Caryl Churchill's Aesthetic of Silence: Terror and language in 'Far Away' and 'Escaped Alone'

Details

Supervisors

Bragard, Véronique

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [120] en langues et lettres modernes, orientation générale

Abstract

enThe object of this thesis is the analysis of two dystopian plays by the female British playwright Caryl Churchill: 'Far Away' and 'Escaped Alone', respectively written and produced in 2000 and 2016. The purpose of these two analyses, through the identification of the key features of Churchill’s theatrical aesthetic, is to shed a new light on her dramaturgy of terror. More precisely, the main emphasis is laid on the playwright’s formal approach to language, whose innovative character has been widely acknowledged. Numerous scholars have pointed out the opaqueness of meaning in Churchill’s plays, often concluding that it reflects a crisis of language that leads to the failure of communication. The argument advanced in this thesis is that there is more to her formal work than a destruction of meaning as a response to the senselessness of terror. The hypothesis put forward here is that Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia is a relevant approach to Churchill’s texts and permits to address the ambiguous status of words as well as the inherent aporia of the language of terror and trauma.