How to Do Things with Salesmen: David Mamet's Speech-Act Play
1994; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 37; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.3138/md.37.3.375
ISSN1712-5286
Autores Tópico(s)Theater, Performance, and Music History
ResumoStanley Fish once called Coriolanus Shakespeare's speech-act play, because it is "about speech acts [and] the rules of their performance. ... It is also about what the theory is about, language and its power." If Coriolanus is Shakespeare's speech-act play, then Glengarry Glen Ross is David Mamet's, for many of the same reasons. The ideological world of Mamet’s play is not the legal institution of Roman law, but rather the economic institution of American capitalism (mythologized as the American Dream), within which Mamet's characters are constituted as salesmen, pivotal figures in the economic world of business. The institution has already predetermined how the salesmen will define themselves, their relationships to each other and to their conditions of existence, and how they will employ language to compose those definitions.
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