Theorizing stages: *Text, performance, and dramaturgical practice in the theatre of Marguerite Duras

In her theatrical works, Marguerite Duras uses conventions in innovative ways to position her audience. The emphasis Duras places on the relationship the audience has to her work signals a shift in the purpose and practice of theatre. Rather than a focus on what a play means or is about, attention shifts to what a play does in performance. Duras's writing recontextualizes perception and recasts experience into other forms. The questions I examine in my dissertation include: What do the theatre works of Marguerite Duras do? What significant links have been forged between the practices of theory and theatre by the work of Marguerite Duras? What is the nature of those links and how do they play themselves out in performance? If Duras's works interact with her audience in a particular way, what is the nature of this interaction and how does Duras chart the gap between the work and the audience? How have Duras's works problematized a hermeneutics of meaning? How have Duras's works confounded mimetic representation?;My dissertation takes as its primary project an examination of the theatre work of Duras, yet it does not follow a chronological form of organization. I point my reader in the direction of developing a method for reading these texts (both on the page and on the stage). I first set up a nexus of ideas necessary for this examination and then examine these ideas in particular texts. My examples move from works that provide more "help" to the audience to those whose texture is more complex. Duras's work examines how the processes of perceiving and experiencing can be slowed down, analyzed, appreciated, and possibly altered. When engaged by an audience, viewing these processes of perception creates an experience in itself. Consequently, Duras's writing involves the stretching and expanding the boundaries of forms of expression. In this dissertation, I examine Duras's works in relation to the concepts of genre, theorizing, memory, and dramaturgical practice.