Peter Brook Research Articles

Abstract 1901: Collagen remodeling in clear cell renal cell carcinoma: Influence of composition on growth and metabolism

Abstract The extracellular matrix (ECM) plays an important role in maintaining the structure and function of the kidney. During aggressive fibrotic disease of the kidney, such as chronic kidney disease (CKD), the kidney extracellular matrix is rapidly modified and degraded. Reports have shown that changes in the ECM composition and architecture can have profound influence on kidney function and recovery. The influence of ECM remodeling on disease progression and kidney function in Renal Cell Carcinoma (RCC), is still not well understood. By co-isolating primary cancer cell lines and the extracellular protein fraction from resected ccRCC tumors, we have determined that changes in collagen isoform composition are drastically altered compared to healthy normal kidney via Mass Spectrometry SWATH analysis (NvT COL1 p= 5.2x10-5; COLIII p=0.03; COLVI; COLIV p=0.004). RNA-seq analysis of TCGA data shows that altered collagen composition compared to normal correlates with patient outcomes (5 year survival COL1 HIGH=55%, LOW=72%, p=3.96e-4; COLIII HIGH=60%, LOW=73%, p=6.67e-2; COLIV HIGH=67%, LOW=56%, p=1.06e-2; COLVI HIGH=44%, LOW=71%, p=4.09e-9). Trichrome staining and IHC analysis of COLI, COLIII, and COLIV alongside cryptic-collagen epitopes XL313 and Hu177, suggests that subsets of tumor cell populations degrade surrounding collagen to drastically alter the ECM architecture. H&E scoring of regions of high XL313/Hu177 staining shows increased grade compared to low/no-staining. Isolated primary ccRCC cancer lines were analyzed for differential adherence to collagen isoforms, showing preferential binding preferences. In parallel, isolated normal kidney epithelia and renal proximal tubule epithelial cells (RPTECs) adherence preference was also investigated. Freshly dissociated tumor tissue cultured on a novel ECM cocktail coating in 3D scaffolds show changes in cell viability, growth, and purity compared to standard tissue culture conditions. In this study, we conclude that collagen composition analysis through IHC and Mass Spectrometry can be indicative of patient tumor aggressiveness. Preferential binding to collagen isoforms by tumor cells and the lack of adherence by normal kidney epithelia indicates a novel mechanism for tumor cells to promote local invasion. Additionally, we have generated a novel method by which to isolate human ccRCC cell lines using a collagen cocktail that will be useful for basic research and disease modeling. Note: This abstract was not presented at the meeting. Citation Format: Kyle H. Bond, Anna Deck, Jennifer Caron, Peter Brooks, Calvin Vary, Sunder Sims-Lucas, Leif Oxburgh. Collagen remodeling in clear cell renal cell carcinoma: Influence of composition on growth and metabolism [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2019; 2019 Mar 29-Apr 3; Atlanta, GA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2019;79(13 Suppl):Abstract nr 1901.

Ритуал і драма

The purpose of the article is to study the nature of the ritual relationship and theater on the example of the Muslim ceremonial theatrical performance of the Ta’zijah – the Shi’i passion play. The chosen problem caused the broad context of the study. In particular, the author draws attention to the peculiarities of the combination of ritual and theater in ancient Greece, as well as in the European and American culture of the twentieth century. In addition, the specificity of ritual and theater connections in other cultures, including Chinese and Japanese, is monitored. Considering the ancient ritual action in terms of theatricality and perception of the seen, the researcher turns to the artistic practice of the American avant-garde theater of the 1960’s and 70’s. Particular attention is paid to the influence of the Muslim ritual theater on the European theatrical culture of the twentieth century: the famous director Peter Brook’s impression from the revival of the ceremony in Iran in the 1970’s. At the same time, the author insists that Ta’ziah is practically impossible to adequately perceive outside the social, cultural and religious context. One of the reasons for this is that viewers become part of the action as well as performers, while a detached skeptical public cannot take part in the action which is deprived of faith. Focusing on contemporary non-religious tendencies in European and American theaters, the researcher comes to the thought of the German theater critic Ericks Fischer-Licht, who views non-rationality in the context of contemporary performative culture. In this regard, he resorted to the general characteristics of performative, outlining the ideas of Antonina Arto, Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brooke and others. The research methodology is mainly based on the comparative method, which involves comparing the archaic rituals of different cultures from the ancient to the Far Eastern, as well as the features of the combination of ritual and theater in these events. An important theoretical basis for the study was the work of the performance theorist Richard Schehner and his mentor Anthropologist Victor Turner. In addition to cultural anthropology, the researcher uses the theoretical works of contemporary European theater critics, in particular Ericks Fischer-Lichte advocating the exclusive influence on the spectator of the ritual performance of the Ta’ziah. The novelty of the work. For the first time in a complex way involving a broad context, using a comparative approach, based on cultural anthropology and based on the study of art, the connections of ritual and theater have been investigated on the example of the Muslim ceremonial theatrical performance of the Ta’ziah. Conclusions. We have shown that ritual and theatre are not identical, though they may be similar.

InstaStan – FaceBrook – Brecht+: a performer training methodology for the age of the internet

What do we do with a cohort of student-performers who show more interest in Instagram than in Konstantin Stanislavski, in Facebook than in Peter Brook and in Google than in Bertolt Brecht? Based on our experience of working with second-year BA (Hons) Performance and Media students at the University of South Wales, this article aims to provide a performance training methodology for the age of the internet. In particular, it focuses on our approach to creating a laboratory-style training experience, engaging student-performers in critical-creative processes as both participants and facilitators of creative practice. The article argues that this exploratory and experimental journey of using social media and online platforms in live performance allows student-performers to make strong connections between everyday digital tools and theatre and performance methods and techniques. Additionally, we ask questions about what forms these laboratories may take in the future: What would a StanChat laboratory look like? How can we incorporate InstaStan, FaceBrook and Brecht + into our training practices for digital performance more broadly?

Heinrich Taegtmeyer: "All is in Flux".

Heinrich Taegtmeyer: "All is in Flux".

Narratives of Force: The Presence of the Writer in International Legal Scholarship

In this article I use the notion of ‘plot’ to uncover where in their texts international legal scholars are ‘present’, directing readers toward a particular conclusion about the meaning of law. I use Peter Brooks’ Reading for the Plot, in which he understands plot as ‘the design and intention of narrative, what shapes a story and gives it a certain direction or intent of meaning’ (p. xi). In short, Brooks is concerned with plot as the movement caused by the order in which events are presented, making sure the reader continues reading. Drawing on the debate on cyberattacks and international law, my aim is to show where in these scholarly texts plot decisions are made by its writers and how these affect the conclusions drawn by them about the meaning of law. In order to show what I mean by the ‘presence of the writer’ I start with an analysis of metadiscourse: those elements of a text by means of which writers explicitly ‘manifest’ (Hyland) themselves, such as ‘in this section I will argue’. The discussion of metatext will hopefully then help to explain what I mean by plot as similar—though perhaps less obvious—proof of the writer’s presence. Overall, my aim is to show where restrictions on our reading experience—the boundaries of what is and is not law—are imposed by the writer.

Towards a poetics of field theatre: situated acts of poem-making in the work of Ted Hughes

ABSTRACTTed Hughes’ poems in Moortown Diary log experience of farming in North Devon in the 1970s. They were written during or shortly after the encounters that prompted them, remaining largely unaltered. Statements and letters lay bare his method’s situated acts of experience giving rise to impulses. This essay considers how such situated acts constitute a theatre-site of writing which opens and remains live towards acts of reading. It contrasts a letter written by Hughes four years before writing the poem ‘Coming Down through Somerset’, suggesting the former is a dress rehearsal and beginning of continuous duration which includes the writing of the final poem. And it considers how such situated acts stage theatre inside performance; James Hart’s idea of ‘rumour’ generating audiences through hearsay; Beatrice Fraenkel’s concept of ‘written speech acts’ as texts which include readers in acts of writing, being crucial propositions. Peter Brook, Grotowski, Wordsworth’s ‘spots of time’, Coleridge’s site poems, support a suggestion that live situated acts of writing intend an experience which gives rise to trace texts that await their readers’ participation. A simple architectural model is drawn: a studio-theatre in which writer and reader can, by a Proustian treatment of time, be simultaneously present.

Presence and Creation

Pedro Pérez-Guillon (Santiago, Chile, 1983), professor of art and architecture at the Catholic University of Temuco (Araucania), interviewed Peter Brook about the mysterious process of artistic creation. In this exchange, which is focused on Western thought on art and artistic creation, but also on millenary Eastern thought and the presence of spirituality in the artist, Peter Brook refers to his travels in the East, where he followed almost the same itinerary as that of Georges Gurdjieff, who inspired his film Encounters with remarkable men. The experiences and knowledge acquired during these different trips and stays in the East, as well as his own work on theater and cinema, feed this interview conducted in the framework of the Academy of Arts of New York (2016) and published today for the first time thanks to Sens Public. The adjustment of the original text in English and its translation into French and Spanish was provided by Chantal Waszilewska and Roberto Gac, in collaboration with Pedro Pérez-Guillon.

The Director’s Prism: E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde by Dassia N. Posner

Reviewed by: The Director’s Prism: E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde by Dassia N. Posner Jonathan Pitches The Director’s Prism: E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde. By Dassia N. Posner. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016; pp. 344. While Russian theatre directors Meyerhold, Tairov, and Eisenstein have continued to stimulate interest in scholarship since the beginnings of their practice and have been the subject of individual studies and selected pairings right up to the present day—from Mel Gordon and Alma Law’s classic Meyerhold, Eisenstein and Biomechanics (1996) to Amy Skinner’s forthcoming Russian Theatre in Practice (2019)—no one has yet taken on all three directorial titans in one volume. This is the challenge that Dassia Posner sets herself with The Director’s Prism, an elegantly organized and deeply scholarly book that manages to reveal (or to use her term, “refract”) new insights into the work of these much-discussed Russian creatives. The vehicle for this refraction and the common reference point for all three directors is the German romantic writer E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822), whose own deeply influential mantra for the theatre was for it “to ‘bear the spectator on invisible wings in to the imaginary world of poesy”’ (3). Hoffmann’s impact on Russian art, literature, and theatre is enormous, intensifying in two waves. The first occurred in the nineteenth century, Posner argues, embodied in Dostoyevsky, Gogol, and Turgenev; the second wave followed in the early twentieth century as part of the Russian revolt against naturalism and its celebration of the “theatre theatrical,” as Oliver Sayler famously termed it. Posner reveals each of her chosen directors to be profoundly “under the sign” of Hoffmann, in their dedication to adapting his work for the stage and in their reimagination of his theatrical worldview—irony, the grotesque, the pursuit of artistic synthesis, the importance of commedia dell’arte and the power of the mask (4). As such, her focus on Hoffmann as an organizing principle is more than justified and helps to weave a rich narrative of both separate and interlaced strands of theatre history. The book’s structure reflects this organizational focus on Hoffmann. An introduction explains the conceit of the director’s prism and the concept of refraction—“the artist’s deep engagement with a source via the prism of untrammeled fantasy”—positioning Hoffmann both in his own time and in the revolutionary period in Russia (29). Separate chapters then follow treating Vsevolod Meyerhold, Alexander Tairov, and Sergei Eisenstein in turn, but welding each of them to another figure—resonating with Hoffmann’s obsession with alter egos. Thus we have the amalgams: Meyerhold-Dapertutto (chapter 1); Tairov-Celionati (chapter 2); and Eisenstein-Yutkevich, or “pipifax” as they termed themselves (chapter 3). These pairings (either actual in the case of Eisenstein and Yutkevich or metaphorical in the case of Meyerhold) serve productively to destabilize the identity and stability of the lone director. They wittily evoke Hoffmann’s own grotesque and dynamic characterizations, although, at least for this reader, they also run the risk of providing one layer of interpretation too many, blurring what is already a complex and kaleidoscopic narrative. The epilogue reflects on Hoffmann’s centenary in 1922 before moving to an assessment of the “significant afterlife [of ] theatricalist poetics” provoked by the German’s work within and beyond the Russian context (200–201). Posner does this not to construct a lineage or explicit line of influence from Hoffmann onwards, she says, but instead to consider the utility of Louise George Clubb’s term “theatregram,” coined to “describe the process of dissemination via oral, visual, and other largely non-traceable means” (202). There is more to be said on this and further expansion needed on the other suggested Hoffmannian afterlives manifest in Peter Brook, Kneehigh, and Dmitry Krymov. But an epilogue can only do so much, to be fair, and these contemporary figures are served up as “indirect refractions,” to be followed up independently. As a final gift, three useful appendices are also included: essays translated from Meyerhold’s famous Love of the Three Oranges journal, as well as commedia scenarios from Schnitzler and...

Laying Out the Bones: Death and Dying in the Modern Irish Novel by Bridget English

Reviewed by: Laying Out the Bones: Death and Dying in the Modern Irish Novel by Bridget English Julieann Veronica Ulin (bio) LAYING OUT THE BONES: DEATH AND DYING IN THE MODERN IRISH NOVEL, by Bridget English. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017. x + 236 pp. $60.00 cloth, $29.95 paper. Bridget English’s Laying Out the Bones: Death and Dying in the Modern Irish Novel departs from the postmortem hauntings that populate Irish literature and criticism, the “voices of the dead . . . missing people, unwritten histories, [and] unrealized potential,” to focus on the literary representation of the process of dying itself and the rituals surrounding it in an increasingly secular Ireland (27). English moves beyond Peter Brooks’s interpretation of deathbed scenes in literature as offering “a key moment of summing-up and transmission,” a way of understanding “man’s time-bound-edness, his consciousness of existence within the limits of mortality,”1 to consider Irish literary representations of death particularly “shaped by a cultural and literary experience that includes Roman Catholicism, the Famine years, and the rhetoric of self-sacrifice and martyrdom that characterized its struggle for independence” (4). Laying Out the Bones opens with English’s analysis of Nuala O’Faolain’s unsparing 2008 interview about her impending death from cancer without the consolation of religion, the endpoint of a trajectory English traces from 1922 to 2007 through James Joyce’s Ulysses, Kate O’Brien’s The Ante-Room, Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies, John McGahern’s The Barracks, and Anne Enright’s The Gathering.2 This eighty-five-year period sees the shift from communal practices around death enacted at home to the removal of the sight and site of dying from the domestic space. Given the tremendous social and religious changes that shape death and burial practices in the forty-four years that separate the two final novels in her analysis, one would welcome additional chapters focused on the works in this gap. Laying Out the Bones contributes a timely literary study to the growing body of interdisciplinary work that considers the Irish reputation for “doing death well”3 even as the Irish public and government continue to excavate a past in which so many were denied what English calls “a good death” (3). As the first of English’s selected novels, Ulysses serves as a contrast to the texts that follow; as in the other novels, death “disturb[s] the narrative order” and “disrupts fixed meanings and destabilizes narrative authority” (18). Joyce incorporates the dead throughout the novel to create “imaginative possibilities that are shut down by normative novelistic endings, ensuring that death functions as a point of reinvention or rebirth” (18). Joyce scholars have long considered the central place that death occupies in Ulysses and so will find surprising English’s opening claim in her chapter that “the central importance of death to Joyce’s Ulysses . . . tends to be overlooked by readers and critics who focus instead on the famous ending, with Molly Bloom’s [End Page 481] vitalist affirmation of life summed up in the word ‘Yes’” (23). The chapter would have benefited from a more sustained engagement with criticism focused on the representations of death and funeral practices and their implications for the depiction of ritual as well as language, form, and reinvention in the novel. English demonstrates how Joyce’s resurrection of past characters, his insistence on the textual presence of the physical, decaying, grotesque body, his protean language resisting closure, and his use of death and the afterlife serve to reinvigorate the narrative structure by “bringing the living and the dead into dialogue and submerging his readers in the infinite play of language that mediates between the actualities of lived experience and the meanings endowed upon that experience by death” (23). In astute close readings of “Telemachus” and “Hades,” English argues that Joyce’s design in Ulysses textually resists the meaninglessness implied in Buck Mulligan’s dismissal of the dead as “tripes” (U 1.206) and Bloom’s preference for Paddy Dignam’s corpse with its open orifices sealed up and sanitized to disguise death in an imitation of life (36, 43). In English’s framework, Joyce’s insistence on...

A Tempest between Naples and Sardinia: Gianfranco Cabiddu's La stoffa dei sogni

This article analyses the significance of Gianfranco Cabiddu's film La stoffa dei sogni [The Stuff of Dreams] (2016) as a transnational Shakespearean appropriation. A palimpsestuous Italian adaptation of The Tempest, La stoffa dei sogni transposes Shakespeare's story to a prison-island setting in 1950s Sardinia. The essay documents the film's literary and historical contexts, exploring its complex array of interwoven visual and literary intertexts – from iconic theatre productions by Giorgio Strehler and Peter Brook to Italian Shakespeare translations, particularly the Neapolitan Tempesta of Eduardo De Filippo. The film's distinctive spatial opposition between prison and theatre creates a carceral reading of The Tempest, focusing issues of power, freedom, and authority as they play out in the conflict between Prospero's hegemony and his subaltern opposites Miranda, Ariel, and Caliban. Further, the Sardinian setting assimilates the play to the postcolonial world of the Mediterranean basin and the complex politics of the area’s local, regional, and national geographies. The film thus exemplifies the process by which Shakespeare's cultural authority is being radically reimagined in the global circulation of non-Anglophone appropriations.

Theatre-Voice Pedagogy within the Royal Shakespeare Company: A Historical Perspective

ABSTRACTThis article examines the theatre-voice pedagogy history of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), one of Britain’s most long-lasting and prominent performing arts institutions. The article traces the history of the organization and highlights its influence in creating and cultivating the field of voice training, noting key figures such as Peter Hall, John Barton, Iris Warren, Michael Saint-Denis, and Peter Brook and their impact not only to Company but also to voice training. Cicely Berry’s work and legacy is also explored. The author then uses autoethnographic techniques to analyze her time as Head of Text, Voice, and Artist Development at the Company. The article concludes with reflections on how the voice and text department at the RSC has shaped the field of voice training and gives implications for the future.

Meeting with Joël Pommerat and with the Theatre for Young Audience

Abstract For a period of time he trained at Bouffe du Nord Theatre, under Peter Brook’s guidance. He worked at Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe and at the National Theatre of Belgium. He has his own private company, named “Louis Brouillard”. The French Academy awarded him with a prize for his playwriting. Together with his works, those are the most important biographical highlights about the author Joël Pommerat, an undiscovered personality for the Romanian public.

Le Bien: édification, exemple et scandale dans le roman du xixe siècle. Édité par Mathilde Bertrand et Paolo Tortonese

This engaging and elegantly written edited volume tackles the problem of goodness in the nineteenth-century novel — a problem derived from the idée reçue that the genre concerns itself with anything and everything other than goodness. The collection focuses on Balzac, especially L’Envers de l’histoire contemporaine, and Flaubert, especially Un cœur simple, these two authors both having had famous things to say about the topic at hand. More surprisingly, it also focuses on Barbey d’Aurevilly, especially Un prêtre marié. Hugo and Zola are discussed more sketchily, as are various non-canonical works of edifying literature. The collection has no index and no bibliography and seems mostly unaware of English-language criticism beyond Peter Brooks. It has four chapters that each function as a kind of introduction, the last of which finally discusses the eighteenth-century background, especially Rousseau: goodness in the nineteenth-century novel makes most sense if one starts with Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse or, failing that, Richardson. The collection is at its most interesting when it thinks about what goodness comes to mean in nineteenth-century fiction. The old good of inflexibly upholding moral imperatives becomes bad and is replaced by the new good of demonstrating pity, compassion, empathy, generosity, and benevolence. Yet, nineteenth-century authors increasingly exhibit a post-Romantic disenchantment (what Stendhal, oddly absent from this collection, refers to as suspicion), according to which all empathy is delusional and narcissistic. Could it be that goodness is only to be found in intelligent self-awareness (Baudelaire) or blind stupidity (Flaubert)? For unless goodness is either intelligent or stupid, it is false (bourgeois). Much is made of the opposition between Flaubert and Sand, who famously corresponded on the problem goodness poses. Flaubert’s tales of sanctity suggest, however, that he was straining to find a goodness that Sand felt more confidently able to locate within herself and others. Baudelaire makes only fleeting appearances as a point of reference, but alongside the (self-)mocking disenchantment evident in his prose poems, we might do well to consider the extent to which he too pursued the ideal represented by la conscience dans le bien. As Balzac famously puts it, true Catholic charity must be ‘aussi savante que le vice’ (p. 110). However, the goodness analysed by Balzac, and more generally by this excellent collection, finally owes more to Rousseau than to Catholicism: it takes the form not of virtue but rather of pity, or benevolence. Thomas Pavel has pertinent things to say about three forms of love: amor concupiscentiae, amor amicitiae, and amor benevolentiae. Goodness, in both Romanticism and the crabbed post-Romanticism that so struggles to believe in goodness, is always finally the last of these. Benevolence allows us both not to recoil before distress and to give of ourselves. It also causes us patiently to accept the help of others: to understand that gifts are not in fact a form of violence. Benevolence might indeed imply a form of possession, but ‘cette possession […] n’évoque ni la maîtrise sur une personne ni le droit d’en disposer, mais la dévotion et les soins’ (p. 30).

From Iron Curtain to Velvet Curtain? Peter Brook'sHamletand the Origins of British–Soviet Cultural Relations during the Cold War

The article assesses the significance of the Moscow tour of Peter Brook'sHamlet. It considers how far the tour succeeded in overcoming the symbolic iron curtain by examining whatHamletmeant for contemporaries on both sides of the political divide. It argues that theHamlettour served at once to perpetuate and undermine the divisions between East and West, confirming Iriye's observation that on one level the Cold War intensified antagonism between states, while on another it helped to foster the growth of internationalist sentiment.

As the Story Goes …

In the rubric Texts around Theatre (TaT) we present various perspectives on theatre – historical and contemporary, intercultural and culture-specific, unexpectedly weird, unusually suspenseful, disturbedly gripping, fascinatingly enigmatic etc. Through the following story renowned theatre director Peter Brook reminds us that what happens on the theatre stage has to be of interest to everyone in the audience, and he leaves us with the question: How can this be achieved? God, seeing how desperately bored everyone was on the seventh day of creation, racked his overstretched imagination to find something more to add to the completeness he had just conceived. Suddenly his inspiration burst even beyond his own limitless bounds and he saw a further aspect of reality: its possibility to imitate itself. So he invented theatre. He called his angels together and announced this in the following terms, which are still contained in an ancient Sanskrit document. “The theatre will be the field in which people can learn to understand the sacred mysteries of the universe. And at the same time,” he added with deceptive casualness, “it will be a comfort to the drunkard and to the lonely.”The angels were very excited and could hardly wait for there to be ...

From Intellect to Feeling

Abstract The basis of the progressive functioning of the human beings lays in these two fundamental components: the intellect and the affective part. They cannot be separated, but they converge towards the same goal, although they are not in absolute mutual subordination. Extrapolating on the idea of the actor, we can say that the starting point for the artistic creation is represented by thought, imagination and improvisation; all of them accomplished in a systematically designed organization, with the aim of alterity appearing. The character is brought to life through the body of the actor, without being able to tell exactly how much of this is the artist’s emotion and how much the character’s. Also, the character’s emotions cannot guarantee purity, unless we consider the representation of the presence a moment of scenic, but not life-like truth. If we think of Peter Brook’s words, “a play is play”, the comments will remain open to many possible responses.

Literary Justice vs. Justice in Literature

Abstract What is the role and representation of justice in modern literature? This is the question addressed in the essay, which examines work by David Mamet, William Faulkner, and William Styron, as well as Dostoevsky and Kafka, while considering issues of testimony, confession, and evidence. It argues that injustice, not justice, dominates the legal literary landscape and that language itself explains this emphasis plus the direct experiences of authors with the law. Additional topics include matters of suppression, publisher's rights, and law's control over the legitimizing power over narrative. Drawing from J. L. Austin, Richard Rorty, and Peter Brooks, the contested state of justice is shown to be repeatedly undermined by the challenges of genre as much as character.

All That is Solid: Producing the Home-Space in John Stahl's Imitation of Life

Theorization of melodrama, in its dramatic and literary forms as well as in film, has emphasized the importance of the domestic setting to its formal and thematic structure. In Peter Brooks' well-k...

Il Nom-du-Père: percorsi del desiderio ne L’uomo che guarda di Alberto Moravia

This essay aims to investigate Alberto Moravia’s novel L’uomo che guarda (1985) through a psychoanalytic understanding of desire, specifically employed as an interpretive device. By primarily speaking of desire from a Lacanian perspective, I will focus in particular on Massimo Recalcati’s further elaborations of Lacan's theory, with special regard to his notion of 'hyper-modernity'. At the same time, by attempting a structural analysis of the novel, I will interpret desire as a drive that shape and organize the plot, following Peter Brook’s seminal work Reading for the plot. My reading allows therefore to see desire as an interpretive device reassessing Moravia's novel in both thematic and structural terms. More specifically, the analysis of the main characters in the light of this perspective will enable a shift in interpretation from the level of the plot to a deeper inquiry into issues of social and generational conflict, thereby enabling a new reading of the novel in the light of the ideological, political and intellectual turmoil occurred in Italy between the Sixties and the Seventies.

Change of paradigm that lead to a transition of topic mainly towards “culture” in social studies and intellectual life after World War II and intersection of new searches in theater triggered by avangards in the beginning of 20th century occur with the increase in intercultural studies during 60s and 70s. The cross-cultural theater theory and practices of Peter Brook offer

Batıda İkinci Dünya Savaşı sonrasında sosyal bilimlerin ve entelektüel yaşamın ağırlıklı olarak “kültür” başlığına kaymasınısağlayan düşünsel paradigma değişikliği ile tiyatroda 20.yy’ın ilk çeyreğinden itibaren avangardlarla tetiklenen yeniarayışların kesişimi, 1960’lı, 70’li yıllarda kültürlerarası çalışmaların yükselmesi ile gerçekleşir. Peter Brook’un kültürlerarasıtiyatro düşüncesi ve pratikleri, hem bu paradigma değişimini mikro bir çerçevede kavramak, hem de tiyatronun metinmerkezlilikten,sahneleme merkezli bir tiyatralliğe doğru evriminde kültürlerarası çalışmaların rolü üzerine düşünmek içinikili bir olanak sunmaktadır. Diğer taraftan, özellikle Mahabharata prodüksiyonun getirdiği tartışmalar, değişen düşünselparadigmanın bünyesinde barındırdığı paradokslara ışık tutmaktadır.