Pygmalion's Wordplay
The Postmodern Shaw
by Jean
Reynolds
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In the first book-length
treatment of Bernard Shaw as a postmodern writer, Jean
Reynolds offers a fresh interpretation of Pygmalion,
one of Shaw's most enduring plays. Challenging widely
held assumptions about Shaw, she maintains that he
critiqued conventional notions about language and
psychology long before such iconoclasts as Jacques
Derrida and James Hillman came on the scene.
Reynolds calls Pygmalion "the Shavian
creation myth" and compares Henry Higgins's struggle
to transform a bedraggled flower girl into a duchess to
Shaw's reinvention of himself as the larger-than-life
G.B.S. who entertained and edified an immense readership.
Reynolds argues that long before Derrida, Karl Marx's
ideas about language were a powerful influence on Shaw.
In Pygmalion, Shaw topples the "binary
oppositions," as Derrida calls them, that
characterize Western thought: essence versus appearance,
speech versus writing, authenticity versus performance.
Reynolds exposes a metaphysical debate in the conflicts
between Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins that repeats
itself in Shaw's conflicts with his public, which often
misunderstood his penchant for role-playing and
rhetorical flamboyance.
Pygmalion's Wordplay reveals an unexpected side
of Shaw--his acute insight into linguistic and
psychological concepts that dominate postmodern
thought--that will be provocative to Shavians and
Derrideans alike.
Jean Reynolds is professor of English at Polk Community
College in Winter Haven, Florida. She is the author of
two textbooks, Succeeding in College and
Sentence Power, and has published articles in such
journals as SHAW: The Annual of Shaw Studies and
the Anglo-Welsh Review.
1999. 160pp. 6 X 9.
Notes, works cited, index.
ISBN 0-8130-1681-9 Cloth, $49.95s
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"Offers a useful, detailed reading of Shaw's linguistic, political, and philosophic writings and argues persuasively for considering Shaw in the context of 20th-century literary theory."--
Choice
"An
illuminating meditation on postmodernist elements in Pygmalion
. . . it offers valuable insights into Shaw's ways of
thinking about and representing experience."--Jonathan
Wisenthal, University of British Columbia
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