Dramatic discourse as intercultural discourse. The Case of Matei Vișniec’s “The Word Progress on My Mother’s Lips Doesn’t Ring True”
This presentation sees plays and their productions as complex communicative environments whose understanding relies on different intercultural pragmatic strategies (Kecskés, 2013). The focus is on Matei Vișniec’s play The Word Progress on My Mother’s Lips Doesn’t Ring True, written in French and translated in Turkish, Greek, Japanese, etc. We are concerned with the French, Romanian and English texts and their performances, focusing on how they create a new intercultural common ground to be shared by the audience and the actors & directors. Looking at how the text was performed and received in different cultures, we argue that dramatic discourse (Herman, 1995) is one of the most complex intercultural discourses, connecting different cultures and enlarging people’s intercultural understanding for millennia. Our analysis suggests that dramatic discourse represents an intercultural setting whose understanding calls for intercultural (pragmatic) competence (Schauer, 2004). The analysis is bidimensional, from the audience’s point of view and of the performers; the former needs to comprehend a play that seems to tackle the former Yugoslavia’s war and its consequences and, depending on their background knowledge, they may or may not need to enlarge their cognitive environment to understand it. An even closer analysis reveals the play’s deeper meaning: a complex synthesis of the atrocities and absurdity of war. Performers have an even more complicated task: they have to go beyond the text’s first reading, to appropriate the characters and their stories, and to give them life. Their parcourse is also explained here as one of the authors has had the opportunity to actually perform in the Romanian production. In dramatic discourse, performers play the role of the ‘intercultural’ communicators who have to bridge the gap between the text and the public, and in doing so, employ different strategies that help the audience accommodate their own cultural background to that of the play.
References
Berghaus, G. (Ed.) (2001). New Approaches to Theatre Studies and Performance Analysis. Max Niemeyer Verlag.
Herman, V. (1995). Dramatic Discourse. Routledge.
Kecskes, I. (2013). Intercultural Pragmatics. Oxford University Press.
Schauer, G. A. (2004). Intercultural Competence and Pragmatics. Springer.
Vișniec, M. (2007). Le mot progrès dans la bouche de ma mère sonnait terriblement faux. Lansman.