Realism, Postmodernism, and Authenticity in the Contemporary Circus Novel

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the late 20th and early 21st century, European circus has become embroiled in public debates about the inclusion of live animal acts, some of which have recently been replaced with hologram alternatives. I ask what such replacements of live bodies with technically mediated one's does to the sense of risk and sensation which has always defined live circus acts and their claim to authenticity through the threat of live danger. I investigate recent revaluations (Schulze, Funk, and Vermeulen) in Theatre Studies of the concept of authenticity after postmodernism to reflect on how the complex mix of loss, assertion, and compensation in these debates can be deployed in analyzing two distinct narrative representations of the circus (Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus); the first exemplifies classic realism, the second a version of postmodernism. I ask how the texts negotiate and interrogate the ongoing problem of circus’s relationship to authenticity, where authenticity is at once an impossible imperative against which circus strives to measure itself, a condition and guarantee of its danger and immediacy, and a performative promise which disappears in the moment of its delivery.