Influencé par le monde artistique et théâtral qui se transformait autour de lui pendant les années soixante et soixante-dix, Shepard va expérimenter lors de sa résidence d’écriture au Magic Theatre, une nouvelle manière d’écrire le théâtre pour ses spectateurs, à travers la confrontation entre texte et scène, personnages et acteurs, action dramatique et performance.Comment lire alors les pièces de cette période? Notre thèse propose d’examiner comment l’acteur, le son, la performance et l’expérience sensorielle du spectateur, sont inscrits dans les textes de notre corpus. Notre travail vise à montrer, à travers la prépondérance intentionnelle de ces éléments dans le texte, comment le texte de Shepard ne s’adresse pas à un simple lecteur mais à un lecteur/spectateur. En effet, contrairement aux autres textes littéraires, le texte de théâtre trouve son actualisation sur scène. Le spectateur est donc celui qui construit le sens in fine de la pièce de théâtre. Notre thèse examine en quoi les pièces de Shepard doivent, pour être comprises, être en partie élucidées par la scène. Notre travail a comme objectif donc d’identifier des éléments scéniques inscrits dans le texte de théâtre et de proposer des outils opérationnels pour les décrire. Il s’agit d’élaborer les prémisses d’une théorie du spectateur implicite pour l’oeuvre de Shepard, dans le but de pouvoir étudier plus rigoureusement le programme de réception inscrit dans son oeuvre. / Influenced by the evolution of the artistic and theatrical context during the nineteen sixties and the nineteen seventies, Shepard began to experiment at the Magic Theatre with an innovative approach to writing theater for his audience. His approach was to confront the text and the stage, the characters and the actors, dramatic action and performance.How should one read Shepard’s plays from this period? Our study suggests that the actor, sound, performance and the sensory experience of the spectator are written within the texts of our corpus. Through our observation of the predominance of these elements in the texts themselves, our thesis demonstrates how Shepard’s text does not simply address the reader but reaches out to the reader/ spectator. The theatrical text, unlike other literary texts, reveals its essence on stage. In a play, it is the spectator that builds the meaning in fine. Our thesis examines how Shepard’s plays need to be clarified by the stage in order to be understood. The objective of our study is to identify the stage elements written within the text, and to draw out some methodological tools to describe them. The idea is to elaborate a theory of the “implicit spectator” for Shepard’s work, with the aim of studying more rigorously the reader’s response program inscribed in his works.

1 Thesis Abstract The present thesis explores six plays written by three (post)modern American playwrights - David Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago and Oleanna, Sam Shepard's Buried Child and True West, and Suzan-Lori Parksʼ The America Play and Topdog/Underdog in order to define and analyze the functions of performative storytelling in the dramatic texts as well as its effects on the characters' identity. In Reading Narrative, J. Hillis Miller analyzes performative storytelling as a human shaped process that people use in order to translate events into meaning and meaning into shared information. Moreover, in Narrative as Performance, Marie Maclean demonstrates the importance of this device in recalibrating human memory and communication and in enriching the traditional mimetic process used in theatre. These ideas are closely followed in the aforementioned American plays through the lenses of the most prominent themes of the end of the twentieth century American theatre. Each of the three American writers uses performative storytelling to delineate socio-political themes. David Mamet comments on the artificiality of the American self, Sam Shepard speaks about the importance of familial past and relationships, whereas Suzan-Lori Parks describes the impact of major national narratives on the...

In my thesis I focused on the matter of the relationship of Americans during the decades after World War II to their own identity, as well as to the myths of the West or consumer society. I wanted to compare these aspects on plays by Sam Shepard and David Mamet, two playwrights concerned with similar issues in 1960s and 1970s. In the theoretical part of the thesis I concentrated on the development of the American theater off Broadway. I described three significant theater groups of the era and the differences in their approach. I based the comparison of the plays on Richard Schechner's performance theory and J. L. Austin's theory of the so-called "performatives." Later I discussed the matters of rituals and myths in the postmodern society where I based my theory especially on Victor Turner's and Marie Maclean's work. The two main chapters are dealing with comparing two plays by each author with regard to the way Shepard and Mamet work with rituals and modern myths. Those are considered commonplace, insufficient, almost misleading in a modern society, and the plays' characters thus cannot cope with the society. They end up being on its outer edge and do not seem to be able to find the way back. As a result of the comparison of the plays based on the theoretical part I concluded that even though from the...

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This paper examines violence and masculinity in Sam Shepard's work as a symptom of war trauma, apparent in his characterization of several of his male characters as war veterans and the violent language accompanying his other characters. War becomes a cultural disease infesting and destroying the family on Shepard's stage.

Review of Emma Creedon, Sam Shepard and the Aesthetics of Performance Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, xi + 199 pp., $90.00.

Excerpt: In 1975, Bob Dylan invited Sam Shepard, the young playwright who had ignited the Off-Broadway and London theatre scene, to go on tour with him in order to write scenes and dialogue for a film of the Rolling Thunder Revue.

Reproduction de : Thèse de doctorat : Langues, littératures et civilsations étrangères : Paris 4 : 2006. / Titre provenant de l'écran titre. 222 références bibliographiques.

This thesis presents the shortcomings of the Fair Use exemption within the Copyright Act through an in depth analysis of the recent Shepard Fairey v. Associated Press surrounding the well-regarded Hope Poster. The thesis critiques the unpredictability of the law, the copyright holder’s growing sense of monopolized ownership over her or his work, the complex facets of art that are overlooked in the court’s legal analysis, and finally, the social justice implications of the Copyright Act. The thesis argues that Fair Use should make room for appropriation art, otherwise successful and progressive artists, such as Shepard Fairey, will be discouraged from creating.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 1999. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 251-271). Also available on the Internet.