Abstract
This chapter looks at Gao’s most recent play and the first to be translated directly from French to English. Many of Gao’s characters and narrators are women displaced in time and location. This chapter uses Ballade Nocturne to explore how Gao’s female characters are engaged in a type of performative philosophy to give voice to a minoritarian power against the dominance of male-centric language and identity. The chapter takes time to consider the play in production as well.
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Notes
Gao Xingjian, Ballade Nocturne, translated by Claire Conceison (London: Sylph, 2010), 17.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press 1987), 104.
Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (London: Routledge, 2004), 165.
Claire Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze (London: Routledge, 2002), 146.
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© 2014 Todd J. Coulter
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Coulter, T.J. (2014). An Individual in Night: Ballade Nocturne and Gao’s Philosophical Woman. In: Transcultural Aesthetics in the Plays of Gao Xingjian. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137440747_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137440747_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-49510-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-44074-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave Theatre & Performance CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)