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This collection of specially written essays offers both student and theatregoer a guide to one of the most celebrated American dramatists working today. Readers will find the general and accessible descriptions and analyses provide the perfect introduction to Mamet's work. The volume covers the full range of Mamet's writing, including now classic plays such as American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross, and his more recent work, Boston Marriage, among others, as well as his films, such as The Verdict and Wag the Dog. Additional chapters also explore Mamet and acting, Mamet as director, his fiction, and a survey of Mamet criticism. The Companion to David Mamet is an introduction which will prepare the reader for future work by this important and influential writer.

David Mamet is widely considered to be the voice of contemporary American Theatre. His use of what is taken to be realistic language together with minimalist staging creates a postmodern combination that pushes an audience in conflicting directions. The result is that initial audiences for Oleanna were aroused to applaud and loudly react to the ending of the play when a male teacher beats a female student. The issues the play raises about political correctness are turned on their head. Oleanna is a particularly complex play in terms of both form and content and this guide offers a theoretically informed introductory analysis. It provides students with a comprehensive critical introduction to the play and includes new interpretations of the text in light of recent developments in Mamet's playwriting and the intervening shifts in the political landscape.

Faustus has a long history in European literature although its origin is obscure. David Mamet, in a modern version of the old legend, presents a new perspective on the issues of power and truth. Michel Foucault, the influential post-structuralist historian and philosopher of the 20th century, gives a novel insight into the nature of power relations and its manner of operation within human societies. In this sense, Foucault posits that power and knowledge are the same; moreover, power and resistance coexist in every social interaction. The current study aims to investigate the power relations in David Mamet’s Faustus in a Foucauldian framework. Faustus’s model of the periodic power offers a rigid paradigm to explain the mechanism of the world. Human will and resistance have no place in Faustus’s ideology. However, the study shows how Faustus gets disillusioned as he becomes aware of the hidden power relations functioning around him. It concludes that the significant role of truth and knowledge in power relations leads to the emergence of confession, reward, and punishment: discourses which entangle the individual in a complex web of power and resistance.

The most complete record of a contemporary American dramatist available, David Mamet: A Resource and Production Sourcebook is the result of ten years' research by a widely published drama and theatre scholar and a university bibliographic specialist. Presenting a complete overview of all reviews and scholarshp on Mamet, the authors challenge assumptions about the playwright, such as the charge that he is an antifeminist writer. This comprehensive sourcebook is an essential purchase for Mamet scholars and students of American drama alike. David Mamet: A Resource and Production Sourcebook reflects the revolution underway in the study of drama, in which not only previous scholarship but performance reviews are a necessary part of research. It gives a complete listing and overview of over 250 scholarly articles and chapters of books on Mamet's plays. It also presents the complete production history of each play, including review excerpts. The authors have produced an invaluable guide to research into this key contemporary dramatist.

Humanism, an ideology created by humans, aims to enhance human potential. It excludes the possibility of supernatural beings and places all blame on human behaviour. According to Ehrenfeld,\"humanism is committed to an unwavering belief in the power of reason; as a result, it rejects other myths of power, including the power of God, the strength of supernatural forces, and even the undirected power of Nature in collaboration with blind chance\" (1978).

One of the concerns of Cognitive Poetic critics has been with the issue of how literary authors make meaning by means of metaphor. Building on the Cognitive Linguistic theories of metaphor, the field of Cognitive Poetics has been concerned, among its many diverse areas, with the studying of metaphor in literary texts. Proposing the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argued in Metaphors We Live By that our conceptual system is metaphorically shaped. In addition, they claimed that the metaphoric linguistic expressions are the manifestation of the fundamental conceptual metaphors forming individuals' cognitions. Conceptual metaphors were defined as the underlying structures of these expressions by means of which people comprehend intangible concepts through more tangible ones. Using the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), the present essay explores the conceptual metaphor of LIFE IS A PLAY in David Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago and Glengarry Glen Ross. In these plays, Mamet depicts a world in which performance, in its theatrical sense, becomes the characters' survival strategy and a manner of living. As one of the most influential playwrights of his time, Mamet has always been concerned with the issues which most afflict America. He finds the ills of his society manifested in the relation among people. An attempt is made to explain the ways in which life-as-play finds expression both linguistically and thematically in the different contexts of these works.

The ordinary human concerns with the past and the future can be seen both as forms of suffering (anxiety toward the future, regret toward the past, etc.) and as illusory because they involve the failure to appreciate the primary reality of the present. In this lecture I argue that while there are certainly ways of being occupied with past or future times that we have reason to criticize, such criticism cannot base itself on any metaphysical claim to the singular or exclusive reality of the present. The task of developing useful forms of describing and assessing the different ways we can go wrong in temporalizing our lives is hindered rather than helped by the suggestion that our concerns with the past and with the future are as such forms of attachment to the Unreal.

Understanding David Mamet analyzes the broad range of David Mamet's plays and places them in the context of his career as a prolific writer of fiction and nonfiction prose as well as drama. Over the past three decades, Mamet has written more than thirty produced plays and garnered recognition as one of the most significant and influential American playwrights of the post-World War II generation. In addition to playwriting and directing for the theater, Mamet also writes, directs, and produces for film and television, and he writes essays, fiction, poetry, and even children's books. The author remains best known for depicting men in gritty, competitive work environments and for his vernacular dialogue (known in the theater as \"Mametspeak\"), which has raised the expletive to an art form. In this insightful survey of Mamet's body of work, Brenda Murphy explores the broad range of his writing for the theater and introduces readers to Mamet's major writing in other literary genres as well as some of his neglected pieces. Murphy centers her discussion around Mamet's most significant plays—Glengarry Glen Ross, Oleanna, American Buffalo, Speed-the-Plow, The Cryptogram, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Edmond, The Woods, Lakeboat, Boston Marriage, and The Duck Variations—as well as his three novels—The Village, The Old Religion, and Wilson. Murphy also notes how Mamet's one-act and less known plays provide important context for the major plays and help to give a fuller sense of the scope of his art. A chapter on his numerous essays, including his most anthologized piece of writing, the autobiographical essay \"The Rake,\" reflects Mamet's controversial and evolving ideas about the theater, film, politics, religion, and masculinity. Throughout her study Murphy incorporates references to Mamet's popular films as useful waypoints for contextualizing his literary works and understanding his continuing evolution as a writer for multiple mediums.