About

David Kornhaber is an Associate Professor in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. His academic focus includes modern and contemporary drama, with particular interest in the intersections of theatre and philosophy, critical theory, modernism, and the avant-garde. His work explores how these areas influence and inform each other, contributing to a deeper understanding of theatrical and philosophical developments in the modern era.

Research topics

• Art
• Literature
• Philosophy
• Sociology
• Social Science
• Art history
• Epistemology
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• Epilogue

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-08-28

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• Transfiguring Tragedy: Schopenhauer, Stirner, and Nietzsche in Eugene O’Neill’s Early Plays

  The Eugene O Neill Review · 2025-03-01

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  In one of the most famous descriptions of a bookshelf’s contents ever put to the page or on stage, James Tyrone in act 4 of Long Day’s Journey Into Night shouts at his son Edmund, “That damned library of yours! (He indicates the small bookcase at rear) Voltaire, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Ibsen! Atheists, fools, and madmen!” (quoted, 2). Two of those atheists, fools, and madmen have long been associated with the middle and late work of Eugene O’Neill, with Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche regularly figuring in studies of his plays and thought. Although Long Day’s Journey was written from 1939 to 1941 and published in 1956, it takes place in August 1912—meaning that the contents of that bookshelf, already well pored over if the elder Tyrone’s anger is any indication, were part of the playwright’s thinking from his earliest days.The consequences of that insight form the subject of Ryder Thornton’s Transfiguring Tragedy: Schopenhauer, Stirner, and Nietzsche in Eugene O’Neill’s Early Plays. As Thornton ably shows, the thinkers of the book’s title—Nietzsche the intellectual superstar, Schopenhauer the mid-tier metaphysician, and Max Stirner the relative unknown—made up a substantial part of O’Neill’s intellectual firmament even from his student days. In other words, the atheists, fools, and madmen of James Tyrone’s vituperations had always been O’Neill’s philosophical lodestars, together offering a means of unlocking new intellectual depths in his earliest theatrical forays.Much of the strength of Thornton’s account comes from the balancing act that he maintains between intellectual biography and literary analysis. As Thornton recounts, O’Neill came to these thinkers in the context of a double disillusionment that marked his early life: firstly and most profoundly, the loss of his Catholic faith upon his discovery of his mother’s opioid addiction and his own role in its inception, the selfsame subject of much of Long Day’s Journey; and secondly, his scholastic disillusionment with the intellectually and culturally conservative atmosphere at Princeton University, where the titular thinkers were believed unworthy for an Ivy League syllabus, if acknowledged at all. It was instead on the bookshelves of iconoclasts and freethinkers with whom the young O’Neill came into contact that he discovered the philosophers who would shape his newly atheistic worldview. The most central of these was arguably the New York City bookseller Benjamin Tucker, whose Unique Bookshop in Greenwich Village would become a mainstay for O’Neill. There the young writer discovered the potent mixture of anarchism, egoism, and proto-existentialism that marked much of the bohemian worldview of the era, a vortex of ideas in which pieces of thought from Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Stirner, and others all swirled.Thornton does a fine job of unpacking for the uninitiated the main philosophical positions of his titular intellectual trio as O’Neill would have encountered and understood them, striking a balance between our own contemporary reception of these figures and the particularities of O’Neill’s engagement with them given the specific translations available to him and the various intellectual currents of the era. (For instance, the proximity of Nietzsche’s thought to the tenets of left-wing political anarchism was taken as almost self-evident at the time, far less so today.) But where Thornton’s work truly shines is in his excavation of O’Neill’s early plays for evidence of this intellectual genealogy. O’Neill’s one-acts from 1913 and 1914 are awash in dualistic confrontations that evoke Schopenhauer’s distinction of will and representation or Nietzsche’s dichotomy of the Dionysian and Apollonian, an ever-unfolding struggle between intangible essence and imposed order. The open schematism of many of these plays makes for a relatively easy application: one readily sees such ideation at work, for instance, in the conflict between the Poet and Business Man in Fog (1914), where worldviews as much as survival strategies are at issue for the denizens of a life raft out at sea, the all-pervasive fog of the play’s title evoking the primordial unity in which such distinctions play out in Schopenhauer’s thought. Yet Thornton is just as adept at uncovering traces of a Schopenhauerian or Nietzschean bent in O’Neill’s more social realist works, each marked, in Thornton’s reading, by layers of “suffering and solace” if not necessarily outright philosophizing (10). This propensity for discovering the philosophical in the quotidian comes to the fore in Thornton’s impressive readings of O’Neill’s breakthrough Glencairn plays, the quartet of seafaring one-acts written between 1914 and 1917 that were some of his earliest successes with the Provincetown Players. Gone are the open dichotomies and plain pontification of some of the prior one-acts, yet questions of what Thornton calls “suffering, illusion, and possession” remain at the quartet’s core, with wild nature and the churning sea continuing to evoke Schopenhauer’s primordial will or the wild Dionysian forces of Nietzsche’s thought against the structures, routines, and hierarchies of the Glencairn steamer (45).If Schopenhauer and Nietzsche loom over the one-acts, it is the less well-known Stirner who in Thornton’s estimation lies behind the worldview of O’Neill’s first full-length plays of the 1910s, Beyond the Horizon (1918) most famously but also Bread and Butter (1914) and The Personal Equation (1915). Though he is today largely remembered for his connections to political anarchism, Stirner’s most famous work, The Ego and Its Own (1844, trans. 1907), was central to the era’s understanding of individuation, alienation, and egoism (at the time, a proto-existentialist grappling with self-creation and self-actualization, not to be confused with the term’s later political valences), each of which Thornton traces in O’Neill’s first full-length plays. For Thornton, the co-mingling of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Stirner truly comes to fruition slightly later in O’Neill’s career, with “Anna Christie” (1921). Here Thornton’s knack for discovering the philosophical veins pulsing underneath O’Neill’s realist coverings produces a tour-de-force analysis. Paying detailed attention to the revisions that turned the original draft of the play, then titled Chris Christopherson, into “Anna Christie” in 1920, Thornton finds in this tale of a former prostitute seeking spiritual and material redemption a sublimated story of religious revision, a “philosophical synthesis, in which [O’Neill] combined Christian symbolism, Nietzschean religious critique, his increasing knowledge of Eastern religion, and Stirner’s philosophy of egoism to dramatize the transformation of ‘old forces’ into new ones” (109). In other words, a remarkable encapsulation of the bohemian philosophical currents of the time and the new world and new morality they portended.In many ways, “Anna Christie” marked a high point of O’Neill’s early career, and so too is it arguably the high point of Thornton’s analysis. Less compelling is his reading of The Emperor Jones (1920). Thornton incorporates some of the most important recent work on this complex and problematic play addressing issues of race and indigeneity, and he shows how many of the philosophical concerns and tropes of O’Neill’s earlier works persist, yet it never becomes clear how the latter might meaningfully shape or recast the former. Thornton’s reading of The Hairy Ape (1922), taken as a bridge between the early and middle O’Neill, falls similarly short. Again, O’Neill’s philosophical commitments persist, but here an overt Marxist-materialist element enters into his thinking and stagecraft, none of which Thornton addresses in any depth. There’s a potentially interesting point to be made about the transition from the idealist to the materialist in O’Neill, both philosophically and dramaturgically, but the absence of any examination of Marx in the book means that such an argument never fully emerges.These shortcomings notwithstanding, Thornton offers an unmistakably valuable contribution to our understanding of O’Neill’s earliest philosophical development and its impact on his dramaturgy and stagecraft. If there is an overarching criticism to be made, it is mainly that Thornton’s work is somewhat out of step with other recent currents in O’Neill scholarship. With the exception of the chapter on The Emperor Jones, which is very much in dialogue with recent work, Thornton misses out on what could be fruitful conversations with the more cognate publications on O’Neill and his sources of the past decade-plus: my own work on Nietzsche and O’Neill, Michael Y. Bennett’s and Benjamin Carson’s collection on O’Neill’s one-acts (which contains a number of areas of intellectual overlap with Thornton’s approach), and Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s landmark intellectual history American Nietzsche. Thornton’s work is calling for dialogue with these and other recent forays. O’Neill is being rethought as a thinker, and Thornton has made a useful contribution to that rethinking.

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• Philosophy and Theory

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-08-28

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• What theatre knows

  2024-11-21

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  This chapter endeavours to build out a consideration of theatre as a knowledge-making system. While my previous work has been primarily concerned with the ways in which theatre artists have used the medium to interrogate and deconstruct received notions of knowledge, this chapter intends to flip those considerations and look at theatre not as a vehicle of knowledge critique but as an engine of knowledge-formation, albeit a very particular kind. Specifically, this chapter considers theatre as a system aimed at the production of relational knowledge of the kind outlined in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s On Certainty: a system wherein the fact status of any given component can be known in relation to the other components of the system but cannot be definitively assessed independently of that system. In furtherance of this examination, this chapter turns to the Ontological-Hysterical Theatre of Richard Foreman and his 1994 play “My Head Was a Sledgehammer,” wherein the basic fact patterns of traditional theatrical production are meticulously deconstructed. Through this investigation, this chapter aims to articulate a vision of the theatre, and to highlight a particular tradition of theatre-making, wherein knowledge is both produced and rendered impossible at one and the same time.

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• Kushner at Colonus

  2022-01-01

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  Kornhaber, David, “Kushner at Colonus: Tragedy, Politics, and Citizenship,” in PMLA, vol. 129, no. 4, (2014). Reprinted by permission of the author.Kornhaber, David, “Kushner at Colonus: Tragedy, Politics, and Citizenship,” in PMLA, vol. 129, no. 4, (2014). Reprinted by permission of the author.TONY

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• Philosophy

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2021

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  • Sociology
  • Social Science
  • Philosophy

  Stoppard’s fascination with philosophy spans his whole career, from early pieces like Jumpers and Dogg’s Hamlet to Darkside and The Hard Problem. Though he was extraordinarily conversant in the disciplinary questions of British analytic philosophy, even striking up correspondences with some of its leading figures, Stoppard also always harboured reservations as to philosophy’s utility and insight, finding it in many cases insufficient compared to the depth of human exploration available in the theatre.

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• Index

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2021-06-09

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  A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

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• Foucault's Theatres ed. by Tony Fisher and Kélina Gotman

  Theatre Journal · 2021-01-01

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  Reviewed by: Foucault's Theatres ed. by Tony Fisher and Kélina Gotman David Kornhaber FOUCAULT'S THEATRES. Edited by Tony Fisher and Kélina Gotman. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020; pp. 250. "I would like to know how illness has been staged, how madness has been staged, how crime has been staged" (222), says Michel Foucault of his own body of work in the rare and revealing 1978 interview "The Philosophical Scene," newly translated and printed as an appendix to Tony Fisher and Kélina Gotman's important edited collection Foucault's Theatres. That Foucault has for so long evaded a book-length treatment in the realm of theatre and performance studies even as his methods have infused the same has always been something of a mystery. Finally, in Fisher and Gotman's new compendium, he takes center stage. In the same interview, Foucault describes his own books as "dramaturgies" (223); here at last they are submitted to dramatic analysis. Of course, Foucault has hardly been absent from theatre and performance studies in any total sense. "A quick survey," Fisher and Gotman write, "suggests that it is obligatory to mention Foucault, but rarely to inhabit his thought: to cite and to enlist but not to engage" (7). That is in part a reflection of the purposefully fractured and fractious nature of Foucault's discourses, what Gotman describes as "the anarchaeology of movement-towards 'truth' … a form of thinking that embraces concurrence without shying away, without pretense to universal or objectivizing certainty or totality" (64–65; emphasis in original). The scene of Foucault's thought is always changing, the narrative always turning. Yet for Fisher and Gotman, the complexity of Foucault's intellectual dramaturgy offers exciting opportunities. As they state in their joint introduction, their collection seeks "to remedy what we believe to be the neglect within theatre and performance studies of systemic engagement with Foucault's intellectual contribution to theatre and performance thinking" (9). It is a mission that extends in at least two directions: to better situate Foucault within the study of theatre and performance and to better situate theatre and performance within the study of Foucault. More so than most, Foucault's elusive philosophy is well-suited to the multivocality of the edited collection over the monovocal proclamations of the monograph. With twelve chapters as well as an introduction, afterword, and interview, Foucault's Theatres offers many entry points to the multiple theatres of the volume's title. The first four entries cover "Truth, Methods, Genealogies" and investigate the theatrical and performative elements of Foucault's different discursive modes. "Foucault often writes at the edge of some stage," writes Mark Jordan in [End Page 446] the evocative opening of his essay on "Foucault's philosophical theatres" (25). The description applies equally well to the visceral sites that frequently feature in Foucault's writing—the executioner's platform, the monarch's dais—as to the degree to which his philosophy always exists in proximity to the performative. Thus Jordan offers an explication of what Foucault himself describes as "philosophy not as thought, but as theatre" (27). Aline Wiame continues this line of inquiry in her synchronous subsequent essay "The Dramas of Knowledge: Foucault's Genealogical Theatre of Truth." Noting Foucault's description of his youthful encounter with Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot as a "rupture" in his experience as a philosophy student, she expounds on the degree to which "Foucault's style of writing is theatrical, or more precisely, dramatic" and convincingly argues that "Foucault develops a particular kind of writing which is not about theatre but which thinks through theatre," using the tropes and topos of the theatre as a means of newly understanding topics from history to philosophy (38–39; emphasis in original). Turning to another mode of discourse, Magnolia Pauker offers an original examination of Foucault as interview subject. Acknowledging the paradox of the intensely private author's preponderance of printed interviews (over a hundred across eighty publications in just twenty-three years), she demonstrates that "the performative scene of the interview offers a particular opportunity for counterhegemonic analysis" (50). Gotman herself turns to the lecture hall, examining Foucault's 1979–80 lectures on...

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• The playwright as thinker

  Routledge eBooks · 2020

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  • Art
  • Philosophy
  • Literature

  This essay contends that the emergence of modern drama between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries should be regarded as an important development in what the author calls the “pre-history of performance philosophy”. The essay considers the relationships between a wide range of theatrical figures, including Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw, O’Neill, W.B. Yeats, Brecht, Artaud, Beckett, and philosophers from Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, to Kierkegaard. Through these examples, the chapter argues that the particular way in which the relationship between philosophy and theater starts to be conceived during the period of modern drama and the increasing frequency with which dramatists considered and spoke of the art of playwriting as an explicitly philosophical act during this epoch presages important aspects of what has become known as performance philosophy. The author acknowledges that many of the artistic assumptions of the period run against contemporary approaches to performance practice – most obviously the privileging of literary authorship in the figure of the playwright and the idea of theatrical performance as an orchestrated, iterable enactment and instantiation of literary texts. But he goes on to propose that behind and alongside these ideas ran a powerful sense that the theater itself was a place where philosophical meaning might not just be communicated, but actively constructed – not just a more entertaining version of a lecture hall but what George Bernard Shaw potently called an actual “factory of thought”. If, as has long been observed, the modern drama marked a distinct moment where the theater moved decidedly closer to philosophy, it also constituted a reverse motion away from a particular hierarchized version of that relationship. Drawn to philosophy but wary of being made a mere mouthpiece of any individual philosopher’s ideas, given to expressions of philosophical capacity while also advocating for the intellectual potency of its own natural tools, the modern drama was a pivotal site of negotiation between the previously separated realms of performance and philosophy. The modern dramatist – the vaunted playwright as a thinker – stood at the heart of these negotiations.

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• Philosophy and Social Theory

  2020-01-01

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Frequent coauthors

• Catherine Cole

  University of Iowa

  2 shared

• Martin Middeke

  1 shared

• Paul Raimond Daniels

  1 shared

• Claire Sponsler

  1 shared

• Katherine West

  1 shared