Edges of loss

One of the curious characteristics of much postmodern theory is the attention it has paid to theater, an art form seemingly more in danger of extinction today than perhaps ever before in its history. Mark Pizzato interrogates this curiosity, revealing it as an obsession with the destruction of social institutions and the "universal truths" of modernism. The book begins with an investigation of the psychohistory of modern and postmodern stages: the return to ritual chorus and the belief in poetry in Eliot's modern poetic drama, and the nostalgia for a lost ritual "womb" in Nietzsche's proto-postmodern views of ancient tragedy. Building on this approach, the author employs the techniques of psychobiography with modern, avant-garde playwrights Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, and Jean Genet to diagnose the significance of their work in relation to various postmodern theorists. In doing so, he reveals a common concern among both modernists and postmodernists for the stage edge as a border, a gap, an ambiguous juncture between the artist as a self and the artist as a voice of the community. In the end, Edges of Loss establishes this concern as a yearning for the lost mother and a lost symbiosis with something deeper and more true.