Today many states have no theatre censorship laws. When laws governing propriety in the arts were enacted (for example, in California in 1872), they anticipated censorable activity in literature, sculpture, and the visual arts, but never in theatre: such was the powerful, silent entente of gentility between audience and performer which bound theatre to its middle-class audiences. But today, even in much popular theatre, a measure of conflict is expected as part of the theatrical experience. Playwrights and theatre people, as never before in this country, are outspoken morally, philosophically, sexually, and politically. With neither tradition nor legal precedent to act as a guide, American theatre faces the possibility of powerful and unreasoned censorship.

Professional theatre in New York has had few censorship problems, most of them on grounds of obscenity, not politics or morality. A greater threat is censorship on campus.

Lucien Goldmann was one of the most important independent Marxist intellectuals in Western Europe during the past two decades. His interests and works—in philosophy, sociology, history, and aesthetics—were classically broad, insisting as he did on the indivisibility of social experience. He was probably the most prominent of the pupils of Georg Lukács and in turn helped form a whole generation of French and German humanist Marxists. The course he taught at the Ecole Practique des Hautes Etudes was a mecca for European and Third World students. His major work The Hidden God, on Pascal and Racine, remains a classic in the sociology and epistemology of literature; The Theory of the Novel is currently being translated by Random House. The study below continues the socio/structural line of inquiry followed in his work on Genet (T38) and Gombrowicz (T47).

In German one says a child is “strange” with adults it does not know, or does not know well: the child may speak little or not at all, will probably stand sucking a finger. But when children are strange in this way they are still at home within themselves, not alienated from their own lives. An adult in a wholly strange environment also may still be at home within himself; indeed, he may depend more on himself, the less a strange environment welcomes him. Alienation from oneself is something quite different, and estrangement is different again (which is what we will have to show in a roundabout way).

It is easy to hear where some sounds come from. The word entfremden (“to alienate”) is an old one, originally used in business. Abalienare in Latin means to rid oneself of a thing, to sell something.