Three Uses of the Knife - (Columbia Lectures on American Culture) by David Mamet (Hardcover)
Similar Products
Products of same category from the store
All
Product info
<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Book </b></p></br></br>What makes good drama? How does drama matter in our lives? Here one of America's most respected writers reminds us all of the secret powers of the play. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, screenwriter, poet, essayist, and director, David Mamet celebrates the absolute necessity of drama in our lurching attempts to make sense of ourselves and our world.<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br><p>What makes good drama? How does drama matter in our lives? In <em>Three Uses of the Knife, </em> one of America's most respected writers reminds us of the secret powers of the play. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, screenwriter, poet, essayist, and director, David Mamet celebrates the absolute necessity of drama--and the experience of great plays--in our lurching attempts to make sense of ourselves and our world.</p><p>In three tightly woven essays of characteristic force and resonance, Mamet speaks about the connection of art to life, language to power, imagination to survival, the public spectacle to the private script.</p><p>It is our fundamental nature to dramatize everything. As Mamet says, "Our understanding of our life, of our drama.... resolves itself into thirds: Once Upon a Time.... Years Passed.... And Then One Day." We inhabit a drama of daily life--waiting for a bus, describing a day's work, facing decisions, making choices, finding meaning. The essays in the book are an eloquent reminder of how life is filled with the small scenes of tragedy and comedy that can be described only as drama.</p><p>First-rate theater, Mamet writes, satisfies the human hunger for ordering the world into cause-effect-conclusion. A good play calls for the protagonist "To create, in front of us, on the stage, his or her own character, the strength to continue. It is her striving to understand, to correctly assess, to face her own character (in her choice of battles) that inspires us--and gives the drama power to cleanse and enrich our own character." Drama works, in the end, when it supplies the meaning and wholeness once offered by magic and religion--an embodied journey from lie to truth, arrogance to wisdom.</p><p>Mamet also writes of bad theater; of what it takes to write a play, and the often impossibly difficult progression from act to act; the nature of soliloquy; the contentless drama and empty theatrics of politics and popular entertainment; the ubiquity of stage and literary conventions in the most ordinary of lives; and the uselessness, finally, of drama--or any art--as ideology or propaganda.</p><p/><br></br><p><b> From the Back Cover </b></p></br></br>Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, screenwriter, poet, essayist, and director, David Mamet celebrates the absolute necessity of drama - and the experience of great plays - in our lurching attempts to make sense of ourselves and our world. In three tightly woven essays of characteristic force and resonance, Mamet speaks about the connection of art to life, language to power, imagination to survival, the public spectacle to the private script. The essays in the book are an eloquent reminder of how life is filled with the small scenes of tragedy and comedy that can be described only as drama. Mamet also writes of bad theater; of what it takes to write a play, and the often impossibly difficult progression from act to act; the nature of soliloquy; the contentless drama and empty theatrics of politics and popular entertainment; the ubiquity of stage and literary conventions in the most ordinary of lives; and the uselessness, finally, of drama - or any art - as ideology or propaganda. Self-assured, filled with autobiographical touches, and attentive to the challenges to theater presented by a media world of simulacra, this book is a bracing call to art and to arms, a manifesto that reminds us of the singular power of the theater to keep us sane, whole, and human.<p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br>One of America's leading living playwrights has crafted three short essays beginning iwth the premise that it is 'our nature to dramatize'...It will be compelling to students of theater and serves as a good companion to Mamet's advice to actors, <i>True and False.</i>--Library Journal<br><p/><br></br><p><b> About the Author </b></p></br></br>David Mamet is the author of the plays <i>Oleanna; Glengarry Glen Ross, </i> for which he won a Pulitzer Prize and a New York Drama Critics Circle Award; <i>Speed the Plow;</i> and <i>Sexual Perversity in Chicago, </i> among others. His films include, as screenwriter, <i>The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Verdict, The Untouchables, The Edge, </i> and <i>Wag of the Dog, </i> and as writer/director, <i>House of Games, Homicide, Things Change, </i> and <i>The Spanish Prisoner.</i> He is also the author of children's books and four books of essays, <i>Writing in Restaurants, Some Freaks, The Cabin, </i> and <i>Make Believe Town;</i> two novels, <i>The Village</i> and <i>The Old Religion</i> and a book on acting, <i>True and False.</i>
Price History
Cheapest price in the interval: 24 on October 28, 2021
Most expensive price in the interval: 24 on November 6, 2021
Price Archive shows prices from various stores, lets you see history and find the cheapest. There is no actual sale on the website. For all support, inquiry and suggestion messagescommunication@pricearchive.us