernist drama -- ii. The historical context -- Ch. 1. The dissociationists -- Ch. 2. After 1909 -- Ch. 3. The theater of therapeutics -- Ch. 4. Trauma, dissociation and modernist dramatic form -- Ch. 5. Theodore Dreiser and the comfort of Freud -- Ch. 6. Dramatizing incest -- i. Gertrude Stein : IIIIIIII -- ii. Djuna Barnes : the erotics of trauma -- Ch. 7. The theatre of war in Greenwich Village -- i. Millay : savage beauty? -- ii. O'Neill and shell shock -- Ch. 8. Susan Glaspell : Dionysian -- Ch. 9. "The horror! The Horror!" O'Neill, incest, and black face -- Ch. 10. Lynching and miscegenation in African American drama -- i. Du Bois, Locke, and dissociation -- ii. Angelina Grimke : white crow -- iii. Jean Toomer : "how many lives?" -- iv. Marita Bonner : where the skin is tenderest -- Ch. 11. The matriarchal offense -- Ch. 12. Mimetic and traumatic doubling in O'Neill -- Ch. 13. The father machine -- Ch. 14. The machine of consciousness -- Ch. 15. John Howard Lawson : psychology and revolution -- Ch. 16. O'Neill as a Freudian -- Ch. 17. Sophie Treadwell and the death of the female hysteric -- Conclusion : the end of modernism.

ISBN

0820474665 (alk. paper)

LCCN

2004021355

OCLC

• ocm56517393
• SCSB-5217732

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries