Discontinuities: New Essays on Renaissance Literature and Criticism by Viviana Comensoli and Paul Stevens (review) (original) (raw)

CRITICISM ON A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE A Bibliographic Survey, 1947-2003

2004

When A Streetcar Named Desire opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theater on 3 December 1947, it stirred up controversy overnight. The play met with rave reviews in the following morning’s papers, like that from Brooks Atkinson who called it “a quietly woven study of intangibles” and Tennessee Williams “a genuinely poetic playwright whose knowledge of people is honest and thorough” [First Night, 42]. In the days ahead, Joseph Wood Krutch in Nation, Kappo Phelan in Commonweal, John Chapman in the New York Daily News, John Mason Brown in The Saturday Review, and Irwin Shaw in The New Republic all sounded similar praise for Williams and for Streetcar. The play was not impervious to negative reviews, however, as Thomas Adler points out in his monograph The Moth and the Lantern,

Staging a Streetcar Named Desire, Understanding Its Elements

Prosodi, 2012

Abstrak: Drama seperti genre sastra yang lainya selalu identik dengan penggunaan bahasa kiasan dalam menyampaikan ekspresinya kepada pembaca. Khususnya drama, kalimat -kalimat dan kata -kata kias tersebut akan terefleksikan melalui dialog diantara para tokoh dalam cerita. Dari dialog yang dilakukan oleh para tokoh tersebut maka akan dapat dianalisis dan diobservasi elemen -elemen figuratif yang lain, semacam karakterisasi, struktur cerita, seting atau latar, tone, dan juga tema. Sayangnya, bagi sebagian besar mahasiswa, memahami elemenelemen figuratif tersebut merupakan persoalan yang sulit, apalagi jika drama tersebut adalah drama klasik, seperti drama A Streetcar Named Desire karya Tennessee Williams. Dengan demikian salah satu solusi yang digunakan untuk membantu tingkat pemahaman para mahasiswa terhadap elemen -elemen figuratif ini adalah dengan cara memanggungkan atau menampilkannya dalam pentas drama di kelas. Makalah ini akan mengamati dan menganalisis strategi -strategi yang digunakan untuk memberikan tingkat pemahaman elemen -elemen figuratif dalam drama. Strategi -strategi yang digunakan tersebut terdiri dari beberapa tahap, yaitu: persiapan, diskusi, pengarahan, dan penampilan.Kemudian langkah selanjutnya, setelah penampilan, mahasiswa diberikan beberapa pertanyaan dalam bentuk kuesioner untuk mengukur tingkat pemahaman terhadap elemen -elemen figuratif mahasiswa setelah mereka menampilkan secara langsung drama tersebut.

TRANS-MEDIATION OF GENDER IN ELIA KAZAN'S ADAPTATION OF A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE

Littera Aperta 6 (2018), 63-77, 2018

is among the first directors who adapted Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) for the cinema. Kazan's film adaptation was almost faithful to the original manuscript by sticking to Williams's words and sentences. However, even if one ignores the cultural and historical contexts, the alterations that take place in the process of trans-mediation cannot be disregarded, since the telling mode in the text changes to the showing mode in the media. With this hypothetical basis, the present study aims to detect the possible alterations in the adaptation of the play to examine gender roles in both texts. Using the ideas of Linda Hutcheon in A Theory of Adaptation (2013), the authors have studied the verbal signs in the play together with the verbal and visual codes in the movie to assess how the film adaptation has incorporated the ideas of femininity, which are the main concerns of the play, too. The results of the study suggest that the alterations from the literary text to film have contributed to the development of female identity.

'A Desire Named Streetcar', in Bradshaw, Marcus & Roach, eds., Moving Modernisms (OUP, 2016)

For a figure to migrate from everyday life into aesthetic form, there needs to be an everyday life in the first place. More than that, there must be a crisis in the legitimacy of its reproduction, such that the figure can emerge—like Heidegger's hammer1—in its conspicuous Thing-being, and thus be exposed to second-order critical reflection. It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm—this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the 'why' arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.2 Here in Camus's 'weariness tinged with amazement' is the condition of attention in the aesthetic regime.3 With it, the everyday decomposes into its elements, each now discerned in its routine abstraction as a mode of Sisyphean torment. Of these elements , the streetcar (the American English equivalent of the British English 'tram') emerges as perhaps the most emblematic shorthand for the very reproduction of daily life: a figure of movement in which nothing moves, yet the stage set of the quotidian is woven of its repetitive shuttles to and fro across the urban surface. Articulating the Scylla of home with the Charybdis of labour, the streetcar was perhaps modernity's privileged chronotope of the everyday, and as such, alive with contradictions. To map, however briefly, its appearance in aesthetic forms, is to seize hold of an unreconciled antagonism between dystopian and utopian energies. In what follows, I would like to develop a provisional framework for conceptualizing the historicity of the aesthetic—and especially the transformation of cultural 'dominants'—by way of a focused consideration of this single figure. In brief, I will want to put specific pressure on Fredric Jameson's recent reconsideration of Western realism as a force field in which the narrative order of the récit, and the affective intensities of phenomenological embodiment, are held in compact by the conventions of authority specific to the realist novel as a form, before unravelling in the anomie of modernism.4 It is my contention that the shift from a realist to a modern-ist cultural dominant can be observed with peculiar clarity in the widespread repur-posing of 'realist' figures for 'modernist' ends—a process that entailed a relative demotion of the cognitive or didactic function of those figures, and a promotion of their sheerly affective capabilities. Singling out the streetcar as a figure already loaded

Understanding the 'Terrible Passions' in A Streetcar Named Desire and Woman's Struggle for Identity

The project of this study is to investigate how the censorship is arrived at in the film adaption of "A Streetcar Named Desire" and see how feminist criticism is related with the debated discussion of gender representation in cinema. The research scrutinizes woman's struggle for identity under the social and historical context in the U. S. as the creation of cultural production is merely for entertainment, and the artistic value appears to be undervalued.