Tom Stoppard´s Leopoldstadt (2020) as “Encyclopedia” of the Author´s Œuvre
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| Year of publication | 2021 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Tom Stoppard is one of the most accomplished contemporary British playwrights, whose career spans over half a century. His latest play, Leopoldstadt (2020), has been long-awaited, and the author has spoken about it as his last and final play several times. The presentation will introduce the concept of encyclopedic writing with various implications to literary analysis. Then, this approach will be applied to Leopoldstadt, ultimately identifying elements in the play that make is a summa of Stoppard’s distinctive playwriting style. Besides language humor (puns, witticisms, absurdity), intertextuality, meta-theatricality, and “comedy of ideas,” which have been a staple of Stoppard’s playwrighting, the presentation will also present Stoppard as an author of a specific type of the history play, tentatively called “a deliberative political-ideological history play.” |
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