ABSTRACT

The dramatic text represents the best hope of a text turning out to be, after all, “an event in the life of the reader.” The tendency to speak of non-dramatic texts as “theatre,” and as events, goes well beyond this late-Renaissance titling practice; it is ubiquitous. More persuasive than all such designating – whether by individual authors or by language itself – of texts as “theatre” would be some actual instances of non-dramatic texts that display the characteristics of a theatre script or event. The text of The Sunset Limited is visibly “in dramatic form,” consisting as it does entirely of dialogue between its two characters, speech-tagged “White” and “Black,” together with the occasional italicized stage direction, for example, A door to the outer hallway and another presumably to a bedroom. For the most part, theatre continues to cherish for its texts the very aspiration that non-dramatic literary texts cherish for themselves.