| Abstract [eng] |
The dissertation centers on the aspect of musical expression in the corpus of plays by Lithuanian exile playwright Kostas Ostrauskas (1926–2012), a classic and one of the pioneers of Lithuanian absurdist and postmodern drama. Ostrauskas’s plays are multimedial works characterised by the texts’ distinctively nuanced graphic representation and organizational principles, the abundance and diversity of musical references and graphic inserts, the multifaceted integration and imitation of musical notation, forms and other elements. Starting with Werner Wolf’s classification of intermedial relationships between music and literature, widely accepted in the field of word and music studies, and drawing on the concept of intermodality as intermediality as suggested by Lars Elleström, the tension between text and performance is discussed and “rules for reading” multimedial (dramatic) texts are formulated. Using these rules, four plays by Ostrauskas are analysed: “Belladonna” (1992–3), “Summa Philosophica, or Also Sprach Zarathustra” (1995), “The Quartet” (1969) and “The Fifth” (first published in 2014). The research reveals the scale and complexity of the interrelations between word and music in the playwright’s texts, as well as their unique, transgressive nature, highlights articulations of the sensorial, spatiotemporal and semiotic modalities that are unusual for literary texts, shows the importance of the reader’s eye (and ear), confirms the possibility / necessity of performing while reading (“theatre of the imagination”). |
