Revisiting "Axis of Evil": Liberal Ironist and Shepard's God of Hell

Document Type : Research article

Authors

1 PHD student, School of Literature & Humanities, Department of Foreign Languages & Linguistics, Shiraz, Iran. h.oroskhan@gmail.com

2 Associate Professor, Shiraz University, Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics, Faculty of Literature and Humanities.Shiraz. Iran

Abstract

United States adopted the nineteenth century British model of colonialism for the twentieth century, specially in the exercise of controlling people's perspectives within the country while undertaking the adventure of directly interfering in other countries’ affairs. When President Bush addressed three countries around the world as Axis of Evil on January 29, 2002, he was following the same route. Nevertheless, coining the phrase was not enough, and making people believe it required the main task that became possible through creating an intellectual atmosphere in which the focus was to promote the picture of good and evil embedded in the addressing of Axis of Evil. Consequently, any voice out of tune was hushed instantly, even if it meant Sam Shepard who had previously won great fame on the American stage by his family plays. Shepard never stopped on the notion of revealing the multiplicity of self, interacting with different geopolitical situations. As such, it is no wonder that his God of Hell is pursuing the same aim, a play totally neglected by the critics and reviewers for being too political and incoherent. Nevertheless, the research at hand is to demonstrate that Shepard is a true intellectual or, in Rorty's term, a liberal Ironist, able to entangle himself from the tissues of the aforementioned cultural war by considering people's susceptibility to humiliation.

Keywords


  1. Borders, W. (2010). Introduction. In  A. Mason, D. Felman, & S. Schnee (Eds.), Literature from the "Axis of Evil": Writing from Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and other enemy nations. ReadHowYouWant.
  2. Cammett, J. M. (1971). Antonio Gramsci and the origins of Italian communism. Stanford University Press.
  3. Coe, R. (1980, November 23rd). Saga of Sam Shepard. New York Times Magazine, 56-59, 118, 120, 122, 124.
  4. Cook, J. H. (1992). Fifty years on the old frontier as cowboy, hunter, guide, scout, and ranchman. University of Oklahoma Press.
  5. Crank, J. A. (2012). Understanding Sam Shepard. University of South Carolina Press.
  6. Dabashi, H. (2008). Iran: A people interrupted. New Press.
  7. Grant, G. (1991). Writing as a process of performing the self: Sam Shepard's notebooks. Modern Drama, 34(4), 549-565. https://doi.org/10.3138/md.34.4.549
  8. Grant, G. (1993). Shifting the paradigm: Shepard, myth, and the transformation of consciousness. Modern Drama, 36(1), 120-130. https://doi.org/10.3138/md.36.1.120
  9. Harris, L. (2004). Civilization and its enemies: The next stage of history. Free Press.
  10. Heradstveit, D., & Bonham, M. G. (2007). What the axis of evil metaphor did to Iran. The Middle East Journal, 61(3), 421-440. https://doi.org/10.3751/61.3.12
  11. Islam, M. S. (2005). Muslims in the capitalist discourse: September 11 and its aftermath. Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 25(1), 3-12. https://doi.org/10.1080/13602000500113423
  12. Jillson, C. C. (2016). The American dream: In history, politics, and fiction. University Press of Kansas.
  13. Mirowska, P. (2017). Negotiating reality: Sam Shepard’s States of Shock, or “A Vaudeville Nightmare.” Text Matters, 7(7), 368-385. https://doi.org/10.1515/texmat-2017-0020
  14. Prohászka Rád, B. (2009). Effacing myths and mystification of power: Sam Shepard’s The God of Hell. Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica, 1(1), 60-77. http://acta.sapientia.ro/actaphilo/C1-1/philo12.pdf.
  15. Rorty, R. (1999). Contingency, irony, and solidarity. Cambridge University Press.
  16. Rorty, R. (2007). Philosophy as cultural politics. Cambridge University Press.
  17. Rosen, C. (1993). "Emotional territory": An interview with Sam Shepard. Modern Drama, 36(1), 1-11. https://doi.org/10.3138/md.36.1.1
  18. Rumbaut, R. G., Foner, N., & Gold, S. J. (1999). Transformations: Immigration and immigration research in the United States. SAGE Publishing.
  19. Said, E. W. (1996). Representations of the intellectual: The 1993 Reith lectures. Vintage.
  20. Said, E. W. (2014). Culture and imperialism. Vintage Digital.
  21. Shepard, S. (1993). States of shock: Far north. Vintage Books.
  22. Shepard, S. (2005). The god of hell: A play. Vintage Books.
  23. Silva, E. C. (2015). ‘Terror as theater’: Unraveling spectacle in post 9/11 literatures.  Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, 11(5), 1-22.
  24. Strieff, D. (2017). FLAG and the diplomacy of the Iran hostage families. Diplomacy & Statecraft, 28(4), 702-725. https://doi.org/10.1080/09592296.2017.1386465
  25. Suskind, R. (2004, October 17). Without a doubt. The New York Times.
  26. Wade, L. A. (2007). Sam Shepard and the American sunset: Enchantment of the mythic west. In D. Krasner (Ed.), A companion to twentieth-century American drama (pp. 285-300). Blackwell Publishing Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470996805.ch18
  27. Weiss, K. (2009). There’s no question that this is torture!: Electrocuting patriotic fervour in Sam Shepard’s The God of Hell. EnterText, 7(3), 197-206, https://www.brunel.ac.uk/creative/writing/research/entertext/documents/entertext073/ET73WeissED.pdf.
  28. Willadt, S. (1993). States of war in Sam Shepard's States of Shock. Modern Drama, 36(1), 147-166. https://doi.org/10.3138/md.36.1.147
  29. Wilson, G. M. (1994). Edward Said on contrapuntal reading. Philosophy and Literature, 18(2), 265-273. https://doi.org/10.1353/phl.1994.0025
  30. Winters, J. J. (2017). Sam Shepard: A life. Counterpoint.