The language of power: Gender relations and communication in dramatic texts (Lenz, Hauptmann, Bernstein, Streeruwitz

This dissertation develops a method for a feminist analysis of dramatic texts by combining theories of gender construction, power relations and communication. Judith Butler's theory that gender is a performative act and therefore an effect, not an expression of an already existing stable identity, and Michel Foucault's concept of power as relational provide the theoretical background for the analysis of dramatic dialogues. This analysis stresses the function of language as a process of communication instead of the aesthetic aspects of poetic language. While traditional speech act theory uses a single speech-act as its functional unit of analysis, an extended version views language as inherently dialogical and therefore examines the sequence of an initiating and a responding speech-act.;Focusing on dialogue, I read gender relations as power relations in four German plays, two by male and two by female authors: J. M. R. Lenz's Soldaten (1776), Gerhart Hauptmann's Einsame Menschen (1891), Elsa Bernstein's Wir Drei (1891) and Marlene Streeruwitz's Waikiki Beach. (1989).;While dramatic figures are from the beginning positioned in a hierarchy of power by constraints of gender, class or social status, they use language not only to manipulate and influence each other, but also to resist control. Viewing gender and power as relational and language as dialogical opens up the possibility of examining a dramatic text as a fluctuating and dynamic process of constructing dramatic subjects. Each of the four plays suggests a different answer to the question of the tension between the subjects' agency and determinism.