Postmodernity as a Disability Experience in Lyle Victor Albert’s Cut!

Abstract

Postmodernism has exerted its influence in almost all walks of life. It is a cliché that postmodernism is indefinable. It can, however, be defined as a set of critical, strategic, and rhetorical activity that uses ideas like difference, repetition, trace, simulacrum, and hyper-reality to destabilise other concepts like presence, identity, historical progress and epistemic certainty. The literary critical arena welcomed postmodern philosophy and it has been fundamental in various experimentations in the field of literature. The focus shifted from the central characters to the marginalized characters and the stories began to be told from the subaltern’s perspectives. Postmodernism also opened up spaces for talent and creativity, no matter where it came from. Lyle Victor Albert, in spite of his Cerebral Palsy, has used theatre as a medium for communication. His writing skills, coupled with his histrionic abilities, has made him a popular playwright of 21st century Canada. The paper is an attempt to examine Cut! as a postmodern drama and to consider the postmodernity in the play as coming from a form of disabled experience.