This article analyzes the socio-cultural theories of Adorno, Benjamin, and Brecht through the lens of the theatre, most especially as it pertains to the work of actors. It explores the forces of capitalism that determine how art is produced, distributed, and consumed. Following Adorno’s reading of Marx, actors are here posited as commodities whose labor is separated from the product they create for public consumption. This commodification raises various questions: How does a market economy shape the production and consumption of (...) art? What is technology’s function in the commodification of art? What is art’s sociopolitical role and how does it apply to theatre? To address these questions I juxtapose the cultural theory of Adorno and Benjamin with Brecht’s epic theatre. This comparison exposes the ritualistic potential of the theatre to bring an audience together as a community through sharing a socially enriching event. (shrink)

In 1973, the Trilateral Commission asked whether democracies were becoming ‘ungovernable’. Warning of the ‘rise of anomic democracy’, it identified threats that we are more than familiar with today, as we confront – once again – the ‘crisis’ of democracy: ‘the disintegration of civil order, the breakdown of social discipline, the debility of leaders, and the alienation of citizens’. In this chapter I revisit this ‘problem’ of anomie, locating it at the very heart of democracy and the historical problem of (...) its governance. In the Laws, Plato had already used the disparaging term ‘theatrocracy’, which drew on the analogy of the theatre and its audience, to describe the unruly nature of democratic forms of life. Just as the theatre audience is an ill-disciplined rabble so, he argued, the members of a democratic society are prone to various disorders. Thus the pathologies of the democratic polis qualify it for one of Plato’s ‘diseased cities’, where popular discontentment collapses democracy into something far worse: tyranny. I pursue this ‘theatrocratic’ problem as a means of understanding democracy’s central dynamic, particularly visible in an age of popular discontentment, namely its constitutive proneness to displeasure, incivility and antagonism. The first part of the chapter re-examines the legacy of theatrocratic discourse by reframing it in relation to the discourse on play. I argue that for theatrocratic discourses ‘play’ – often understood as ‘idleness’ – constitutes the core problematic of democratic or ‘common’ forms of life, and that for Plato, and for many commentators who later followed him, democracy must be viewed as ‘dangerous play’. I show how the modern State sought to neutralise the ‘theatrocratic’ threat associated with democracy’s dangerous play by means of ‘education’, converting incivility into civility; disorder into orderly conduct; idleness and illegality into productive labour. The second part of the chapter, focusses more closely on this educational solution, arguing that it leads to a further paradox and one with which we still contend today. This paradox becomes particularly acute in Schiller’s notion of the ‘aesthetic education of man’ and in his tract on theatre as a tool for instruction. While Schiller sees ‘play’ as central to human emancipation, in advocating theatre as a tool of moral instruction, designed to reconcile the demos to the State, aesthetic education reverts to a discourse of two humanities – one civil, the other barbaric. Nonetheless, I argue Schiller’s insight that ‘man’ is ‘only wholly Man when he is playing’ remains useful to understanding the theatrocratic ‘crisis’ afflicting contemporary democracies with the rise of populism across Europe and beyond. Thus in the final part of the chapter, I turn to consider how we might understand democracy through the figure of theatrocracy today. Following the political theorist, Chantal Mouffe, I argue that the solution to the crisis of democracy is not less but more democracy. I suggest that what this involves is the need to reconstruct democratic engagement around two senses of the term ‘play’. First, that play is indeed correctly understood as a ‘subversive’ force – a productive ‘incivility’ – and that an ‘aesthetic education’ today requires ‘playful resistance’ to the total mobilisation of the social by capitalism; second, that democratic politics must be reconfigured around the notion of a radical ‘politics of rehearsal’ – where play signifies, not something subservient to an instrumental goal, but the opening of an autonomous space, emancipated from productive labour, in which new ‘identities’ can be created. (shrink)

In the context of the blurring of boundaries between club and theatre, game and theatre, and party and theatre, experiential spectatorship is spilling into the mainstream. This article starts from the recognition of the rapid rise of the experience economy as a turning point in consumer culture towards a specific appeal to the sensory body. The definition of experience in this analysis is key and a distinction is made between experience as it passes moment by moment, erlebnis, and experience as (...) something that is cumulatively built up over time, erfahrung. This paper asks, in a society defined by the crisis of experience, does this rise of the experiential in theatre simply reflect the reduction of experience to a series of consumable sensory moments or is there a mode of experience modelled through performance interaction which moves both beyond this established mode of experience and also beyond the notion of experience as cumulatively formed wisdom? Drawing a parallel between established popular cultural practices of the body and those of the spectator in spectacular promenade performance, Fuerzabruta is used as an illustrative example of popular experiential performance and Hwang’s The Road as an example of experiential performance in which a transformative aesthetic is made possible. (shrink)

SummaryScholars have pointed to Montesquieu's influence on Rousseau's work generally. Other scholars, who focus more intently on the Letter to d'Alembert, discern a crucial but limited influence of Montesquieu in two of Rousseau's teachings there: first, that some practices, including the theatre, can be appropriate and even wholesome for some societies, while noxious for others; and second, that mores are important in determining what types of laws and institutions a given people can tolerate and maintain. Careful consideration of Rousseau's Letter (...) in light of Montesquieu's Persian Letters and Spirit of the Laws reveals a much more pervasive influence, however. Rousseau's depictions of the theatre as well as his discussions of the role of women in both French and English society reveal that the Letter bears a striking resemblance to, and, in fact, appears to be a response to, aspects of Montesquieu's thought. Montesquieu's captivating depictions of the sociability that the French theatre can engender was surely an obstacle for Rousseau's opposition to its influence in Geneva. In resisting such influence, Rousseau counters many of Montesquieu's specific arguments and judgements. (shrink)

This article has been translated into English by Nancy Luxon and published with permission. Michel Foucault, La littérature et la folie [La folie dans le théâtre baroque et le théâtre d'Artaud], in Folie, langage, littéature, eds. H.-P. Fruchaud, D. Lorenzini, & J. Revel, pp. 89–109 © Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, Paris, 2019. www.vrin.fr Requests for re-use of La littéature et la folie [La folie dans le théâtre baroque et le théâtre d'Artaud] should be directed to Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, Paris. (...) Literature and madness dominate Michel Foucault’s early writings in the 1960s, and indeed much of his career. In this text, Foucault considers the relation between madness, language, and silence; the difficult frontier between language and literary convention; and the experience of madness within language. He moves from a meditation on madness, to a rare commentary on theatre, stagecraft, and Artaud, and finishes by considering literature’s capacity for rupture. ‘Literature and Madness’ is a translation of a text written by Foucault in the 1960s, and recently published in Folie, langage, littérature, ed. Henri-Paul Fruchaud, Daniele Lorenzini and Judith Revel (Paris: Vrin, 2019, 89–109). This version includes a translator’s introduction by Nancy Luxon and was given a distinct subtitle to distinguish it from a similar lecture with the same title in that volume. (shrink)

While early modern Spain may seem a world away, it is an extremely rich and relevant context for gaining a better understanding of the Rhetoric of Health, specifically the power of metaphor, in the related spheres of policy-making and public debate. It was a time and place in which the urban populace’s physical well-being depended upon the fortunes of theatrical performances due to a system of alms for hospitals driven by ticket receipts. Anti-theatricalists argued that the immoral nature of theatrical (...) performances made them spiritually and medically detrimental to society. Pro-theatricalists argued that plays were always a public good on balance because they raised much-needed funds for hospitals. Instead of producing a conflict between morality and public health, each side reinforced their connection until the two topics became nearly inseparable in the sphere of public debate. While pro-theatricalists mainly stayed with their arguments about funding hospitals, anti-theatricalists developed a new strategy of literalising the metaphor of theatre as a “plague of the republic” and arguing that immoral entertainment brought literal disease to the populace as a punishment from God. This exemplifies Stephen Pender’s observation of how, in an early modern medical context, “Rhetoric as a way of perceiving probabilities and adjusting one’s argument to the audience and circumstance offers a model of ethical action and interaction”. This article is organised chronologically to track specific adjustments to a specific public-health debate that rely upon moral metaphors of medicine. Each side wrangled over these metaphors in an effort to break a deadlock in a public-health policy debate with entertainment, finance, and morality at its centre. By the end of the seventeenth century, anti-theatricalists finally found their best rhetorical weapon in the literalisation of the “plague of the republic” metaphor, but it only offered a short-term solution to banning theatre contingent upon the ebb and flow of epidemics. Simultaneously, the finance structure of funding hospitals began to erase the role of hospitals from the longstanding debate about the morality of public theatre. The case of early modern Spain provides valuable lessons about the power of metaphor in the Rhetoric of Healthcare that are still applicable today. (shrink)

Foucault only refers to Shakespeare in a few places in his work. He is intrigued by the figures of madness that appear in King Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth. He occasionally notes the overthrow of one monarch by another, such as in Richard II or Richard III, arguing that “a part of Shakespeare's historical drama really is the drama of the coup d’État.” For Foucault, the first are illustrations of the conflict between the individual and the mechanisms of discipline. The second (...) are, however, less interesting than moments when the sovereign is replaced, not with another sovereign, but with a different, more anonymous, form of power. Yet, in his 1976 Collège de France course, Society Must Be Defended, where he treats the theme at most length, he intriguingly suggests that Shakespearean historical tragedy is “at least in terms of one of its axes, a sort of ceremony, or a rememorialization of the problems of public right.” Foucault was long fascinated by the theatre, and especially its relation to political ceremony. Drawing especially on his 1972 lectures in Paris and a related presentation in Minnesota, this paper asks how we might understand the relation between ceremony, theatre, and politics in Foucault and Shakespeare. Many of Shakespeare's plays, both histories and tragedies, thus demonstrate the importance of ritual and ceremony, a political theatre. Examining the disrupted ceremony of King Lear, the repeated ceremony of King John, the denial of ritual in Coriolanus, and the parody of the ceremonial in Henry IV, Part One opens up a range of historical, theoretical, and political questions. (shrink)

From oral culture, through the advent of literacy, to the introduction of printing, to the development of electronic media, communication structures have radically altered culture in profound ways. As the first book to take a critical realist approach to culture, Theatre, Communication, Critical Realism examines theatre and its history through the interaction of society’s structures, agents, and discourses. Tobin Nellhaus shows that communication structure—a culture’s use and development of speech, handwriting, printing, and electronics—explains much about why, when, and how (...) theatre has transformed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Setting the Stage for a Dialogue:Aesthetics in Drama and Theatre EducationAlistair Martin-Smith (bio)For us, education signifies an initiation into new ways of seeing, hearing, feeling, moving. It signifies the nurture of a special kind of reflectiveness and expressiveness, a reaching out for meanings, a learning to learn.—Maxine Greene, Variations on a Blue Guitar1Examining the aesthetics of the complementary fields of educational drama and theatre is like looking through a (...) kaleidoscope. If you turn it one way, you see one colorful pattern; if you turn it the other way, you see yet another. The multiplicity of approaches to drama and theatre education, each with its own aesthetic pattern, often obscures the common ground they all share. As a result, in its unique emphasis on art, pedagogy, and society, each may have its own aesthetic pattern; yet only by looking closely at each distinct pattern can we understand more of the power of drama and theatre to develop human consciousness.In Western education, aesthetic learning seems incidental to the assessment of learning. How did this happen? For Descartes, whose Cartesian philosophy dissociated mind from body, aesthetic feelings are irrational, since they originate in the body's senses rather than in the mind. Theories of education focused on the primacy of cognition, denying feelings in the erroneous belief that learning is independent of its context. Conversely, aesthetic education is concerned with the quality of experience, how it is felt. Dewey believed that "learning by doing" was a "consummatory" experience for the learner; it was dramatic, dialogic, and felt. The confusion between subjective and objective aspects of the aesthetic experience makes aesthetic evaluation difficult, and this may be why cognitively dominated education has steered clear of aesthetics. Richard Courtney recognized that there is an important distinction to be made between aesthetic symbols and [End Page 3] artistic symbols: "Aesthetic symbols emphasize feeling; artistic symbols are context-dependent—they only have meaning in the context of art."2David Best argues that "the failure to recognise the distinction between the aesthetic and the artistic contributes largely to the trivialisation of the potential of the arts in education."3 He points out that "... it may often be necessary to take into account, at least implicitly, wider factors... in order to judge whether [an] appraisal was aesthetic or artistic."4 What are these wider factors, and how can audiences attend to them? As Christopher Havell reminds us,There is increasing pressure on drama teachers to use their teaching expertise purely for the development of social and life-skills training. This instrumental work may, at times, closely resemble the drama process, but the intentions will be confined to an experience that simulates or resembles those "real-life situations" that it is expected students will encounter. The aesthetic search for the "universal" at the centre of the particular will not be a relevant aim in any vocational training! One can only hope that the emerging interest in the aesthetic nature of drama and its place in a coherent arts education will encourage teachers and students to reflect on the final inadequacy of any instrumental view.5I believe that it is through the power of aesthetic education that audiences for drama and theatre will come to appreciate the artistic.In Caravaggio's painting David with the Head of Goliath (1606-10), the viewer is confronted with three time periods simultaneously. In his depiction of David, Caravaggio paints the shepherd-king of the Old Testament who prefigures Christ, but he is also modeled on Caravaggio's lover. David holds the severed head of Goliath down low in such a way as to engage the private viewer rather than to evoke the public spectacle.6 As I understood that the head of Goliath was actually a self-portrait of the painter not long before his death, I experienced a moment of instantaneity that shocked me into a new awareness of my own mortality, my relation to life and death. As it is Caravaggio's last journey, so is it our own. While Caravaggio's penultimate painting is recognized in terms of its artistic achievement, the moment of self-recognition on the part of the... (shrink)

In this article I introduce and summarize Alexander’s theory of social events as performance and ask what it offers performance studies. I critique the theory as being grounded in a theatre dramaturgy of actors, characters and scripts and suggest that while it appears to open new theoretical ground to deal with performances, it omits crucial features, namely embodiment, creativity and imagination. I distinguish between the cultural category performance, the theoretical category performance, and actual performance events, and I differentiate these from (...) the theoretical notion of performativity. I go on to enquire into the relations between performance, performances, performativity and society. (shrink)

Representation was invented as an issue during the 17th century in response to specific developments in the technology of simulation. It remains an issue of central importance today in the design of information systems and approaches to artificial intelligence. Our cultural legacy of thought about representation is enormous but as inhibiting as it is productive. The challenge to designers of representative technology is to reshape this legacy by enlarging the politics rather than the technics of simulation.

Avant-garde theatre is often invoked as the bellwether for a society that has become postdramatic – fragmented, alienated, and critical of efforts to create collectively shared meanings. A theatre whose sequenced actions have no narrative (so the story goes) mirrors a social world where the most conflictual situations no longer appear as drama but merely as spectacle: a society where audiences look on without any feeling or connection. Because only half right, these theses about postdramatic theatre and (...) class='Hi'>society are fundamentally wrong. As modern societies have expanded and differentiated, the elements that compose performances have become separated and often fragmented in both theatre and society. If they can be brought back together again, performances are viewed as authentic and meaningful. If (re)fusion cannot be achieved, performances fail to communicate meaning. The aim of this essay is to demonstrate that a shared ambition to (re)fuse fragmented performative elements has defined the most important strain of avant-garde theatre over the last two centuries. Most radical theatrical innovation has sought to open live drama back up to the telos of myth and ritual. Neither in theatre nor social life can the world transcend dramaturgy; it is fundamental to the search for meaning in a world beyond cosmological religion. (shrink)

In the 1880s and 1890s, performance played a significant role in the lives of the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) and his second wife, Juliette Peirce (185?–1934). Having moved to Milford, Pennsylvania, in April 1887, Charles and Juliette were still adjusting to country life. Milford, situated on the Delaware River among forests that seemed inexhaustible, had been settled by Hugenot immigrants whose French language and cultural influence were still strong. When the Peirces arrived, the town was already shifting from (...) the lumber industry to tourism, particularly as a summer retreat for the wealthy. Nearby Port Jervis offered relatively easy access by train to the cosmopolitan life in New.. (shrink)

Due to the simultaneous linguistic and musical quality of voicing, voiced breath poses theoretical challenges to notions of ‘embodiment’, especially as they are used in theatre practice/studies. In this article, I make two intertwining arguments to address questions of the place of semantic meaning and conscious thought in performance practice/theories as they arose in my anthropological engagement with laboratory theatre. Firstly, theatre and performance practice/theories keen to embrace ‘embodiment’ often leave out things like explicit analysis, reflexivity, referential or semantic meaning (...) and so on because, as my ethnography shows, they are judged as secondary, and thus belonging implicitly more closely to disembodied ‘mind’. I engage in anthropological comparison to show how other ways of being/knowing complicate any sense in which practices labelled ‘embodied’ can be seen as primary in contrast to conscious, linguistic or explicit knowing. Instead I outline an onto/epistemology of emergence that offers an alternative imaginary in which no binaries exist a priori. Rather all is a matter of ongoing mutual constitution. Secondly, while the discourses of embodiment in performance practice/theory that I critique may continue to reproduce dualist assumptions, theatre approaches influenced by Grotowski’s anti-method, focusing on continual revision of practice, offer insights for scholarship concerned with the ontological indistinguishability of social, psychological and physical phenomena. Laboratory theatre practices offer a prospective way of knowing, enabling an exploration of the ontological equality of breath, in this case in song, and the sorts of meaningfulness associated with language and analysis. In 2011, my Nanna (grandmother in Maltese) passed away in circumstances that remain traumatic to me. I turned with to my daily practices to find ways to scream, to grieve: to anthropology and to a particular practice of song in laboratory theatre, where encounter is actively sought. Arising from ethnographic and analytic engagement with such practices, in this article, I offer an anthropologically inflected critique of notions of embodiment in performance studies and performance philosophy. I present the alternative imaginary of emergence onto/epistemologies and the prospective investigative practices of laboratory theatre. I do this by weaving autobiographical, ethnographic and anthropological threads to explore my own practice relating to the work of my collaborator Gey Pin Ang, a Singaporean director, actor and pedagogue. (shrink)

When Albert Hunt joined the staff of the Regional College of Art, Bradford, in 1965, he found himself working mostly with ‘non-academic’ students on a fascinating range of games, projects and theatre events outside the main stream of exam-oriented education. In this title, first published in 1976, Albert Hunt describes this experience, and explains how he himself evolved from a conventional grammar school teacher to a radical and experimental educator. In particular, Hunt describes the evolution of new working relationships between (...) teachers and students, which in turn highlight an alternative way of viewing society. _Hopes for Great Happenings_ is not only a vividly interesting account of Albert Hunt’s teaching methods, but is of practical value to anybody involved in the study of liberal arts, theatre studies or in community arts work. (shrink)

The term Kathakali has by far become a word that is known widely among theatre lovers all over the world. It is no longer an art intended to perform within the four walls of a temple in Kerala, with only a limited educated upper class to appreciate. In its evolution, it has become a symbol that represents a society, culture and tradition. This paper explores Kathakali art form, tracing its origin and evolution and analyzing how it hasbecome a socio-cultural (...) icon. The paper also intends a comparative analysis of Kathakali with its counterparts – Krishnanaattam, Koodiyattam and Yakshagana – in order to substantiate its pre-eminence. (shrink)

The concepts “dispositive” and “intermediality” emerged at the same time and are becoming increasingly prominent. In this article, I propose to consider what intermediality brings to the dispositive, based on a case study of the diptych El Otro Lado de la Cama and Los Dos Lados de la Cama, two mainstream films from contemporary Spain in the early twenty-first century. Dispositive theory has been developed in France by academics working in the fields of modern literature and theater at the (...) University of Toulouse, notably Marie-Thérèse Mathet, Stéphane Lojkine, Philippe Ortel and Arnaud Rykner. In the late 1990s, this group adapted Foucault’s concept of the dispositive 2 to the fields of literature and.. (shrink)

The turbulent 1960s in America testifies to the artistic and intellectual need and move beyond the liberal cult of fantasy and inaction. Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) views the social and political reality in its dynamism, and not in its immutability or stasis. Black art, within a repressive society, must be perceived as an arm, a weapon and not a means of banter or fun. Werner Sollors considers him as the engagé artist par excellence. The political art that Baraka (...) espouses is drastic and functional, an art that exposes common predicaments and plights. Entailed in Baraka’s dramatic art is the diatribe against art for art’s sake, thefusion of art and activism, and the finality of human action. Baraka considers theatrical playwriting as didactic, telic, and constructive. In this light, art, playwriting, and engagement constitute one monolithic unity that could stand in the face of liberal reactionary politics and arrangements. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 127.1 (2006) 149-152 [Access article in PDF] Mario Erasmo. Roman Tragedy: Theatre to Theatricality. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004. xii + 211 pp. Cloth, $45. [Erratum]This is a study of Roman tragedy from Livius Andronicus to Seneca. Erasmo states that his aim is to study the development of the form, "focusing on the process of how Roman tragedy became increasingly theatricalized and the role (...) [End Page 149] played by Roman culture in shaping the perception of theatricality on and off the stage" (x). The center of the study is, therefore, the incorporation into Roman tragedy, either in the script produced by the dramatist or in the same script as manipulated in performance, of material drawn from Roman life and political culture and, by extension, the reflection of theatrical figures and motifs in the world outside. Most interesting, therefore, is the material handled in chapters 3 and 4 (52–121), where Erasmo engages inter alia with Pompey's restaging of the Clytemnestra of Accius, with the Iter of Cornelius Balbus, and with the Thyestes of Varius Rufus. There are some provocative suggestions here which merit attention. There is also much of which this cannot fairly be said.Erasmo begins his account with the tragedies of Livius Andronicus (9–14) and moves on to Naevius (14–18), Ennius (18–28), Pacuvius (34–42), and Accius (42–51). Each author is given a brief introduction, and his place in the history of the genre is set out. Erasmo then takes one play of each of these writers and attempts to set out what can be inferred from the extant fragments that remain. It often appears that the principal criterion for selection of this sample work is simply that its remains are rather more numerous than those of any other work of the author in question. There is little guarantee that they will actually develop Erasmo's central thesis. This finally makes for one rather unsatisfactory coda after another. More effective is the deployment of the material to hand in chapters 3 and 4 (52–121), although it was probably unnecessary to print the dream narrative of the Accian Tarquin twice (62–63 and 92–93). Seneca takes center stage only in the brief chapter 5 (122–39).Erasmo notes the rather different definitions of the term "metatheatre" offered by Gentili and Slater (5). It is probably fair to say that the definition drawn from the latter ("theatre that demonstrates an awareness of its own theatricality") is rather more familiar to most modern readers. Yet Erasmo has a further claim, and this is summarized on the same page: "allusions to personalities or events outside of the theatre or to the dramatic action of the play are needed to understand the play." This is a markedly unclear piece of prose, but what Erasmo is trying to say probably emerges rather better if we delete "outside of" and read "external to." For what "metatheatre" means in Erasmo's discussion of Ennius (19 and 22) is the playwright's inclusion in his adaptation of Euripides' Iphigenia and Medea of language redolent of Roman society and custom. Now this does not directly draw attention to the modes of representation of the play at issue to the same extent as does, for example, the appearance on stage of the choragus in the Curculio, but there is little doubt that Erasmo is reaching here for something important.Some interesting work has been done of late on Pompey's rather unfortunate identification of himself with Agamemnon (see especially E. Champlin in D. Braund and C. Gill [eds.] Myth, History and Culture in Republican Rome [Exeter, 2003], 295–319; and F. R. Berno in Maia 56 [2004]). Erasmo offers his own contribution to this issue with his discussion of the staging of the Clytemnestra of Accius (83–91). Pointing to Cicero Ad Familiares 7.1.2, he treats the grand [End Page 150] spectacle of Agamemnon's entry as a reperformance of Pompey's own triple triumph six years before. Yet why put all this in the context of a drama... (shrink)

Published in 2008, Slavoj Žižek’s Violence: Six Sideways Reflections provides critical insight into the structures of power which dictate our perception and comprehension of violence in society. In particular, Žižek’s conception of the distinction between the subjective and objective modes of perceiving violence is particularly illuminating. This paper utilizes Žižek’s distinction to recontextualize and reframe a classic of Australian theatre, David Williamson’s The Removalists. [i] This approach puts Žižek’s seminal work on violence to task, teases out new meanings from (...) Williamson’s text, and most broadly, explores new methods for understanding the playing out of violence on stage. (shrink)

Contemporary Native American theater consists of a long list of plays which normally include indigenous and mixed-blood characters who often find themselves living between two worlds, that is, Native culture and white American society. Therefore, it is common to find a significant confrontation and conflict between the two cultures, which is usually solved at the end of the plays with the characters’ reconcilement or synthesis between their Native heritage and the white domineering society. In this way, Native (...) Americans can ensure their Native cultural existence and survival whilst simultaneously adapting to the changes and customs required by white American society. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:François H. Lapointe PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE: A BIBLIOGRAPHIC SURVEY ThL· survey is limited to articles written in English that have appeared in journals published between 1 January 1974 and 31 December 1976. Abbott, Don. "Marxist Influences on the Rhetorical Theory of Kenneth Burke." Philosophy and Rhetoric 7 (1974): 217-33. Abel, Lionel. "Jacques Derrida: His 'Difference' With Metaphysics." Salmagundi no. 25 (1974): 3-21. Adamowski, T. H. "Character and Consciousness: D. (...) H. Lawrence, Wilhelm Reich, and Jean-Paul Sartre." University of Toronto Quarterly 43 (1974): 31 1-34. Adams, D. J. "Style and Social Ideas in Jacques le fataliste." Studies in Voltaire & the Eighteenth Century 124 (1974): 231-48. Adams, Hazard. "Contemporary Ideas of Literature: Terrible Beauty or Rough Beast?" Contemporary Literature 17 (1976): 349-77. Adorno, Theodor W. "Lyric Poetry and Society." Telos no. 20 (1974): 56-71. Ages, Arnold. "Bonald and the Jews." Revue de l'Université d'Ottawa 44 (1974): 32-43. Allen, Diogenes. "The Experience of Existence: Jean-Paul Sartre and Iris Murdoch." International Philosophical Quarterly 14 (1974): 181-87. Allen, Marcus. "Character Development in the Oreste of Voltaire and Les Mouches of Jean-Paul Sartre." CLA Journal 18 (1974): 1-21. Alter, Jean. "A (Terrorist) System of the Novel." Diacritics 6 (1976): 10-15. Altieri, Charles. "Wittgenstein on Consciousness and Language: A Challenge to Derridean Literary Theory." MLN 91 (1976): 1397-1423. Altieri,Charles. "Wordsworth's 'Preface' as Literary Theory." Criticism 18 (1976): 122-146. [On Wordworth and Wittgenstein.] Ames, Van Meter. "Art for Art's Sake Again?" Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 33 (1975): 303-307. Appleman, Philip. "The Dread Factor: Eliot, Tennyson, and the Shaping of Science." Columbia Forum, N. S. 3 (1974): 32-38. Armstrong, Paul B. " E. M. Forster's Howard's End: The Existential Crisis of the Liberal Imagination." Mosaic 8 (1974): 183-99. Arnold, A. James. "La Condition humaine as Nietzschean Tragedy." Mélanges Malraux Miscellany 6 (1974): 15-24. 366 François H. Lapointe367 Aronson, Ronald. "L'Idiot de la famille: The Ultimate Sartre?" Telos no. 20 (1974): 90-107. Arthos, John. "Du Bartas, Petrarch and the Poetry of Deism." Rice University Studies 60 (1974): 1-17. Artz, Johannes. "Newman as Philosopher." International Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1976): 263-88. Ausmus, Harry J. "Schopenhauer's Philosophy of Language." The Midwest Quarterly 18 (1977): 169-86. Ayala, Francisco. "Ortega y Gasset, Literary Critic." Critical Inquiry 1 (1974): 395-414. Bakalar, H. Nicholas. "The Cartesian Legacy to the Eighteenth-century Grammarians." MLN 91 (1976): 698-721. Barnes, Hazel. "Apotheosis and Deification in Plato, Nietzsche and Huxley." Philosophy and Literature 1 (1976): 3-24. Baron, Dennis E. "Role Structure and the Language of Literature." Journal of Literary Semantics 4 (1975): 43-52. Barooskian, Vahan D. "The Aesthetics of the Russian Revolutionary Theatre 1917-1921." British Journal of Aesthetics 15 (1975): 99-117. Bart, B. F. "Hypercreativity in Stendhal and Balzac." Nineteenth Century French Studies 3 (1974-75): 18-39. Barthes, Roland. "An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative." New Literary History 6 (1975): 237-72. Bashford, Bruce. "The Rhetorical Method in Literary Criticism." Philosophy and Rhetoric 9 (1976): 133-46. Bass, Alan. "Time and the Witch: Femininity, Metapsychology and the Temporality of the Unconscious." MLN 91 (1976): 871-912. Bassett, Sharon. "Towards a Critique of Romanticism: Wordsworth, Pater and the 'Anima Mundi'." Criticism 17 (1975): 262-75. Batchelor, R. "Literature, Society and the Concept of Revolt." European Studies Review 5 (1975): 395-427. Battin, M. Pabst. "Aristotle's Definition of Tragedy in the Poetics, Part 1." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 33 (1974): 155-70, and Part II in Ibid. 33 (1975): 293-302. Bauer, George. "Sartre and the 'Sugars' of History." L'Esprit Créateur 15 (1975): 377-86. Baumgarten, Murray. "The Historical Novel: Some Postulates." Clio 4 (1975): 173-82. Beauchamp, Gorman. "Gulliver's Return to the Cave: Plato's Republic and Book IV of Gulliver's Travels." The Michigan Academician 7 (1974): 201-10. Bennett, Jonathan. "The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn." Philosophy 48 (1974): 123-34. Benzon, William. "Cognitive Networks and Literary Semantics." MLN 91 (1976): 952-82. Bergonzi, Bernard. "A Grid of Codes: Views of Structuralism." Encounter 45 (1975): 52-58. Berry, Wanda Warren. "The... (shrink)

InLe Bonheur Primitif, Olympe de Gouges takes on Rousseau's account of the evolution of human society in his first twoDiscourses, and she argues that primitive human beings were not only happy, but also capable of virtue. I argue that in that text, Gouges offers a contribution to the eighteenth-century debate on human progress that is distinct from Rousseau's in that it takes seriously the contribution of women and families to human happiness and progress. I show how the concept of (...) emulation plays an important role in Gouges's analysis, both in her account of primitive societies and of the theater, and argue that she uses it to bridge the gap between primitive happiness and future progress. (shrink)

To become sovereign, one must be seen as sovereign. In other words, a sovereign must appear-philosophically, politically, and aesthetically-on the stage of power, both to themselves and to others, in order to assume authority. In this sense, sovereignty is a theatrical phenomenon from the very beginning. This book explores the relationship between theater and sovereignty in modern political theory, philosophy, and performance. Arthur Bradley considers the theatricality of power-its forms, dramas, and iconography-and examines sovereignty's modes of appearance: thrones, insignia, (...) regalia, ritual, ceremony, spectacle, marvels, fictions, and phantasmagoria. He weaves together political theory and literature, reading figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Montaigne, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Schmitt, Benjamin, Derrida, and Agamben alongside writers including Shakespeare, Cervantes, Schiller, Melville, Valéry, Kafka, Ionesco, and Genet. Formally inventive and deeply interdisciplinary, Staging Sovereignty offers a surprising and original narrative of political modernity from early modern political theology to the age of neoliberal capitalism. (shrink)

Une forme d'art comprend-elle le critère de son acceptation ou de son rejet par la société dans laquelle elle prend forme? Le public auquel une oeuvre d'art s'adresse possède-t-il la compétence de faire l'exploration qu'elle lui propose? La Lettre à d'Alembert sur les spectacles de Rousseau et la Conférence de Schiller : « Was kann eine gute stehende Schaubùhne eigentlich wirken ? » donnent chacune réponse à ces deux questions par la caractérisation d'une manière de sentir et d'agir propre aux (...) protagonistes du domaine esthétique. Je propose d'examiner si les principes sur lesquels l'un appuie sa condamnation de la représentation théâtrale, l'autre son apologie de l'efficace de la scène, ont leur source et leur valeur dans l'expérience du plaisir du théâtre.Does a kind of art hold in itself the criterion of its acceptance or of its reject by the society in which it takes shape ? Is the public to whom a work of art is aimed enabled to make the exploration it suggests to him ? The Lettre à d'Alembert sur les spectacles by Rousseau and the lecture of Schiller: "Was kann eine gute stehende Schaubùhne eigentlich wirken?" give each one answer to both questions by the caractérisation of a way of feeling and working proper to aesthetic protagonists. I suggest to examine if the principles on which lay the reproof of the theatrical representation by Rousseau and the justification of the stage's efficacious by Schiller stem from and are worth according to the experience of theatrical enjoyment. (shrink)

Antinomies of war -- The context of contemporary war -- War without chance : something better than war -- Overestimate yourself, underestimate your enemy, never know victory -- War without passion : something other than war -- Theatre of war -- Strategic narrative and strategic incoherence -- War without reason : something just short of war -- The new age of anxiety.

This article presents a philosophical dialogue as a means of modelling approaches to capitalism and society over the past two centuries. Adam Smith’s views of economics were located in a moral and cultural context, derived from the Scottish Enlightenment, which has been disregarded by enthusiasts for the free market. Through an imagined dialogue with German artist Joseph Beuys and Dutch businessman Paul Fentener Van Vlissingen, using their words, we identify a European position which both preceded and follows the period (...) of industrialisation. Using philosophical dialogue as a form of intellectual forum theatre, we hope to stimulate debate. (shrink)

West Indian military service in the First World War is recalled in many settings. During the war, race and class boundaries of colonial society were temporarily eroded by visions of imperial unity, but quickly restated through post-war assertions of imperial authority. However, recollections of wartime sacrifices were kept alive by Pan-African, ex-service and emerging nationalist groups before being incorporated into independent Caribbean national identity and migrant West Indian communities. During the centenary commemorations, West Indian participation has increasingly been mediated (...) through literature, theatre and broadcasting. Spheres of conflict which provided more heroic visions, such as the Middle East or the Taranto mutiny, have acquired particular symbolic importance, contrasting with the more tragic representations of the war as a whole. (shrink)

The main tendencies of social work from the standpoint of postmodernist theory are considered in this article. It is determined that postmodernism is characterized by: the production of a cult of individual independence, a philosophical vision of real life as a theatre of the absurd, where emphasis is placed on the realities of real life, collective subconscious, interweaving of different styles, significant parody and irony of social processes. It has been established that social work in postmodernism is due to the (...) growing need for a critical understanding of the crisis state of modern society and viewing relations with the state, the market, users of services and society. Social work in the postmodern period is accompanied by a number of social challenges, among which we consider the psychological distress of citizens, cultural competence and virtualization of the individual. The philosophy of postmodernism is based on the relativity and absence of reality, which is often replaced by virtuality, in which people spend a lot of their time, which raises debates about whether a virtual personality can be considered a personality. The main problem of information socialization of the individual is the problem of readiness and ability of man in such a world to approach a more humane understanding of social phenomena. The study highlights the hierarchy of social work and identifies its postmodern transformations. (shrink)

The sociology of literature, in the first of many paradoxes, elicits negations before assertions. It is not an established field or academic discipline. The concept as such lacks both intellectual and institutional clarity. Yet none of these limitations affects the vitality and rigor of the larger enterprise. We use the sociology of literature here to refer to the cluster of intellectual ventures that originate in one overriding conviction: the conviction that literature and society necessarily explain each other. Scholars and (...) critics of all kinds congregate under this outsize umbrella only to differ greatly in their sense of what they do and what sociology of literature does. They subscribe to a wide range of theories and methods. Many would not accept the sociology of literature as an appropriate label for their own work; other would refuse it to their colleagues. Nevertheless, every advocate agrees that a sociological practice is essential to literature. For the sociology of literature does not constitute just one more approach to literature. Because it insists upon a sociology of literary knowledge and literary practice within the study of literature, the sociology of literature raises questions basic to all intellectual inquiry.The sociology of literature begins in diversity. The way that is combines the ancient traditions of art with the modern practices of social science makes the very term something of an oxymoron. There is not one sociology of literature, there are many sociological practices of literature, each of which operates within a particular intellectual tradition and specific institutional context. These practices cross basic divisions within the contemporary intellectual field, especially within the university. Inherently interdisciplinary, the sociology of literature is subject to constant reformulation as scholars re-evaluate their disciplines. In consequence, disciplinary boundaries seem less rigid, less logical, and, hence, less authoritative than ever before. Even so—and this is another paradox of the sociology of literature—any sociological conception of literature is best situated in terms of an original discipline and its institutional setting. However frequently individual scholars cross over disciplinary lines, the fundamental divisions retain their force. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson is professor of French at the University of Illinois at Chicago; she is author of Literary France: The Making of a Culture. Philippe Desan, whose Naissance de la method: Machiavelle, la Ramée, Bodin, Montaigne, Descartes was published in 1987, is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago. Wendy Griswold, associate professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, recently published Renaissance Revivals: City Comedy and Revenge Tragedy in the London Theatre, 1576-1980. (shrink)