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Events
Jan. 9 | Call for papers: Identities and Technocultures
A 2-day conference about American culture and technologies that examines how new technologies dominate and define Americaness in the US and abroad. Co-sponsored by the University of Iowa Center for Ethnic Studies and the Arts (CESA) and the Mid-America American Studies Association (MAASA).
Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Gorgan Roodi, Sami. ""A Dark Fairy Land," America in the American Social and Political Drama of the 1930s: A Study of Plays by Maxwell Anderson, Elmer Rice, Robert E. Sherwood, Lillian Hellman, Sidney Kingsley and Clifford Odets," American Studies, Sussex University, May 2004.
This thesis examines and evaluates plays - both well known and little regarded - of the 1930s. It focuses on the portrayal of America and the treatment of different aspects of American ideology by six Depression-era playwrights, by analyzing the cultural, social, economic and political factors that made an impact on their dramas. With the dawning of the Cold War many of the plays discussed here fell out of favor, dismissed as dogmatic, feared as un-American and disparaged as aesthetically frivolous and imaginatively incomplete. Despite its richness, the drama of the Depression years is nearly overlooked in present-day discussions of America’s social and cultural development. In reclaiming their place at the forefront of dramatic creativity in 1930s America, this work shows how the 1930’s dramatists animated a stimulating cultural dialogue in the history of American dramatic literature. In doing so, it fuses close readings with a synthesizing concern for artistic and dramatic devices, politics, and history to illuminate the art of the thirties playwrights, calling attention to the relationship between the dramatic and thematic structures in their plays. The plays discussed here are diverse in subject and range of reference, but united by their critical look at the distinction between individualistic and collectivist aspects of American history. The plays are studied as a living process: therefore, discussions of the theatrical production and history and the dramatist’s lives and milieu are also included. The introduction examines the distinction between individualistic and collectivist features of American ideology in the Depression years. With this distinction in mind, the work moves on to study the political beliefs of dramatists against the backdrop of the debates of the 1930s. Having established the political contexts of the plays in consideration, it then examines the relationship between the thematic and dramatic structures in an integrated study of some of the plays. Each of the main chapters deals with one of six particular dramatists, who were chosen on the basis of their preoccupation with contemporary social issues, their willingness to express the age in which they lived, the quality of their talents, their survival value and the existence of a substantial body of criticism on their works.
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