Tony Kushner’s Use of Angels in Building a Community
Keywords:
Gender Studies, Queer Theory, Jewish Studies, Walter Benjamin,Abstract
Tony Kushner's 'Angels in America' deconstructs traditional communities as insufficiently supportive to the postmodern subject. He builds a new queer family based on self-respect, mutual care and environmental concern. This article will discuss how various forms of the angelic are advanced dialectically to facilitate the protagonist's and play's development. The author uses a Benjaminian reinvention of Judeo-Christian angels to introduce his theme, whilst proposing a psychoanalytical reading of the same characters. In order to negotiate the challenges these angels represent, the protagonist is helped towards the new community by two human angels, one a female visionary and one a mother figure.Downloads
References
Barnett, Claudia. “AIDS = Purgatory: Prior Walter’s Prophecy and Angels in America”. Modern Drama 53 (2010): 471-94.
Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History”. Twentieth Century Political Theory: A Reader. Ed. Stephen Eric Bronner. New York; London: Routledge, 1997. 219-225.
Chambers-Letson, Joshua Takano. “The Principle of Hope: Reflections of a Revival of Angels in America”. TRD 56 (2012): 143-149.
Cohen, Norman J. “Wrestling with Angels”. Tony Kushner in Conversation. Ed. Robert Vorlicky. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. 217-30.
Kushner, Tony. Angels in America. London: NHB, 2010.
---. “Notes About Political Theatre”. The Kenyon Review 19.3-4 (1997): 19-35.
Lipshitz, Yair. “The Jacob Cycle in Angels in America: Re-Performing Scripture Queerly”. Prooftexts 32 (2012): 203-38.
McNulty, Charles. “Angels in America: Tony Kushner’s Theses on the Philosophy of History”. Modern Drama 39 (1996): 84-96.
Montgomery, Benilde. “Angels in America as Medieval Mystery”. Modern Drama 41 (1998): 596-606.
Nutu, Ela. “Angels in America and Semiotic Cocktails of Sex, Bible and Politics”. Biblical Interpretation 14 (2006): 175-86.
Pederson, Joshua. “‘More Life’ and More: Harold Bloom, the J Writer, and the Archaic Judaism of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America”. Contemporary Literature 50 (2009): 576-98.
Rosenberg, David, and Harold Bloom. The Book of J. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990.
Savran, David. “Ambivalence, Utopia, and a Queer Sort of Materilaism: How Angels in America Reconstructs the Nation”. Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America. Ed. Deborah R. Geis and Steven F. Kruger. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. 13-39.
Downloads
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 licence that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work. Authors may deposit the Submitted version; Accepted version (Author Accepted Manuscript); or Published version (Version of Record) in an institutional repository of the author's choice.
