Text and Supertext in Ibsen's Drama [Library Binding]

Brian Johnston (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1989

Brian Johnston's approach to Ibsen, now well known, is unlike any other. Johnston sees Ibsen's twelve realist plays as a single cyclical work, the "realist" method of which hides a much larger poetic intention than has previously been suspected. He believes that the cycle constitutes one of the major works of the European imagination, comparable in scale to Goethe or Dante. And he has shown Ibsen to be the heir to Romantic and Hegelian art and thought, adapting this heritage to the circumstances of his own day.This work demonstrates how the language and scene, characters and "props," of the Ibsen dramas establish a bold and far-reaching theatrical goal: nothing less than an account of our biological and cultural identity in its multilayered totality. Johnston argues that Ibsen's realist text, while stimulating the appearance of nineteenth-century life, also objectively and precisely builds up an alternative image in which archetypal figures and situations from our cultural past repossess the realist stage. Thus he sees the Ibsen "strategy" in his realist plays as twofold: (1) the dialectical subversion of the nineteenth-century reality presented in the plays, and (2) the forced recovery of the archetypal from the past, in a procedure similar to James Joyce's in Ulysses. By "supertext" Johnston means a reservoir of cultural reference upon which Ibsen continuously drew in his realist work just as in is earlier poetic and historical dramas.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Brian Johnston is Chief Editor of Theater Three. He is the author of The Ibsen Cycle and To the Third Empire, and is Visiting Professor, Department of Drama, Carnegie Mellon University. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Library Binding: 306 pages
• Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press; 1St Edition edition (April 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0271006447
• ISBN-13: 978-0271006444
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,898,904 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Brian Johnston, like his namesake, Johnston (or Freeman) in The Lady from the Sea, has traveled widely. After finishing sporadic elementary schooling in 1945 at age 13 and military service in Malaya (1950-53) he worked at various (unskilled) jobs, spent a year at Fircroft College, Birmingham, England and gained a scholarship to Cambridge University, in 1957. He has taught at Cambridge University, England; Norges Laererhøgskolen in Trondheim, Norway; Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois; the University of California-(Berkeley and Santa Barbara); Yarmouk University in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan; the University of Amman, Jordan; Beirut University College, Beirut Lebanon (1982-3; and from 1983 to 1986 at the American University of Beirut. He joined the faculty of the School of Drama, Carnegie Mellon University in 1986 and is currently retired (Emeritus). He has published three critical studies of Ibsen: To the Third Empire: Ibsen's Early Plays (1980); The Ibsen Cycle (1975 revised 1992); Text and Supertext in Ibsen's Drama (1988). Performances of his translations of Ibsen include A Doll House (Center Stage, Baltimore), Ghosts (Alliance Theater, Atlanta; Berkeley Repertory Theater, Berkeley), An Enemy of the People (Center Stage, Baltimore and Perseverance Theater, Alaska), Hedda Gabler, The Lady from the Sea (George Mason University) Rosmersholm (Washington Shakespeare Company, DC); Little Eyolf (University of Toledo, Ohio) and various other college and university productions up to the present.
He edited the journal Theater Three between 1986 and 1991 He has lectured on Ibsen in the United States and internationally. In addition to essays and reviews in numerous journals his critical work has appeared in anthologies of drama studies. Four volumes of his translations have been published by Smith and Kraus: Ibsen: 4 Major Plays translated by Rick Davis and Brian Johnston (1995); Ibsen: Volume II Four Plays (1996); Ibsen: Volume III: Four Plays (1998). His version of Ibsen's Emperor and Galilean was published in 1999 by Smith and Kraus. He edited the Norton Critical Edition of Ibsen's Selected Plays, published in 2004. It includes his new translation of Peer Gynt. In 2009 Smith and Kraus published an Electronic edition of his verse translation of Ibsen's LOVE'S COMEDY, available online as a PDF file from Smith and Kraus, Publishers, Inc.,Lyme N.H.
Brian Johnston's website is www.ibsenvoyages.com