Theory For Historical Progress: Reenactment Of Love, Responsibility And Forgiveness--An Intertextual Study On Tony Kushner's Angels In America

Set in 1986 at the height of the AIDS epidemic, the disintegration of communism, and the unraveling of Reaganism, Angels in America by Tony Kushner is a play that raises moral questions. It is a play that asks questions about the nature and extent of our responsibility to others, about the sexual identity, about the meaning and the limits of love. The play goes deeper than these resulting from Kushner's preoccupation with the relation between the human progress and moral issues, and his innovation with the theatrical expression in structure.The significance of approaching this issue is palpable when we consider the current situation of the contemporary Western theatre world. There is an obvious lack of a universally accepted world picture with unquestioned belief in evolution and progress. Confronted with the collapse of values in the human community in the bleak environment, the idea of human history and progress is at stake. However, the question of historical progress turns out to be not only a moral position, but also an epistemological position: a question of seeing and choosingIn this thesis I have narrowed my interest in the theory of historical progress to a plausible topic: the reenactment of values like love, responsibility and forgiveness in Tony Kushner's Angels in America. The research question in this thesis is: How does Tony Kushner positively respond to this seemingly faithless world and offer an unprecedented theory of human history and progress? To address this question, I shall apply Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of "polyphony" and the "dialogic", and Julia Kristeva's idea of intertextuality, in the analysis of the theatrical structure and thematic concern on the issue of progress and morality in this play.Bakhtin's understanding of language use as integrally and inextricably related to social discourse suggests that every writer is not independent of other voices. He is always drawing on the other resources to perform that which is both "new" and "not-new", thereby replenishing the resources of the community. When applied to the textual relation, it means that every text is interacting with other previous texts whichforms a dialogic relation. The immanent truth comes out dialogically through the interaction without coming to a generalized universal answer. Based on her understanding of Bakhtin's theory, Kristeva coined the term intertextuality and further developed the theory.In this play we can find many biblical and literary references, the mingling of the historical events and the fictional story, and the overlapping historical stories. It is the interaction of these varying but closely related texts that makes this play a converging arena. Intertextuality, the approach in literary criticism to the relation between the texts, specifically that view of textual relations, works precisely in this play. I shall use the theory of intertextuality in the task of exploring how Tony Kushner postulates a theory for historical progress and establishes a hope about the reenactment of love, responsibility and forgiveness in the contemporary American society. In my research I shall trace how the different texts, either of personal history or of religious stories or of previous literary texts, influence each other in terms of interpretation. I shall argue that the interaction of the texts demonstrates how the values attached to them: love and responsibility, go beyond any foundation like religion, political belief, and race, and can further be reenacted in contemporary America as an impetus for historical progress.