Kaspar and Other Plays
Picador · Paperback · January 1, 1970
Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke's first full-length drama, hailed in Europe as "the play of the decade" and compared in importance to Waiting for Godot Kaspar is the story of an autistic adolescent who finds himself at a complete existential loss on the stage, with but a single sentence to call his own.
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- Who it’s for
- Readers interested in experimental drama about language and personal identity
- Themes
- Language and self-expression, Public performance and identity, Pressure to conform
- Genres
- German Plays
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Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke's first full-length drama, hailed in Europe as "the play of the decade" and compared in importance to Waiting for Godot Kaspar is the story of an autistic adolescent who finds himself at a complete existential loss on the stage, with but a single sentence to call his own.
Continue reading
Drilled by prompters who use terrifyingly funny logical and alogical language-sequences, Kaspar learns to speak "normally" and eventually becomes creative--"doing his own thing" with words; for this he is destroyed. In Offending the Audience and Self-Accusation, one-character "speak-ins," Handke further explores the relationship between public performance and personal identity, forcing us to reconsider our sense of who we are and what we know.
Where it sits
| German Plays | 95% |
|---|
Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.
Publisher categories
- German Plays
- Playwriting
- Authors
- Peter Handke
- Publisher
- Picador
- Published
- January 1, 1970
- Format
- Paperback
- Theme
- Language and self-expression · Public performance and identity · Pressure to conform
- Reading lane
- German Plays