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ScholarWorks > Arts & Sciences > English > COMPDR > Vol. 59 (2025) > Iss. 4

 

Disappearing Fathers and Affective Withdrawal in the Neoliberal Era: Tracy Letts' August: Osage County and Mrinal Sen's Ek Din Achanak

Nidhi Singh

Abstract

In Tracy Letts’ play August: Osage County and Mrinal Sen’s Hindi film Ek Din Achanak, the disappearance of the father figures, tacitly understood as mediocre academics by their families, foregrounds the changing discourse of success in relation to the figure of the failed male intellectual. The plays, set respectively in an America grappling with the dying American Dream and a neoliberalizing India, lead us to rethink contemporary capitalist ethos shrouded in societal values that now refashion productive work in global capitalism. Historicizing social mores in close contact with the rhetoric of resourcefulness, reinvention, and exceptionalism by way of the conflicted microcosm of family serving as an allegory for nation can uncover the capitalist naturalization of the enterprising self and mobility. Both narratives are animated by the absence of the intellectual, muddled with an indecipherability shadowing the event of their departure which the families consequently attempt to unravel. The similar points of inflection call for interrogating opacity as an ethic. While I read opacity as resistance to dominant social and economic codes, its affective examination in the two different societies results in a difference of ethical value. In Sen’s film, societal gaze contorted by the new discourse on enterprise insistently demands legibility from the Rai family and directs their engagement with opacity. In Letts’ play, the demands of post-capitalist lucidity in its avowed impatience with ambiguities, transforms into a heteropatriarchal truth-telling that posits the individual self as the uncompromising site for improvement.

Comparative Drama is carried by JSTOR and Project MUSE.

Link to Project Muse


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