Looking Back Forward: Existentialist Readings of (Post)modern Bulgarian Drama

• In Event: Rethinking Bulgarian Transitions: Literary, Anthropological, and Political Discourses of Memory

Abstract

This paper analyzes Bulgarian plays written in the 2010s, in attempt to find common threads in their reflection on local and global processes after the 2008 financial crises. It discusses these works’ formalistic and cultural relations to the 1900s’ Existentialism and Theatre of the Absurd as foregrounded by shared postcolonial shifts and sentiments. The analysis draws a different paradigm than the one outlined by Bulgarian criticism and advances the idea of stylistic hybridity in Bulgarian post-communist theatre. Focusing on the existentialist tropes of “authenticity” and “freedom”, the analysis tries to answer how and why Bulgarian drama of the 21st century revisits modernist discourses while adapting the postmodern language of theatre. Ultimately, the paper aims to advance the dialog about postmodernity and current postcolonialisms, refining the notion of literary reaction to global anxiety across historically desynchronized societies.

Author

• Vessela S. Warner, U of Alabama at Birmingham