Crossings: David Mamet’s Work in Different Genres and Media

In a career spanning forty years the Chicago-born David Mamet (1947) not only left his imprint on American drama with stage classics like American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross and Oleanna, he systematically ventured into different genres and media as a way of experimenting, honing his craft, and broadening his audiences. The international scholars assembled in the present volume assess Mamet's career to date, focussing particularly on his forays into film, television, the novel and adaptation/translation, as well as on how his work fared in the hands of other artists, whether with serious or comic intentions. By measuring his works' diverse incarnations against each other, his more apodictic theorizings and essays, in the light of formal, institutional and historical determinants, this volume also contributes to a more general reflection on the intermedial and interdisciplinary practice of contemporary artists.

Johan Callens is Professor of English at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and has published extensively on genre and media transpositions, notably on Jack Richardson’s The Prodigal (a metatheatrical revision of Aeschylus’ Oresteia), Sam Shepard’s The Bodyguard (a film adaption of Middleton and Rowley’s Jacobean classic, The Changeling), Robert Altman’s screen version of Shepard’s Fool for Love, The Builders Association’s Jump Cut (Faust), The Wooster Group’s reappropriations of Martha Graham and Luis Bunuel in To You, The Birdie! (Phedre), Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire (a movie on the making of Murnau’s Nosferatu) and David Mamet’s The Water Engine, a stage play remediating radio drama. For the journal Degres he also edited a special issue on intermediality.