While it might not be a stretch to get scholars and critics to agree that the work of people like Robert Wilson and Richard Foreman are postmodern, asking the same folks to agree upon this categorization for Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Sam Shepard might be more challenging. Stephen Watt address this issue of classification with regards to drama, which for Watt excludes “performance,” to concentrate on “what writers write” (4). This is not an easy task since, as Watt points out, the very idea of postmodernism dissolves “neatly sutured categories, such as genres themselves” (8). With this understanding, which prompts the dialectical slash in the book's title, Watt searches for a way to “begin to unravel the taut conceptual skein that results from the paradoxical union of the two terms” (13).