W. B. Worthen
Fellow
W. B. Worthen is Alice Brady Pels Professor in the Arts, and Chair of the Department of Theatre at Barnard College, Columbia University. He took his Ph.D. in English Literature at Princeton University in 1981. Before coming to Barnard, he taught at the University of Texas at Austin, Northwestern University, the University of California at Davis, the University of California at Berkeley, and at the University of Michigan, as well as being a founding faculty member of the International Centre for Advanced Theatre Studies sponsored by the University of Helsinki, Finland. William B. Worthen teaches a wide range of courses in dramatic literature and performance theory, and is affiliated with the Theatre Division of the Columbia School of the Arts, and the Columbia Department of English and Comparative Literature. He is the author of several books, among them Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge, 1997), Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (Cambridge, 2003), and Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama (Cambridge, 2006).
THIS AUTHOR WROTE
August 18, 2010
Since the late 1980s, Samuel Beckett's plays have come to epitomize the conflict at the heart of dramatic performance in the age of print: do we understand dramatic theatre, as Hans-Thies Lehmann puts it, as the "declamation and illustration of written drama" (21), or as a means for using writing in the production of an independent artwork, one agency among many in framing the theatrical event? …
