Backwards & Forwards, A Technical Manual for Reading Plays

David Ball

Southern Illinois University Press

The best-selling script analysis book for thirty-five years Considered an essential text since its publication thirty-five years ago, this guide for students and practitioners of both theater and literature complements, rather than contradicts or repeats, traditional methods of literary analysis of scripts. Ball developed his method during his work as literary director at the Guthrie Theater, building his guide on the crafts playwrights of every period and style use to make their plays stageworthy. The text is full of tools for students and practitioners to use as they investigate plot, character, theme, exposition, imagery, conflict, theatricality, and the other crucial parts of the superstructure of a play. Also included are guides for discovering what the playwright considers a play’ s most important elements, thus permitting interpretation based on the foundation of the play rather than its details. Using Shakespeare’s Hamlet as illustration, Ball assures a familiar base for clarifying script-reading techniques as well as exemplifying the kinds of misinterpretation readers can fall prey to by ignoring the craft of the playwright. Of immense utility to those who want to put plays on the stage (actors, directors, designers, production specialists) Backwards &amp; Forwards is also a fine playwriting manual because the structures it describes are the primary tools of the playwright.

Backwards & Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays

Arts & Photography

Performing Arts

Freedom of speech in the United States

This historical development of freedom of speech from Athens, through Rome, to England and the United States presents comprehensive, up-to-date treatment secure upon a historical First Amendment base that also covers defamation and privacy, obscenity, commercial speech, prior restraint, free press/fair trial, copyright and broadcasting as well as questions of media access.

Freedom of Speech in the United States

Politics & Social Sciences

Tedford, Thomas L.

Politics & Government

Essays in Experimental Logic

Offering a new edition of Dewey’s 1916 collection of essaysThis critical edition of John Dewey’s 1916 collection of writings on logic, Essays in Experimental Logic—in which Dewey presents his concept of logic as the theory of inquiry and his unique and innovative development of the relationship of inquiry to experience—is the first scholarly reprint of the work in one volume since 1954. Essays in Experimental Logic, edited by D. Micah Hester and Robert B. Talisse, uses the authoritative texts from the Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882–1953 (published by Southern Illinois University Press) and includes as well articles from leading journals representing various contemporary schools of philosophy that criticized Dewey’s experimentalism. Culling materials from six volumes of the chronologically arranged Collected Works, this single-volume edition of Essays marks a crucial point in Dewey’s intellectual development: one in which Dewey critically engages idealistic and intuitionist theorists and lays the groundwork for his mature theory of inquiry. The text includes a new introduction by renowned Dewey scholar Tom Burke that places Essays in philosophical and historical context. In addition to the original essays, Essays in Experimental Logic also features five critical essays by Dewey’s contemporaries, including Bertrand Russell, Wendell T. Bush, R. F. Alfred Hoernlé, H. T. Costello, and C. S. Peirce. 

Biographies & Memoirs

John Dewey

Professionals & Academics

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Books by Southern Illinois University Press