Dismantling Fabricated Reality in Shepard’s State of Shock
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31185/eduj.Vol51.Iss1.2906Keywords:
States of Shock, identity, war, Sam ShepardAbstract
ABSTRACT
This paper investigates Sam Shepard’s States of Shock in which the playwright explores family relation during an international crisis, war. As male identity is noted as a recurring theme in Shepard’s plays, the paper examines masculine identity in States of Shock. As depicted in the play, Colonel and Stubbs, the main characters in the play, struggle to negotiate their personal identity prisms. As such, we explore this issue via the lens of social identity to address the primary constructs in the play. Although taking as its setting a family café, the events in the play transcend this both temporally and spatially through the two characters’ battle for male identity at the war front lines. As such, we argue that through the characters of Colonel and Stubbs, where the former promotes war mythologies regardless of the suffering of the traumatized soldier, Stubbs, the play presents a critique of American myths of war.
Downloads
References
References
Abbotson, S. C. W. (2002). Sam Shepard: A bibliographic essay and production overview. The Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard. Ed. Matthew Roudané (pp.292-310). Cambridge UP.
Al-Rashedi, K., & Nilofer, M. (2018). Identity crisis and its negative effects on individual and familial integration in Sam Shepard's Buried Child. Research Gate, 6, 416-425.
Bak, J. S. (2010). Dis/figuring Sam Shepard. Études Anglaises, 63(2), 254.
Bigsby, C. (2000). Born injured: The theatre of Sam Shepard. In Matthew Roudané (Ed.), The Cambridge history of American theater (pp.120-141). Cambridge UP.
Bottoms, S., J. (1998). The theatre of Sam Shepard: States of crisis. Cambridge UP.
Brannon L. (2002). Gender psychological perspectives. Allyn and Bacon.
Bruskin, S. (2019). Insider or outsider? Exploring the fluidity of the roles through social identity theory. Journal of Organizational Ethnography, 8(3), n.p.
Bryer, J., & Madachy, P., S. (2003). "The Nightmare of the Nation": Sam Shepard and the paradox of American identity. Research Gate, 7(9), n.p.
Caricati, L., & Sollami, A. (2018). Contrasting explanations for status‐legitimacy effects based on system justification theory and social identity theory. Journal of Theoretical Social Psychology, 2(1), 13-25.
Clum, J., M. (2002). The classic Western and Sam Shepard’s family drama. The Cambridge companion to Sam Shepard. Ed. Matthew Roudané (pp.171-88). Cambridge UP.
Creedon, E. (2015). States of Shock and Simpatico: Performances of waste. In Sam Shepard and the aesthetics of performance (pp. 135-161). Palgrave Macmillan.
Creedon, E. (2013). Non-productive expenditure and Sam Shepard’s States of Shock: A performance of waste. Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, 1(2), n.p. doi:10.1515/jcde-2013-0019.
Davis, J. L., Love, T. P., & Fares, P. (2019). Collective social identity: Synthesizing identity theory and social identity theory using digital data. Social Psychology Quarterly, 82(3), 254-273.
Falasiri, R. (2016). Hyperreal world of Sam Shepard's States of shockand kicking a dead horse. SOCRATES, 3(4), 13.
Garner, S. (2019). Object, objectivity, and the phenomenal body. In Bodied spaces (pp. 87-119). Cornell University Press.
Haslam, S. A., Haslam, C., Jetten, J., Cruwys, T., & Dingle, G. A. (2020). Social identity. The Wiley Encyclopedia of Health Psychology, 12, 679-688.
Hassan, S. L. (2015). Politics and the craft of war in Sam Shepard’s States of Shock. Lark Journal, 1(20), 30-40.
Hogg, M. A. (2020). Social identity theory. Stanford University Press.
Katherine, W. (2007). Exploding bombs: Masculinity and war trauma in Sam Shepard’s drama. New England Theatre Journal, 18, 77-93. ISSN: 1050-9720
Lemon, J. (1992). The crisis of masculinity and the renegotiation of power. Communication, 18(2), 16–30. doi:10.1080/02500169208537709
Mergenthal, S. (2011). A man could stand up: Masculinities and the Great War. In Constructions of masculinity in British literature from the Middle Ages to the present (pp. 189-208). Palgrave Macmillan.
Matlak, M. (2014). The Crisis of masculinity in the economic crisis context. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 140, 367–370. doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.04.436.
Mirowska, P. (2017). Negotiating reality: Sam Shepard’s States of Shock, or “A vaudeville nightmare”. Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture, 7, 368-385.
Nordmann, A., & Wickert, H. (1998). Shamanism vilified and redeemed: Sam Shepard’s States of Shock. Contemporary Theatre Review, 8(4), 41–54. doi:10.1080/10486809808568530
Parvin, G., & Razieh, F. (2016). Postmodern sense of doom in the hyperreal world of Sam Shepard's States of shockand kicking a dead horse. Socrates: Scholarly Research Journal, (ahead of print), n.p.
Prohászka-Rád, B. (2010). Dramatic representation of a culture of violence in Sam Shepard’s The Late Henry Moss. Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica, 2(1), 43-61.
Rio, D. (2017). Revising the mythology of the American West after 9/11: Sam Shepard's The God of Hell. Studies in the Literary Imagination, 50(2), 1-16.
Schaub, D., Linder, J., Novak, K., Tam, S. Y., & Zanini, C. (2019). Topography of trauma: fissures, disruptions and transfigurations. Brill.
Senaha, E. (2006.). Manhood and American literary history: An overview with selected bibliography of masculinities and men's studies. The Faculty of Letters, Hokkaido University.
Shepard, S. (1993). States of Shock; Far North; Silent Tongue. Vintage.
Skelton, S. B. (2017). Sam Shepard and the aesthetics of performance by Emma Creedon. Comparative Drama, 51(3), 424-427.
Tekinay, A. (2019). Transformative Shocks: War trauma in David Rabe's Sticks and Bones and Sam Shepard's States of Shock. Topography of Trauma: Fissures, Disruptions and Transfigurations, 126, 115-132.
Trepte, S., & Loy, L. S. (2017). Social identity theory and self‐categorization theory. The International Encyclopedia of Media Effects, 5, 1-13.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2023 Ziyad Shakir Loaybi Al-Zayadi, Asst. Prof. Thamir R. S. Az-Zubaidy (Ph.D.)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
