The childhood of Thomas Lanier Williams III, who was born in Columbus, Mississippi, and raised in various other Southern locations, is described as nothing less than "a southern idyll," regardless of the father's evident alcoholism, frequent family quarrels, and the older sister's fragile health.
But like Crandell she insists that despite such pervasive Endgame mood, the fundamental romanticism running through all of Williams's plays nevertheless resurges: the hope for love and beauty.
Barbara Harris discusses Williams as an icon of twentieth-century American popular culture, illustrating how deeply entrenched references to his work are in everyday American culture, from sitcoms to advertisement, Holditch once more presents Williams's close connections to New Orleans, showing us where the playwright liked to wine and dine.
(of depth) capable of being sounded or measured for depth
In a comparative analysis of Jim of Glass Menagerie, Mitch of Streetcar, Alvaro of Rose Tattoo, and Chicken of Kingdom of Earth, Kolin comes to the conclusion that all of them "suffer from interrupted/incomplete sexuality, branding them as representatives of a desire that is fathomable, disappointing."
the quality of being not alike; being distinct or different from that otherwise experienced or known
Una Chaudhuri argues that Williams's abstruse surrealistic drama The Gnadiges Fraulein in many ways anticipates Deleuze and Guattari's notion of "becoming animal"--in light of which the dominant bird imagery as well as the Fraulein's own metamorphosis into an animal represent a concerted effort of venturing into radical otherness.
Two recent essay collections, Magical Muse and Undiscovered Country, reassess the playwright's life and oeuvre in light of the recent release of Williams's papers that disclosed a number of previously unknown letters, drafts, as well as several unpublished plays.
large herbivorous tropical American arboreal lizards with a spiny crest along the back; used as human food in Central America and South America
After all, "no one was claiming that [the] newly discovered plays were likely to join the magical company of The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or Night of the Iguana."
The essays bear testimony to the playwright's attempt to cope with changes in American culture by incorporating such postmodern themes as the decentering of the subject and the subsequent shift from identity to performativity.
"Even more perniciously," Kolin points out, "Williams' later canon has been superciliously ostracized by a majority of critics who continue to explore the 1945-61 canon while they extol his recently rediscovered apprentice plays of the 1930s."
Jackson Bryer draws out thematic parallels between Williams and F. Scott Fitzgerald, manifest not only in Clothes for a Summer Hotel, a drama about Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda, but also as early as in Streetcar and The Great Gatsby.
"Even more perniciously," Kolin points out, "Williams' later canon has been superciliously ostracized by a majority of critics who continue to explore the 1945-61 canon while they extol his recently rediscovered apprentice plays of the 1930s."
drawing from or characterized by participation of two or more fields of study
Employing a wide range of interdisciplinary methodologies and theories--from close reading to poststructuralist philosophy, from visual aesthetics to performance theory--they underscore the heterogeneity and complexity of the later plays.
prejudice against (fear or dislike of) homosexual people and homosexuality
Some of his best-known characters are outsiders, who struggle bitterly (and often in vain) against the xenophobia, racism, and homophobia of Southern communities: Val Xavier and Lady of Orpheus Descending, Mr. Vacarro of 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, and even Stanley Kowalsky of Streetcar.
It is the photographs that point to the story the text leaves untold: a picture of Bessie Smith, "murdered by John Barleycorn and Jim Crow" as Val reminds us, of cotton gins and black workers, of the Delta floods.
In short, rather than being read as innovative and provocative works, in which Williams was trying to develop a new kind of dramaturgy, the later plays were persistently read in light of the handful of classics that established the playwright's reputation early on.
Reviews such as the following by leading drama critic C.W.E. Bigsby unfortunately set the tone for the reception of Williams's later plays: "His plays had always borne directly out of his life, but over the years the degree of refraction lessened until he began to write more and more about himself as a blighted gay poet or debilitated artist for whom writing was a way of denying his mortality."
Of
course, even if she had in reality followed those directions in
1947, taking the appropriate streetcars as she had been instructed,
she would not have reached her destination, since the playwright
rearranged the topography of reality to accommodate his expressionistic vision.
a German courtesy title or form of address for an unmarried woman
The fifteen contributors accomplish precisely that with their innovative and compelling readings of a fair share of the later plays, including The Gnadiges Fraulein, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, Small Craft Warnings, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, Clothes for a Summer Hotel, Out Cry, Two-Character Play, Vieux Carre, Red Devil Battery Sign, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, Something Cloudy, Something Clear, and A House Not Meant to Stand.
discussion of a subject of public interest by a group of persons forming a panel usually before an audience
Although Colby Kullman, moderator of a concluding panel discussion, insists that the conference/book offered abundance of testimony to innovative work on Williams, the majority of essays rehearse already existing approaches.
the final stages of a chess game after most of the pieces have been removed from the board
But like Crandell she insists that despite such pervasive Endgame mood, the fundamental romanticism running through all of Williams's plays nevertheless resurges: the hope for love and beauty.
a defense that claims the defendant would not have broken the law if not tricked into doing it by law enforcement officials
Michael Paller maintains that Williams's relationship to his sister Rose was marked not only by feelings of tender care and brotherly protection, but also ridden with sentiments of entrapment and guilt--a strain running through Williams s entire oeuvre from Glass Menagerie and Rose Tattoo to Suddenly Last Summer and Two-Character Play.
substituting a mild term for a harsher or distasteful one
In short, where the book falls short is precisely in its careful dodging of concrete personal and social realities and its euphemistic evocation of a mythological counter reality.
the quality of being diverse and not comparable in kind
Employing a wide range of interdisciplinary methodologies and theories--from close reading to poststructuralist philosophy, from visual aesthetics to performance theory--they underscore the heterogeneity and complexity of the later plays.
being twofold; a classification into two opposed parts or subclasses
Rehearsing such cliches of along-standing North-South dichotomy, the authors establish the South as a warm and comfortable haven, in which Williams apparently felt sheltered from personal and social conflicts.
barbiturate that is a white odorless slightly bitter powder (trade name Seconal) used as a sodium salt for sedation and to treat convulsions
The fifteen contributors accomplish precisely that with their innovative and compelling readings of a fair share of the later plays, including The Gnadiges Fraulein, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, Small Craft Warnings, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, Clothes for a Summer Hotel, Out Cry, Two-Character Play, Vieux Carre, Red Devil Battery Sign, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, Something Cloudy, Something Clear, and A House Not Meant to Stand.
Robert Gross poses the question of Williams's political commitment as a playwright, arguing that his politics, even in such overtly topical plays as The Red Battery Devil Sign, need to be located not on a concrete socioeconomic level, nor on the level of erotic desire, but on a Gnostic level, i.e., the insistence of achieving liberation and transcendence through self-knowledge.
Some of his best-known characters are outsiders, who struggle bitterly (and often in vain) against the xenophobia, racism, and homophobia of Southern communities: Val Xavier and Lady of Orpheus Descending, Mr. Vacarro of 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, and even Stanley Kowalsky of Streetcar.
a machine that separates the seeds from raw cotton fibers
It is the photographs that point to the story the text leaves untold: a picture of Bessie Smith, "murdered by John Barleycorn and Jim Crow" as Val reminds us, of cotton gins and black workers, of the Delta floods.
After all, "no one was claiming that [the] newly discovered plays were likely to join the magical company of The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or Night of the Iguana."
the system of methods followed in a particular discipline
Employing a wide range of interdisciplinary methodologies and theories--from close reading to poststructuralist philosophy, from visual aesthetics to performance theory--they underscore the heterogeneity and complexity of the later plays.
(art) the branch of philosophy dealing with beauty and taste (emphasizing the evaluative criteria that are applied to art)
Approaching this experimental play from the perspective of Eastern philosophy and aesthetics, which Williams studied at the time, Hale effectively revises the prevalent critical rejection of the play, reassessing it instead as a complex and profound statement on artistic martyrdom.
Employing a wide range of interdisciplinary methodologies and theories--from close reading to poststructuralist philosophy, from visual aesthetics to performance theory--they underscore the heterogeneity and complexity of the later plays.
(chess) a chess pawn that is moved two squares can be captured by an opponent's pawn commanding the square that was passed
A discussion of these other aspects exhausts itself, however, in an en passant reference to the large black labor force, whose "life were markedly different from those of the Delta planters."
If discussed at all, the later plays were attacked as fragmented and tiresome imitations of previous themes and motives, or simply rejected as reflections of the playwright's deteriorating lifestyle, as booze- and drug-induced ruminations on the failed dreams of an artist.
Last but not least, drama critic Dan Sullivan adds some brief personal reminiscence about Williams the man, who turned out to be, as Sullivan figuratively puts it, both "angel and crocodile."
an undivided or unbroken completeness or totality with nothing wanting
Crandell interprets the dream/ghost play as Williams's most radical manipulation of time, a deliberate attempt at misrepresentation, which was to unmask the perpetual exile from wholeness experienced by the modern subject.
After all, even in his dramatic imagination the South was never simply just a place of enduring gentility and romanticism to Williams, but it was also the site of very concrete and often cruel social, ethnic, and sexual conflicts.
the act of presupposing; a supposition made prior to having knowledge (as for the purpose of argument)
Given the rather conservative presupposition that Williams's fame rests solidly on and is entirely explainable in terms of a handful of classics, it is not surprising that in the end the anthology contributes few fresh perspectives to Williams scholarship.
the means of connection between things linked in series
Moreover, in symbolically elevating this interrupted desire to the level of failed religions epiphany, Williams succeeds in turning the unsuitable suitor into a suitable metaphor for the tight nexus of sensuality and salvation in his works.
with a sneer; in an uncomplimentary sneering manner
"Even more perniciously," Kolin points out, "Williams' later canon has been superciliously ostracized by a majority of critics who continue to explore the 1945-61 canon while they extol his recently rediscovered apprentice plays of the 1930s."
Robert Gross poses the question of Williams's political commitment as a playwright, arguing that his politics, even in such overtly topical plays as The Red Battery Devil Sign, need to be located not on a concrete socioeconomic level, nor on the level of erotic desire, but on a Gnostic level, i.e., the insistence of achieving liberation and transcendence through self-knowledge.
characterized by fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtapositions
Una Chaudhuri argues that Williams's abstruse surrealistic drama The Gnadiges Fraulein in many ways anticipates Deleuze and Guattari's notion of "becoming animal"--in light of which the dominant bird imagery as well as the Fraulein's own metamorphosis into an animal represent a concerted effort of venturing into radical otherness.
United States author whose novels characterized the Jazz Age in the United States (1896-1940)
Jackson Bryer draws out thematic parallels between Williams and F. Scott Fitzgerald, manifest not only in Clothes for a Summer Hotel, a drama about Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda, but also as early as in Streetcar and The Great Gatsby.
(chemistry) a change directly from the solid to the gaseous state without becoming liquid
All in all, Undiscovered Country persuasively establishes that the later plays are far from being the Abgesang of an aging and deteriorating artist, that instead they are the continuation and sublimation of his early works.
the state of excelling or surpassing or going beyond usual limits
Robert Gross poses the question of Williams's political commitment as a playwright, arguing that his politics, even in such overtly topical plays as The Red Battery Devil Sign, need to be located not on a concrete socioeconomic level, nor on the level of erotic desire, but on a Gnostic level, i.e., the insistence of achieving liberation and transcendence through self-knowledge.
an alcoholic beverage that is distilled rather than fermented
It is the photographs that point to the story the text leaves untold: a picture of Bessie Smith, "murdered by John Barleycorn and Jim Crow" as Val reminds us, of cotton gins and black workers, of the Delta floods.
It is the photographs that point to the story the text leaves untold: a picture of Bessie Smith, "murdered by John Barleycorn and Jim Crow" as Val reminds us, of cotton gins and black workers, of the Delta floods.
Rehearsing such cliches of along-standing North-South dichotomy, the authors establish the South as a warm and comfortable haven, in which Williams apparently felt sheltered from personal and social conflicts.
Moreover, in symbolically elevating this interrupted desire to the level of failed religions epiphany, Williams succeeds in turning the unsuitable suitor into a suitable metaphor for the tight nexus of sensuality and salvation in his works.
A discussion of these other aspects exhausts itself, however, in an en passant reference to the large black labor force, whose "life were markedly different from those of the Delta planters."
It is the photographs that point to the story the text leaves untold: a picture of Bessie Smith, "murdered by John Barleycorn and Jim Crow" as Val reminds us, of cotton gins and black workers, of the Delta floods.
If discussed at all, the later plays were attacked as fragmented and tiresome imitations of previous themes and motives, or simply rejected as reflections of the playwright's deteriorating lifestyle, as booze- and drug-induced ruminations on the failed dreams of an artist.
Approaching this experimental play from the perspective of Eastern philosophy and aesthetics, which Williams studied at the time, Hale effectively revises the prevalent critical rejection of the play, reassessing it instead as a complex and profound statement on artistic martyrdom.
the action of alienating; the action of causing to become unfriendly
The alienation and conflicts of the North, in tuna, trigger the transformation of the Southern past into a comforting myth: "His experiences, good and bad, served as a sort of magical catalyst to convert the past into a precious stone of memory, enriching it with a luster and magnificence it may never have possessed in reality."
Reviews such as the following by leading drama critic C.W.E. Bigsby unfortunately set the tone for the reception of Williams's later plays: "His plays had always borne directly out of his life, but over the years the degree of refraction lessened until he began to write more and more about himself as a blighted gay poet or debilitated artist for whom writing was a way of denying his mortality."
barrier preventing blacks from participating in various activities with whites
It is the photographs that point to the story the text leaves untold: a picture of Bessie Smith, "murdered by John Barleycorn and Jim Crow" as Val reminds us, of cotton gins and black workers, of the Delta floods.
a port and largest city in Louisiana; located in southeastern Louisiana near the mouth of the Mississippi river; a major center for offshore drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico; jazz originated here among black musicians in the late 19th century; Mardi Gras is celebrated here each year
Then the book quickly moves on to Williams's life in New Orleans and Key West, "One of the Last Frontiers of Bohemia," as the chapter's tide suggests.
an understanding of yourself and your goals and abilities
Robert Gross poses the question of Williams's political commitment as a playwright, arguing that his politics, even in such overtly topical plays as The Red Battery Devil Sign, need to be located not on a concrete socioeconomic level, nor on the level of erotic desire, but on a Gnostic level, i.e., the insistence of achieving liberation and transcendence through self-knowledge.
If discussed at all, the later plays were attacked as fragmented and tiresome imitations of previous themes and motives, or simply rejected as reflections of the playwright's deteriorating lifestyle, as booze- and drug-induced ruminations on the failed dreams of an artist.
Thus the entire first half of the collection, summarized by Voss as bibliographical and biographical approaches, reads very much like an exercise in the humanist tradition: Williams's becomes as an explanation for Williams's oeuvre.
(chemistry) a substance that initiates or accelerates a chemical reaction without itself being affected
The alienation and conflicts of the North, in tuna, trigger the transformation of the Southern past into a comforting myth: "His experiences, good and bad, served as a sort of magical catalyst to convert the past into a precious stone of memory, enriching it with a luster and magnificence it may never have possessed in reality."
stimulation that calls up (draws forth) a particular class of behaviors
In short, where the book falls short is precisely in its careful dodging of concrete personal and social realities and its euphemistic evocation of a mythological counter reality.
Thus the entire first half of the collection, summarized by Voss as bibliographical and biographical approaches, reads very much like an exercise in the humanist tradition: Williams's becomes as an explanation for Williams's oeuvre.
Approaching this experimental play from the perspective of Eastern philosophy and aesthetics, which Williams studied at the time, Hale effectively revises the prevalent critical rejection of the play, reassessing it instead as a complex and profound statement on artistic martyrdom.
This also seems to be the case for Kenneth Holditch and Richard Freeman Leavitt, the authors of the beautiful biographical album Tennessee Williams and the South. (2) Holditch and Leavitt's book is alive with nostalgia for a South that no longer exists: a culture of grace and ease, of cavalier behavior and stoic endurance, a place where the romantic imagination is alive and in perpetual struggle with the crude realism of modernity.
Robert Gross poses the question of Williams's political commitment as a playwright, arguing that his politics, even in such overtly topical plays as The Red Battery Devil Sign, need to be located not on a concrete socioeconomic level, nor on the level of erotic desire, but on a Gnostic level, i.e., the insistence of achieving liberation and transcendence through self-knowledge.
Besides establishing Williams's intimate ties with the South and revealing the biographical material beyond the writer's fiction, the book relishes the perpetuation of Southern mythologies.
Michael Paller maintains that Williams's relationship to his sister Rose was marked not only by feelings of tender care and brotherly protection, but also ridden with sentiments of entrapment and guilt--a strain running through Williams s entire oeuvre from Glass Menagerie and Rose Tattoo to Suddenly Last Summer and Two-Character Play.
a meeting or conference for the public discussion of some topic especially one in which the participants form an audience and make presentations
Magical Music: Millennial Essays on Tennessee Williams, coming out of the 1999 Alabama Symposium on English & American Literature in Tuscaloosa, strives to infuse Williams's oeuvre with the millennial significance a turn-of-the-century retrospective inevitably entails.
In a meticulous study of Williams's correspondence, Albert Devlin demonstrates the pivotal role of the year 1939 in the playwright's career--the year Thomas Lanier Williams became Tennessee Williams.
a soldier of the American Revolution who was hanged as a spy by the British; his last words were supposed to have been `I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country' (1755-1776)
Allean Hale concludes the critical section with a persuasive reading of In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel as a No play.
an advocate of the principles of humanism; someone concerned with the interests and welfare of humans
Thus the entire first half of the collection, summarized by Voss as bibliographical and biographical approaches, reads very much like an exercise in the humanist tradition: Williams's becomes as an explanation for Williams's oeuvre.
the attribute of accepting the facts of life and favoring practicality and literal truth
This also seems to be the case for Kenneth Holditch and Richard Freeman Leavitt, the authors of the beautiful biographical album Tennessee Williams and the South. (2) Holditch and Leavitt's book is alive with nostalgia for a South that no longer exists: a culture of grace and ease, of cavalier behavior and stoic endurance, a place where the romantic imagination is alive and in perpetual struggle with the crude realism of modernity.
The alienation and conflicts of the North, in tuna, trigger the transformation of the Southern past into a comforting myth: "His experiences, good and bad, served as a sort of magical catalyst to convert the past into a precious stone of memory, enriching it with a luster and magnificence it may never have possessed in reality."
a short poem descriptive of rural or pastoral life
The childhood of Thomas Lanier Williams III, who was born in Columbus, Mississippi, and raised in various other Southern locations, is described as nothing less than "a southern idyll," regardless of the father's evident alcoholism, frequent family quarrels, and the older sister's fragile health.
Last but not least, drama critic Dan Sullivan adds some brief personal reminiscence about Williams the man, who turned out to be, as Sullivan figuratively puts it, both "angel and crocodile."
minimal language unit that has a syntactic (or morphological) function
William's formative relationships with other men, significantly with Frank Merlo, is reduced to being part of Williams's flamboyant bohemian existence, "a functional blend of persistent, almost obsessive labor and pleasure in a new lifestyle to which he adapted completely."
English poet remembered primarily for his free translation of the poetry of Omar Khayyam (1809-1883)
Jackson Bryer draws out thematic parallels between Williams and F. Scott Fitzgerald, manifest not only in Clothes for a Summer Hotel, a drama about Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda, but also as early as in Streetcar and The Great Gatsby.
the change in direction of a propagating wave (light or sound) when passing from one medium to another
Reviews such as the following by leading drama critic C.W.E. Bigsby unfortunately set the tone for the reception of Williams's later plays: "His plays had always borne directly out of his life, but over the years the degree of refraction lessened until he began to write more and more about himself as a blighted gay poet or debilitated artist for whom writing was a way of denying his mortality."
the configuration of a surface and the relations among its man-made and natural features
Of
course, even if she had in reality followed those directions in
1947, taking the appropriate streetcars as she had been instructed,
she would not have reached her destination, since the playwright
rearranged the topography of reality to accommodate his
expressionistic vision.
In a comparative analysis of Jim of Glass Menagerie, Mitch of Streetcar, Alvaro of Rose Tattoo, and Chicken of Kingdom of Earth, Kolin comes to the conclusion that all of them "suffer from interrupted/incomplete sexuality, branding them as representatives of a desire that is fathomable, disappointing."
the visual property of something that shines with reflected light
The alienation and conflicts of the North, in tuna, trigger the transformation of the Southern past into a comforting myth: "His experiences, good and bad, served as a sort of magical catalyst to convert the past into a precious stone of memory, enriching it with a luster and magnificence it may never have possessed in reality."
Michael Paller maintains that Williams's relationship to his sister Rose was marked not only by feelings of tender care and brotherly protection, but also ridden with sentiments of entrapment and guilt--a strain running through Williams s entire oeuvre from Glass Menagerie and Rose Tattoo to Suddenly Last Summer and Two-Character Play.
In this regard, George Crandell's comprehensive overview of Williams' scholarship at the end of the twentieth century, including an extensive bibliography, is probably the most useful contribution of the first half of the collection.
Robert Gross poses the question of Williams's political commitment as a playwright, arguing that his politics, even in such overtly topical plays as The Red Battery Devil Sign, need to be located not on a concrete socioeconomic level, nor on the level of erotic desire, but on a Gnostic level, i.e., the insistence of achieving liberation and transcendence through self-knowledge.
elegance by virtue of fineness of manner and expression
After all, even in his dramatic imagination the South was never simply just a place of enduring gentility and romanticism to Williams, but it was also the site of very concrete and often cruel social, ethnic, and sexual conflicts.
a nonconformist writer or artist who lives an unconventional life
William's formative relationships with other men, significantly with Frank Merlo, is reduced to being part of Williams's flamboyant bohemian existence, "a functional blend of persistent, almost obsessive labor and pleasure in a new lifestyle to which he adapted completely."
Magical Music: Millennial Essays on Tennessee Williams, coming out of the 1999 Alabama Symposium on English & American Literature in Tuscaloosa, strives to infuse Williams's oeuvre with the millennial significance a turn-of-the-century retrospective inevitably entails.
In a meticulous study of Williams's correspondence, Albert Devlin demonstrates the pivotal role of the year 1939 in the playwright's career--the year Thomas Lanier Williams became Tennessee Williams.
Although Voss commends the recent staging of previously ignored plays as well as the renewed interest of young scholars in them, he also insists that Williams's canonical greatness rests above all on a few great works written between 1945 and 1961.
concerning or characterized by an appreciation of beauty or good taste
Approaching this experimental play from the perspective of Eastern philosophy and aesthetics, which Williams studied at the time, Hale effectively revises the prevalent critical rejection of the play, reassessing it instead as a complex and profound statement on artistic martyrdom.
But like Crandell she insists that despite such pervasive Endgame mood, the fundamental romanticism running through all of Williams's plays nevertheless resurges: the hope for love and beauty.
difficult to penetrate; incomprehensible to one of ordinary understanding or knowledge
Una Chaudhuri argues that Williams's abstruse surrealistic drama The Gnadiges Fraulein in many ways anticipates Deleuze and Guattari's notion of "becoming animal"--in light of which the dominant bird imagery as well as the Fraulein's own metamorphosis into an animal represent a concerted effort of venturing into radical otherness.
This also seems to be the case for Kenneth Holditch and Richard Freeman Leavitt, the authors of the beautiful biographical album Tennessee Williams and the South. (2) Holditch and Leavitt's book is alive with nostalgia for a South that no longer exists: a culture of grace and ease, of cavalier behavior and stoic endurance, a place where the romantic imagination is alive and in perpetual struggle with the crude realism of modernity.
A discussion of these other aspects exhausts itself, however, in an en passant reference to the large black labor force, whose "life were markedly different from those of the Delta planters."
Given the rather conservative presupposition that Williams's fame rests solidly on and is entirely explainable in terms of a handful of classics, it is not surprising that in the end the anthology contributes few fresh perspectives to Williams scholarship.
The essays bear testimony to the playwright's attempt to cope with changes in American culture by incorporating such postmodern themes as the decentering of the subject and the subsequent shift from identity to performativity.
based on or told of in traditional stories; lacking factual basis or historical validity
In short, where the book falls short is precisely in its careful dodging of concrete personal and social realities and its euphemistic evocation of a mythological counter reality.
the largest city in Missouri; a busy river port on the Mississippi River near its confluence with the Missouri River; was an important staging area for wagon trains westward in the 19th century
However, these fundamental problems erupted suddenly and violently, so the authors insist, only with the family's move north to St. Louis.
This also seems to be the case for Kenneth Holditch and Richard Freeman Leavitt, the authors of the beautiful biographical album Tennessee Williams and the South. (2) Holditch and Leavitt's book is alive with nostalgia for a South that no longer exists: a culture of grace and ease, of cavalier behavior and stoic endurance, a place where the romantic imagination is alive and in perpetual struggle with the crude realism of modernity.
This also seems to be the case for Kenneth Holditch and Richard Freeman Leavitt, the authors of the beautiful biographical album Tennessee Williams and the South. (2) Holditch and Leavitt's book is alive with nostalgia for a South that no longer exists: a culture of grace and ease, of cavalier behavior and stoic endurance, a place where the romantic imagination is alive and in perpetual struggle with the crude realism of modernity.
Crandell interprets the dream/ghost play as Williams's most radical manipulation of time, a deliberate attempt at misrepresentation, which was to unmask the perpetual exile from wholeness experienced by the modern subject.
Magical Music: Millennial Essays on Tennessee Williams, coming out of the 1999 Alabama Symposium on English & American Literature in Tuscaloosa, strives to infuse Williams's oeuvre with the millennial significance a turn-of-the-century retrospective inevitably entails.
William's formative relationships with other men, significantly with Frank Merlo, is reduced to being part of Williams's flamboyant bohemian existence, "a functional blend of persistent, almost obsessive labor and pleasure in a new lifestyle to which he adapted completely."
Moreover, in symbolically elevating this interrupted desire to the level of failed religions epiphany, Williams succeeds in turning the unsuitable suitor into a suitable metaphor for the tight nexus of sensuality and salvation in his works.
Moreover, in symbolically elevating this interrupted desire to the level of failed religions epiphany, Williams succeeds in turning the unsuitable suitor into a suitable metaphor for the tight nexus of sensuality and salvation in his works.
a striking change in appearance or character or circumstances
Una Chaudhuri argues that Williams's abstruse surrealistic drama The Gnadiges Fraulein in many ways anticipates Deleuze and Guattari's notion of "becoming animal"--in light of which the dominant bird imagery as well as the Fraulein's own metamorphosis into an animal represent a concerted effort of venturing into radical otherness.
Jenckes describes Clothes as a mediation on the insufficiency of desire and the absolute necessity for it in a "Post-All" universe, in which all roles have been tried and discarded in order to be tried and discarded again.
Holditch and Leavitt also succeed in illuminating how tightly Williams's writing is interwoven with his life by repeatedly identifying the biographical material behind the fiction.
designed for or capable of a particular function or use
William's formative relationships with other men, significantly with Frank Merlo, is reduced to being part of Williams's flamboyant bohemian existence, "a functional blend of persistent, almost obsessive labor and pleasure in a new lifestyle to which he adapted completely."
(Greek mythology) a great musician; when his wife Eurydice died he went to Hades to get her back but failed
Some of his best-known characters are outsiders, who struggle bitterly (and often in vain) against the xenophobia, racism, and homophobia of Southern communities: Val Xavier and Lady of Orpheus Descending, Mr. Vacarro of 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, and even Stanley Kowalsky of Streetcar.
the study or investigation of ancestry and family history
It also establishes in great detail his family genealogy, identifying such illustrious Southern ancestors as poet Sidney Lanier and Governor John Sevier.
On the other band, they are "also marked by a greater interest in spirituality, which gradually begins to replace Williams's focus on physical desire (sensual and sexual) as the site of an enduring and subversive Otherness.
Rehearsing such cliches of along-standing North-South dichotomy, the authors establish the South as a warm and comfortable haven, in which Williams apparently felt sheltered from personal and social conflicts.
affected by blight; anything that mars or prevents growth or prosperity
Reviews such as the following by leading drama critic C.W.E. Bigsby unfortunately set the tone for the reception of Williams's later plays: "His plays had always borne directly out of his life, but over the years the degree of refraction lessened until he began to write more and more about himself as a blighted gay poet or debilitated artist for whom writing was a way of denying his mortality."
a visual representation (of an object or scene or person or abstraction) produced on a surface
Barbara Harris discusses Williams as an icon of twentieth-century American popular culture, illustrating how deeply entrenched references to his work are in everyday American culture, from sitcoms to advertisement, Holditch once more presents Williams's close connections to New Orleans, showing us where the playwright liked to wine and dine.
linked or locked closely together as by dovetailing
Holditch and Leavitt also succeed in illuminating how tightly Williams's writing is interwoven with his life by repeatedly identifying the biographical material behind the fiction.
with everything considered (and neglecting details)
All in all, Undiscovered Country persuasively establishes that the later plays are far from being the Abgesang of an aging and deteriorating artist, that instead they are the continuation and sublimation of his early works.
Although quite a few of these post-Iguana plays were staged in the U.S. or abroad, their public reception was predominantly negative, causing them to fold after only a few performances.
In the final and largest chapter, Holditch and Leavitt first briefly discuss the "harsh reality" of St. Louis, marked by Tom's increasing alienation from his father and the rapid deterioration of Rose's mental state.
recognize as being; establish the identity of someone or something
It also establishes in great detail his family genealogy, identifying such illustrious Southern ancestors as poet Sidney Lanier and Governor John Sevier.
having existed from the beginning; in an earliest or original stage or state
Annette Saddik, for instance, proposes to read Williams's plays as Artaudian theater of cruelty, which attempts to reach beyond reason and language in order to return the reader/spectator to primal forms of expression.
deliberately avoiding; keeping away from or preventing from happening
In short, where the book falls short is precisely in its careful dodging of concrete personal and social realities and its euphemistic evocation of a mythological counter reality.
Holditch and Leavitt also succeed in illuminating how tightly Williams's writing is interwoven with his life by repeatedly identifying the biographical material behind the fiction.
Barbara Harris discusses Williams as an icon of twentieth-century American popular culture, illustrating how deeply entrenched references to his work are in everyday American culture, from sitcoms to advertisement, Holditch once more presents Williams's close connections to New Orleans, showing us where the playwright liked to wine and dine.
a sheltered port where ships can take on or discharge cargo
Rehearsing such cliches of along-standing North-South dichotomy, the authors establish the South as a warm and comfortable haven, in which Williams apparently felt sheltered from personal and social conflicts.
lacking in harmony or compatibility or appropriateness
Without doubt, its greatest strength consists in its extensive and detailed portrayal of Williams's intimate ties to the American South (which in the authors' definition also includes such incongruous "Southern" places as New Orleans and Key West).
serving or tending to provoke, excite, or stimulate; stimulating discussion or exciting controversy
In short, rather than being read as innovative and provocative works, in which Williams was trying to develop a new kind of dramaturgy, the later plays were persistently read in light of the handful of classics that established the playwright's reputation early on.
As Kolin insists: "Essays here do not disclaim biography, but they do not substitute it for confronting Williams's scripts as highly experimental and carefully crafted for a theatre of body and mind."
The blissful days of the Delta were cut short with the "fateful move" to St. Louis, here described as "a new expulsion from Eden into a cold northern world lacking the benefits, virtue, and social decorum he remembered."
It is the photographs that point to the story the text leaves untold: a picture of Bessie Smith, "murdered by John Barleycorn and Jim Crow" as Val reminds us, of cotton gins and black workers, of the Delta floods.
present as worthy of regard, kindness, or confidence
Although Voss commends the recent staging of previously ignored plays as well as the renewed interest of young scholars in them, he also insists that Williams's canonical greatness rests above all on a few great works written between 1945 and 1961.
a person who is professionally engaged in the analysis and interpretation of works of art
Last but not least, drama critic Dan Sullivan adds some brief personal reminiscence about Williams the man, who turned out to be, as Sullivan figuratively puts it, both "angel and crocodile."
the act of intervening for the purpose of bringing about a settlement
Jenckes describes Clothes as a mediation on the insufficiency of desire and the absolute necessity for it in a "Post-All" universe, in which all roles have been tried and discarded in order to be tried and discarded again.
tending to increase knowledge or dissipate ignorance
Holditch and Leavitt also succeed in illuminating how tightly Williams's writing is interwoven with his life by repeatedly identifying the biographical material behind the fiction.
a traditional story accepted as history; serves to explain the world view of a people
The alienation and conflicts of the North, in tuna, trigger the transformation of the Southern past into a comforting myth: "His experiences, good and bad, served as a sort of magical catalyst to convert the past into a precious stone of memory, enriching it with a luster and magnificence it may never have possessed in reality."
Una Chaudhuri argues that Williams's abstruse surrealistic drama The Gnadiges Fraulein in many ways anticipates Deleuze and Guattari's notion of "becoming animal"--in light of which the dominant bird imagery as well as the Fraulein's own metamorphosis into an animal represent a concerted effort of venturing into radical otherness.
The blissful days of the Delta were cut short with the "fateful move" to St. Louis, here described as "a new expulsion from Eden into a cold northern world lacking the benefits, virtue, and social decorum he remembered."
Barbara Harris discusses Williams as an icon of twentieth-century American popular culture, illustrating how deeply entrenched references to his work are in everyday American culture, from sitcoms to advertisement, Holditch once more presents Williams's close connections to New Orleans, showing us where the playwright liked to wine and dine.
the ability to form mental images of things or events
Una Chaudhuri argues that Williams's abstruse surrealistic drama The Gnadiges Fraulein in many ways anticipates Deleuze and Guattari's notion of "becoming animal"--in light of which the dominant bird imagery as well as the Fraulein's own metamorphosis into an animal represent a concerted effort of venturing into radical otherness.
Moreover, in symbolically elevating this interrupted desire to the level of failed religions epiphany, Williams succeeds in turning the unsuitable suitor into a suitable metaphor for the tight nexus of sensuality and salvation in his works.
As Kolin insists: "Essays here do not disclaim biography, but they do not substitute it for confronting Williams's scripts as highly experimental and carefully crafted for a theatre of body and mind."
The blissful days of the Delta were cut short with the "fateful move" to St. Louis, here described as "a new expulsion from Eden into a cold northern world lacking the benefits, virtue, and social decorum he remembered."
a collection of books accepted as holy scripture especially the books of the Bible recognized by any Christian church as genuine and inspired
"Even more perniciously," Kolin points out, "Williams' later canon has been superciliously ostracized by a majority of critics who continue to explore the 1945-61 canon while they extol his recently rediscovered apprentice plays of the 1930s."
"Even more perniciously," Kolin points out, "Williams' later canon has been superciliously ostracized by a majority of critics who continue to explore the 1945-61 canon while they extol his recently rediscovered apprentice plays of the 1930s."
Reviews such as the following by leading drama critic C.W.E. Bigsby unfortunately set the tone for the reception of Williams's later plays: "His plays had always borne directly out of his life, but over the years the degree of refraction lessened until he began to write more and more about himself as a blighted gay poet or debilitated artist for whom writing was a way of denying his mortality."
discover the location of; determine the place of; find by searching or examining
Robert Gross poses the question of Williams's political commitment as a playwright, arguing that his politics, even in such overtly topical plays as The Red Battery Devil Sign, need to be located not on a concrete socioeconomic level, nor on the level of erotic desire, but on a Gnostic level, i.e., the insistence of achieving liberation and transcendence through self-knowledge.
a precious or semiprecious stone incorporated into a piece of jewelry
The alienation and conflicts of the North, in tuna, trigger the transformation of the Southern past into a comforting myth: "His experiences, good and bad, served as a sort of magical catalyst to convert the past into a precious stone of memory, enriching it with a luster and magnificence it may never have possessed in reality."
On the other band, they are "also marked by a greater interest in spirituality, which gradually begins to replace Williams's focus on physical desire (sensual and sexual) as the site of an enduring and subversive Otherness.
Robert Siegel's essay focuses on the metaphysical strain in Williams's plays, the fundamental tension between flesh and spirit, running through all of the major plays and attaining some kind of reconciliation only in The Night of the Iguana.
This also seems to be the case for Kenneth Holditch and Richard Freeman Leavitt, the authors of the beautiful biographical album Tennessee Williams and the South. (2) Holditch and Leavitt's book is alive with nostalgia for a South that no longer exists: a culture of grace and ease, of cavalier behavior and stoic endurance, a place where the romantic imagination is alive and in perpetual struggle with the crude realism of modernity.
Employing a wide range of interdisciplinary methodologies and theories--from close reading to poststructuralist philosophy, from visual aesthetics to performance theory--they underscore the heterogeneity and complexity of the later plays.
The blissful days of the Delta were cut short with the "fateful move" to St. Louis, here described as "a new expulsion from Eden into a cold northern world lacking the benefits, virtue, and social decorum he remembered."
Robert Gross poses the question of Williams's political commitment as a playwright, arguing that his politics, even in such overtly topical plays as The Red Battery Devil Sign, need to be located not on a concrete socioeconomic level, nor on the level of erotic desire, but on a Gnostic level, i.e., the insistence of achieving liberation and transcendence through self-knowledge.
so lacking in interest as to cause mental weariness
If discussed at all, the later plays were attacked as fragmented and tiresome imitations of previous themes and motives, or simply rejected as reflections of the playwright's deteriorating lifestyle, as booze- and drug-induced ruminations on the failed dreams of an artist.
According to editor Ralph Voss, at the end of the twentieth century Tennessee Williams undoubtedly emerges as one of two great playwrights of the American Renaissance in drama (together with O'Neill).
(used of opinions and actions) far beyond the norm
Una Chaudhuri argues that Williams's abstruse surrealistic drama The Gnadiges Fraulein in many ways anticipates Deleuze and Guattari's notion of "becoming animal"--in light of which the dominant bird imagery as well as the Fraulein's own metamorphosis into an animal represent a concerted effort of venturing into radical otherness.
Magical Music: Millennial Essays on Tennessee Williams, coming out of the 1999 Alabama Symposium on English & American Literature in Tuscaloosa, strives to infuse Williams's oeuvre with the millennial significance a turn-of-the-century retrospective inevitably entails.
The essays bear testimony to the playwright's attempt to cope with changes in American culture by incorporating such postmodern themes as the decentering of the subject and the subsequent shift from identity to performativity.
a figure of speech in which an expression is used to refer to something that it does not literally denote in order to suggest a similarity
Moreover, in symbolically elevating this interrupted desire to the level of failed religions epiphany, Williams succeeds in turning the unsuitable suitor into a suitable metaphor for the tight nexus of sensuality and salvation in his works.
Two recent essay collections, Magical Muse and Undiscovered Country, reassess the playwright's life and oeuvre in light of the recent release of Williams's papers that disclosed a number of previously unknown letters, drafts, as well as several unpublished plays.
Approaching this experimental play from the perspective of Eastern philosophy and aesthetics, which Williams studied at the time, Hale effectively revises the prevalent critical rejection of the play, reassessing it instead as a complex and profound statement on artistic martyrdom.
death that is imposed because of the person's adherence of a religious faith or cause
Approaching this experimental play from the perspective of Eastern philosophy and aesthetics, which Williams studied at the time, Hale effectively revises the prevalent critical rejection of the play, reassessing it instead as a complex and profound statement on artistic martyrdom.
This also seems to be the case for Kenneth Holditch and Richard Freeman Leavitt, the authors of the beautiful biographical album Tennessee Williams and the South. (2) Holditch and Leavitt's book is alive with nostalgia for a South that no longer exists: a culture of grace and ease, of cavalier behavior and stoic endurance, a place where the romantic imagination is alive and in perpetual struggle with the crude realism of modernity.
any plant disease resulting in withering without rotting
Reviews such as the following by leading drama critic C.W.E. Bigsby unfortunately set the tone for the reception of Williams's later plays: "His plays had always borne directly out of his life, but over the years the degree of refraction lessened until he began to write more and more about himself as a blighted gay poet or debilitated artist for whom writing was a way of denying his mortality."
Although quite a few of these post-Iguana plays were staged in the U.S. or abroad, their public reception was predominantly negative, causing them to fold after only a few performances.
In short, where the book falls short is precisely in its careful dodging of concrete personal and social realities and its euphemistic evocation of a mythological counter reality.
Besides establishing Williams's intimate ties with the South and revealing the biographical material beyond the writer's fiction, the book relishes the perpetuation of Southern mythologies.
Reviews such as the following by leading drama critic C.W.E. Bigsby unfortunately set the tone for the reception of Williams's later plays: "His plays had always borne directly out of his life, but over the years the degree of refraction lessened until he began to write more and more about himself as a blighted gay poet or debilitated artist for whom writing was a way of denying his mortality."
a mental impression retained and recalled from the past
Last but not least, drama critic Dan Sullivan adds some brief personal reminiscence about Williams the man, who turned out to be, as Sullivan figuratively puts it, both "angel and crocodile."
a collection of related things intended for use together
The fifteen contributors accomplish precisely that with their innovative and compelling readings of a fair share of the later plays, including The Gnadiges Fraulein, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, Small Craft Warnings, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, Clothes for a Summer Hotel, Out Cry, Two-Character Play, Vieux Carre, Red Devil Battery Sign, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, Something Cloudy, Something Clear, and A House Not Meant to Stand.
"Even more perniciously," Kolin points out, "Williams' later canon has been superciliously ostracized by a majority of critics who continue to explore the 1945-61 canon while they extol his recently rediscovered apprentice plays of the 1930s."
Robert Siegel's essay focuses on the metaphysical strain in Williams's plays, the fundamental tension between flesh and spirit, running through all of the major plays and attaining some kind of reconciliation only in The Night of the Iguana.
If Blanche DuBois should return to New Orleans from whatever haven
has sheltered her for the last half century and attempt to follow
those directions today, she would be perplexed indeed....
the act of changing in form or shape or appearance
The alienation and conflicts of the North, in tuna, trigger the transformation of the Southern past into a comforting myth: "His experiences, good and bad, served as a sort of magical catalyst to convert the past into a precious stone of memory, enriching it with a luster and magnificence it may never have possessed in reality."
a beautiful garden where Adam and Eve were placed at the Creation; when they disobeyed and ate the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil they were driven from their paradise (the fall of man)
The blissful days of the Delta were cut short with the "fateful move" to St. Louis, here described as "a new expulsion from Eden into a cold northern world lacking the benefits, virtue, and social decorum he remembered."
In short, where the book falls short is precisely in its careful dodging of concrete personal and social realities and its euphemistic evocation of a mythological counter reality.
in spite of everything; without regard to drawbacks
The childhood of Thomas Lanier Williams III, who was born in Columbus, Mississippi, and raised in various other Southern locations, is described as nothing less than "a southern idyll," regardless of the father's evident alcoholism, frequent family quarrels, and the older sister's fragile health.
a worker who puts or sets seeds or seedlings into the ground
A discussion of these other aspects exhausts itself, however, in an en passant reference to the large black labor force, whose "life were markedly different from those of the Delta planters."
Approaching this experimental play from the perspective of Eastern philosophy and aesthetics, which Williams studied at the time, Hale effectively revises the prevalent critical rejection of the play, reassessing it instead as a complex and profound statement on artistic martyrdom.
In this regard, George Crandell's comprehensive overview of Williams' scholarship at the end of the twentieth century, including an extensive bibliography, is probably the most useful contribution of the first half of the collection.
Robert Gross poses the question of Williams's political commitment as a playwright, arguing that his politics, even in such overtly topical plays as The Red Battery Devil Sign, need to be located not on a concrete socioeconomic level, nor on the level of erotic desire, but on a Gnostic level, i.e., the insistence of achieving liberation and transcendence through self-knowledge.
Michael Paller underscores the influence of Japanese No plays on Williams, distinguishing his later plays not only by various formal innovations but also by a distinct thematic shift from the struggle for survival to that of attaining a high degree of spirituality which will eventually enable a "graceful letting go" of life.
According to editor Ralph Voss, at the end of the twentieth century Tennessee Williams undoubtedly emerges as one of two great playwrights of the American Renaissance in drama (together with O'Neill).
the actions and activities assigned to or required or expected of a person or group
In a meticulous study of Williams's correspondence, Albert Devlin demonstrates the pivotal role of the year 1939 in the playwright's career--the year Thomas Lanier Williams became Tennessee Williams.
Robert Gross poses the question of Williams's political commitment as a playwright, arguing that his politics, even in such overtly topical plays as The Red Battery Devil Sign, need to be located not on a concrete socioeconomic level, nor on the level of erotic desire, but on a Gnostic level, i.e., the insistence of achieving liberation and transcendence through self-knowledge.
It is the photographs that point to the story the text leaves untold: a picture of Bessie Smith, "murdered by John Barleycorn and Jim Crow" as Val reminds us, of cotton gins and black workers, of the Delta floods.
erect bushy mallow plant or small tree bearing bolls containing seeds with many long hairy fibers
Some of his best-known characters are outsiders, who struggle bitterly (and often in vain) against the xenophobia, racism, and homophobia of Southern communities: Val Xavier and Lady of Orpheus Descending, Mr. Vacarro of 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, and even Stanley Kowalsky of Streetcar.
Besides establishing Williams's intimate ties with the South and revealing the biographical material beyond the writer's fiction, the book relishes the perpetuation of Southern mythologies.
The alienation and conflicts of the North, in tuna, trigger the transformation of the Southern past into a comforting myth: "His experiences, good and bad, served as a sort of magical catalyst to convert the past into a precious stone of memory, enriching it with a luster and magnificence it may never have possessed in reality."
lever that activates the firing mechanism of a gun
The alienation and conflicts of the North, in tuna, trigger the transformation of the Southern past into a comforting myth: "His experiences, good and bad, served as a sort of magical catalyst to convert the past into a precious stone of memory, enriching it with a luster and magnificence it may never have possessed in reality."
Robert Siegel's essay focuses on the metaphysical strain in Williams's plays, the fundamental tension between flesh and spirit, running through all of the major plays and attaining some kind of reconciliation only in The Night of the Iguana.
Besides establishing Williams's intimate ties with the South and revealing the biographical material beyond the writer's fiction, the book relishes the perpetuation of Southern mythologies.
someone who has committed a crime or has been legally convicted of a crime
Nancy Tischler also uses biographical material to reveal the lengthy and exhausting struggle over the filming of the rape scene in Streetcar, which the 1930 Motion Picture Production Code essentially outlawed.
the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object
Besides establishing Williams's intimate ties with the South and revealing the biographical material beyond the writer's fiction, the book relishes the perpetuation of Southern mythologies.
(Old Testament) the guardian archangel of the Jews
Michael Paller maintains that Williams's relationship to his sister Rose was marked not only by feelings of tender care and brotherly protection, but also ridden with sentiments of entrapment and guilt--a strain running through Williams s entire oeuvre from Glass Menagerie and Rose Tattoo to Suddenly Last Summer and Two-Character Play.
The fifteen contributors accomplish precisely that with their innovative and compelling readings of a fair share of the later plays, including The Gnadiges Fraulein, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, Small Craft Warnings, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, Clothes for a Summer Hotel, Out Cry, Two-Character Play, Vieux Carre, Red Devil Battery Sign, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, Something Cloudy, Something Clear, and A House Not Meant to Stand.
In this regard, the ambitious attribute of the collection's fide, Millenial Essays, signals not so much the will to profoundly reassess a body of dramatic works as to the will to pay homage to a playwright whose place in American literature is well established.
Reviews such as the following by leading drama critic C.W.E. Bigsby unfortunately set the tone for the reception of Williams's later plays: "His plays had always borne directly out of his life, but over the years the degree of refraction lessened until he began to write more and more about himself as a blighted gay poet or debilitated artist for whom writing was a way of denying his mortality."
an undivided or unbroken completeness or totality with nothing wanting
The collection as a whole convinces through its innovative approach and its critical integrity--a definite must-read for Williams scholars and twentieth-century drama critics.
(2) Philip C. Kolin's review of this book appears in the Summer 2003 issue of the Mississippi Quarterly (pp. 466-469).
In a comparative analysis of Jim of Glass Menagerie, Mitch of Streetcar, Alvaro of Rose Tattoo, and Chicken of Kingdom of Earth, Kolin comes to the conclusion that all of them "suffer from interrupted/incomplete sexuality, branding them as representatives of a desire that is fathomable, disappointing."
Magical Music: Millennial Essays on Tennessee Williams, coming out of the 1999 Alabama Symposium on English & American Literature in Tuscaloosa, strives to infuse Williams's oeuvre with the millennial significance a turn-of-the-century retrospective inevitably entails.
Robert Siegel's essay focuses on the metaphysical strain in Williams's plays, the fundamental tension between flesh and spirit, running through all of the major plays and attaining some kind of reconciliation only in The Night of the Iguana.
Crandell interprets the dream/ghost play as Williams's most radical manipulation of time, a deliberate attempt at misrepresentation, which was to unmask the perpetual exile from wholeness experienced by the modern subject.
If Blanche DuBois should return to New Orleans from whatever haven
has sheltered her for the last half century and attempt to follow
those directions today, she would be perplexed indeed....
belonging to an early stage of technical development; characterized by simplicity and (often) crudeness
This also seems to be the case for Kenneth Holditch and Richard Freeman Leavitt, the authors of the beautiful biographical album Tennessee Williams and the South. (2) Holditch and Leavitt's book is alive with nostalgia for a South that no longer exists: a culture of grace and ease, of cavalier behavior and stoic endurance, a place where the romantic imagination is alive and in perpetual struggle with the crude realism of modernity.
Michael Paller maintains that Williams's relationship to his sister Rose was marked not only by feelings of tender care and brotherly protection, but also ridden with sentiments of entrapment and guilt--a strain running through Williams s entire oeuvre from Glass Menagerie and Rose Tattoo to Suddenly Last Summer and Two-Character Play.
Robert Gross poses the question of Williams's political commitment as a playwright, arguing that his politics, even in such overtly topical plays as The Red Battery Devil Sign, need to be located not on a concrete socioeconomic level, nor on the level of erotic desire, but on a Gnostic level, i.e., the insistence of achieving liberation and transcendence through self-knowledge.
It also establishes in great detail his family genealogy, identifying such illustrious Southern ancestors as poet Sidney Lanier and Governor John Sevier.
in essence; at bottom or by one's (or its) very nature
Nancy Tischler also uses biographical material to reveal the lengthy and exhausting struggle over the filming of the rape scene in Streetcar, which the 1930 Motion Picture Production Code essentially outlawed.
copying (or trying to copy) the actions of someone else
If discussed at all, the later plays were attacked as fragmented and tiresome imitations of previous themes and motives, or simply rejected as reflections of the playwright's deteriorating lifestyle, as booze- and drug-induced ruminations on the failed dreams of an artist.
In the final and largest chapter, Holditch and Leavitt first briefly discuss the "harsh reality" of St. Louis, marked by Tom's increasing alienation from his father and the rapid deterioration of Rose's mental state.
Employing a wide range of interdisciplinary methodologies and theories--from close reading to poststructuralist philosophy, from visual aesthetics to performance theory--they underscore the heterogeneity and complexity of the later plays.
one the first colonists or settlers in a new territory
With a pioneering spirit that needs to be commended, it seeks to come to grasp with the large body of experimental works written between Night of the Iguana (1961) and the playwright's death in 1983, work which until very recently has been either ignored or marginalized by scholarship.
suitable for a particular person or place or condition etc
Of
course, even if she had in reality followed those directions in
1947, taking the appropriate streetcars as she had been instructed,
she would not have reached her destination, since the playwright
rearranged the topography of reality to accommodate his
expressionistic vision.
Robert Gross poses the question of Williams's political commitment as a playwright, arguing that his politics, even in such overtly topical plays as The Red Battery Devil Sign, need to be located not on a concrete socioeconomic level, nor on the level of erotic desire, but on a Gnostic level, i.e., the insistence of achieving liberation and transcendence through self-knowledge.
Although Voss commends the recent staging of previously ignored plays as well as the renewed interest of young scholars in them, he also insists that Williams's canonical greatness rests above all on a few great works written between 1945 and 1961.
direct onto a point or target, especially by automatic navigational aids
And since "southerners ... have deep roots in their own native soil and do not tend to forget the land that gave them birth," the young Tom could never feel at home in "the cold North."
complicated in structure; consisting of interconnected parts
Approaching this experimental play from the perspective of Eastern philosophy and aesthetics, which Williams studied at the time, Hale effectively revises the prevalent critical rejection of the play, reassessing it instead as a complex and profound statement on artistic martyrdom.
Jackson Bryer draws out thematic parallels between Williams and F. Scott Fitzgerald, manifest not only in Clothes for a Summer Hotel, a drama about Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda, but also as early as in Streetcar and The Great Gatsby.
a set of rules or principles or laws (especially written ones)
Nancy Tischler also uses biographical material to reveal the lengthy and exhausting struggle over the filming of the rape scene in Streetcar, which the 1930 Motion Picture Production Code essentially outlawed.
a close observer; someone who looks at something (such as an exhibition of some kind)
Annette Saddik, for instance, proposes to read Williams's plays as Artaudian theater of cruelty, which attempts to reach beyond reason and language in order to return the reader/spectator to primal forms of expression.
If discussed at all, the later plays were attacked as fragmented and tiresome imitations of previous themes and motives, or simply rejected as reflections of the playwright's deteriorating lifestyle, as booze- and drug-induced ruminations on the failed dreams of an artist.
a current of air (usually coming into a chimney or room or vehicle)
Two recent essay collections, Magical Muse and Undiscovered Country, reassess the playwright's life and oeuvre in light of the recent release of Williams's papers that disclosed a number of previously unknown letters, drafts, as well as several unpublished plays.
put into service; make work or employ for a particular purpose or for its inherent or natural purpose
Employing a wide range of interdisciplinary methodologies and theories--from close reading to poststructuralist philosophy, from visual aesthetics to performance theory--they underscore the heterogeneity and complexity of the later plays.
Terri Smith Ruckel demonstrates how the artist's vision as a painter began to shape his vision as a writer, and how visual elements such as colors, shapes, light, and space became increasingly more important for Williams, most notably in In a Bar of a Tokyo Hotel.
a writer of poems (the term is usually reserved for writers of good poetry)
It also establishes in great detail his family genealogy, identifying such illustrious Southern ancestors as poet Sidney Lanier and Governor John Sevier.
(mathematics) an attribute of a shape or relation; exact reflection of form on opposite sides of a dividing line or plane
In a meticulous study of Williams's correspondence, Albert Devlin demonstrates the pivotal role of the year 1939 in the playwright's career--the year Thomas Lanier Williams became Tennessee Williams.
Last but not least, drama critic Dan Sullivan adds some brief personal reminiscence about Williams the man, who turned out to be, as Sullivan figuratively puts it, both "angel and crocodile."
a calculator that keeps a record of the number of times something happens
In short, where the book falls short is precisely in its careful dodging of concrete personal and social realities and its euphemistic evocation of a mythological counter reality.
a building where theatrical performances or motion-picture shows can be presented
Annette Saddik, for instance, proposes to read Williams's plays as Artaudian theater of cruelty, which attempts to reach beyond reason and language in order to return the reader/spectator to primal forms of expression.
If discussed at all, the later plays were attacked as fragmented and tiresome imitations of previous themes and motives, or simply rejected as reflections of the playwright's deteriorating lifestyle, as booze- and drug-induced ruminations on the failed dreams of an artist.
clearly revealed to the mind or the senses or judgment
Jackson Bryer draws out thematic parallels between Williams and F. Scott Fitzgerald, manifest not only in Clothes for a Summer Hotel, a drama about Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda, but also as early as in Streetcar and The Great Gatsby.
Michael Paller underscores the influence of Japanese No plays on Williams, distinguishing his later plays not only by various formal innovations but also by a distinct thematic shift from the struggle for survival to that of attaining a high degree of spirituality which will eventually enable a "graceful letting go" of life.
any venturesome undertaking especially one with an uncertain outcome
Una Chaudhuri argues that Williams's abstruse surrealistic drama The Gnadiges Fraulein in many ways anticipates Deleuze and Guattari's notion of "becoming animal"--in light of which the dominant bird imagery as well as the Fraulein's own metamorphosis into an animal represent a concerted effort of venturing into radical otherness.
Magical Music: Millennial Essays on Tennessee Williams, coming out of the 1999 Alabama Symposium on English & American Literature in Tuscaloosa, strives to infuse Williams's oeuvre with the millennial significance a turn-of-the-century retrospective inevitably entails.
change the nature, purpose, or function of something
The alienation and conflicts of the North, in tuna, trigger the transformation of the Southern past into a comforting myth: "His experiences, good and bad, served as a sort of magical catalyst to convert the past into a precious stone of memory, enriching it with a luster and magnificence it may never have possessed in reality."
violent or severe weather (viewed as caused by the action of the four elements)
Terri Smith Ruckel demonstrates how the artist's vision as a painter began to shape his vision as a writer, and how visual elements such as colors, shapes, light, and space became increasingly more important for Williams, most notably in In a Bar of a Tokyo Hotel.
Jenckes describes Clothes as a mediation on the insufficiency of desire and the absolute necessity for it in a "Post-All" universe, in which all roles have been tried and discarded in order to be tried and discarded again.
a characteristic (habitual or relatively temporary) state of feeling
But like Crandell she insists that despite such pervasive Endgame mood, the fundamental romanticism running through all of Williams's plays nevertheless resurges: the hope for love and beauty.
The childhood of Thomas Lanier Williams III, who was born in Columbus, Mississippi, and raised in various other Southern locations, is described as nothing less than "a southern idyll," regardless of the father's evident alcoholism, frequent family quarrels, and the older sister's fragile health.
not of long duration; having just (or relatively recently) come into being or been made or acquired or discovered
The blissful days of the Delta were cut short with the "fateful move" to St. Louis, here described as "a new expulsion from Eden into a cold northern world lacking the benefits, virtue, and social decorum he remembered."
someone who practices homosexuality; having a sexual attraction to persons of the same sex
Reviews such as the following by leading drama critic C.W.E. Bigsby unfortunately set the tone for the reception of Williams's later plays: "His plays had always borne directly out of his life, but over the years the degree of refraction lessened until he began to write more and more about himself as a blighted gay poet or debilitated artist for whom writing was a way of denying his mortality."
any nonverbal action or gesture that encodes a message
In this regard, the ambitious attribute of the collection's fide, Millenial Essays, signals not so much the will to profoundly reassess a body of dramatic works as to the will to pay homage to a playwright whose place in American literature is well established.
of or relating to or characteristic of Japan or its people or their culture or language
Michael Paller underscores the influence of Japanese No plays on Williams, distinguishing his later plays not only by various formal innovations but also by a distinct thematic shift from the struggle for survival to that of attaining a high degree of spirituality which will eventually enable a "graceful letting go" of life.
the condition of being honored (esteemed or respected or well regarded)
In this regard, George Crandell's comprehensive overview of Williams' scholarship at the end of the twentieth century, including an extensive bibliography, is probably the most useful contribution of the first half of the collection.
the activities and affairs involved in managing a state or a government
Robert Gross poses the question of Williams's political commitment as a playwright, arguing that his politics, even in such overtly topical plays as The Red Battery Devil Sign, need to be located not on a concrete socioeconomic level, nor on the level of erotic desire, but on a Gnostic level, i.e., the insistence of achieving liberation and transcendence through self-knowledge.
any of the more than 100 known substances (of which 92 occur naturally) that cannot be separated into simpler substances and that singly or in combination constitute all matter
Terri Smith Ruckel demonstrates how the artist's vision as a painter began to shape his vision as a writer, and how visual elements such as colors, shapes, light, and space became increasingly more important for Williams, most notably in In a Bar of a Tokyo Hotel.
reassess
