Staging Consciousness PDF Download

Author: William W. Demastes
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472112029
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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How theater has challenged the mind/body dualism that underpins much of Western thought

Author: Joshua Gang
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421440865
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
What might behaviorism, that debunked school of psychology, tell us about literature? If inanimate objects such as novels or poems have no mental properties of their own, then why do we talk about them as if they do? Why do we perceive the minds of characters, narrators, and speakers as if they were comparable to our own? In Behaviorism, Consciousness, and the Literary Mind, Joshua Gang offers a radical new approach to these questions, which are among the most challenging philosophical problems faced by literary study today. Recent cognitive criticism has tried to answer these questions by looking for similarities and analogies between literary form and the processes of the brain. In contrast, Gang turns to one of the twentieth century's most infamous psychological doctrines: behaviorism. Beginning in 1913, a range of psychologists and philosophers—including John B. Watson, B. F. Skinner, and Gilbert Ryle—argued that many of the things we talk about as mental phenomena aren't at all interior but rather misunderstood behaviors and physiological processes. Today, behaviorism has relatively little scientific value, but Gang argues for its enormous critical value for thinking about why language is so good at creating illusions of mental life. Turning to behaviorism's own literary history, Gang offers the first sustained examination of the outmoded science's place in twentieth-century literature and criticism. Through innovative readings of figures such as I. A. Richards, the American New Critics, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and J. M. Coetzee, Behaviorism, Consciousness, and the Literary Mind reveals important convergences between modernist writers, experimental psychology, and analytic philosophy of mind—while also giving readers a new framework for thinking about some of literature's most fundamental and exciting questions.

Author: Kirsten Shepherd-Barr
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691188238
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Science on Stage is the first full-length study of the phenomenon of "science plays"--theatrical events that weave scientific content into the plot lines of the drama. The book investigates the tradition of science on the stage from the Renaissance to the present, focusing in particular on the current wave of science playwriting. Drawing on extensive interviews with playwrights and directors, Kirsten Shepherd-Barr discusses such works as Michael Frayn's Copenhagen and Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. She asks questions such as, What accounts for the surge of interest in putting science on the stage? What areas of science seem most popular with playwrights, and why? How has the tradition evolved throughout the centuries? What currents are defining it now? And what are some of the debates and controversies surrounding the use of science on stage? Organized by scientific themes, the book examines selected contemporary plays that represent a merging of theatrical form and scientific content--plays in which the science is literally enacted through the structure and performance of the play. Beginning with a discussion of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, the book traces the history of how scientific ideas (quantum mechanics and fractals, for example) are dealt with in theatrical presentations. It discusses the relationship of science to society, the role of science in our lives, the complicated ethical considerations of science, and the accuracy of the portrayal of science in the dramatic context. The final chapter looks at some of the most recent and exciting developments in science playwriting that are taking the genre in innovative directions and challenging the audience's expectations of a science play. The book includes a comprehensive annotated list of four centuries of science plays, which will be useful for teachers, students, and general readers alike.

Author: Nancy J. Doran Hazelton
Publisher: Ann Arbor, Mich. : UMI Research Press
ISBN:
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 138

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Author: Michal Grover-Friedlander
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100052907X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 129

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Staging Voice is a unique approach to the aesthetics of voice and its staging in performance. This study reflects on what it would mean to take opera’s decisive attribute—voice—as the foundation of its staged performance. The book thinks of staging through the medium of voice. It is a nuances exploration, which brings together scholarly and directorial interpretations, and engages in detail with less frequently performed works of major and influential 20th-century artists—Erik Satie, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill—as well as exposes readers to an innovative experimental work of Evelyn Ficarra and Valerie Whittington. The study is intertwined throughout with the author’s staging of the works accessible online. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in voice studies, opera, music theatre, musicology, directing, performance studies, practice-based research, theatre, visual art, stage design, and cultural studies.

Author: David Krasner
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472025147
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
The fifteen original essays in Staging Philosophy make useful connections between the discipline of philosophy and the fields of theater and performance and use these insights to develop new theories about theater. Each of the contributors—leading scholars in the fields of performance and philosophy—breaks new ground, presents new arguments, and offers new theories that will pave the way for future scholarship. Staging Philosophy raises issues of critical importance by providing case studies of various philosophical movements and schools of thought, including aesthetics, analytic philosophy, phenomenology, deconstruction, critical realism, and cognitive science. The essays, which are organized into three sections—history and method, presence, and reception—take up fundamental issues such as spectatorship, empathy, ethics, theater as literature, and the essence of live performance. While some essays challenge assertions made by critics and historians of theater and performance, others analyze the assumptions of manifestos that prescribe how practitioners should go about creating texts and performances. The first book to bridge the disciplines of theater and philosophy, Staging Philosophy will provoke, stimulate, engage, and ultimately bring theater to the foreground of intellectual inquiry while it inspires further philosophical investigation into theater and performance. David Krasner is Associate Professor of Theater Studies, African American Studies, and English at Yale University. His books include A Beautiful Pageant: African American Theatre, Drama, and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910-1920 and Renaissance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African American Theatre, 1895-1910. He is co-editor of the series Theater: Theory/Text/Performance. David Z. Saltz is Professor of Theatre Studies and Head of the Department of Theatre and Film Studies at the University of Georgia. He is coeditor of Theater Journal and is the principal investigator of the innovative Virtual Vaudeville project at the University of Georgia.

Author: John Keefe
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000073092
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
In Staging and Re- cycling , John Keefe and Knut Ove Arntzen re-visit and reappraise a selection of their work to explore how the retrieval, re-approaching and re-framing of material can offer pathways for new work and new thinking. The book includes a collection of reprinted and first-published (although previously presented) textual material interspersed with editorial material – reflective essays from John and Knut on these pieces from the archives and original essays from invited scholars that explore the theme of repetition and re-cycling. The project has a number of aims: to suggest how the status of ‘new’ with regard to academic and staged dramaturgical materials may be reframed; to re-examine these through certain lenses and concepts (re-cycling; re-working; the spectator; landscape, post- and other dramaturgies); to explore the possibilities of critique offered by particular modes of juxtaposition, dialogue and dialectic; to offer further provocations to received ideas; and to retrieve and re-approach material, once published or presented, that becomes ‘lost’ in archives or on library shelves. As shown here, the role of the hyphen acts as an indicator to the status of ‘re-’ in relation to the ‘new’. Written for scholars and academics, researchers, undergraduate and postgraduate students, and practitioners working in all forms for theatre and performance, Staging and Re-cycling suggests a new form of dialogue between work, authors and readers, and draws out threads that extend back into the past and potentially forward into the future.

Author: Barbara Freedman
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801497377
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Author: Martin Willis
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113749994X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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This book considers scientific performances across two centuries, from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Performances include demonstrations of technologies, experiments that look like theatre, theatre that looks like science, tourist representations and natural history film-making. Its key aim is to open debate on how scientific activity, both historical and contemporary, might be understood in the context of performance studies and the imaginative acts required to stage engaging performances. Scientific performances have become increasingly of interest to historians of science, literature and science scholars, and in the field of science studies. As yet, however, no work has sought to examine a range of scientific performances with the aim of interrogating and illuminating the kinds of critical and theoretical practices that might be employed to engage with them. With scientific performance likely to become ever more central to scholarly study in the next few years this volume offer a timely, and early, intervention in the existing debates, and aims, too, to be a touchstone for future work.

Author: Astrid Oesmann
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791483606
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Staging History analyzes the commitment to social change present in the theatrical and theoretical writings of Bertolt Brecht. Challenging previous notions, Astrid Oesmann argues that Brecht's work was less dependent on Marxist ideology than is often assumed and that his work should be seen as a coherent whole. Brecht used the stage to release political ideas into experimental spaces in which actors and spectators could explore the relationships between abstract thought and concrete social life. Oesmann places Brecht within the context of the major leftist theorists of the twentieth century, particularly Adorno, Benjamin, and Lukàcs, focusing on their discussions of realism, aesthetics, natural history, and mimesis. Oesmann elaborates upon the vision of a "counter-public sphere" in a number of Brecht's theoretical texts and plays—especially The Three Penny Trial and Fear and Misery of the Third Reich—that present the emergence of such a sphere in the face of fascism. By exploring Brecht's theoretical writings, selected plays, and recently published theatrical fragments, Oesmann reveals unpredictable constructions of history and surprising distinctions among various political ideologies, while also proving that Brecht remains vitally relevant to a "post-communist" world.