Memory in Theater
Memory in Theater
The Scene Is Memory
This chapter joins Henrik Ibsen, Tennessee Williams, and Samuel Beckett with Sigmund Freud, Jerome Bruner, and Gerald Edelman—three playwrights with three kindred, twentieth-century memographers or writers and thinkers about memory. The study of the correspondences between scientific conceptions of memory and the constructions of dramatists can contribute substantively to the histories of both drama and memory, and it is a shame that they have largely gone unnoticed. Memory has always been considered a variable, not a constant, in dramatic character; however, it had become a system property of character construction by the early twentieth century, even as it came to be considered a system property of the psyche or, later on, of the neuroanatomical connections responsible for the brain's ability to recognize and categorize perceived objects.
Keywords: memographers, Henrik Ibsen, Tennessee Williams, Samuel Beckett, Sigmund Freud, Jerome Bruner, Gerald Edelman, dramatists, character construction, neuroanatomical connections
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