Rereading Shepard: Contemporary Critical Essays on the Plays of Sam Shepard [Paperback]

Rereading Shepard draws together 13 original theoretical perspectives on one of America's most important contemporary playwrights. Representing a range of critical appraoches - including semiotics, deconstruction, and feminism - the essays address recent debates emerging in Shepard criticism. These include the status of Shepard's texts within the modernist tradition on the one hand and a developing post-modernism on the other, and the feminist debate over Shepard's drama - does it reinforce a masculinist world or does it provide some oppositional stance toward patriarchal 'master narratives'?Acknowledgements - Notes on the Contributors - Introduction - Artifacts: The Early Plays Reconsidered; G.Weales - Potential Performance Texts for The Rock Garden and 4-H Club; D.Carroll - The Desert and the City: Operation Sidewinder and Shepard's Postmodern Allegory; L.Wilcox - Memory and Mind: Sam Shepard's Geography of a Horse Dreamer; G.McCarthy - Shepard's Challenge to the Modernist Myths of Origin and Originality: Angel City and True West; S.Rabillard - True Stories: Reading the Autobiographic in Cowboy Mouth, 'True Dylan' and Buried Child; A.Wilson - Shepard's Family Trilogy and the Conventions of Modern Realism; C.R.Lyons - A Kind of Cavorting: Superpresence and Shepard's Family Dramas; D.J.DeRose - Speaking without Words: The Myth of Masculine Autonomy in Sam Shepard's Fool for Love; A.C.Hall - When a Woman looks: The 'Other' Audience of Shepard's Plays; S.Bennett - Lighting out for the Territory within: Field Notes on Shepard's Expressionist Vision; S.Grace - 'I Smash the Tools of my Captivity': The Feminine in Sam Shepard's A Lie of the Mind; J.A.Crum - A Motel of the Mind: Fool for Love and A Lie of the Mind; F.H.Londr - Index