Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)

Studies - Mária Kurdi: "Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain." On the Scholarly Heritage of Péter Egri (1932-2002)

Modem Games continues the scrutiny of contemporary drama in a both interdisciplinary and international context and neighbourhood. As their general strategy, the analyses confront Renaissance works of art with their twentieth-century replicas and echoes to study the changes in reconstructing form and rechanneling meaning that such alterations are found to involve. Necessarily, iconoclasm, subversiveness, parody and irony become key-terms as well as vantage points throughout the volume. First the book examines the various avantgarde, pop art and postmodern transpositions of Leonardo's paintings, mainly Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. Testified by Egri's elaborate discussion, the twentieth-century reworkings result in fundamental shifts and disruptions in the system of established values. Robert Rauschenberg's four-piece Pneumonia Lisa (1982), for one, fits the analytical scheme of the author as "a work of artistic deconstruction eliciting acts of critical deconstruction" (23). Another example, Andy Warhol's notorious Thirty Are Better Than One (1963), which consists of a set of irregularly composed silkscreen prints of Leonardo's Mona Lisa

, is interpreted here as thoroughly questioning the uniqueness of the original by foregrounding the commercialization of art, a more than contentious "achievement" of our era. A considerable part of Modern Games, however, focuses on the intertextual presence of Shakespeare in Stoppard's drama, bearing in mind, usefully, the parallels with Leonardo's fate in twentieth century painting and pop art. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) easily lends itself for a closer examination, being a play that carries double parody, that of both Hamlet and Beckett's Waiting for Godot. While elaborating on the interaction between Renaissance and (post)modern drama, the author traces the caricaturing of Hamlet's soliloquy in the Stoppard text, and points out that it ventures to omit the very substance of Shakespeare's words. Language and structure play a significant part in the re-writing process as Egri's argument clarifies: And to top it all, Shakespearean high blank verse is replaced by comic, contemporary, petty, if witty, prose. Order is also meaning: if Ros's prosaic pondering and blundering precede the parodistic fragment from Hamlet's soliloquy, they also prepare the spectator for the comic reinterpretation of the soliloquy. (60) 29