Fusini, Letizia. Dionysus on the Other Shore: Gao Xingjian’s Theatre of the Tragic. Leiden: Brill, 2020.
In Dionysus on the Other Shore, Letizia Fusini argues that throughout his early exile years (late 1980s-1990s), Gao Xingjian gradually moved away from Absurdist Drama to develop a dramaturgical system with tragic characteristics. Drawing on a range of contemporary theories of tragedy, this book reconfigures some of the key tropes of Gao’s post-1987 theater as varied articulations of the Dionysian sparagmos mechanism. They are the dismemberment of the dramatic self, the usage of constricted spaces, the divisive nature of gender relations, and the agony of verbal language. Through a text-based analysis of seven plays, the author ultimately aims to show that in Gao’s theater, tragedy is an ongoing and mostly subtextual dynamism generated by an interplay of psychic forces concurrently cohesive and divisive.
Contents:
A Dramaturgical System with Tragic Characteristics: Rethinking Gao Xingjian’s Post-Exile Dramaturgy, 1–17
From Oedipus to Dionysus: the Gaoian Tragic Self from Philosophy to Dramaturgy, 18–58
Toward a Theatre of the Tragic: The Bus Stop, The Other Shore, and the Transition from Absurdity to Tragedy, 59–98
Between Cohesion and Division: the Tragic Field and Mode in Gao Xingjian’s Post-1990 Plays of Self, 99–169
Escape and Modern Tragedy, 170–211
Gao Xingjian’s Theatre of the Tragic as Thirdspace: towards a Transcultural Model?, 213–223