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is the argument of my own essay from this collection, “Tom Stoppard’s Regressive Postmodernity,” which argues that after a brief flirtation with postmodern attitudes in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and The Real Inspector Hound, Stoppard moved gradually away from a postmodern treatment of theatrical space and philosophical concerns during the rest of his career. The essays of the second half of this collection continue in the same vein, describing various playwrights, from Caryl Churchill, to Tony Kushner, to Mark Ravenhill, who, after having given consideration to and flirted with the postmodern, began to move away from the postmodern in important, complex, and profound ways.
Christine Kiebuzinska’s “Elfriede Jelinek: Staging a Heideggerian Postmodern Debate in Totenauberg” argues that Jelinek is “postdramatic” in a way that at first recalls Brecht for its “unmasking of the illusion that theatrical art replicates reality” where “there are no distinct characters, and stage images are constructed out of film clips, disconnected collage-like stage imagery” (183 in this volume). However, Kiebuzinska is also careful to detail where Jelinek’s aesthetic transcends Brecht’s Epic theatre:
As Kiebuzinska explains it, because there is none of the modernist moralizing of Brecht in Totenauberg, the metadramatic liveliness of the play has more room to serve as a “deconstruction of past and present fictions” (188 in this volume) surrounding the life and career of Martin Heidegger and his Jewish student (and prewar lover), Hanna Arendt. Accordingly, after balancing between the modern and the postmodern, the work