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"Shepard, Sam, 1943-2017."
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Sam Shepard : a life
\"With more than 55 plays to his credit, including the 1979 Pulitzer Prize-winning Buried Child, Sam Shepard's impact on American theater ranks with the greatest playwrights of the past half-century. Critics have enthused that he \"forged a whole new kind of American play,\" while younger playwrights venerate him -- Suzan Lori Parks, herself a Pulitzer winner, calls Shepard her \"gorgeous north star.\" As an actor who's appeared in more than 50 feature films, Shepard possesses an onscreen persona that's been aptly summed up as \"Gary Cooper in denim.\" He earned an Oscar nod for his portrayal of Chuck Yeager in the 1983 film The Right Stuff, and his screenplay for Paris, Texas helped that now-classic film sweep the top prizes at the Cannes Film Festival. Despite these accomplishments and more -- five collections of prose, writing songs with Bob Dylan, making films with Robert Frank and Michelangelo Antonioni, as well as romantic relationships with rocker Patti Smith and actress Jessica Lange -- Shepard seems anything but satisfied. Sam Shepard: A Life details his lifelong bouts of insecurity and anxiety, and delves deeply into his relationship with his alcoholic father and his own battle with the bottle. Also examined for the first time in-depth are Shepard's tumultuous relationship with Lange, and his decades-long adherence to the teachings of Russian spiritualist G.I. Gurdjieff. Throughout this new biography, John J. Winters gets to the heart of the enigma that is Sam Shepard, presenting an honest and comprehensive account of his life and work\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Psychosocial or Mythological: Sam Shepard’s Kicking a Dead Horse as a Liberal Ironist
American West has conjured up a shining image in the media but a complex subject in the research studies. Among the iconic elements that represent the American West, the image of cowboy has occupied a unique place. Relatively, mythological or psychosocial methods may contribute to the comprehension of the image of cowboy. In this vein, an examination of cowboy with regard to the aforementioned perspectives are studied but proved insufficient because it is almost impossible to draw a fine distinction between these two matters. Nevertheless, the core of this study by attributing to one of Shepard’s late plays entitled Kicking a Dead Horse tries to address the issue of cowboy with regard to Richard Rorty’s liberal ironist to prove that neither mythological nor psychosocial approach is appropriate enough to study the image of cowboy whereas Shepard’s emphasis on self-creation as buttressed by Richard Rorty’s liberal ironist is the suitable method for analyzing the image of cowboy.
Journal Article
Revisiting \Axis of Evil\: Liberal Ironist and Shepard's God of Hell
United States adopted the nineteenth century British model of colonialism for the twentieth century, specially in the exercise of controlling people's perspectives within the country while undertaking the adventure of directly interfering in other countries’ affairs. When President Bush addressed three countries around the world as Axis of Evil on January 29, 2002, he was following the same route. Nevertheless, coining the phrase was not enough, and making people believe it required the main task that became possible through creating an intellectual atmosphere in which the focus was to promote the picture of good and evil embedded in the addressing of Axis of Evil. Consequently, any voice out of tune was hushed instantly, even if it meant Sam Shepard who had previously won great fame on the American stage by his family plays. Shepard never stopped on the notion of revealing the multiplicity of self, interacting with different geopolitical situations. As such, it is no wonder that his God of Hell is pursuing the same aim, a play totally neglected by the critics and reviewers for being too political and incoherent. Nevertheless, the research at hand is to demonstrate that Shepard is a true intellectual or, in Rorty's term, a liberal Ironist, able to entangle himself from the tissues of the aforementioned cultural war by considering people's susceptibility to humiliation.
Journal Article
Unbecomings #1
Five years later, noting a fellow author's death, Renard wrote, \"Is it my turn?\" and died a month later. Afflicted with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis-the merciless ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease- until days before his death using a tape recorder or dictating, Shepard wrote and edited Spy of the First Person. THOMAS FARBER has been a Fulbright Scholar, awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and three times National Endowment fellowships for fiction and creative nonfiction, recipient of the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize, and Rockefeller Foundation scholar at Bellagio.
Journal Article
Unnatural narratives in Sam Shepard’s Mad Dog Blues
The main focus of this article is the term “unnatural” in a narratological analysis of Sam Shepard’s Mad Dog Blues (1971) in the light of ‘possible worlds’ theory. The term is recently coined and, in Jan Alber’s definition, designates those physically, logically, and even humanly impossible scenarios and events—according to the cognitive model of possible worlds—that challenge our real world knowledge. Mad Dog Blues is deemed to be one of the most complicated, fast-moving, and vividly imaginative but also obscure and puzzling of Shepard’s plays. The play in postmodernist fashion teems with a simultaneous collage-like collection of different types of unnatural narratives and storyworlds. It starts with a self-reflexive postmodern list; confronts us with unnatural characters; deconstructs our real-world knowledge about time and temporal progress; and presents us with impossible spaces. The analysis of the play in this essay is based on Jan Alber’s reading strategies which are meant to naturalize the play’s unnatural narratives.
Journal Article
The Offstage Character in Modern American Drama: Sam Shepard’s Buried Child
This paper highlights and explains the impact of the offstage character, which is widely prevalent in the American drama, on the onstage characters and the audience as well. In the 20th century, American drama is marked by the loss and absence which depict the dark side of American society because of the ramifications of the two World Wars. These consequences are the major reasons behind man’s hopelessness, alienation and failure. With the great development in the field of psychology, at the hand of Sigmund Schlomo Freud in the 19th century, which paved the path for the writers to deeply burrow in the psychological issues that man suffers from in the modern and postmodern era. Consequently, writers, like Shepard, try to examine the hidden issues of their characters by dint of the offstage character in the context of a family that represents the society. These unseen characters have influential roles including; catalyst roles and the proximate cause which uncover the cause of the obliteration of American family members in the darkness of their sin. This paper also examines; the role played by the absent character in dealing with the critical issues of American society, such as the incestuous issues and the failure of the American dream.
Journal Article
The Journey from Compliancy to Intimate Revolt: A Kristevan Reading of Sam Shepard’s Three Major Plays
The study intends to examine three major plays of Sam Shepard –True West, Fool for Love, and A Lie of the Mind– to explore the underlying reasons for the characters’ social transgression in the light of Julia Kristeva’s theory of intimate revolt. Notwithstanding that all the characters feel alienated from reality and other members of society, there is a marked divergence between male and female characters in the approach they adopt to revolt against the societal norms so as to transform their lives. The findings suggest that while men seem less likely to revolt against the rules of patriarchy, it is predominantly women who embark on revolting against the psyche-numbing society to bring jouissance to their once-predetermined meaningless lives. The study comes to the conclusion that by reconnecting with their personal desire and preserving their individuality in a society that hegemonizes its subjects’ identities, women engage in what Kristeva calls ‘intimate revolt’ and become the forces of power and change in the modern world.
Journal Article