Muthana Shareef Al_Zaidawi, Dr. Zohreh Taebi & Dr. Azra Ghandeharion
Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran
Arthur Kopit’s Wings is about the disrupted world of an ordinary human being who has been paralyzed by her chaotic world. Postmodernism has been selected as the main methodology of this paper, because it seems that it is capable of providing a better criterion to examine Kopit’s play. The aim of this paper, therefore, is to study Wings from a postmodernist perspective; but since postmodernism has a broad nature, this paper has limited itself to the ideas of the prominent postmodernist critic Ihab Hassan. The reason of selecting Hassan as the theorist of the present study lies in the fact that postmodernism could be understood as an interpretation of our lives in the urbanized societies of the postmodern era, which is linked to a crisis of identity. The postmodern aspects of Wings are closely linked to the disaster of a fractured, depersonalized identity. This play is structurally mimetic of, and metaphorically attached to, both postmodernism and depersonalization. In fact, Wings is considered as the fractured reflection of the protagonist’s identity while voicing the psychological terrors of the postmodern era such as the departure from one’s self. Interpreting a play like Wings which interconnects between the depersonalization disorder and the postmodern condition can result in a better interpretation of both this horrible sense of a split self and of the play itself. The paper also recommends the application of Hassan’s philosophies to comprehensively analyze Wings.
The above abstract is a part of the article which was accepted at The Second International Conference on Current Issues of Languages, Dialects and Linguistics (WWW.TLLL.IR), 1-2 February 2018, Ahwaz.
