Destabilizing Media Borders Narrative: Filmic Practices in Sam Shepard’s Drama
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| Year of publication | 2026 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The paper examines Sam Shepard’s early experimental plays through the theoretical lens of intermedial storytelling, with a particular attention to the filmic narrative techniques that permeate his dramatic texts. By combining the research in intermedial studies with plays shaped by Shepard’s experience in the film industry, this paper aims to offer a new methodological approach to reading a certain kind of experimental theatre as it breaks down the boundaries between such distinct media that film and theatre represent. Building on Irina Rajewsky’s framework of “intermedial storytelling”, which is primarily focused on the relationship between literature and film, this paper proposes an expansion of her model to the underexplored dynamics between dramatic texts and filmic techniques. Rather than relying on the use of multimedia, these plays exhibit a form of implicit intermediality, wherein filmic modes are embedded in the dramatic text itself. In that connection, I’ll discuss how Shepard’s plays can be read through intermedial storytelling and how his intentional use of techniques usually associated with films in some of his plays reshapes the meaning of his work and positions Shepard as an artist who thinks across media as he destabilizes the media boundaries of theatrical representation. |
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