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A moving and genre-defying text, written after a great loss, that blurs the boundaries between writing and performance
A comprehensive history of Russian theatre, written by an international team of experts.
This is a book about what becomes of the truth when it succumbs to generational memory loss and to the fictions that intervene to cause and fill the gaps. It is a book about the impossibility of writing an autobiography when there is a prepossessing cultural and familial 'we' interfering with the 'I' and an 'I' that does not know itself as a self, except metastatically — as people and characters it has played but not actually been. A highly original combination of close readings and performative autobiography, this book takes performance philosophy to an alternative next step, by having its ideas read back to it by experience, and through assorted fictions. It is a philosophical thought experiment in uncertainty whose literary, theatrical, and cinematic trappings illustrate and finally become what this uncertainty is, the thought experiment having become the life that was, that came before, and that outlives the 'I am'.
This book applies Heidegger’s writings to experimental fictions and film genres in order to study a being-there that performs itself beyond liveness and a future that is already here. Theatrical mise-en-scène is analyzed as a way of modeling the Heideggerian ontological-existential, exchanging a deeper presencing for the fictional “now” of liveness. The book is organized around ostensible objects that are in fact things-as-such and performs its theme via time-traveling, interruptions, decompositions, incompleteness, failure, geometric patterning, and above all black pages first cited in Tristram Shandy. This is a nuanced, original work that combines unexpected sources with even more unexpected writing, imagery, and correspondences. It is part of Golub’s ongoing project of lyrically reimagining philosophy and the mise-en-scène of theatrical performance (a presence-room of consciousness) in light of one another.
In The Baroque Night, authorial idiosyncrasy hybridizes the concepts of "baroque" and "noir" across the fields of film, theater, literature, and philosophy, arguing for mental function as form, as an impossible object, a container in which the container itself is the thing contained. The book is an experiment in thinking difference and thinking differently, an ethics of otherness and the abstract. Spencer Golub inverts the unreality of the real and the reality of fiction, exposing the tropes of memory, identity, and authenticity as a scenic route through life that ultimately blocks the view. The Baroque Night draws upon materials that have not previously been included in studies of either th...
After seizing power in 1917, the Bolshevik regime faced the daunting task of educating and bringing culture to the vast and often illiterate mass of Soviet soldiers, workers, and peasants. As part of this campaign, civilian educators and political instructors in the military developed didactic theatrical fictions performed in workers' and soldiers' clubs in the years from 1919 to 1933. The subjects addressed included politics, religion, agronomy, health, sexuality, and literature. The trials were designed to permit staging by amateurs at low cost, thus engaging the citizenry in their own remaking. In reconstructing the history of the so-called agitation trials and placing them in a rich soci...
A rich, historically grounded exploration of why theater and performance matter in the modern world
What is a 'Shakespearean actor'? Does the term still have any meaning? Drawing on the biographical and autobiographical accounts of actors and directors, as well as on interviews with actors from a wide range of backgrounds, this book looks at these questions in a variety of contexts, historical and contemporary. A survey of the training of the classical actor, with its increasing vocal and physical demands, considers how it, like its subsequent career path, is affected by class and gender. There is discussion of the uneasy balance of power between actors and directors, rehearsal practice, the difficulties faced by women as performers and directors, and attempts at undirected productions. Ot...
"Explores the relationship between culture and power in Imperial Russia. Argues that Russia's performing arts were part of a vibrant public culture that was usually ambivalent or hostile to the tumultuous political events of the revolutionary era"--Provided by publisher.
Simon Joyce examines heritage culture, contemporary politics, and the "neo-Dickensian" novel to offer a more affirmative assessment of the Victorian legacy, one that lets us imagine a model of social interconnection and interdependence that has come under threat in today's politics and culture.