Fields of Being: Harry in the Wings and the Dramaturgy of Da-Sein

Abstract

<p>This thesis demonstrates how Martin Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology can be applied to the dramaturgy of contemporary playwriting through the concept of <i>Da-sein</i>. For Heidegger, the experience of being is disclosed through conscious attention and concern for other phenomena apparent within an awareness – or field – of being. He argues that questioning being brings us closer to experiencing being, and that the <i>poiesis</i> (bringing into being) of language is a discourse that unfolds this disclosure. In the <i>Poetics</i>, Aristotle theorizes playwriting as a <i>poiesis</i> of possible experiences. Yet, the Aristotelian model largely provides one perspective on being: a linear, chronological trajectory of plot in which characters impact the world around them. This approach contrasts with the perspectives of a diverse range of playwrights who have constructed characters that are impacted upon by the world, such as Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Sarah Kane. This thesis seeks to contribute to this broader post-Aristotelian tradition by applying Heideggerian ideas to dramatic form in the creation of a new play, <i>Harry in the Wings</i>. Through experimenting with Heidegger’s ideas about the thrownness of being, the difference between time and temporal presence, intersections of ‘inauthentic’ and ‘authentic’ being, and characters constructed as fields-of-being inferred by their awareness, <i>Harry in the Wings</i> provides a model for a Heideggerian approach to the <i>Poetics</i> that further diversifies and explicates the question of being for the contemporary stage.</p>