Between "Play" and "Power" : performing "Waiting" Under Siege : Susan Sontag's staging of Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo

This project considers Susan Sontag's 1993 staging of Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot in besieged Sarajevo, staged amid an entanglement of political, ideological, cultural, ethical and epistemological discourses. The production is discussed in the theoretical context of emerging postmodern aesthetic/political praxis, and in the western cultural context of a distanced post cold-war crisis within postmodernity. An interrogation of existing representations of this theatrical event reveals that Sontag's production has previously been constructed in traditional, inherited terms of aesthetic/political praxis. This study suggests the inadequacy of these representations, and argues for a different way of seeing the political capacity of the production and, therefore, the aesthetic. In its interrogation of the politics of the aesthetic economy of Beckett's text, amid besieged Sarajevo, this study yields an aesthetic critique of what is at stake in the ambiguous role of the west in relation to contemporary European political and social strife.

Author dc:creator

• Taylor, Rachel Mary

Statement dc:rights

• Available to the World Wide Web

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1828/19875

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.library.uvic.ca:1828/19875