The Labor of Life

The Labor of Life
Author: Hanoch Levin
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2003
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780804748582

Israeli playwright and director Hanoch Levin was one of the most original and innovative writers of his generation. Although Levin is familiar within the Israeli cultural context--and despite the steadily growing stream of literary and theatrical research of his oeuvre--there are few resources on his work available outside of Israel. The present volume, containing a selection of ten of his plays, is the first comprehensive effort to present this unique playwright and director to a broad readership. Levin's artistic credo was based on a constant urge to criticize Israeli society and its mainstream ideology while simultaneously confronting the basic human and existential issues of life and death. A whole generation of Israeli theater audiences has grown up on Levin's performances with all their paradoxical complexities. At this point, just a few years after his death from cancer in 1999 at the age of 56, it may not be possible to evaluate the full impact of his work. But this volume will contribute significantly to scholarship in this direction and to the appreciation of Levin's unique style.

Hanoch Levin: Selected Plays One

Hanoch Levin: Selected Plays One
Author: Hanoch Levin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2020-03-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1786829150

'Hanoch Levin is the modern world on the stage... we badly need to hear what he has to say.' David Lan Hanoch Levin was one of Israel's leading dramatists. Born in Tel Aviv in 1943, his work includes comedies, tragedies, and satirical cabarets, most of which he directed himself. He received numerous theatre awards both in Israel and abroad and his plays have been staged around the world. Levin was awarded the Bialik Prize in 1994. Published in brand-new English translations, these selected volumes of Hanoch Levin, one of Israel's leading dramatists, aim to bring one of the most important playwrights of the Middle East to English speaking audiences. Plays One contains the plays Krum (1975), Schitz (1975), The Torments of Job (1981), A Winter Funeral (1978), and The Child Dreams (1993).

Songs from Bialik

Songs from Bialik
Author: Atar Hadari
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2000-06-01
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9780815628149

Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873-1934) is considered Israel's national poet and one of the greatest Hebrew poets of all time. Several of his poems, particularly his immensely popular children's verse, were set to music and proved to be among the most popular twentieth-century Hebrew songs. An essayist, storyteller, translator, and editor, he had a unique ability to use fully the entire linguistic and conceptual inventory of the Hebrew language. Bialik's career was a turning point in Hebrew literature, bringing Biblical Hebrew into a contemporary usage and forming the basis of its renewed vigor. His legacy remains embedded in modern Hebrew literature like an immovable foundation stone. Atar Hadari's new translation of Bialik's major poetry fills a long-standing gap in English letters.

Lives of the Dead

Lives of the Dead
Author: Hanoch Levin
Publisher: ARC Publications
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018
Genre: Hebrew literature
ISBN: 9781908376640

Hanoch Levin's poetry stands alone as a single volume in his collected works, which run to fifteen volumes of drama and prose. Levin's poetic voice - mordant, witty, irreverent, erotic and highly satirical, yet also whimsical and delicate - is arresting, distinctive and unusual. When this volume was published in Israel, it proved to be enormously popular and went through three editions in its first year and has continued to be reprinted since. This bilingual edition makes his poetry available to an English-language readership for the first time - to date Levin is only known in the UK as a playwright.

Theatrical Events

Theatrical Events
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2022-06-08
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9004502882

Theatrical Events. Borders, Dynamics and Frames is written to develop the concept of ‘Eventness’ in Theatre Studies. The book as a whole stresses the importance of understanding theatre performances as aesthetic-communicative encounters of a wide range of agents and aspects. The Theatrical Event concept means not only that performers and spectators meet, but also that the specific mental sets, backgrounds and cultural contexts they bring in, strongly contribute to the character of a particular event. Moreover, this concept gives space to the study of the role societal developments – such as technological, political, economical or educational ones – play in theatrical events.

The Epic of Gilgamesh

The Epic of Gilgamesh
Author:
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2003-04-29
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9780140449198

Andrew George's "masterly new translation" (The Times) of the world's first truly great work of literature A Penguin Classic Miraculously preserved on clay tablets dating back as much as four thousand years, the poem of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, is the world’s oldest epic, predating Homer by many centuries. The story tells of Gilgamesh’s adventures with the wild man Enkidu, and of his arduous journey to the ends of the earth in quest of the Babylonian Noah and the secret of immortality. Alongside its themes of family, friendship and the duties of kings, the Epic of Gilgamesh is, above all, about mankind’s eternal struggle with the fear of death. The Babylonian version has been known for over a century, but linguists are still deciphering new fragments in Akkadian and Sumerian. Andrew George’s gripping translation brilliantly combines these into a fluent narrative and will long rank as the definitive English Gilgamesh. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Irony and the Modern Theatre

Irony and the Modern Theatre
Author: William Storm
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2011-05-05
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1139499424

Irony and theatre share intimate kinships, not only regarding dramatic conflict, dialectic or wittiness, but also scenic structure and the verbal or situational ironies that typically mark theatrical speech and action. Yet irony today, in aesthetic, literary and philosophical contexts especially, is often regarded with skepticism - as ungraspable, or elusive to the point of confounding. Countering this tendency, William Storm advocates a wide-angle view of this master trope, exploring the ironic in major works by playwrights including Chekhov, Pirandello and Brecht, and in notable relation to well-known representative characters in drama from Ibsen's Halvard Solness to Stoppard's Septimus Hodge and Wasserstein's Heidi Holland. To the degree that irony is existential, its presence in the theatre relates directly to the circumstances and the expressiveness of the characters on stage. This study investigates how these key figures enact, embody, represent and personify the ironic in myriad situations in the modern and contemporary theatre.

Performing History

Performing History
Author: Freddie Rokem
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2007-03-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781587295881

In his examination of the ways in which theatre participates in the ongoing representations of and debates about the past, Freddie Rokem concentrates on the ways in which theatre after World War II has presented different aspects of the French Revolution and the Holocaust, showing us that by “performing history” actors bring the historical past and the theatrical present together.

Bohemia in America, 1858–1920

Bohemia in America, 1858–1920
Author: Joanna Levin
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 481
Release: 2009-10-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0804772541

Bohemia in America, 1858–1920 explores the construction and emergence of "Bohemia" in American literature and culture. Simultaneously a literary trope, a cultural nexus, and a socio-economic landscape, la vie bohème traveled to the United States from the Parisian Latin Quarter in the 1850s. At first the province of small artistic coteries, Bohemia soon inspired a popular vogue, embodied in restaurants, clubs, neighborhoods, novels, poems, and dramatic performances across the country. Levin's study follows la vie bohème from its earliest expressions in the U.S. until its explosion in Greenwich Village in the 1910s. Although Bohemia was everywhere in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American culture, it has received relatively little scholarly attention. Bohemia in America, 1858–1920 fills this critical void, discovering and exploring the many textual and geographic spaces in which Bohemia was conjured. Joanna Levin not only provides access to a neglected cultural phenomenon but also to a new and compelling way of charting the development of American literature and culture.