History of Critical Thought in the 20th Century

19th Century Roots

Darwin and Compte

• Darwin's Origin of the Species (1859) challenged the foundation of all "spiritual" or "ideal" rationales for art.
• Auguste Compte argued for "positivism" (1835) calling for a more objective view of life and application of scientific method to all spheres of society and its problems.

Realism

Realism sometimes given an "experimental" approach, examining relationships between subjects and environment.

1. Truthful representation of real world in phenomenal sense.
2. Based upon direct observation of contemporary life and manners.
3. Author must be impersonal in attitude toward subject matter.

1. In avoiding ideal, concentrated on ugly and trivial.
2. Emphasized external detail and qualities only
3. Completely materialistic in outlook
4. Morally indifferent or decidedly immoral in outlook.

Independent Theatre Movement

• Theatre Libre (Andre Antoine, Paris, 1887)
• Freie Bühne (Gerhardt Hauptmann, Berlin)
• Independent Theatre (London)
• Moscow Art Theatre (Stanislavsky, Moscow, 1897)

Symbolists

• Principal writers: Charles Pierre Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarme, Maurice Maeterlinck, Edmond Rostand, Paul Claudel.
• Feeling that realism and naturalism concentrated on superficial physical manifestations of life with no real effort to convey or examine its meaning.
• Advocated the power of metaphor, particularly through poetry - that metaphor communicates to the realm of cumulative experience within the individual and not just the superficial cognitive process.

Art for Art's Sake

• Belief that art is an experiential phenomenon and that it should endeavor most to create a profoundly intense experience in the auditor. Denied any utilitarian values for art, it was to be appreciated on its own terms only.

Important Intellectual Contributions at fin de siecle

Nietsche

• Gave theoretical underpinning to much 20th Century aesthetic thought.
• Belief that art arises from conflict in man's nature; desire for order and meaning vs. man's animalistic orgiastic drives.
• Rejects naturalism because art is not another instrument for reporting on life, but rather a human need.

Freud

• Idea that man's unconscious motivations and conscious ones are products of heredity and environment.
• Idea that sexuality is closely associated with unconscious motives.
• Idea that man's subconscious realm really governs his character and personality, and that subconscious, though suppressed, manifests itself in dreams and other non-conscious states.
• Idea that man's perception of values resides in a superego which interprets all experience in light of all previous experience to establish values, then censors external behavior to conform with those values. This gives psychological basis for facades, role playing, etc., and establishes relativity of all value structures.

Carl Jung (1912)

• Added the racial unconscious - which is the biological product of individual's heritage.
• " The human brain has acquired its particular structure in part through the necessity of dealing generation after generation with certain basic patterns of experience . . . ."
• Contended that the more powerful art appeals to the racial unconscious - the appeal to the archetype.
• "They sought to perceive patterns shared in common by myths and secular art forms and to reconstruct the rituals which lay behind the myths.

Albert Einstein

• Theory of Relativity - time and space are functions of one another - all dimensions being relative to one another.
• Led to new conceptions of time, space, and causality. A work existing in time no longer needed causality to establish unity - could be thematic.
• Between 1910 and 1925 techniques of juxtaposition of disparate elements, discontinuity, multiple focus, unity, through them or motif came into widespread use for the first time.

Early 20th Century Movements

Futurism

• Founded by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1909 in Italy.
• Worship of technological and emotional advancement.
• Worship of speed, brevity, newness, innovation.
• Aggressive pursuit of the original and the new with complete disregard of any indebtedness to rules or theories.
• Most important innovations:
  1. Attempt to rescue art from museum-like atmosphere.
  2. Direct confrontation and intermingling of performers and audience (1960s Environmental Theatre)
  3. Exploitation of modern technology to create multimedia presentations.
  4. Extreme use of simultaneity and multiple focus.
  5. Antiliterary and alogical bias.
  6. Destruction of barriers among the arts.

Expressionism

• Principally German
• Impressionism: captured the appearance of objects as seen under a certain light at a particular moment.
• Expressionism: emphasized strong inner feelings about objects and to portray life as modified and distorted by the painter's own vision of reality.
• "Thus, in expressionism truth or beauty was said to reside in the mind rather than (with impressionism) in the eye."
• Romanticist's feeling of indomitability of human spirit and realist/naturalist's concern for social problems.

1. Message-centered, structured thematically or around a motif rather than by logical causality.
2. Central character usually sacrificed to materialism, hypocrisy, or callousness of other characters epitomizing social attitudes and human types.
3. Each element reduced to essentials - plot very simplified and characters unidimensional embodiments of social elements, dialogue telegraphic (short) prose.
4. Everything is distorted. Bizarre plot twists disregard for logic, distorted sets and lighting.
5. Sharp contrasts constant throughout.
6. Permeated with sense of dreamlike or nightmarish fantasies.
7. "The overall impression is one of allegory clothed in nightmare or vision." Most expressionistic writers not well-known today, but work was very influential to writers of 30s, 60s.

Dadaism

• From a café in Zurich (1916) during WWI, by Tristan Tzara
• Dada - French baby talk for anything having to do with horses
• Sick of war: "Since insanity seemed to them the world's true state the dadaists sought in their actions to replace logic and reason with calculated madness, and in their art to substitute discord and chaos for unity, balance and harmony."

Surrealism

• As movement, founded by Andre Briton in 1924.
• Continued dada's emphasis on spontaneity, chance, and juxtaposition of disparate elements, but attempted to maintain foundation in stated principles and a defined course of action.
• Major pre-occupation with freeing the subconscious:
  1. Believed in primacy of subconscious
  2. Truth is reposited only in the subconscious and the censorship of the ego and superego must be overcome for it to emerge.
  3. In moments of truth all contradictions in life are transcended (not rectified, transcended).
• Not as productive in theatre as in visual arts and film, but represented effort to break normal associational patterns so that the new "surreal" perception can occur.
• Antonin Artaud - expelled from movement by Breton for mystical and occultist inclinations. Later wrote a treatise (The Theatre and its Double) which became important in the 1960s.
• Federico Garcia Lorca - began with surrealism but progressed to archetypal appeals - efforts to reach the racial unconscious of the Spanish people - known as Spain's greatest dramatist in the 20th Century.

Between the Wars

• Antonin Artaud (France)- The Theatre and Its Double
  • Called for "theatre of cruelty"
  • Believed subconscious must be reached by theatre to help man purge himself of the negative aspects of his socialization - greed, hatred, etc.
  • That the way to do this was to create such an intense emotional experience that the spectator becomes caught up in an intense religious ritualistic fervor it strips away his social being and contacts the subconscious being directly.
  • That the way to do this was through a violent and aggressive theatre full of intense spectacle - loud music, flashing lights, etc.
• Erwin Piscator (Germany)
  • Principally involved with a dialectical but illusionistic theatre - focusing on social issues and espousing Marxian socialism.
  • Founded New School for Social Research in New York during WWII. Students included Julian Beck and Judith Malina.
  • Returned to Germany in 1951.
• Bertolt Brecht (Germany)
  • Began writing as expressionist after WWI
  • Worked with Piscator, others, gravitating toward socialism and theatre of dialectic.
  • By 1936 had firmly established ideas, published Short Organum, calling for:
    1. Entertainment in order to teach.
    2. Alienation effects - to destroy illusion periodically in order to permit spectator to comment and reflect on what she had experienced.
  • Eventually came to U.S.; problems with HUAC and Joseph McCarthy; returned to East Germany in 1948.

War and Postwar Years

• Unfathomable atrocities of WWII
• Nuremberg trials - men judged for following orders.
• McCarthy hearings - return to witch-hunting
• Cold-war paranoia - trust no one.

Existentialism

• Principally popularized by Jean-Paul Sartre
• Considered question of quality of existence, not reason for existence.
• "Each individual is responsible for making himself what he is, since his being defined by his choices and actions, and that unless a man acts only after choosing consciously and freely he cannot truly be said "to exist."
• Man must establish his own value structure and rigidly deny any deviation from it.
• Man must engage his world actively, by choice, for only then is he defined and does he define the world. Albert Camus held similar beliefs but denied being an existentialist.
• Absurd arises from conflict of human need for order in world of irrationality and chaos. If man cannot find his need he opts for absurdity.

Absurdism

• Man, cut from his "religious, metaphysical and transcendental roots" is lost and all his actions become "senseless, absurd, useless."
• Common conclusion: The world is irrational and truth unknowable
• Implications for drama:
  1. No causality or linear development, circular action, frequently unresolved.
  2. Typical or archetypal characters rather than specific or individual.
  3. Time and place are generalized.
  4. Language downgraded to the meaningless. Repetitive, social game level.
  5. Spectacle is treated metaphorically or symbolically to compensate some for language.
  6. No distinctions among genre.
  7. Plays are ultimately conceptual, seeking to project intellectualized perceptions about the human condition.
• Sources: Jarry, Apollinaire, Pirandello, futurists, dadaists, and surrealists, particularly Artaud.
• Three principal Absurdists:
  • Samuel Becket: Marked by isolation of characters, settings of the world after holocaust, characters incapable of effectively relating.
  • Eugene Ionesco: Concerned with social relationships, isolation of individual, anesthetizing nature of society, mood for non-conformity.
  • Jean Genet: Concerned with the roles people play, the interplay of power and sexuality, ritualization of play for characters.
  • Also Pinter, others.

Theatre for social change

Black theatre Movement

• Black Arts Repertoire Theatre School (1964)
• Negro Ensemble Company (1968)
• New Lafayette Company (1967)
• Playwrites: James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, LeRoi Jones, Douglas Turner Ward, Ed Bullins.

Radical Theatre:

• Bread and Puppet (1961) Peter Schumann
  Expressionistic, propagandistic; uses puppets and masked actors; ritually offers bread to audience.
• San Francisco Mime Troupe (1959) R. G. Davis
  Dropped mime and radicalized in 1966; agitprop.
• El Teatro Campesino (1965) Luis Valdez, for National Farm Workers Association
  Dramatizes and educates farm laborers in California.
• Free Southern Theatre (1963) John O'Neal and Guilbert Moses
  Originally to raise cultural awareness of blacks through white tradition, but move on to address black problems.

Postmodernism

• Modernism is broadly defined as the historical posture of intellectual thought since the Enlightenment (1700s), which ushered in an intellectual value for rational thought in all aspects of life.
• As a style in art and architecture, Modernism generally dates from the late 1800s, and is characterized by highly logical and rational form and content. In the theatre this means all parts of the work are tightly knitted around a unifying idea, and that all elements of the production serve to reinforce this unity. Further, characters and dialogue are rationally related with a clear progression or unfolding toward a predetermined ending. Postmodernism challenged many of the rational assumptions of Modernism, although it really coexists as an alternative to Modernism rather than supplanting it.
• It began to appear in mainstream works as identifiable style, especially in Europe in the 1970s, following the radical explorations of the forms of art in the 1950s and 1960s. It became a significant factor in the American theatre through the 1980s and early 1990s. At the end of the 1990s a period of consolidation appeared to be occurring.
• Arguably the most significant characteristic of a postmodern work is the release of control of the work's meanings to the participation of the recipient. Where rules of unity sought to maintain the work and its meanings under the control of the artists, through postmodernism that unity has been much more loosely held. Works seek to facilitate and stimulate a wider range of possible associations for the recipient through juxtaposition of disparate elements and stylistic provocations. The work is "opened up" for greater participation by the recipient.

[Sarratore, Steven T. Muses for a Postmodern Scenography: Marcel Duchamp and John Cage. New England Theatre Journal, vol. (1993) pp. 21-22.]

Postmodernism, of course, is defined poorly, if at all. The word shows up in studies of poetry, architecture, geography, economics, and most other arts and sciences, indifferent guises meaning very different things. It is important to note that postmodernism is just that, "post" and not "anti"; it follows the modern era without negating it. Todd Gitlin writes disdainfully but accurately that "Post-modernism . . . is indifferent to consistency and continuity altogether. It self-consciously splices genre, attitudes, styles. It relishes the blurring or juxtaposition of forms (fiction-nonfiction), stances (straight-ironic), moods (violent-comic), cultural levels (high-low)" There does, however, seem to be some agreement that the following elements are part of postmodernism as it is applied to the arts:

1. Artistic Indeterminacy. This concept specifies that any work of art should be created in the conditions or under the ground rules that mandate unexpected or unpredictable results. This is clearly a reflection of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.
2. Deconstruction. Postmodernism seeks to break down preconceived models of structure, eliminating barriers between seemingly antithetical elements, and attempts to reconstruct a new order from the apparent remaining chaos.
3. Historicism. Unlike its immediate predecessor, modernism, postmodernism does not desire the annihilation of the past. Rather it regularly employs historical and situational references and takes particular pleasure in the manipulation of historical context.
4. Populism. Postmodernism allows so-called popular culture to be accepted into the realm of the aesthetic. Art is a part of everyday life and should be available, accessible, and approachable. This does not imply that art should be reduced to only the obvious, but rather that it need not necessarily exclude the obvious.
5. Aesthetic Flexibility. Aesthetic flexibility allows the imposition of aesthetic value on things that were not previously endowed with artistic status as well as upon those things that are more traditionally attributed with artistic status.
6. Artistic Self-Awareness. Postmodernism makes no attempt to disguise or hide the artistic process. It instead regularly acknowledges, and often plays with, the observer-observed relationship.