Susan Sontag lays out for us fifty-eight notes on camp, attempting to conjure up the difficult to grasp and almost elusive concept of camp. In very broad terms, I see camp as the extreme dramatization (and often heightened irony) of a moment in order to highlight some aspect of that moment. It is particularly useful in situations dealing with a serious or complex situation. Angels in America,\u201d a play dealing with a myriad of difficult topics such as the AIDs crisis and the struggle that members of the LGBTQ community faced in the 1990s, camp is heavily utilized. The first scene that I found to be clearly campy in the play was act one, scene seven, where Harper\u2019s hallucination and Prior\u2019s dream converge. This scene is particularly important because Harper and Prior are able to provide one another new insight into themselves that the characters they typically interact with have not been able to offer.<\/p>\n
Perhaps one of the most defining characteristics of camp is a sort of acknowledgment of the absurdity of the moment. We see this acknowledgement in the interactions between Harper and Prior, who both seem confused by the other\u2019s presence in their personal imaginations. This scene is so infused with camp that we even see elements of it in the stage direction, where it is conceded that the fact that these two characters are meeting on this strange ethereal plane is in fact \u201cbewildering\u201d (36.) However, without this eccentric, absurd, and campy scene, these two characters would not have crossed paths. Infusing the play with these heightened, campy scenes allows for deeper revelations by the characters and interesting overlaps and relationships between characters whose plot lines would not necessarily cross otherwise. The element of camp in \u201cAngels in America\u201d both facilitates these moments of recognition and understanding, as well as highlights them for the audience as moments of particular importance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Susan Sontag lays out for us fifty-eight notes on camp, attempting to conjure up the difficult to grasp and almost elusive concept of camp. In very broad terms, I see camp as the extreme dramatization (and often heightened irony) of a moment in order to highlight some aspect of that moment. It is particularly useful … Continue reading Welcome to Camp!<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2032,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[111423],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall-2016"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2032"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=384"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}