Sade's Theatre

Sade's Theatre PDF Author: Thomas Wynn
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Sade's rehabilitation as a major Enlightenment writer has hitherto not extended to a re-evaluation of his dramatic works. With a theoretical framework inspired by psychoanalysis and dramatic theory, and attentive to eighteenth-century theoretical debates, Thomas Wynn demonstrates the value of these neglected works. This is the first study to consider the nature and implications of Sade's dramatic aesthetic, and to define the erotic quality of spectatorship in his experimental plays. Challenging the assumption that the gaze is sadistic, the author uses insights from film theory to argue that Sade adapts contemporary theatrical texts and practice to create an aesthetic distinct from that of his novels. Rather than replicate the style of such works as Les Cent vingt journ es de Sodome, Sade's drama anticipates a masochistic model, as theorised by Theodor Reik and Gilles Deleuze. This analysis of Sadean spectatorship takes a thematic rather than chronological or text-by-text approach. The author argues that Sade, as an atheist materialist, focuses on the structural elements of theatre to produce visual pleasure rather than moral improvement, and that he elaborates an insistently visual dramatic aesthetic, a mode analogous to the linguistic saturation of the novels' tout dire. With reference to eighteenth-century obscene drama, theatre architecture and the history of visuality, the author explores the paradox that Sade's theatre is meant not for the stage, but for the private imagination. His visionary theatre is an example of the late eighteenth-century sublime, an aesthetic of the ineffable and the unrepresentable which, in its emphasis on the survival of the demeaned individual, structurally resembles masochism. Without deforming his technique or strategy, the author shows that Sade's voluptuous theatre - like his fiction - addresses an individual whose sovereignty in a godless world is intimately linked to the independent imagination. This book will be of interest to all those working in eighteenth-century drama and theory of spectatorship.

Sade's Theatre

Sade's Theatre PDF Author: Thomas Wynn
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Sade's rehabilitation as a major Enlightenment writer has hitherto not extended to a re-evaluation of his dramatic works. With a theoretical framework inspired by psychoanalysis and dramatic theory, and attentive to eighteenth-century theoretical debates, Thomas Wynn demonstrates the value of these neglected works. This is the first study to consider the nature and implications of Sade's dramatic aesthetic, and to define the erotic quality of spectatorship in his experimental plays. Challenging the assumption that the gaze is sadistic, the author uses insights from film theory to argue that Sade adapts contemporary theatrical texts and practice to create an aesthetic distinct from that of his novels. Rather than replicate the style of such works as Les Cent vingt journ es de Sodome, Sade's drama anticipates a masochistic model, as theorised by Theodor Reik and Gilles Deleuze. This analysis of Sadean spectatorship takes a thematic rather than chronological or text-by-text approach. The author argues that Sade, as an atheist materialist, focuses on the structural elements of theatre to produce visual pleasure rather than moral improvement, and that he elaborates an insistently visual dramatic aesthetic, a mode analogous to the linguistic saturation of the novels' tout dire. With reference to eighteenth-century obscene drama, theatre architecture and the history of visuality, the author explores the paradox that Sade's theatre is meant not for the stage, but for the private imagination. His visionary theatre is an example of the late eighteenth-century sublime, an aesthetic of the ineffable and the unrepresentable which, in its emphasis on the survival of the demeaned individual, structurally resembles masochism. Without deforming his technique or strategy, the author shows that Sade's voluptuous theatre - like his fiction - addresses an individual whose sovereignty in a godless world is intimately linked to the independent imagination. This book will be of interest to all those working in eighteenth-century drama and theory of spectatorship.

Sade

Sade PDF Author: Annie Le Brun
Publisher: City Lights Books
ISBN: 9780872862500
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
The literary adventure of D.A.F. (1740-1814) is unique and paradoxical. He was widely read in the nineteenth century, but his books disappeared almost completely from circulation in the century. Meanwhile the exegesis of Sade poured from the presses of the Western world in a flood of words in which the writer, the novelist, and the exceptional pet disappeared. In France today, J. J. Pauvert, who considers Sade "the greatest French writer," is publishing a new edition of the complete works with a new introduction by Annie Le Brun. Sade: A Sudden Abyss is the translation of this introduction, which shows Sade as the inventor of an entirely new language through which he fathoms human nature, desire, and relationships of power. In this fresh and authoritative survey of Sade's work as a whole, Le Brun frees it from such critics as Bataille, Blanchot, Klossowski, and Barthes (who see Sade's language as a metaphor for history, society, or writing itself). She asks, Where is Sade himself in these texts? What exactly does Sade tell us? What is obscured when Sade's writing is placed in a "universe of discourse" rather than understood as a manifestation of a life spent in eleven prisons over twenty-seven years? Like a powerful laser beam, her reflections cut through two centuries of intellectual hide-and-seek and let Sade for the first time be seen and read in his own light. Annie Le Brun is a French poet and literary theorist. Her books include Lachez tout, a critique of the French neofeminist movement; A distance; and Les chateaux de la subversion, a study of the Gothic tradition.

Theatre on the Edge

Theatre on the Edge PDF Author: Mel Gussow
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
ISBN: 9781557833112
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 492

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Book Description
(Applause Books). Compiled by Mel Gussow, this collection of sideshow American and international theatre includes: Deeply American Roots (Sam Shepard) * The Man Who Made Theatre Ridiculous (Charles Ludlam) * From the City Streets, a Poet of the Stage (Miguel Pinero) * The Clark Kent of Modern Theatre (Robert Wilson) * Speaks the Language of Illusion (Martha Clarke) * The Lonely World of Displaced Persons (Lanford Wilson) * A Virtuoso Who Specializes in Everything (Michael Gambon) * Actress, Clown, and Social Critic (Whoopi Goldberg) * Comedy, Tragedy and Mystical Fantasy (Peter Brook) * Celebrating the Fallen World (Richard Foreman).

Theatre Sciences

Theatre Sciences PDF Author:
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1836241313
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
Traditional theatre semiotics promoted a scientific approach to theatre studies, albeit viewing semiotics as the unique discipline of research. Theatre Sciences: A Plea for a Multidisciplinary Approach to Theatre Studies suggests instead a multi-disciplinary approach, including the following theoretical disciplines: narratology, mythology, pragmatics, ethics, theatre irony, theory of genres, aesthetics, semiotics, theory of non-verbal figures of speech, rhetoric, psychoanalysis, reception theory, history, and sociology -- with semiotics being only one among equals. These disciplines are presented from the perspective of their possible contributions to a sound methodology of theatre-texts analysis. Traditional theatre semiotics, moreover, holds the view that the actual performance on stage is the genuine text of theatre, instead of the play-script. Despite this paradigmatic shift, however, this viewpoint has failed to produce commendable analyses of such texts. The alternative presupposition put forward in this volume entails a series of novel perceptions of the theatre-text and its possible impact on the experiencing spectator, whose role in reading, interpreting and experiencing the theatre-text is not less crucial than that of the text itself. This view presupposes that the theatre-text is a description of a fictional world generated by the theatre medium. The author also contests the age-old view that a theatre/fictional-text reflects a simple narrative structure, and suggests instead a complexity that consists of seven layers: personified, mythical, praxical, naive, ironic, modal and aesthetic -- with each one of them re-structuring the previous layer. Professor Rozik also presents and describes a semiotic layer that lends communicative capacity to the description of a fictional world, and two additional metaphoric and rhetoric layers, which structure the theatre experience. The underlying purpose is to illustrate the application of the aforementioned disciplines to these fictional layers, and eventually their joint application to entire theatre / fictional texts. Organisation of the book reflects the structure of a university course.

Public Theatres and Theatre Publics

Public Theatres and Theatre Publics PDF Author: Sara Freeman
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443838616
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Public Theatres and Theatre Publics presents sixteen focused investigations that connect theatre and performance studies with public sphere theory. The organizing critical lens of publics and publicness allows for the chapters to speak to one another other across time periods and geographies, inviting readers to think about how performing in public shapes and circulates concepts of identity, notions of taste or belonging, markers of class, and possibilities for political agency. Each essay presents a theorized case study that grapples with fundamental questions of how individuals perform in public contexts. The essays, written by a cross-section of prominent and emerging theatre and performance scholars, contribute new discussions and understandings of how theatre and performance work, as well as how publics, publicity, and modes of publicness have been constructed and contested over the last three centuries and in multiple national contexts including the US, Britain, France, Germany, Argentina and Egypt.

Body Parts

Body Parts PDF Author: Clara Elizabeth Orban
Publisher: Associated University Presse
ISBN: 9780934223973
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
Explores the link between Herve Guibert, one of France's most provocative contemporary writers who died of AIDS in 1991, and the Marquis de Sade, the most notorious Enlightenment libertine.

Rape, Incest, Murder! the Marquis de Sade on Stage Volume Three - Asylum Plays

Rape, Incest, Murder! the Marquis de Sade on Stage Volume Three - Asylum Plays PDF Author: Marquis De Sade
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781593937416
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
"When numerous critics have all pointed to the stunning mastery of dialogue evinced in [Sade's] novels, to say nothing of the truly theatrical disposition of many of the scenes-erotic or otherwise-this would seem to be linked to the theatrical obsession that persisted so disturbingly throughout his tempestuous existence. Shouldn't we therefore look more closely at this theatre...?" Annie Le Brun In commemoration of the two hundred years that have passed since the death of the Marquis de Sade in 1814, the three-volume series, Rape, Incest, Murder! The Marquis de Sade on Stage, offers English translations of all of Sade's writings, for and about the theatre, with introductions that contextualize Sade's work within the theatrical climate of eighteenth-century France. Volume 3 presents Sade's plays and occasional verse written at the Charenton Asylum during the reign of Napoleon. The lunatic asylum provided Sade with a creative freedom that allowed him not only to conceive his most innovative and original work, but to stage it as well, using actors from the asylum and the professional theatre. The violence and eroticism of Sade's infamous novels continue to be present in the plays, to such a degree that the asylum directors considered Sade's theatre to be a dangerous threat to the inmates. "[I]t is at the theatre rather than somewhere else that we must revive the almost extinguished flame of the love that every Frenchman owes his country; there is where he'll be convinced of the dangers that would exist for him should he fall back into the hands of tyranny. He'll carry home the enthusiasm and teach it to his family and its effects will be so much more durable, so much more passionate than the momentary inspirations of a newspaper article or proclamation because at the theatre, he learns the lesson by example, and he remembers it." The Marquis de Sade

Teaching Postdramatic Theatre

Teaching Postdramatic Theatre PDF Author: Glenn D'Cruz
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319716859
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
This book explores the concept and vocabulary of postdramatic theatre from a pedagogical perspective. It identifies some of the major anxieties and paradoxes generated by teaching postdramatic theatre through practice, with reference to the aesthetic, cultural and institutional pressures that shape teaching practices. It also presents a series of case studies that identify the pedagogical fault lines that expose the power-relations inherent in teaching (with a focus on the higher education sector as opposed to actor training institutions). It uses auto-ethnography, performance analysis and critical theory to assist university teachers involved in directing theatre productions to deepen their understanding of the concept of postdramatic theatre.

Sade

Sade PDF Author: John Phillips
Publisher: Pluto Press (UK)
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
''... brilliantly original ... brings cultural and post-colonial theory to bear on a wide range of authors with great skill and sensitivity.' Terry Eagleton

Performing History

Performing History PDF Author: Freddie Rokem
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587293366
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
In his examination of the ways in which theatre participates in the ongoing representations of and debates about the past, Freddie Rokem concentrates on the ways in which theatre after World War II has presented different aspects of the French Revolution and the Holocaust, showing us that by “performing history” actors bring the historical past and the theatrical present together.