The Language of Silence: On the Unspoken and the Unspeakable in Modern Drama

by Leslie Kane

Examining the plays of Maeterlinck, Chekhov, Jean-Jacques Bernard, Pinter, Albee, and Beckett, this critical study exhibits the eloquence with which silence and inarticulateness portray the experience of inadequacy, incompleteness, impermanence, and uncertainty in early-twentieth-century drama. Moving on to post-World War II drama, the author explores the use of noneloquent speech and silence to convey the alienation and isolation engendered by the rise of political humanity.

195 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1984

Reviews

[Phillip · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was really excited to read The Language of Silence because I am doing a major paper this semester on the silent figures in The York Mystery Plays and The Laramie Project--Jesus Christ and Matt Shephard, respectively. Their silences are distinct and meaningful, but I think the silences are of a different kind than what Kane focuses on. I really only read the intro, since the main chapters of this book are all devoted to individual modern playwrights--Chekhov, Beckett, Pinter, etc. And, to the extent that she 'theorizes' silence in drama, Kane largely thinks of silence as a distinct experience of the world, whether that's a retreat from it, and expression of the futility of interaction, or the dumbstruck horror of the survivor of the 20th century. I plan to theorize silence in quite a different direction. So all in all this was not a very helpful book for me. However, it is probably useful to people studying these specific playwrights.

Also, she didn't feel the need to translate things from French or German into English, even in endnotes. I feel this is a bad rhetorical decision because a reader like me, who doesn't read French or German, immediately loses access to the points she's trying to make there.