We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Tragedy and the Common Goat: Deperformative Poetics in Edward Albee's The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?
- Authors
SOFER, ANDREW
- Abstract
While The Goat is notorious for its subject matter, the force behind Albee's tragic poetics is less unorthodox sexuality than (de)performative language. The play hinges less on Martin's offstage affair than on the devastating effects of particular speech acts in the theatrical now, which by turns produce and undo a reality they seem only to label. Goat lover Martin Gray is a queered martyr, beyond hetero/homonormative boundaries, whose acts of coming out unravel Stevie as a woman and as a wife. By dramatizing a couple's potential to unmake a loving marriage through acts of speech, Albee queers tragedy through "deperformativity": a violent undoing of the fabric of the real by words alone. The Goat thus characterizes tragedy as the unmaking of a world through utterance, irrespective of the (supposed) acts that precede it. And because Sylvia the goat is denied both utterance and subjectivity, she remains a victim of abuse, excluded from love and tragedy alike.
- Subjects
GOAT, Or Who Is Sylvia?, The (Play); ALBEE, Edward, 1928-2016; TRAGEDY (Drama); HUMAN sexuality in drama; HETERONORMATIVITY; QUEER theory; MARRIAGE in literature; 21ST century American drama; DRAMA criticism
- Publication
Modern Drama, 2017, Vol 60, Issue 4, p501
- ISSN
0026-7694
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.3138/MD.0866