English Language and Literature ETDs

Publication Date

5-19-1971

Abstract

Much contemporary criticism tends to judge and interpret theater on preconceived grounds peculiar to the critic, rather than in terms of dramatic action--the play itself. In part, the critic who is responsible for clarifying the meaning of often perplexing, "open" forms of contemporary drama has been handed an impossible task, for the playwrights are apparently dedicated to a view of reality that doggedly refuses to follow a set, external pattern capable of resolution into easy meaning. An excellent example is Harold Pinter's The Homecoming, a play which has led critics to elaborate, subjective interpretations in their attempts to resolve its meaning. One answer to this critical dilemma is to develop a criticism devoted to elucidating the play's structure as it emanates from the dramatic action, not as it is imposed from the critic's preconceptions. Meaning is, after all, intimately joined with the structure of action. A practical method for the analysis of modern play structures may be arrived at by turning to the field of social-psychology, specifically to Robert F. Bales' systematic method for the study of small groups--Interaction Process Analysis. Assuming an intrinsic connection between small-groups (in Professor Bales' sense of the term) and small groups of characters engaged in dramatic action upon the stage, one is able to apply the scoring procedures of the twelve-category system to The Homecoming. The play was analyzed into over 3,000 unit acts--both verbal and non-verbal--and each act was "scored" according to its process content (i.e., shows solidarity, shows tension release, agrees, gives suggestion, gives opinion, gives orientation and information, asks for orientation and information, asks for opinion, asks for suggestion, disagrees, shows tension, shows antagonism) and according to who initiated the act and who received it. The critic's interpretive judgment is thus focused, in a systematic and basically phenomenological manner, on a microscopic segment of interaction. The results are tabulated by computer, and schematic diagrams showing, for example, the fluctuating levels of tension, hostility or affection, are drawn. In any selected duration of "time"--a scene, an act, the entire play--and in terms of the categories, the critic is able to examine relational patterns among the characters, or to determine the channels of communication. The emergence of a leader in the group's struggle for dominance may be revealed. These tables and figures are viewed as replacements for the more traditional concepts of exposition, complication, climax, and resolution. The use of the method becomes an exhilarating exercise in sensitivity to a playwright's artistry, for the critic must consider the contextual nuance of each microscopic interaction in all its immediacy as well as in a more retrospective relationship with the larger structural units of the play's ''time." Since the study is not a conclusion in itself, but rather the presentation of a viable method for dramatic analysis, one hopes that time and further usage will hone the instrument and determine its applicability and limitation for a wide range of drama--traditional as well as modern. With future simplifications and sophisticated computer programming, it may be possible to produce nearly instantaneous tabulations and diagrams of enough plays to make inferences about the structural rhythms of drama itself.

Degree Name

English

Level of Degree

Doctoral

Department Name

English

First Committee Member (Chair)

Franklin Miller Dickey

Second Committee Member

Gene Frumkin

Third Committee Member

Paul Benjamin Davis

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

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