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History will eat itself: Rory Mullarkey's "Cannibals" and the terrors of end-narratives

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jcde_2014_0025_2_.pdf (323.8Kb)
Date
05/12/2014
Author
Haddow, Sam
Keywords
Rory Mullarkey
John Gray
Alain Badiou
Cannibals
Eschatology
PN2000 Dramatic representation. The Theater
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Abstract
Rory Mullarkey’s Cannibals (2013), an odyssey from post-Soviet Ukraine to contemporary Britain, catalogues the destructive power of teleological historical narratives through the eyes of a protagonist “mutilated in acts of spectacular terror” (Gray 205). This article aligns Mullarkey’s play with the anti-narrative political philosophy of John Gray, criticizing their approaches as implicitly valorising the very philosophies they purport to oppose. Offering an alternative reading of Cannibals through the lens of Alain Badiou’s Rebirth of History (2012), I contend that the play opens up a space of resistance against the totalizing impulses of the present, one in which “the power of an Idea may take root” (Badiou 15).
Citation
Haddow , S 2014 , ' History will eat itself: Rory Mullarkey's "Cannibals" and the terrors of end-narratives ' , Journal of Contemporary Drama in English , vol. 2 , no. 2 , pp. 275-288 . https://doi.org/10.1515/jcde-2014-0025
Publication
Journal of Contemporary Drama in English
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1515/jcde-2014-0025
ISSN
2288-4300
Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2014 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH. This work is made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the final published version of the work, which was originally published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/jcde-2014-0025
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  • University of St Andrews Research
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/8866

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