Drama Aesthetics and Criticism text - request for help

[Stephen Johnson]

From Moira Day <moira.day at usask.ca>
Subject: Re: Drama Aesthetics and Criticism text - request for help

Hi everyone,

I've just had a problem come up with less than a month to go before the term begins, and any help or advice people could give me would be welcome.

For years I used Bernard Dukore's *From the Greeks to Grotowski* text to teach my 400 level course in Dramatic Theory and Criticism. Even when the book went out of print, I was for any years able to get permission from the press to print the relevant excerpts from the text. This year, - I just found out today - for the first time, none of the presses originally affiliated with the book, claim to have the copyright for it or its extracts anymore, or know who has it. (And our copyright centre checked this out with 5 different presses before turning to the author.) The author has said he doesn't know who would have it now either, but if he could see which excerpts were involved he can probably tell us where we need to write to get individual permission to use them. But with less than a month before the class start, this would probably take too long to do.

If anyone else has encountered a similar situation and has had experience solving it quickly, please let me know. The advantage of the original text was that it was very comprehensive, going from the classical through to the contemporary period, it gave abstracts of the actual texts rather than just summaries, and many of the abstracts were short but very helpful. The older selections between the Greeks and the 19th century were particularly useful in teaching a survey course. I don't know if there would be a similar text still in print that would be a good substitute for this one - or how difficult it would be to track down the original readings in a different medium. Our copyright person suggesting checking electronic sources - but at least on a first glance, there don't seem to be e-books of the original text available either.

As mentioned, any help or advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks, and have a good summer.

Moira Day
Dept. of Drama
University of Saskatchewan
Canada

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