"Goldman argues that, in performance, drama exerts a unique command over the forces that both create and disrupt human identity. Thus fuelled, drama works on its audience by radically engaging some of the problems about self and meaning, persons and texts, community and identity - that have most tormented contemporary thought.".

"Goldman begins in a surprising, perhaps unlikely place, with the question of generic classifications in drama. Challenging the view that genre is by definition exclusion, he suggests that the lens of genre can provide keen insights for our understanding and appreciation of drama. For Goldman, it is important to consider drama as an experience, an ongoing moment-to-moment process for audiences or readers.

He explains that everything changes when we stop to think of genre as not entirely unlike rhyme or ambiguity, a feature whose primary interest for readers or audiences is as something that happens to us in a poem or play, as it happens. In wide-ranging discussions that focus on works by Euripides, Shakespeare, Beckett, Handke, and Almodovar, among others, Goldman makes a strong case for returning the study of drama to a position of primacy in current intellectual debate."--BOOK JACKET.