Velina Hasu Houston’s theatrical representations focus on exploring cultural collision and coalescence in transnational communities. With her biographical and cultural background deeply influenced by her Japanese mother’s way of life and sense of values, Houston has been open-minded in creating a new viewpoint through which to look at Japan, the United States and the world. Calligraphy is quite challenging in that it looks at her mother’s aging from both Japanese and American perspectives. It sheds new light on not only (...) understanding the beauty in the aging process but also women’s memories that have value beyond the personal. Since she wrote Tea based on her mother’s life as a war bride, Houston has presented a pioneering, in-depth exploration of Asian women’s memories that have been historically ignored in the United States. This paper examines how Houston’s insight into transnationalism through the transformative nature of cultural identity and change inspires her to re-envision women’s writing and highlights the need for a re-examination of the power of love and beauty. (shrink)

Spartacus became one of the key figures of Soviet dramaturgy in the 1920s. He was presented as the only ancient predecessor of the Bolsheviks and his theatrical image significantly shaped the later icon of the gladiator as a brave leader of the oppressed masses and a hero acting in the name of the proletariat. This article explores the image of Spartacus in early Soviet theater and mass performance and outlines the correlation between the template of Spartacus’ portrayal, Raffaello Giovagnoli’s (...) novel Spartaco (1874), and the first dramatic adaptations by Vladimir Mazurkevich (1920) and Vladimir Volkenstein (1921). The article examines the use of the ancient hero in Bolshevik propaganda and traces the ways in which Spartacus’ image morphs and maps onto wider shifts of Soviet political and cultural policy in the early decades of the USSR. (shrink)

In this article I will combine Erving Goffman’s sociology with some of the main aspects of Actor-Network Theory in order to outline a theatrical conception of social power. My first aim is to try to summarize the sociological perspective introduced by Kenneth Burke and then improved on by Erving Goffman to understand the face-to-face interactions of everyday life. Secondly, I will try to use the theatrical metaphor underlying this theoretical framework to describe power-over relations in everyday life. Thanks (...) to the combination of the dramaturgical theory proposed by Erving Goffman and the ‘object turn’ given to social theory by Actor-Network Theory, a theatrical conception of power allows the episodic, dispositional and systemic dimensions of power relations to be mapped respectively depending on the actors’ performances, their roles of power and the institutionalized scripts. Moreover, this theatrical representation of power-over relations is a defaced understanding of the phenomenon that enables us to investigate not only its different directional forms (power-to, -over and -with), but also their possible variants (empowerment, resistance, domination and solidarity). (shrink)

Through the study of Richard Gruneau and Gunter Gebauer’s respective works, this article examines the social significance and theoretical implications of sport’s capacity to represent social life in a theatrical manner. The drama-like images and representations sporting practices produce, institutions codify, and television programs enhance is considered in relation to ideology’s integrative, legitimating, and distorting functions . Acknowledging the filiations of ‘theatre’ with ‘theory’ – both words stand for ‘to contemplate, to see, to observe’ – this study considers theatricality (...) as a valuable theoretical notion that enables a synthetic and reflexive understanding of athletic practices’ bodily dimension, symbolic representations, and institutional determinants. (shrink)

From the semiotics of theatrical representation to cultural anthropology or why theater (resists)? In this paper I propose an epistemological approach to the field of theatre semiotics from the beginning of the 20th century to our days. Firstly, I point out two different periods that have influenced theatre semiotics. The first one centres on reflections and studies by the Prague School of Structuralism. More precisely, I address Jan Mukařovsky’s essays about art and society as well as Jindrich Honzl’s (...) contributions to the study of sign and system in theatre. The second period presented here is that of theatre semiotics in the early 70s and late 80s in France.My goal here is to expose the main reasons that led theatre semiotics to a deadlock in the early 90s. Theatre semiotic research has been rich and fruitful in the beginning of last century. However, in our days it is generally deemed unadvisable to describe theatre representation in terms of sign and system.Although theatre semiotics used to be presented in French university classes, it is no longer possible to do so.Even though general semiotics has progressed by denying the importance of structure and by refusing to search for the minimal sign and its code, theatre semiotics has remained faithful to old communicational semiotics research.Throughout my contribution, I would like to examine the kind of semiotic field best fit to approaching an artistic domain such as theatre. In other words, I would like to show that Western theatre, granted it can be seen as a semiotic object, is first and foremost an artistic and cultural one.In order to do so, I propose a theoretical and methodological framework based on a specific semiotic model: the “indicial semiology” proposed by Anne-Marie Houdebine. Inspired by Juri Lotman’s essays about culture and art, I will try to set “indicial semiology” in the general field of a cultural anthropology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Actors in the Audience: Theatricality and Doublespeak from Nero to HadrianJohn T. KirbyShadi Bartsch. Actors in the Audience: Theatricality and Doublespeak from Nero to Hadrian. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1994. x + 310 pp. Cloth, $37.50. (Revealing Antiquity 6)The unsuspecting reader, if such exists in the 1990s, will probably not know what to make of the title of this book. Even deeply suspicious ones will (...) not be able to predict its contents. Nor does the subtitle produce full disclosure. The reason, I think, is that classical philologists will, by virtue of their training, expect something rather different from a book so titled: they might suppose it to be a work on technical aspects of Roman theater, or perhaps an assessment of oratory in the imperial Senate. The author is deliberately coy in the preface:I have not written an introduction to this book, preferring to let the reader travel through its twists and turns unequipped with the lamp of foreknowledge. All I will say at the outset is that it is a book about representation, not reality, although much of its content serves to undermine that distinction (a trait in which I follow the tendency of my ancient sources); a book about the ways in which antithetical categories such as spectator and spectacle, intention and interpretation, and praise and blame were variously conflated and exploited by writers and historians of the first century a.d. as a reaction to the transformation of Rome from republic to empire; a book about what happens to language’s ability to mean when all communication is distorted by the pull of a centralized and autocratic authority.(vi)But these compressed remarks in fact offer a serviceable précis of what is to come. Put another way, this is a book about rhetoric, about Rezeptionsästhetik, about the reciprocal reflexes of language and power.What are the effects of political power upon the free and fearless use of language? The question is not new. Hesiod and Demosthenes both posed it, answering in quite different ways. Tacitus revisited the issue explicitly in his Dialogus de oratoribus, and more subtly in the historical writings. Indeed the problem continues to be a pressing one today, as the whole scholarly project of Michel Foucault demonstrates. This is a main theme of Actors in the Audience.A contrapuntal issue is that of how texts of all kinds problematize the distinction between reality and illusion (“fiction”?). Here again we may reach back as far as Hesiod and—though he might balk at a subpoena to such testimony—Plato. This latter theme is at least as persistently (post-)modern as the first; one thinks of Pirandello’s Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore and Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo.Bartsch’s project begins to come into focus by page 2. After a brief meditation on the savagery of Caligula, she moves to a vivid evocation of Nero as scaenicus and of his scrutiny of the audiences at his thespian and musical performances, “as if the spectators were the performers here” (5); for Tacitus, Dio, and Suetonius, “Nero’s rule is the occasion for a transformation of the theater into the site of a reversal of actor-audience relations, and as an emperor onstage, [End Page 155] Nero literally constrained his audience to be actors” (10). Moreover, according to Bartsch, Tacitus sees this phenomenon extending beyond the theater itself to encompass the Neronian political scene in general.The first three of the book’s five chapters—“The Emperor’s Audience: Nero and the Theatrical Paradigm,” “The Invasion of the Stage: Nero Tragoedus,” and “Oppositional Innuendo: Performance, Allusion, and the Audience”—all have to do with Nero in some respect. Chapter 2 turns to the issue of reality versus illusion. Bartsch demonstrates that, in the realm of politics, this is already of explicit interest to Philostratus. She then goes on to consider its implications for the reign of Nero. We read of popular graffiti, sparked by Nero’s murder of his mother Agrippina, that classed him with the legendary matricides Orestes and Alcmeon. These, plus the numerous theatrical roles (such as Oedipus and... (shrink)

This article analyses some of the shifts in tone and argumentation in Derrida's work by comparing the treatment of the topics of theatre and theatrical representation in his early writing on literary and philosophical texts with the conception of a politically committed ‘ethics’ in his late work. The topic of theatrical representation is particularly useful for a critical assessment of Derrida's later ethics because it allows us to give careful consideration to his position on different types (...) of, and contexts for, involvement. I argue that some of the important differences in tone and argumentation in Derrida's work arise not just because of the different exigencies that distinguish readings of literary/philosophical texts from analyses of political circumstances and events. There is also a shift in his work from attempting to account for the aporetic economy that supports positions held and defended to the terms of his advocacy for ethical commitment. In the case of his early writing the emphasis falls on accounting for meaning in terms of a typology of conversion effects; positive values are aporetically joined with negative ones. In his later work aporias do not present occasions for examining conditions of meaning. Rather, they become compelling imperatives to act. Despite the differences between these perspectives they both articulate an important role for aesthetic experience in meaning. I conclude by considering the consequences that such a position on meaning imposes on Derrida's use of the vocabulary of injunctions and imperatives to ‘compel’ a response. (shrink)

RESUMO:Na Carta a d’Alembert, Rousseau se coloca contra a ideia de um teatro enquanto instrumento de educação moral, porém, o posicionamento do filósofo não está em colocar essa atividade lúdica de ordem moral na categoria de atividade imoral, mas na de atividade artificial, e, talvez, isso gerasse efeitos imorais. Todavia, é preciso observar os verdadeiros efeitos do teatro, a partir de alguns argumentos que Rousseau resolve construir e analisá-los, contudo, apenas se trouxesse à tona a crítica de Rousseau ao romance, (...) na Carta a d’Alembert, que tem como contexto “a ideia negativa de privatização da cena”, pois o teatro destina uma excessiva importância à descrição do amor, obviamente, exagerando na representação, naquilo que é romanesco. Porém, se, na Carta a d’Alembert, o filósofo não expressa de forma direta que a teorização sobre o teatro também equivale ao romance, na Nova Heloísa, ou seja, no próprio romance, o autor faz essa ratificação, ao importar um longo comentário sobre o teatro que estava na Carta, afirmando que considera o mesmo da própria cena quanto à maioria dos novos escritos. O cidadão genebrino ataca os romances indiretamente e viceversa, porque é observado que tudo aquilo que diz sobre uma arte se aplica quase que integralmente a outra arte. E, como um povo galante deseja amor e polidez, Rousseau resolve fixar alguns termos, na tentativa de explicar suas críticas e argumentar a coerência de seu posicionamento, já que, se, em geral, a cena é um quadro das paixões humanas, cujo original está nos corações, se o pintor, porém, não tiver cuidado de acariciar suas paixões, os espectadores logo ficarão desgostosos e não desejarão mais se ver sob um aspecto que fizesse com que desprezassem a si mesmos. E pontua que essa linguagem não tem mais sentido, em seu século, pois é preciso falar as paixões, esforçando-nos para usar uma que melhor se compreenda, talvez o romance. ABSTRACT:In theLetter to d’Alembert, Rousseau argues against the idea of theater as a moral instrument of education. However, the position of the philosopher is not one of putting this playful activity in the category of immoral activity, but in the category of an artificial activity that perhaps generates immoral purposes. It is necessary to observe the true effect of the theater on the basis of some arguments that Rousseau decides to construct. These are analyzed here, bringing to the fore Rousseau’s critique of the novel in theLetter to d’Alembert. The letter has as its context “the negative idea of privatization of the scene”, as the theater gives an excessive importance to the description of love, obviously exaggerating the representation of romance. If, in theLetter to d’Alembert, the philosopher does not directly express that theorizing about the theater is equivalent to the novel, in theNouvelle Héloïse, that is, in the novel itself, the author does this. He adds to the novel a long commentary on the theater that was in theLetter, stating that he considers the theatrical scene itself to be the same as most new writing. He attacks novels indirectly, as well as the theatre, observing that everything said about one art applies almost entirely to another art. As a gallant people want love and politeness, Rousseau decides to fix certain terms in an attempt to explain his criticism and argue the consistency of his position. In general, the scene is a picture of human passions whose original is in the heart; if the painter is not careful in stroking these passions, spectators will soon become disgusted, not wanting to see themselves in such a way that they despise themselves. Rousseau points out that this language has no more meaning in his century, as it is necessary to speak the passions, striving to use language that best understands the passions, such as, perhaps, that of the novel. (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)

A reflection on how to teach philosophy with the help of theatrical techniques and scenic interpretation tools, building an allegorical environment for the presentation of philosophical content. Considering Plato's explanation of the allegory of the cave, where he starts from 'appears' or 'imagines' and describes his narrative, in a complete way, in a theatrical approach to use the imagination of his listeners. And thus building a scene, a representation of what he wanted to teach his interlocutors. In (...) addition to reflecting on contemporary caves, built in the rooms of young people, who are isolated, attentive only to the images produced on cell phone and computer screens, without being sure about the veracity of the information received in these 'walls' of modern caves. Also following the approaches and paths of Deleuze and Foucault in their considerations on the constructions relevant to the study of philosophy and its learning, this article aims at this reflection as a contribution to the art of theatre, the 'teatron', the place for to see. And to see how this seeing is a metaphorical perspective, something that is also a philosophical question, both in the direct and in the metaphysical sense. In addition to being a matter of experience made possible by immersion in the world of ideas and imagination, in a reflective, pragmatic way and with a view to learning and teaching philosophy. (shrink)

Let us imagine an actor on stage presenting an impersonation of a certain politician, his manners and his body language. Now, suppose another actor sitting in the audience, impressed by the show and deciding to adopt something of his colleague’s style. He rents another stage and presents an impersonation of the same politician according to what he has learned. What does he actually do? In a certain sense he “imitates” the politician, but in another sense he “imitates” the first actor, (...) whose theatrical style he has adopted.These of course are two entirely different activities, but language marks them both as “imitation.” This lack of differentiation is not a caprice of a particular language; even languages that.. (shrink)

Available in English for the first time, The Bodies of Others investigates, through a series of close readings of several theatrical and film productions in Europe and South America, the relationship between “representation” and ethics. The main concepts are exposed through a comparative analysis of historical processes, political actions and artistic works from different periods. Thus, the dialogue between the film La carrose d'or by Jean Renoir and Rosa Cuchillo by Yuyachkani serves to address the problem of the (...) multiple meanings of representation. The dialogue between the play El Señor Galíndez by Eduardo Pavlovsky, the performance The Conquest of America by Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis and the novel 2666 by Roberto Bolaño allows the concept of an 'ethic of the body' to be addressed. Other key concepts such as identity, care, cruelty, violence, memory and testimony are considered through investigation of work such as Angelica Liddel's theatre pieces, Rabih Mroué and Lina Majdalanie's performances, Albertina Carri, Basilio Martín Patino and Apichatpong Weerasethakul's films, and Mapa Teatro's trans-disciplinary creations. (shrink)

Although the self is distinct from identity, this essay offers some insight into how identity is maintained—in the processes by which a self is formed, and through the actual content of the schemata that compose the self-concept. The author explains how in the 1920s utopian representations of a “new man” indicate the blank space where an aesthetic for the self can appear long before a theory of choice and commitment can exist in reality. Far from being a dramaturgical plan of (...) action, such utopian representations disorient the elements of discourse in order to prepare the way for the appearance of something inconceivable or inexpressible within this discourse. The theatricality produced in this oppositional public sphere—like that of Max Reinhardt, Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Toller, and later by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus—can thus be read as expressions of unfulfilled desire resisting the limitations of the present system and breaking beyond with self-defined narratives not yet realized in our everyday lives. (shrink)

This essay reviews Theatre, Communication, Critical Realism (2010) by Tobin Nellhaus. It begins by outlining the objective of the book and proceeds to evaluate its central argument. The objective is to develop a theory of theatre founded on the premises of critical realism and thereby theoretically situate theatrical performance in its socio-cultural matrix. The argument is that critical realism is effective for developing a comprehensive account of theatrical performance because it has the capacity to reveal truths about the (...) structure of social reality (that correspond to those articulated by critical realism). In the second part of the review, employing the methods of conceptual analysis, I propose that Nellhaus’s thesis of ‘ontological doubling’ (which claims that performance doubles human agency) is undermined by certain epistemological presuppositions regarding the ontology of fictional characters. (shrink)

This essay examines "Philoctetes" as an exercise in self-representation by looking at the self-referential and metatheatrical dimensions of the play. After suggesting an enlarged understanding of metatheater as "a particularly vigorous attempt to engage the audience at the synthetic and thematic levels of reading," I examine "Philoctetes" as a self-conscious discourse on tragedy, tragic production, and tragic experience, one which participates in a larger conversation in the late fifth century about the ethics of tragedy, including the remarks of Gorgias (...) on theatrical deception . The play points up its own constructedness in a variety of ways, most strikingly in the theatrical character of the intrigue by which Odysseus deceives Philoctetes, which provides a play within a play and a representation of texts and readers, plays and spectators. In laying bare the kinds of strategies and techniques that undergird this "intratext," "Philoctetes" offers a model of tragedy and of the tragic poet based on power, deceit, and manipulation. Yet by attributing these characteristics to the moral deficiencies of its internal creator and by demonstrating his failure to achieve his ends, "Philoctetes" rejects such a theater of sophistry. At the same time, the play considers issues of textual reception by providing in Philoctetes an audience for this internal text and a protocol of reading that suggest a more positive model of tragic response. "Philoctetes" uses this model to offer the spectator a subject position that affirms the inherent value of reading tragedy, a humanistic model of reading based upon the audience's identification with and sympathy for the tragic protagonist. Sophocles thus finds in this exercise in self-representation a way to frame critical questions on dramatic theory and to define his own dramatic practice. (shrink)

This essay examines mimetic pictures and the forms of subjectivity encoded in them. Mimetic pictures are representations which are unique in looking like the objects or events they depict. However, the objects or events typically have properties which are incompatible with those of the picture considered as a material artifact. Thus, if a mimetic picture looks like what it depicts, it does not look like what, considered as an artifact, it is. Since seeing a mimetic picture as a picture is (...) seeing what it looks like, it seems to follow that seeing a mimetic picture entails not seeing its material properties. But this is a paradox: it suggests that looking at mimetic pictures means not seeing what is being looked at. My aim is to resolve this paradox. ;This goal is pursued by exploring the forms of subjectivity historically attributed to the spectator of mimetic pictures. Three theorists are examined: Leon Battista Alberti, John Locke, and E. H. Gombrich. While their positions are tied to the forms of pictorial practice central to their respective historical contexts, they share a common attitude toward the paradox of pictoriality: they explain mimetic appearance as an illusion produced in the seeing subject by the picture. This commonality suggests a consistent attitude toward pictorial appearance from the Renaissance to the present; I analyze this attitude, arguing that the concept of illusion, rather than helping us grasp the forms of subjectivity encoded in pictures, obscures it. ;The essay concludes by proposing that cultures of mimesis produce a complex visual activity of recognition and disavowal which I call "fascination". I defend the thesis that mimetic pictures do not induce illusions but are displays in which the social dynamic of illusion is witnessed. This thesis is combined with Lacan's theory of the gaze to redefine mimetic pictures as theatrical entities exhibiting the social interaction of desire and visual appearance. As theatrical, pictures elicit a mode of reflective subjectivity rather than deceiving a pre-reflective spectator. This thesis resolves the paradox of mimetic pictures by analyzing their apparent possession of incompatible properties as a sign that pictures are artifacts in which the social and relational nature of appearance itself can be seen. (shrink)

Performing Difference is a compilation of seventeen essays from some of the leading scholars in history, criticism, film, and theater studies. Each author examines the portrayal of groups and individuals that have been traditionally marginalized or excluded from dominant historical narratives. As a meeting point of several fields of study, this book is organized around three meta-themes: race, gender, and genocide. Included are analyses of films and theatrical productions from the United States, as well as essays on cinema from (...) Southern and Central America, Europe, and the Middle East. Topically, the contributing authors write about the depiction of race, ethnicities, gender and sexual orientation, and genocides. This volume assesses how the performing arts have aided in the social construction of the "other" in differing contexts. Its fundamental premise is that performance is powerful, and its unifying thesis is that the arts remain a major forum for advancing a more nuanced and humane vision of social outcasts, not only in the realm of national imaginations, but in social relations as well."--Jacket. (shrink)

As they make their way through Louis Althusser’s and Jacques Derrida’s texts, readers will cross innumerable curtains – ‘the words and things’, as Derrida says, as many fabrics of traces. These curtains open onto a multiplicity of scenes and mises en scène, performances, roles, rituals, actors, plays – thus unfolding the space of a certain theatricality. This essay traces Althusser’s and Derrida’s respective deployments of the theatrical motif. In his theoretical writings, Althusser’s theatrical dispositive aims to designate the (...) practical and material dimension of the scenes of ideology, materially enacted through roleplays, performances, acts, or discourses. At the horizon: a scientific discourse on ideology or, later, a strategic intervention in the class struggle. This scientific and/or strategic orientation echoes Althusser’s definition of materialism: ‘no more storytelling’. But Derrida’s ‘closure of representation’ reminds us that there’s no presence – even the most ‘material’ – no ‘truth’ or ‘correctness’ – in theoretical or strategic terms – without effects of re-presentation, differential repetition, narrative reconstruction: theatricality and materiality suppose a force of resistance, a secret heterogeneity, curtain foldings. Hence the irreducible necessity of reading, storytelling, transformative interpretation. What are the implications for thinking inheritance and debt – for example, the one binding Althusser and Derrida, and us to them? (shrink)

La présente étude propose une relecture de trois théoriciens dont les investigations continuent à servir de pierre angulaire à la théâtrologie : celles d'Aristote dont La Poétique, outre le fait qu'elle consacre le théâtre occidental, sert de fondement à l'esthétique dramatique et celles, plus récentes, d'Antonin Artaud et de Bertolt Brecht qui, bien qu'ils aient réfuté radicalement les théories aristoté- liciennes, ne se sont pas moins distingués l'un de l'autre pour donner les deux grandes voies que l'on sait à la (...) réflexion dramaturgique contemporaine. Ces spéculations seront envisagées sous l'éclairage décisif de la mimèsis et de la catharsis qui ne se posent pas chez eux comme des notions distinctes, mais comme l'avers et l'envers d'un même travail sur un réel à chaque fois redéfini, qu'il s'agisse de l'obéissance aristotélicienne à une stricte logique narrative, de l'utopique déculturation artaudienne ou de l'engagement brechtien.The author proposes a review of three major theoreticians whose works are considered to be the corner-stones of theatrical studies : Aristotle, whose Poetics, the first reflexion on Occidental theatre, also serve as the foundation of the aesthetics of drama, and, closer to us, Antonin Artaud and Bertolt Brecht who, although unanimous in rejecting the Aristotelian theory, have quite different views on contemporary theatre. Their definitions are analyzed in the light of mimesis and catharsis, which are not taken here as separate notions, but rather as a mean of grasping the fluctuant outlines of the concept of "reality", be it Aristotle's obedience to a strict narrative structure, Artaud's denial of culture or Brecht's political commitment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Peter McGehee and the Erotics of Gay Self-RepresentationRaymond-Jean Frontain (bio)Novelist Peter McGehee was a beautiful man who—at the height of what Brad Gooch terms “the Golden Age of Promiscuity”—knew he was a beautiful man.1 Coming of age in the early 1970s when American gay men consciously set about refashioning their image, Peter’s dress was always striking, whether he was playing the slut or the dandy. Members of his close (...) circle of friends, dubbed “the Quinlan Family,” regularly twitted him for preening in the mirror, and one close friend reports that Peter could not pass a reflective surface without stopping to examine his image.2 Peter’s narcissism was further empowered by his talent as a photographer. He began taking pictures while in high school when his mother, an English teacher who advised both the school newspaper and yearbook, recruited him to serve as the staff photographer for both publications. And he continued taking photos—in particular, making self-portraits—until at least his early thirties (see Illustration 1).3 Click for larger view View full resolution1.Self-portrait by Peter McGehee. The hairstyle is identical to the one in the portrait that appears on the cover of the Stubblejumper Press edition of Beyond Happiness, suggesting that this photo was taken around 1985 when Peter was twenty-nine or thirty years old. Courtesy of the Estate of Peter McGehee.[End Page 115] Click for larger view View full resolution2.Self-portrait by Peter McGehee in mascara and woman’s top, circa 1981. Courtesy of Fiji Robinson.It should not come as a surprise that McGehee’s life and career are characterized by an ongoing and extraordinarily rich experimentation with modes of self-presentation. Peter was adept at making wacky collages that employ photographs and images culled from newspapers or magazines to serve as invitations, announcements to friends, and handbills for his performance activities. Under carefully controlled circumstances, Peter and his male friends donned female drag with Peter fashioning for himself a persona, “Princess Marie,” and signing himself as the same in letters to friends written in the royal first-person plural (see Illustration 2). When performing as the only male with two female partners in the Quinlan Sisters, a musical revue that he founded and for which he wrote the songs, he was generally identified in the program as “Marie Quinlan, the Sister with the Difference” (see Illustration 3).Peter experimented with personae even in his journals, where one might expect to find a less theatricalized self. Beginning in 1986, however, numerous entries are composed as letters that begin “Dear Winsome” (a word defined by the American Heritage College Dictionary as “charming, often in a childlike or naive way”—a manner that Peter liked to adopt), “Dear Winnie” (which is most likely a familiarization of the former), “Dear Timmy” (a name synonymous with naive wholesomeness for American baby boomers who were raised watching the television drama Lassie on Sunday evenings), and the matronly and delightfully dowdy “Dear Mrs. Hackensack.”4 Like Joe Orton, McGehee apparently even wrote letters to the local newspaper under a matronly female pseudonym in which he commented wryly on public matters that concerned him.5 [End Page 116] Click for larger view View full resolution3.Publicity photograph of Peter with Wendy Coad and Fiji Robinson as the Quinlan Sisters, circa 1982. Courtesy of Fiji Robinson.But clearly it was his fiction that offered McGehee the most satisfying opportunity for creative self-fashioning. It is the first rule of the creative writing class that a writer must write from, and of, what he knows if his writing is to have authority. But in his blurring of the line between fiction and autobiography Peter followed the lead established by Christopher Isherwood in The Berlin Stories (1935–39) and, more importantly, Christopher and His Kind (1976)—and pursued by Peter’s senior contemporaries Edmund White and Felice Picano—in which the autobiographer writes of himself in the third person in order to study himself with an almost brutal detachment, or in which the fictional protagonist is a barely disguised version of the writer’s self to the point of... (shrink)

:This article revisits Michael Haneke's Caché as a filmic transformation of the traditional bond between sacrificial violence, morality and community building. By drawing mainly on striking correspondences with Jacques Derrida's view of the “mystical” origin of authority and of the limits of moral representation, the article aims to probe into Haneke's strategies of concealment. In so doing, the article proposes a “postsecular” interpretation of the symbolic meaning of the enigmas of the “ghost director” within the film, and of Majid's (...) theatrical self-sacrifice. (shrink)

Resumen Las tecnologías digitales han transfigurado el campo del arte teatral y vienen produciendo una serie de mutaciones que afectan la tradición perceptiva del espectáculo vivo. Para acercarnos a esos nuevos modos de comunicación que establece hoy el teatro, robustecido en el cruce con estas tecnologías, acudiremos al concepto de remediación planteado por Bolter y Grusin, para examinar en dos performances representativas de la escena latinoamericana del siglo XXI (Sin sangre, de Teatrocinema, yOthelo, de Buendía Theatre), las maneras cómo la (...) opacidad del medio (hipermediación) o su transparencia (inmediación) contribuyen a la construcción de las poéticas tecnológicas sobre la escena misma. Abstract Digital technologies have transfigured the field of theatrical art and have been producing a series of mutations that affect the perceptive tradition of live performance. To approach these new modes of communication that theater establishes today, strengthened in the intersection with these technologies, we will turn to the concept of remediation proposed by Bolter and Grusin, to examine two representative performances of the Latin American scene of the 21st century (Sin Sangre, by Teatrocinema, and Othelo, by Buendía Theatre), the ways in which the opacity of the medium (hypermediation) or its transparency (immediacy) contribute to the construction of technological poetics on the scene itself. (shrink)

This paper explores the construction of dramatic space in the prologues of classical Greek drama. Drawing from theater scholarship on the phenomenology of space, I show how tragedians and comedians alike experimented with how to shape their audience’s understanding of a play’s setting. I focus on opening scenes in plays by Sophocles and Aristophanes where a character sees with and for the audience, and demonstrate how these moments of staged spectatorship are not necessarily straightforward or seamless; they can facilitate the (...) viewing of dramatic space but also, by laying it bare, reveal its complications. Sometimes there are multiple representational possibilities for physical space within and around the theater; sometimes physical and fictional space are to be seen simultaneously; sometimes the representational gap between physical and fictional space is kept open for a surprisingly long time. Such exposure of the process of theatrical representation, I argue, can draw the audience in as a co-participant in a drama’s production. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mind, Theaters, and the Anatomy of ConsciousnessDonald Beecher"All unified theories of cognition today involve theater metaphors."—Bernard J. BaarsAmong the most perplexing challenges for cognitive philoso-phers are those pertaining to representationalism, Gilbert Ryle's denial of the "ghost in the machine," the languages of cognition, and the "self" as the one-time audience and author of consciousness.1 Each of these topics can be discussed metaphorically in terms of the theater. The mind (...) is a kind of acting space in which thoughts and images are in some fashion prepared and represented in rapid sequence. Consciousness is a theatrical machine behind which there is a director who helps to determine how the narrative of the mind will play itself out. The discrete "I" is not only the prompter of consciousness, but its audience, receiving all that is played in the mind's theater. Or, in the words of C. S. Sherrington, "each waking day is a stage dominated for good or ill, in comedy, farce or tragedy by a dramatis persona, the 'self,' and so it will be until the curtain drops."2 The problem, however, is that in matters so difficult to comprehend as the workings of the human brain and the mind operations attached to it, metaphors develop vectors of their own that shade and nuance understanding in ways that obstruct the plasticity of analysis. For this reason, theater analogies in relation to consciousness have been widely endorsed in characterizing its distinctive operations, yet widely criticized for epitomizing the philosophical thinking in the past (and the present) that detaches consciousness from the emotions, the body, and the material world. For the latter reason, the metaphor of [End Page 1] the theater will generally be found wanting, as it is in Dennett's assault on what he labels "the Cartesian theater." And yet there are compelling reasons why this metaphor may persist for a time to come as the image of choice for illustrating the operations of consciousness.Arguably, the earliest intimations of mind as resembling a theater emerged at the beginning of the sixteenth century. It was not only an age that fostered a renewed interest in dramatized spectacle, but one that confronted, through theater metaphors, the illusory nature of human experience. The rise of the modern theater, and speculations upon reality in relation to happenings in the mind, are quite separate phenomena, but, arguably, a sense of the theater as a place of memory, of illusions projected as realities, and of experience provided the best "thought experiment" for dealing with the paradoxes of mentation. In fact, the emerging sense of reality as an illusion was tantamount to a major paradigm shift, one that has remained at the center of western philosophy from the time of Descartes to the present day. That there could be a disparity between the phenomena of mind and the world of extension was a watershed in epistemological thinking, and it followed, as a matter of course, that the illusions associated with perception would find expression in the illusions associated with theatrical representation. The result was that the medieval metaphor of the speculum, emphasizing the mind as the faithful reflection of reality, was replaced by the theater, in which the necessary conventions permitting belief came to bear on the understanding of the data which the mind represented to itself. In short, conventions are to the theater what adequate representation is to the mind—the necessary slippages whereby perceptions function as reality.Parallel insights into the mind as a theater came about through sixteenth-century inquiries into mnemonics techniques for the improvement of memory. This metaphor of mind came about by analogy with memory theaters of the kind epitomized in the Idea del Theatro (1550) of Giulio Camillo. He chose the theater simply as the most apt edifice in which to house his elaborate set of memory prompts. His goal was to devise an actual working machine for enhancing recall. He chose the theater because of its architectural complexity and multi-sectionality which he could in turn invest with information. Yet insofar as the theater functioned in relation to memory through the art of mnemonics, it became an extension of mind, and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 123.3 (2002) v-vi [Access article in PDF] ThesmophoriazousaiPrefaceThe American Journal of Philology began the year 1999 (Volume 120.1) with a special issue, the first in AJP's history, devoted to the Senatus Consultum de Cn. Pisone Patre. The guest editors of this volume were Cynthia Damon and Sarolta Takacs. While it has not been the practice of the Journal to publish special issues, it seems appropriate (...) that we do so from time to time when a particularly interesting set of articles on a major theme presents itself. Such special issues are able to cover an author, work, or subject with more range and depth than one individual paper can, and they often contain layers of complexity and interdisciplinary insights that a single author would find it difficult to contribute.This special issue had its origins in the conference "Performing Aristophanes," held at Case Western Reserve University on February 24, 2001. Designed by the University's Theater Arts Department to complement the production of Mary-Kay Gamel's version of Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazousai, The Julie Thesmo Show, the conference was generously supported by the Baker-Nord Center and by the Susan and Ronald Heller Conferences for the Arts Fund. Two of the articles in this volume, those by Angeliki Tzanetou and Gonda Van Steen, were presented in an earlier version at the conference; others offering presentations were Niall W. Slater, Peter Meineck, John Starks, Jr., and Richard Perloff. Jeffrey Henderson provided incisive comments (which formed the basis for his epilogue in this volume). The other articles included here (Gamel, Scharffenberger, Stehle) were added at a later date.As Henderson points out in his epilogue, the Thesmophoriazousai is the Aristophanic play that has been least explored by scholars. But it has lately received more notice in new translations and a new critical [End Page 5] edition, and the time seems right for a new production of this play with accompanying reflections on its performance history, issues of gender and the body, the limits of a written text, the relationship between tragedy and comedy and between ritual and theatrical representation, and an unpublished, controversial, and relatively unknown translation of this play. Indeed, classicists are now paying more attention to both performance studies/performance criticism and translation as bona fide subdisciplines of classics. It should be noted that this year, for only the second time, the American Philological Association gave the Goodwin Award of Merit to a translation (of several plays of Aristophanes, done for the Loeb Classical Library by Jeffrey Henderson). 1 AJP has in the past year published as Brief Mentions several reviews of contemporary performances of ancient texts.Thus, this special issue marks a new horizon for the American Journal of Philology. I would like to extend my thanks to Mary-Kay Gamel, the guest editor of this volume, for overseeing, editing, coordinating, and encouraging these articles and for her leadership in the fields of performance and performance studies in classics.Barbara K. Gold Editor Note 1. The first award was given in 1977 to Harold Cherniss for his two-part Loeb edition of Plutarch's Moralia, Vol. 13. The award to Henderson was the first time the award was given for a literary translation.... (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)

Leone's Dialogues consists of three conversations - 'On Love and Desire,' 'On the Universality of Love,' and 'On the Origin of Love' - that take place over a period of three subsequent days.They are organized in a dialogic format, much like a theatrical representation, of a conversation between a man, Philo, who plays the role of the lover and teacher, and a woman, Sophia, the beloved and pupil. The discussion covers a wide range of topics that have as (...) their common denominator the idea of Love. Through the dialogue, the author explores many different points of view and complex philosophical ideas. Grounded in a distinctly Jewish tradition, and drawing on Neoplatonic philosophical structures and Arabic sources, the work offers a useful compendium of classical and contemporary thought, yet was not incompatible with Christian doctrine. (shrink)

Interactive media arts offer us new approaches to the role of theatrical representation. Nowadays, digital technology allows us to explore self-representation in systems that cross over between installation art, theatre and performance. By confronting the subject with his or her own image, these devices question the mechanisms of identification and denegation. Both the theatrical creations and the interactive forms that are examined here invite the spectator to explore the relationship between identification and denegation. All the artistic (...) productions that are studied in this article call for a virtual double that the immersant meets: Liquid Views (1992) and Rigid Waves ([1993] 2008) by Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss, Telematic Dreaming ([1992] 2007) by Paul Sermon and Eux (2008) by the Crew company and Sensorama (2009) by the Andwhatbeside(s)death company. In all of these artworks, the participant is encouraged to give less importance to his or her cognitive senses in order to allow his or her sensations to create a representation of himself or herself. The overlap between identity and otherness is therefore to be found at the very heart of the sensitive body. (shrink)

Metaphorical analogies have been popular in different forms of reasoning, theatre and drama analogy among them. From the semiotic perspective, theatre is arepresentation of reality. Characteristic to theatrical representation is the fact that for creating representations of reality it uses, to a great extent, the materiality andcultural codes that also constitute our everyday life; sometimes the means of representation are even iconically identical to the latter. This likeness has inspirednumerous writers, philosophers and, later, social scientists to look (...) for particular similarities between social life, drama and theatre. In this paper I chose twoparticular approaches from the social sciences that make use of the metaphorical analogy of theatre in quite different, yet, to certain extent, also overlapping ways — Victor Turner’s concept of “social dramas” from anthropology and Erving Goffman’s “dramaturgy” of social interactions from sociology. The former bases hisanalogy more on the structure of the dramatic text and on a key resemblance in the (dramatic) conflict, whereas the latter builds his analogy on the principles ofperforming used in theatre, and regards characters and roles as major resemblances between action on stage and in social space. This paper examines these key resemblances and sheds light on what kind of interpretations of culture and society emerge when theatre analogies are put into action. In the concluding section some general problems, related to extended metaphors and analogical explanations the researcher needs to face with, are discussed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Citation and Modernity: Derrida, Joyce, and BrechtHarvey L. HixCitation and Modernity: Derrida, Joyce, and Brecht, by Claudette Sartiliot; xiii & 173 pp. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993, $15.95 paper.Claudette Sartiliot argues that “the traditional definition of citation” is “inadequate and outmoded” (p. 15). It no longer applies to modernist and postmodernist writers, for whom “quotation represents a definite break with the tradition as well as a means (...) of questioning the nature of the literary text” (p. 3). The traditional definition, derived from classical rhetoric, limits quotation to the purpose of illustration and ornament. In contrast, modernist and postmodernist citational practices, having abandoned the typographical separation of the quotation from the “main” text, question “the concept of text as an autonomous entity” and replace the idea of a book “by the more unbounded word discourse” (p. 20).To illustrate her point, Sartiliot appeals first to Derrida’s Glas, which “relies on citation to such an extent that it can serve as a paradigm for a theory of quotation” (p. 35). By juxtaposing two columns of text and by extensive quotation, Derrida (a) links quotation with violence and with sexual penetration, (b) stages “a game of appearance and disappearance” through which he evades the reader’s attempts to “pin him down” (p. 42), (c) reveals that words contain within themselves other words, (d) blurs boundaries between languages and disciplines, and (e) “demonstrates how meaning is generated through an aleatory scattering of semes” (p. 57).Sartiliot also attends to Joyce and Brecht, who achieve similar ends through their citational practices: “both have elevated ‘plagiarism’ to the level of originality” and both “have shown that writing is always and inevitably quoting” (p. 75). Because everything in Finnegans Wake is a quotation—even the characters—Joyce undercuts meaning: a text without boundaries cannot be ingested. Finnegans Wake is like quantum physics: “neither intimated that God was dead, but both confronted the world with a model of representation that intimated that ‘God played dice’” (p. 84).Brecht’s characters, like those of Finnegans Wake, are quotations rather than originals: “empty signifiers” whose very names are not their own, they challenge “the bourgeois myth of the identity and continuity of the subject” (p. 130). [End Page 367] As Copernicus removes humanity from the center of the universe and Marx removes humanity from the center of history, so Brecht removes humanity from the center of theatrical representation, revealing that “the subject as a fully present identity and entity” is delusory, and humanity is “a linguistic (and thus political) construct” (p. 124). In sum, by their citational practices Derrida, Joyce, and Brecht question “the notions of origin, closure, and authorship associated with the conception of the book” (p. 124).Citation and Modernity contains moments of insight. For instance, Sartiliot says of Finnegans Wake that “while Joyce was doing away with quotation marks in his own texts, he was forcing his critics to surround most of their critical terms with quotation marks, as a sore sign [sic] of their inability to find the right word to describe what he was doing” (p. 75). In other respects, however, her book is not satisfying. The most obvious problem is that her own citational practices contradict her thesis. After writers like Derrida, Joyce, and Brecht, she says, we can no longer return to traditional quotation based on classical rhetoric, yet her own quotation is strictly traditional: it illustrates and ornaments, and maintains a clear distinction between her own words and those belonging to someone else.There are other failures to live up to the book’s own standards. Sartiliot claims that the chief purpose of quotation is to attack the authority of the quoted father, to “subvert the notions of filiation and tradition” (p. 149) and “eclipse the precursor” (p. 8), yet her own book steadfastly upholds filiation and tradition. From the cover, which makes much of her having been a student of Derrida, to the pervasive jargon (totalization, hymen, logocentrism, dissemination, etc.), the book defers all too consistently to the authority of its father, and consequently fails to challenge its readers.Harvey L. HixKansas City Art InstituteCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

National identities are to a great extent based on common mythical stories (re)produced by literature and arts; in the long run, the core texts of literature themselves start to function as cultural myths. Performing classical works theatre relates them to the changing social context and thus actualises their meaning. Theatrical representations of national characters and mythical stories participate in reinforcing or redefining national identity. In independent Estonia of the 1990s–2000s the need for reconsidering national values and myths that served (...) to consolidate society in the Soviet period, has become evident. The article focuses on theatrical productions in the turn of the century, which are based on active rewriting of well-known Estonian classics (August Kitzberg, Oskar Luts, and the national epic Kalevipoeg). The article tries to answer two questions: how ingredients of national identity (for instance, the relation to the Other) are displayed and (de)constructed by adapting or rewriting of above-mentioned classics; how textual strategies aimed at semantic transformations are motivated and shaped by the principle of self-reflexive theatrical play. (shrink)

This article aims to shed fresh light on the meaning of the term togata. It conducts an analysis of the term as it appeared in ancient sources,1 investigating in particular both how and why ancient authors across several periods focussed their attention on the togata. The paper will also distinguish between the attestation of the term togata in ancient writers, who are likely to have actually watched these theatrical performances in person and known more directly what they were talking (...) about, and the usage of the term by later grammarians, who would have had no opportunity to watch such performances. These later authors, rather, were simply guessing what kind of theatrical representation could have been performed onstage and did so by adopting obvious differences in terminology. (shrink)

The claim that photographs are fictionally incompetent (i.e. that they can only depict those particulars they are appropriately causally related to) is argued by Noël Carroll, Gregory Currie, and Nigel Warburton to be falsified by cinematic works of fiction. In response I firstly argue that it does not follow from cinema's having a capacity for the representation of ficta that photography has a capacity for the representation of ficta. Secondly, and inspired by the work of Roger Scruton, I (...) develop an account of how it is that cinema represents ficta on which this is fundamentally a matter of dramatic/theatrical representation. I argue that in cinematic fiction photography delivers a pre-existent representation of ficta rather than creating or generating fictional content. With this being so, the claim that photography is fictionally incompetent is compatible with cinematic fiction. 1. (shrink)

If live-action fictions are photographic representations of theatrical representations, “collapsed seeing”, according to Robert Hopkins, is the experience of directly seeing in the films the narrated events, while overriding the theatrical representation. Collapsed seeing opens the door to a paradox: on the one hand, we would experience live-action films as photographic records of narrated events, on the other hand, we know that it is impossible to access directly fictional events. The paradox can be solved if we consider (...) these events as happening in an artefactual – and not simply a possible – world, with points of view as elements of its ontological structure. (shrink)

Metaphorical analogies have been popular in different forms of reasoning, theatre and drama analogy among them. From the semiotic perspective, theatre is a representation of reality. Characteristic to theatrical representation is the fact that for creating representations of reality it uses, to a great extent, the materiality and cultural codes that also constitute our everyday life; sometimes the means of representation are even iconically identical to the latter. This likeness has inspired numerous writers, philosophers and, later, (...) social scientists to look for particular similarities between social life, drama and theatre. In this paper I chose two particular approaches from the social sciences that make use of the metaphorical analogy of theatre in quite different, yet, to certain extent, also overlapping ways — Victor Turner’s concept of “social dramas” from anthropology and Erving Goffman’s “dramaturgy” of social interactions from sociology. The former bases his analogy more on the structure of the dramatic text and on a key resemblance in the conflict, whereas the latter builds his analogy on the principles of performing used in theatre, and regards characters and roles as major resemblances between action on stage and in social space. This paper examines these key resemblances and sheds light on what kind of interpretations of culture and society emerge when theatre analogies are put into action. In the concluding section some general problems, related to extended metaphors and analogical explanations the researcher needs to face with, are discussed. (shrink)

The present article has as its purpose to analyze the “spectacle” (ὄψις), from the conceptions developed in the Poetics of Aristotle, as a fundamental part in the tragic conception of Sophocles, in the work Oedipus Tyrannus. The analysis focused on the exodus of the play to demonstrate how aspects of theatrical representation are present in the tragic text.

Nel Medioevo tante volte presentato dalla letteratura come un grande romanzo di avventure, un posto decisamente particolare spetta alla vicenda di Tommaso Becket, prima cancelliere di re Enrico II e poi arcivescovo di Canterbury, assassinato nella sua cattedrale nel 1170. Si tratta di una vicenda che presenta i motivi fondamentali di ogni racconto epico e tragico. Ispirandosi a questa convinzione l’articolo ripercorre alcune delle maggiori opere letterarie che hanno raccontato da diversi punti di vista lo scontro tra Becket e il (...) suo re: alcune delle agiografie medievali, Alfred Tennyson, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer nel XIX secolo, e – nel XX – Thomas Stearns Eliot, Christopher Fry e Jean Anouilh. Del _vero_ Tommaso Becket è assai difficile riuscire a farsi un’idea precisa, mentre sembra realizzarsi la grande metafora, proposta da Giovanni di Salisbury, suo stretto collaboratore, della vita e della storia come rappresentazione teatrale in cui hanno importanza decisiva solo i ruoli che gli uomini sono chiamati a interpretare. _In the Middle Ages, so often depicted in literature as a great adventure novel, a very special place belongs to the story of Thomas Becket, firstly chancellor of King Henry II and later Bishop of Canterbury, murdered in his cathedral in 1170. _ _This episode presents the fundamental motifs of every epic and tragic tale. Inspired by this conviction, this article examines some of the most significant literary works that have described the conflict between Becket and his king from different points of view: some of the medieval hagiographies, Alfred Tennyson, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer in the 19th century, and – in the 20th – Thomas Stearns Eliot, Christopher Fry and Jean Anouilh._ _It is very difficult to get a precise idea of the _real_ Thomas Becket, while the great metaphor proposed by John of Salisbury, his close collaborator, of life and history as a theatrical representation in which only the roles that men are called to play are of decisive importance, seems to have been realized._. (shrink)

This essay examines pre-colonial Mesoamerican elements in Luis Alfaro’s Mojada, highlighting significant differences between the recently published script of the play and a version produced at the Public Theater in New York City, which I attended in summer 2019, to argue that the Public Theater production questions whether Indigenous myth and ritual can persist and function effectively in the United States in the face of the brutal and dehumanizing forces of capitalism and racism. This essay contributes to discussions of the (...) ways in which theatrical representations of Indigeneity function across different Latinx cultures and even different versions of the same play. (shrink)

The Double Content view is the first comprehensive theory of art that is able to satisfactorily explain the nature of all kinds of artworks in a unified way — whether paintings, novels, or musical and theatrical performances. The basic thesis is that all such representational artworks involve two levels or kinds of representation: a first stage in which a concrete artifact represents an artwork, and a second stage in which that artwork in turn represents its subject matter. "Dilworth (...) applies his theory across the arts and to a variety of issues, demonstrating that it has far-reaching implications for our philosophical understanding of the nature of art.” - Stephen Davies, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Auckland.. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Art of Silent Reading It's All in the Mind Ideal Presence and Radford's Problem Faulty Foundations Home away from Home? The Text and the Real Seeing and Being Told Suspension of Disbelief Yet Again.

On the Origin of Objects is the culmination of Brian Cantwell Smith's decade-long investigation into the philosophical and metaphysical foundations of computation, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. Based on a sustained critique of the formal tradition that underlies the reigning views, he presents an argument for an embedded, participatory, "irreductionist," metaphysical alternative. Smith seeks nothing less than to revise our understanding not only of the machines we build but also of the world with which they interact. Smith's ambitious project begins (...) as a search for a comprehensive theory of computation, able to do empirical justice to practice and conceptual justice to the computational theory of mind. A rigorous commitment to these two criteria ultimately leads him to recommend a radical overhaul of our traditional conception of metaphysics. Everything that exists - objects, properties, life, practice - lies Smith claims in the "middle distance," an intermediate realm of partial engagement with and partial separation from, the enveloping world. Patterns of separation and engagement are taken to underlie a single notion unifying representation and ontology: that of subjects' "registration" of the world around them. Along the way, Smith offers many fascinating ideas: the distinction between particularity and individuality, the methodological notion of an "inscription error," an argument that there are no individualswithin physics, various deconstructions of the type-instance distinction, an analysis of formality as overly disconnected ("discreteness run amok"), a conception of the boundaries of objects as properties of unruly interactions between objects and subjects, an argument for the theoretical centrality of reference preservation, and a theatrical, acrobatic metaphor for the contortions involved in the preservation of reference and resultant stabilization of objects. Sidebars and diagrams throughout the book help clarify and guide Smith's highly original and compelling argument. A Bradford Book. (shrink)

A new take on our bio-cultural evolution explores how the "inner theatre" of the brain and its "animal-human stages" are reflected in and shaped by the mirror of cinema. Vampire, werewolf, and ape-planet films are perennial favorites—perhaps because they speak to something primal in human nature. This intriguing volume examines such films in light of the latest developments in neuroscience, revealing ways in which animal-human monster movies reflect and affect what we naturally imagine in our minds. Examining specific films as (...) well as early cave images, the book discusses how certain creatures on rock walls and movie screens express animal-to-human evolution and the structures of our brains. The book presents a new model of the human brain with its theatrical, cinematic, and animal elements. It also develops a theory of "rasa-catharsis" as the clarifying of emotions within and between spectators of the stage or screen, drawing on Eastern and Western aesthetics as well as current neuroscience. It focuses on the "inner movie theater" of memories, dreams, and reality representations, involving developmental stages, as well as the "hall of mirrors," ape-egos, and body-swapping identifications between human beings. Finally, the book shows how ironic twists onscreen—especially of contradictory emotions—might evoke a reappraisal of feelings, helping spectators to be more attentive to their own impulses. Through this interdisciplinary study, scholars, artists, and general readers will find a fresh way to understand the potential for interactive mindfulness and yet cathartic backfire between human brains—in cinema, in theater, and in daily life. (shrink)

The article proposes a re-interpretation of the shoreless seascape through a concept the author terms ‘aimlessness’. This concept can function as a hybrid metaphor suitable for investigating the failures of human transcendence. Essentially, every multidisciplinary practice in contemporary artistic, technological and scientific culture is a series of failed geopolitical setbacks. Related actions may well be reversed, interrupted or even recalled at any time with new acquisitions, discoveries or experiments. The understanding of the sea as a theatrical stage can offer (...) spatial observatory mechanisms for decentred perspectives in order to decipher and invent contemporary notions and symbols that are floating into this hydro forest. The article develops a critical reflection based on a series of sea-oriented artworks. Drawing on the ubiquity of the water, these artworks – through representational and performative actions of drifting and floating – examine the concept of aimless floatation. Through an analysis of artistic methodologies interacting with water, the text offers a series of reflections on how such actions become performative, playful and open to unexpected circumstances that lie on the surface or the depths of the water world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.1 (2001) 14-30 [Access article in PDF] Mallarmé Contra Wagner Eric Gans I In early 1885, Edouard Dujardin wrote to Stéphane Mallarmé for a contribution to his newly founded Revue wagnérienne. Mallarmé, admitting that he had never seen--and perhaps never heard--anything of Wagner, replied to Dujardin in July that he was working on a "half article, half prose poem," and that "never has anything seemed to (...) me more difficult." 1 A month later, the Revue published a text, more prose poem than article, entitled "Richard Wagner, rêverie d'un poète français." 2Wagner was an increasingly obligatory reference for the French avant-garde after his death in 1883. But as far back as 1862, the 20-year-old Mallarmé, no doubt influenced by Baudelaire's enthusiastic groundbreaking article "Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris" of the year before, had included Wagner along with Mozart and Beethoven in a group of three creators of the "mystery" of music, in a brief article entitled "Artistic Heresies: Art for Everyone." Characteristically enough, what fascinated the young Mallarmé was not music itself so much as the "signes sévères, chastes, inconnus" ("severe, chaste, unknown signs") (OC, p. 257) with which it was written, which give music the advantage over poetry--written in the universally understood alphabet--of being inaccessible to the uninitiated. This characteristic emphasis on writing over sound reappears in the "Hommage" sonnet for Wagner published in Dujardin's journal in January 1886, where Wagner's music is described as "mal tu par l'encre même en sanglots sibyllins" ("badly silenced by the ink itself in Sibylline sobs") (OC, p. 71). As we shall see, however, the relation between music and poetry suggested in "Art for Everyone" had by then been reversed. [End Page 14]Unlike most of his circle, Mallarmé was no Wagnerite; his "Rêverie," like his sonnet, expresses reluctant praise and reflects a certain professional jealousy. The theater had long been Mallarmé's chief preoccupation, as it had been for so many nineteenth-century writers who would be forced to make their reputation in other genres. The unfinished poem "Hérodiade," which occupied him throughout his life, took the form of a drama, and an early version of the "Après-midi d'un faune" had actually been presented to a theater director. References to music in Mallarmé's writings increase in number and specificity after 1885, and it is not unreasonable to assume that for him the prime representative of "music" in this period was Wagner. However much Mallarmé's own theater had become internalized and idealized, Wagner's theatrical success, as well as his near-deification by friends and disciples like Dujardin or Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, could not leave the poet indifferent. II What I would like to explore, however, is something more fundamental than the personal equation. Mallarmé's rivalry with Wagner over the theatrical center of culture is the rivalry of two arts and their respective means. What makes Mallarmé's critique of Wagner of particular interest is the exemplary rigor of the former's artistic intentions. Mallarmé's poems are a series of attempts to produce literary form with a minimum of figural content. Each poem has been submitted, so to speak, to Ockham's razor. The ultimate aim of this labor may be described as the discovery of the originary scene of poetry itself, the minimal sine qua non of representation, and therefore of humanity. 3 On the contrary, Wagner did not shrink from saturating the figural imagination in the pursuit of his totalizing aims. The confrontation reveals that musical maximalism in the service of national myth becomes a threat to what we may call, from Mallarmé's minimalist perspective, the anthropological mission of true art.Mallarmé held no particular brief for the theater of words; his tastes in performance went rather to the ballet, or to the mime-show, the subject of one of his most aesthetically interesting reflections. 4 Mallarmé anticipated 20th-century dramaturgy in seeing the theater not as a place for ratiocination and... (shrink)

En Fenicias resultan dignos de destacar los cambios substanciales que Eurípides introdujo al tratamiento del mito en sus versiones tradicionales. De modo particular, en el análisis filológico-literario de prólogo y párodos se pone de manifiesto una evidente integración de espacios y tiempos teatrales y el ensamble de los dos ámbitos trágicos estructurales significa una expresión clara de los límites entre "lo propio" y "lo ajeno". Nos proponemos demostrar que el diseño espacio-temporal de prólogo y párodos construye una suerte de agón (...) en el nivel espacial que se evidencia en el trazado de los personajes de Yocasta, Antígona y el Pedagogo en el prólogo y de las mujeres fenicias en la párodos. De modo que también resulte agonal la confrontación entre propio y ajeno, ya mencionada, como característica de la composición teatral euripidea, acorde con las realidades comunicativas de la época de representación de la tragedia y con la propuesta poética del autor. In 'Phoenician Women' it is interesting to point out the substantial changes that Euripides introduced to the treatment of the myth in his traditional versions. In a singular manner, in the literary-philological analysis of the prologue and párodos it does depict an evident integration of theatrical times and spaces and the assembly of the limits between ´the foreign´ and ´the self´. We will try to show that the temporal-space design of the prologues and párodos builds a chance of agón at the spatial level that gives evidence to the outline of the characters in Yocasta, Antigone and in the Pedagogue in the prologue and the Phoenician women in the párodos. Furthermore, the confrontation between the foreign and the self is also agonistic, already mentioned, is a characteristic of the theatrical Euripidean composition, according to communicative realities of the time of the representation of the tragedy and the poetic proposal of its author. (shrink)

El idealismo moderno de la estética plantea una distinción entre símbolo y alegoría. A partir de esta distinción, Schelling y Hegel caracterizan la alegoría como un suplementario o un mecanismo degradado de representación. Consecuentemente, sus lecturas de Calderón de la Barca están informadas por la preminencia del símbolo y el supuesto de la idealidad del significado, es decir, su univocidad y transparencia frente al carácter secundario de la encarnación o inscripción alegórica. De este modo, afirmar que en el símbolo no (...) hay diferencia entre el símbolo y lo simbolizado no es sino una apuesta que subsume la materialidad en lo absoluto y conjura la inscripción. Dicho de otro modo, al rechazar la figuración alegórica porque el sentido estaría escindido y mal representado, se oculta la pregunta acerca de las condiciones materiales que complican cualquier clasificación fija. En este registro, y a partir de Walter Benjamin, se propone que el procedimiento barroco en Calderón pone en cuestión este supuesto de la anterioridad del sentido. Calderón, entonces, temática y performativamente, levanta y entabla la pregunta por las condiciones materiales de la producción del sentido, y con ello pone en escena que el sentido no puede permanecer simplemente intocado. La teatralidad, pues, consiste en hacer aparecer esta relación contaminante. El Gran teatro del tundo de Calderón aparece, así, como una radical crítica del idealismo trascendental: instala la pregunta por la teatralidad que desajusta la posición de la idealidad, desmonta el ordenamiento a partir del cual se afirmaba la idealidad en desmedro de la singularidad empírica de la encarnación alegórica, al mismo tiempo que desestabiliza las condiciones de la soberanía. Modern idealism of aesthetics poses a distinction between symbol and allegory. From this difference, Schelling and Hegel characterize the allegory as a supplementary or degraded mechanism of representation. Consequently, his readings of Calderón de la Barca are informed by the preeminence of the symbol and the presupposition of the ideality of the meaning, that is, its univocity and transparency in the face of the secondary character of the incarnation or allegorical inscription. In this way, to affirm that in symbol there is no difference between the symbol and the symbolized is nothing more than a bet that subsumes the materiality in the absolute and conjures up the inscription. In other words, by rejecting the allegorical figuration because the meaning would be divided and misrepresented, the question about the material conditions that complicate any fixed classification is hidden. In this register, and following Walter Benjamin, this paper proposes that the baroque procedure in Calderón put in question this assumption of the anteriority of meaning. Then, Calderón, thematically and performatively, raises and poses the question of the material conditions of the production of meaning, and with this, he puts on stage that meaning cannot simply remain untouched. Theatricality, then, consists of making this contaminating relationship appear. El Gran Teatro del Mundo, thus, appears as a radical critique of transcendental idealism: it installs the question of theatricality that dismantles the position of ideality, it disassembles the order from which ideality was affirmed to the detriment the empirical singularity of the allegorical incarnation, and, at the same time, it destabilizes the conditions of sovereignty. (shrink)

© British Society of Aesthetics 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] essays collected in Fictional Characters, Real Problems: The Search for Ethical Content in Literature present unique perspectives on the representation of ethical concerns in literature. Edited by Garry L. Hagberg, these essays address different ways that ethical and aesthetic concerns are interwoven in works of long-form literature such as novels and theatrical (...) works. The majority of these essays also support a related claim: due to their long-form nature, these types of literary works provide a reader with ethical perspectives that are both more holistic and nuanced than is possible in typical philosophical thought experiments. Long-form literature affords the time and space to show us the breadth and depth of both our ethical motivations and their consequences.Hagberg has divided this work into... (shrink)

En Fenicias resultan dignos de destacar los cambios substanciales que Eurípides introdujo al tratamiento del mito en sus versiones tradicionales. De modo particular, en el análisis filológico-literario de prólogo y párodos se pone de manifiesto una evidente integración de espacios y tiempos teatrales y el ensamble de los dos ámbitos trágicos estructurales significa una expresión clara de los límites entre "lo propio" y "lo ajeno". Nos proponemos demostrar que el diseño espacio-temporal de prólogo y párodos construye una suerte de agón (...) en el nivel espacial que se evidencia en el trazado de los personajes de Yocasta, Antígona y el Pedagogo en el prólogo y de las mujeres fenicias en la párodos. De modo que también resulte agonal la confrontación entre propio y ajeno, ya mencionada, como característica de la composición teatral euripidea, acorde con las realidades comunicativas de la época de representación de la tragedia y con la propuesta poética del autor. In 'Phoenician Women' it is interesting to point out the substantial changes that Euripides introduced to the treatment of the myth in his traditional versions. In a singular manner, in the literary-philological analysis of the prologue and párodos it does depict an evident integration of theatrical times and spaces and the assembly of the limits between ´the foreign´ and ´the self´. We will try to show that the temporal-space design of the prologues and párodos builds a chance of agón at the spatial level that gives evidence to the outline of the characters in Yocasta, Antigone and in the Pedagogue in the prologue and the Phoenician women in the párodos. Furthermore, the confrontation between the foreign and the self is also agonistic, already mentioned, is a characteristic of the theatrical Euripidean composition, according to communicative realities of the time of the representation of the tragedy and the poetic proposal of its author. (shrink)