Text Theory Research Articles

Digital humanities and practical memory: modelling textuality

This paper reflects on the relation between Humanities and Digital Humanities from scholarly perspectives intertwined as they are with political stances. Often characterized as enabling a unifying as well as transformative sentiment for the Humanities as a whole, Digital Humanities can be described as a challenging hybridization of scholarly practices contingent to social and cultural contexts. The core of the paper relates to one of the topics of the 2015 conference on Rethinking Humanities , namely digital memory, by recalling on the concept of Humanities as scholarship engaged with meaning-making practices connecting past and present. Building on the literature and some co-authored research 1 , I present a humanities-informed theorization of modelling in Digital Humanities as a meaning-making practice enacted in the present and aiming at repurposing the past. As privileged objects of digital modelling activities, texts are repurposed via the creation and manipulation of (digital) external representations. An informed theory of textuality reminds us how cultural products embed the processes of their creati- ons and uses. Can digital models enact such practical memory and become in themselves strategies to exercise memory and encode knowledge?

Teatro y traducción / Por un giro escénico

La puesta en escena de un espectáculo teatral es un proceso creativocomplejo en el que intervienen múltiples agentes, elementos y procesos de significación. El texto deviene pretexto y por eso la obra literaria dará lugar a una serie de textos sucesivos que se concretarán en el texto teatral, aquel que se actualiza en cada representación. En ese proceso cobra especial relevancia la figura del dramaturgista, pero también la del traductor, pues si la dramaturgia implica revisión y/o adecuación de la materia literaria a la sintaxis escénica, la traducción facilita el acceso a textualidades de otras lenguas. Con este artículo queremos proponer un marco teórico desde el que estudiar la relación entre teatro y traducción a partir del análisis de los conceptos, procesos y métodos de trabajo que son específicos de ese territorio de intersección de prácticas culturales.

Thomas Shadwell’s the Virtuoso as an Assemblage Laboratory. A View from Installation Art

Summary The contemporary landscape of performing arts becomes more and more populated by hybrid genres or “artistic installations” (Rebentisch) which fuse traditional artistic, theatrical and performance practices with scientific procedures, political activism and designing new technologies (e.g. bioart, technoart, digital art and site-specific performance). In this context, theatre texts can no longer be perceived as autopoietic means of solely artistic expression but become part of an assemblage of different discourses and practices. As contemporary assemblage theory contends (DeLanda), assemblages are relational entities which change dramatically depending on relations between its different human and nonhuman elements and various contexts in which they function. Taking the contemporary installation art as a vantage point, this paper aims to analyse a Restoration comedy The Virtuoso (1676) by Thomas Shadwell in an assemblage of theatrical, scientific and political discourses and practices of Early Modern England. Staged in Dorset Gardens theatre in London, the play mobilised a plethora of discourses of science (the status of experimental philosophy institutionalized in 1660 as the Royal Society), politics (Restoration of the monarchy under Charles II) and gender (the infamous heac vir or effeminate man). Drawing on contemporary new materialism, the paper focuses predominantly on Shadwell’s use of the laboratory as a site of emerging assemblages rather than objective matters of fact. In this context, the play itself becomes an assemblage laboratory where new ways of thinking and being are being forged and constantly negotiated.

Eating Miss Julie

In an accounting of the role of taste in performance, I analyze the impact of multiple aspects of taste within the development of a series of edible performances of Strindberg’s Miss Julie and Buchner’s Woyzeck, culminating in an edible mashup of the two theatrical texts as part of the Prague Quadrennial Makers event (PQ Makers) in June 2015. I first pursue an account of the role of sensory, aesthetic, critical and economic dimensions of taste in a genealogy of these three edible performances. I chart our recipes’ development, beginning with an initial translation from intelligible to sensible material (text into recipe into edible object), through artistic and critical expressions and performances of taste (recipe into bodies, performances, and critiques), into scholarly and economic models of taste and connoisseurship (recipe as artifact of scholarly labor and evidence of aesthetic judgment) and finally into another mode of public consumption (within the convivial and commensal frame of PQ Makers itself). Against and alongside this accounting of and for the roles of taste within our own performance, I contrast this food-based performance with several additional approaches to the staging of taste within the twenty-four events of PQ Makers. Along the way I highlight the ways in which PQ Makers exposed tensions between competing and overlapping concepts of taste as discernment, taste as distinction, taste as presence and taste as performative act.

Vedere nel futuro: esplorazioni oniriche e allucinatorie

This paper briefly analyzes some of the prophetic dreams and some visions (Penelope, Hecuba, Cassandra, Polymestor), from Homer to Euripides, to gain a few reflections on the enunciative forms that knowledge of the future can take in narrative (mythical) speech in some literary and theatrical texts of Ancient Greece.

Motivet der blev væk for litteraturteorien

The article argues that classical concepts in literary theory such as “motif” and “theme” have been undertheorized in recent decades. They have been taken for granted as “ordinary language”-vocabulary in no need of conceptual clarification. But the dimension of content in a literary text cannot be sufficiently theorized without precise definitions of “motif” and “theme”. The article claims that the theme is always an abstract concept, an idea, extrapolated from the text by its interpreter, whereas the motif presents itself in the text as an observable constellation between mimetic elements from the human life world that can be traced with variations through multiple texts or other fictional modes. The motif can be more or less specified and will always be located somewhere on a continuum between the abstract theme and the individual text. The article then tries to enrich this understanding of the motif by confronting it with the textual theories of Paul Ricoeur and James Phelan. It is furthermore discussed whether the critique of ideology in the Marxist years played a role in the marginalization of the motif. The relevance of the reconstructed concept is finally demonstrated in an outline of an analytical approach to three novels (The “Hvium”-trilogy) by the Danish author Ida Jessen and it is concluded that this type of approach enables observations that would have been less obvious entering the textual universes on higher or lower levels than the motif being always in between the theme and the text.

Coracles, Castanets, Cadaqu�s

This ReView of a series of therapy sessions that took place two years ago, over a period of seven months, takes the form of a theatrical text written for the stage. Coracles, Castanets, Cadaqu�s is part monologue, part comedy, part detective story, and part history lesson and follows the story of theatre professor who makes an appointment with a therapist. What ensues is a sonic and surrealistic autobiographical tale of lost orientation, and of learning to turn an eye into an ear in order to hear the ways that our own darkness is looped with our grandest understanding of love. Oh, and there�s a tiger.

Writing on the edge: the poet, the printer, and the colonial frontier in Ercilla’s La Araucana (1569–1590)

It took Alonso de Ercilla (1533–1594) thirty years to finish La Araucana, a first-person narrative epic poem about the brutal war of Arauco, in southern Chile, and one of the most canonical texts of colonial Latin America. By focusing on a crucial episode of Ercilla's eyewitness account, this essay revisits a number of scholarly discussions that have been central for our understanding of the text. First, it takes into consideration previous scholarship overlooked by specialists, as well as hitherto unstudied copies of the poem, in order to offer a thorough reevaluation of the textual and editorial history of the poem. Moreover, it explores the frontier as a chronotope and as a locus of enunciation for colonial epic, a space that is also crucial for Ercilla's carefully crafted authorial persona. Finally, it interrogates the ways in which the discursive representations of colonial frontier spaces were mediated by the material practices of early modern book production, arguing for a more fruitful relation between ecdotics and poetics, between material bibliography and theories of authorship and textuality in our approaches to colonial texts.

Usage Volume and Trends Indicate Academic Library Online Learning Objects and Tutorials Are Being Used

A Review of:
 Hess, A. N., & Hristova, M. (2016). To search or to browse: How users navigate a new interface for online library tutorials. College & Undergraduate Libraries, 23(2), 168-183. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10691316.2014.963274
 
 Abstract
 
 Objective – To discover how users interact with a new online interface for learning objects, user preferences for types of access when given both browsing and searching options, and user needs for tutorial subject matter.
 
 Design – Mixed methods, with quantitative analysis of web traffic and qualitative analysis of recorded search terms through grounded textual theory.
 
 Setting – An academic library in the Western United States of America.
 
 Subjects – Users of the Libraries’ online tutorials and learning objects.
 
 Methods – The researchers collected web traffic statistics and organically occurring searches from the Libraries’ tutorial access interface. They defined the collection period as the 2013/2014 academic year, with collection beginning in September 2013 and ending in April 2014. Web traffic for organic searches, facilitated searches (search results accessed through clicking on particular words in a tag cloud), and categorical browsing was collected via Google Analytics. They categorized other interaction types (accessing featured content, leaving the page, etc.) under an umbrella term of “other.” Their analysis of web traffic was limited to unique page views, with unique page views defined as views registered to different browser sessions. Unique page views were analyzed to determine which types of interface interaction occurred most frequently, both on-campus and off-campus, and whether there were differences in types of interaction preferred over time or by users with different points of origin. Individual organic search keywords and phrases, and the dates and times of those searches, were separately collected and recorded. One of the researchers coded the recorded organic search terms using grounded textual theory analysis, and the researcher formed generalized categories. They sent these categories and a random sample of 10% of the recorded search terms to librarians unaffiliated with the study, and used their categorizations of the search term samples to validate the initial researcher’s textual analysis.
 
 Main Results – After analyzing the 5,638 unique page views recorded, researchers found that categorical browsing was used more frequently than facilitated searching throughout the year, and more frequently than organic searching for 6 of the 8 recorded months. Organic searching was used more frequently than facilitated searching during most months, while both organic and facilitated searching were less likely to be engaged in by users working on Saturday or Sunday. They found that interactions in the “other” category were quite high, and the researchers attributed this to featured videos on the interface homepage being required for a number of classes. The researchers discovered that patterns in interface use were similar between on-campus and off-campus users, and that most traffic to the interface was through referral from other websites (such as the library homepage). Direct traffic (from URLs manually typed in or in documents) was the second most frequent point of access, while users arriving at the interface from a search engine interaction was a distant third. Grounded textual theory analysis of the 14,428 collected organic searches achieved a 92% consensus in coding, and showed a user focus in searching for specific resources, tasks, and knowledge, rather than broader conceptual searches. Additionally, researchers noticed that a significant number of users performed organic searches for videos that were featured on the front page, possibly indicating that certain users engage with search functions before viewing page content. 
 
 Conclusions – The researchers concluded that despite the limitations of the study, the usage volume and trends identified indicate that the Libraries’ online learning objects and tutorials are being used. They also concluded that the categorization and labelling of these learning objects has been successful because the categorical browsing function is used more than the other search functionalities. The researchers determined that they should consider the non-user in the future, and examine the barriers that students, faculty, and staff encounter when attempting to use online learning content. They affirm a need to develop, via further studies, a more thorough understanding of the motivations behind user interactions.

"Don't Teach These Plays!": Latina/o Theatre and the Termination of the Tucson Unified School District's Mexican American Studies Program

"Don't Teach These Plays!":Latina/o Theatre and the Termination of the Tucson Unified School District's Mexican American Studies Program Jimmy A. Noriega (bio) The second decade of the twenty-first century began with a series of milestones that signaled a major turning point for Latina/o theatre. In April 2010 Luis Valdez's classic Zoot Suit opened at the Compañía Nacional de Teatro in Mexico City, and the Association of Theatre Journalists honored it as the Best Mexican Musical of the year, making it the first time a non-Mexican play was given the award. John Leguizamo performed his one-man show Ghetto Klown at the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway from March to July 2011; it received Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards and was eventually filmed for television. In 2012 Quiara Alegría Hudes became the first Latina to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Water by the Spoonful, which went on to become one of the most produced plays of the 2013–14 season. And in May 2012 eight theatre practitioners met in Washington, D.C., to set in motion the process that would lead to the founding of the Latina/o Theatre Commons, which in fall 2013 would hold its historic National Convening in Boston. It was during this period of noteworthy progress and acclaim that a number of Latina/o playwrights were thrust into the national spotlight in a way they did not anticipate. In January 2012 several books were removed from the classrooms of Tucson, Arizona, as a result of Arizona House Bill 2281. This legislation, passed in May 2010, targeted ethnic studies in the schools and led to the dismantling of the Tucson Unified School District's (TUSD) Mexican American Studies (MAS) program. The elimination led to what many called a "banning" of the books that were previously part of the curriculum and classrooms of the district. Among the many such titles, three books were collections of Latina/o theatrical texts: Zoot Suit and Other Plays (1992); Culture Clash: Life, Death, and Revolutionary Comedy (1998); and Puro Teatro: A Latina Anthology (2000). Puro Teatro, edited by Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez and Nancy Saporta Sternbach, consists of five full-length plays, three one-acts, four texts for performance pieces, and a series of testimonios by an array of Latinas working in the theatre. In their introduction to the collection, the editors assert that "[a]ccessibility to these plays and circulation of them in a variety of different venues will benefit communities, students at all levels of their education and their teachers, actors and actresses looking for material, and theaters at the community, regional, and national level" (xiv). Despite its well-intended aims, the anthology—created for social, cultural, and artistic empowerment—was deemed unsuitable and outlawed in Tucson classrooms. The legislation not only prevented accessibility and circulation of these works in the schools, but also emphasized the precarity of Latina cultural expression in the US today. Although perhaps it was not intentional, more Latina-written plays were censored than those by Latino men. This ban on Latina theatrical texts is even more egregious, given the lack of production opportunities for female playwrights in general (Evans). In many ways the banning of these plays in the Tucson schools became an extension of the erasure that Latinas face in season calendars and production budgets in theatres across the nation. [End Page 37] With this in mind, this essay aims to explore the ways in which HB 2281 further marginalized Latina/o theatrical texts in the US educational landscape. In the first part I will briefly outline the history and debate surrounding the legislation, focusing on the methods used to target Latina/o theory, pedagogy, and cultural production. The remainder of the essay discusses two banned texts from the Puro Teatro anthology as case studies by which to teach and understand the events: Silviana Wood's And Where Was Pancho Villa When You Really Needed Him? (2000), and Elaine Romero's The Fat-Free Chicana and the Snow Cap Queen (1995). Although both plays predate the events of HB 2281, they speak to a history of racist pedagogy and acts...

A History of Theatre in Spain ed. by María M. Delgado and David T. Gies

Reviewed by: A History of Theatre in Spain ed. by María M. Delgado and David T. Gies Bárbara Mujica María M. Delgado and David T. Gies, editors. A History of Theatre in Spain. CAMBRIDGE UP, 2012 (PAPERBACK EDITION 2015). 558 pp. THIS NEW CONTRIBUTION TO HISPANISM by María M. Delgado and David T. Gies is an unconventional literary history. Because it is a compendium of articles by specialists, A History of Theatre in Spain avoids some of the major pitfalls that plague other literary histories. Single-authored chronicles inevitably offer a limited perspective, as no one scholar can be an expert in every aspect or period of a national literature. Even highly qualified experts in one area—say, the Spanish comedia—may be deficient in others, such as the zarzuela or contemporary feminist theater. However, the editors of A History of Theatre in Spain offer an overview of Spanish theater from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century provided by over two dozen eminent scholars of diverse backgrounds, areas of expertise, and approaches. The result is a history of Spanish theater that is panoramic, profound, and multifaceted. The editors' insightful Introduction poses some questions usually ignored by scholars. The most basic is: What is Spanish theater? The tendency of critics, historians, and politicians to equate Spain with Madrid or Castile has led scholars to overlook the existence of cultures that have flourished in the Iberian Peninsula in languages other than Spanish, for example, Arabic, Basque, Catalan, Navarro-Aragonese. Furthermore, the primacy given to Spain's Golden Age has led scholars to neglect the rich theatrical traditions of Spain's eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Theatrical culture is much broader than a selected group of canonical works, argue the editors. Performance techniques, audience tastes, dramatic space, and myriad other elements all come into play. Rather than assigning hegemony to either text or performance-related issues, the editors have sought to view theater in its totality, including script, stage architecture, kinetics, the role of publishers, and paralinguistic material. Although their focus is on peninsular Spain, they have sought to expand our notion of Spanish theater by exploring issues of colonialism and the broad influence of Spain's theater abroad, both in Latin America and Europe. The editors' frankly revisionist approach calls into questions conventional assumptions about what constitutes a national theater and the parameters of Spain's theater. [End Page 135] In "The Challenges of Historiography: The Theatre in Medieval Spain," Ángel Gómez Moreno challenges the long-accepted 1958 statement by Fernando Lázaro Carreter that the history of theater in Medieval Spain is "the history of an absence" (18). For decades it has been assumed that almost no evidence exists of a theatrical tradition between the Auto de los Reyes Magos, composed at the end of the twelfth century, and the plays of Juan del Encina, the first of which appeared in the Cancionero de 1496. However, Gómez Moreno argues that records attesting to payments for scenery and costumes and references to paratheatrical productions do survive. Furthermore, scholars are now recovering some missing theatrical texts or finding references to them in other works. To gain an understanding of the breadth of theatrical activity in medieval Iberia, argues Gómez Moreno, we need to expand our horizons. Gómez Moreno examines the liturgical theater of Toledo and elsewhere, as well as momos and other medieval theatrical forms in Portugal. He concludes, "Modern scholarship has allowed us to perceive, albeit in indirect ways, the existence of a vigorous tradition of performance during the Middle Ages in Spain" (35). The following four chapters examine different aspects of the theater of the Golden Age, impugning some widely held assumptions. In "Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca and Tirso de Molina: Spain's Golden Age Drama and its Legacy," Jonathan Thacker considers Lope de Vega, the most influential playwright of Spain's Golden Age, not only as a creator of plays but also as a theatergoer. Thacker believes that Lope's greatest source of inspiration was his experience as a spectator. By watching plays, he learned what pleased the audience. If Lope rejected the neo-Aristotelian rules that...

Staging “Islam”: Sefi Atta's <em>Hagel auf Zamfara</em> [<em>The Sentence</em>] at the Theater Krefeld/Mönchengladbach

In October 2011 the Theater Krefeld/Mönchengladbach, Germany, staged the worldwide premiere of Sefi Atta's play The Sentence in a German translation entitled Hagel auf Zamfara. Drawing on judicial sentences of death-by-stoning in North Nigeria in the early 2000s, Hagel auf Zamfara recounts the story of an unnamed Muslim woman unjustly sentenced to death for adultery. As the play progresses, the protagonist not only becomes a symbol of perceived injustice for the Nigerian and international media, it also transpires that the woman has been interpellated, and actively participates, in a system based on gender inequality and religious bigotry. Drawing on both the dramatic and the theatrical text of the play, this article examines different dimensions of "Islam" as contained, imagined, and staged in Hagel auf Zamfara; it also pays attention to gendered roles, violence, perceptions of justice, and the role of fantasy. Aimed at a largely secular, white, middle-class audience at a German Stadttheater, the production rejected an oversimplified, one-sided staging of "Islam" as "menace" (Said xx), but instead allowed for multiple viewpoints to be expressed in all their contradiction and ambiguity.

Communication Model “Self — The Other” in the Theater of Eugene Grishkovets

This article focuses on the semiotic system of the theater of Grishkovets. The special attention is given to the communication model “Self — The other”. With two paradigms “Self — The body — The other” and “Self like body — for The other” in the theatrical text of Grishkovets, the author underlines that paradigm “Self — The other” is performed mainly in the presence of the storyteller — mono-hero — Grishkovets and the image “The other” on the stage. In the first paradigm “Self — The body — The other” the author analyses different types of the characters and relationships between these characters, considers that the model “Self — The body — The other” serves as a demonstration of strained relations of the characters between their inner and outer worlds. The second paradigm “Self like body — for The other” focuses on the crucial question of the deprivation of the self-identification of the heroes. The author gives the characteristics of the “Self” and “The other”, believes that the “Self” is served as the beyond-household and beyond-existential element, which belongs to the category of the present time and the future time. “The other” symbolizes the way the past experience is destructed, which represents the past time of the hero. In the end, the author concludes that the communication model “Self-The other” has a semiotic character of the stage embodiment, including the difference of the temporary parameter in one space: past-present-future.

What Was Tragedy? Theory and the Early Modern Canon by Blair Hoxby

Reviewed by: What Was Tragedy? Theory and the Early Modern Canon by Blair Hoxby Marta Albalá Pelegrín Blair Hoxby. What Was Tragedy? Theory and the Early Modern Canon. Oxford UP, 2015. 366 Pp. IN TIMES OF CHAOS, tragedy has been the spirit or the ghost that hovers over history. Tragedy has also been particularly long-lived as a theatrical genre, one whose aesthetic has changed over the course of the centuries, and with it, so too, its appraisal by critics. What Was Tragedy? reflects recent interest in reception studies, as some of its chapters diligently consider the performance history and success of a variety of theatrical texts, some now forgotten (as is the case of Stefonio’s Crispus), some relegated to a secondary position within the corpus of extremely canonical authors (as is the case of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra). With a conceptual-history bent, What Was Tragedy? is an in-depth reflection on the construction of literary theories across time; its ultimate goal is demonstrating “that the philosophy of the tragic is an obstacle to our interpretation of most of the tragedy that was produced in early modern Europe” (293). As the title reminds us, there is not a single definition able to encompass tragedy through time, and delving into the history of tragedy means delving into its past meanings, what it was as opposed to what it is for us. Hoxby’s book is divided into two parts, The Philosophy of the Tragic and the Poetics of Tragedy and The World We Have Lost. Part 1, consisting of chapters 1–2, sets out the theoretical basis of the book, while part 2, consisting of chapters 3–6, incorporates case studies of particular tragedies, each with varying aims and often accompanied by an overview of the performance history of the works in question. Chapter 1, “Our Tragic Culture,” reviews theories of tragedy developed by the German idealist tradition and assesses their influence in twentieth-century conception of tragedy. Special attention is given to a range of 1960s-era scholars, including Jean-Pierre Vernant, who stressed that an alien subjectivity such as that of the Greek tragedy “could not be properly understood apart from its social and cultural context” (37). Following this idea, Hoxby situates himself among more recent critics such as Terence Cave, Terry Eagleton, and Simon Goldhill, while at the same time distinguishing himself from them by “putting emphasis on pathos” and by confining his book “to a historical period with a coherent poetics of tragedy” [End Page 163] (40). Hoxby’s aim, therefore, as he states, is to “redefine tragedy in trans-historical terms,” setting early modern literary theory “in dialogue with rival ideas that have existed in other historical moments” (41). To conceptualize early modern tragedies, Hoxby relies on five propositions: (1) “Great drama need not be the drama of a nation” (41); (2) “Organic form is not superior to beautiful design” (44); (3) “Tragedy is a theatrical rather than a poetic art” (47); (4) “The passions are dramatic units of crucial significance in early modern tragedy” (48); and (5) “Not only the naive but also the sophisticated and seemingly modern aspects of ancient theater have value” (51). As the subsequent chapters unfold, these five propositions serve as the skeleton of the book’s overall argument. Chapter 2, “An Early Modern Poetics of Tragedy,” delves into early modern theories of tragedy while analyzing relevant period vocabulary for today’s reader. The chapter relies both on Aristotle’s Poetics and on the myriad interpretations of his text that emerged out of humanist milieux of early modern Italy. As Hoxby explains, “early modern critics often used Aristotle’s terms as a scaffold on which to hang a vast collection of ancient testimonies that elucidated, complicated, or contradicted Aristotle” (57). While the chapter provides terminology and definitions key to understanding the early modern poetics of tragedy, it fails to provide a full portrait of the vast debates and the varied theoretical currents surrounding the issue in early modern Europe. A project as ambitious as that of recovering “what early modern tragedy was” in a single volume must necessarily have its blind spots. One example concerns the chapter...

The Irish Stage: A Legal History by W. N. Osborough

Reviewed by: The Irish Stage: A Legal History by W. N. Osborough Deirdre Oleary THE IRISH STAGE: A LEGAL HISTORY. By W. N. Osborough. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2015; pp. 352. As he opens his The Irish Stage: A Legal History, W. N. Osborough is quick to concede that the study of the history of the Irish theatre is itself a rich and varied genre, and the justification for another work on the subject might not be immediately obvious. But his ambitious and extensively detailed survey and analysis of the legal applications, patents, transfers of ownership, laws, and codicils surrounding Irish theatre from the seventeenth to the late twentieth century are distinctive in their focus. While other Irish theatre scholars, notably Christopher Morasch, John Harrington, and Eamonn Jordan, have examined Irish theatrical history primarily chronologically and through the lens of dramaturgical analysis, Osborough largely omits a consideration of dramatic literature from his study. Instead, he provides exhaustive documentation on changes in theatre patents, reviews of privy councils, newspaper accounts, political pamphlets, acts of Parliament, and so on to further contextualize the evolution of theatre in Ireland as inextricably tied to Irish law. While other Irish theatre texts may focus on the entertainments and dramatic offerings as reflecting the evolving Irish national character and cultural interests of the people, Osborough examines the legal maneuvers and political acts that exercised limitations on the types of performances allowed at various theatres, and considers how these limitations influenced the development of particular genres and entertainments. The book is largely geared to Irish theatre scholars and legal scholars and provides valuable contributions to the extensive body of Irish theatre scholarship. The Irish Stage is organized chronologically across fifteen chapters, beginning with the creation in 1638 of the office of the Master of the Revels in Ireland. The original Master of the Revels, James Ogilby, and his successors are the focus of much of chapter 1, as they individually navigate the nascent Irish theatre landscape (exclusively concentrated in Dublin) against the changing political climate of Britain. Osborough notes the changes in theatrical patents, the theatrical threat posed by an emboldened Sir William Davenant and Sir Thomas Killigrew in London in 1660, and the ever-changing occupiers and owners of Ireland's original theatre, Smock Alley. This chapter is followed by an examination of the theatrical regulation in Britain from the early eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth. Some theatre scholars might rightly contest the choice of relying heavily (as Osborough does) upon British theatre historical practice (which was far larger, catered to a more diverse audience, and had significant legal and organizational differences) to document the Irish theatre. To that point, Osborough argues that Ireland's patents, theatrical structure, and legal oversight are informed and shaped by British theatrical practice, and that the Irish law surrounding theatre is best understood with sufficient description of British theatrical precedent. Where there are differences—for example, the lack of a Lord Chamberlain for Ireland—they are extensively documented. The next three chapters focus on the Dublin Stage Regulation Act, first introduced in 1779 by Thomas Sheridan as a thinly veiled attempt to preserve his theatrical monopoly in Dublin, passed by Parliament in 1785, and vigorously challenged by the Dublin Corporation the same year. Osborough details the debates in the House of Commons and the petitions filed in opposition to the act, which focused on the discrepancy in fees for putting on a play in an unlicensed theatre (£300 in Ireland, compared with £100 in Britain). Chapters 6-7 consider performances in Britain that were regulated under the Act of 1737 and the often creative means by which producers and managers sought to skirt the definitions of what constituted a regulated performance, in accordance with the act. These include the various attempts by managers to have their performances categorized as other forms of entertainment, as well as oftentimes ingenious staging methods employed to escape classification as a "stage play." Osborough notes as example the court case of Day v. Simpson, about an 1865 production of Pepper's Ghost by James Day that was performed "from a chamber below the stage—a complicated pattern of lenses and mirrors being...

The Role of Textual Theory and the Future of Political Practice: The “Third Term” as a Key for Solidarity

The Role of Textual Theory and the Future of Political Practice: The “Third Term” as a Key for Solidarity

The role of the Kurdish Press (1898-1920) in the deployment and Emergence of the Kurdish Literary Arts and Literary Criticism

Literary output is the sum of the process of artistic creativity. Literary study is as science to literature which forms one side of the triangle, along with two other sides of the literary theory and the history of literature. Literary criticism studies and analyzes literary outcomes and evaluates them from intellectual, literary and artistic points of view. Due to the delay in the appearance of books and printing presses and publishing houses in the Kurdish language, the Kurdish press since its inception at the beginning of the twentieth century has played an active role and has undertaken the task of spreading the products of Kurdish literature where poetry formed the greatest part. Also, the Kurdish press has contributed from its early beginning, especially the period between the emergence of the first newspaper in Kurdish in 1898 to the ends of the first World war in 1920 and the emergence of modern literary arts in the Kurdish language, whether prose (Essay, Artistic story, and theatrical texts) or poetic types (Epic, poetic story and prose poem). Moreover, the first attempts to study literary criticism emerged and later evolved into an integrated technical literary work according to the plans and curricula to become an integrated cash scientific criticism theory. This study examines the role of the Kurdish press, between the period (1898-1920) in the deployment and the emergence of Kurdish literary prose and poetry, as well as tracing the footsteps of the emergence and development of the critical process in the Kurdish literature in that time period exclusively.

Celebrating heteroglossic hybridity: Ready-to-assemble Broadway-style musicals in South Korea

Abstract British and American musical theatre has made a major contribution to the globalization of musical theatre at large, and the way in which it has been remounted and circulated in international productions has recently caught the attention of scholars. This has been particularly the case when ready-to-assemble replica Broadway-style productions have been remounted. In these productions, shows have been duplicated, from stage props and blocking to the intonation of lines, rather than having their material adapted by taking into consideration the different cultures, historical contexts and audiences. The only two elements in international remountings that are not duplicated are the performers and language; accordingly, translation of the source language into the local language becomes the cardinal factor in local audience reception. This article investigates Korean remountings of the West-End-originated, Broadway-style The Phantom of the Opera (2001), using this as a case study to illuminate a larger and multivocal debate on the remounting of international productions of Broadway-style musicals. It is my attempt to further strengthen Bruce Kirle’s emphasis on the incompleteness of theatrical texts by expanding Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories on heteroglossia and creative understanding to musical theatre, in order to argue that these two concepts serve as powerful indicators of the translation of international Broadway-style musical remountings.

The people and the Wayang by Franz Magnis Suseno: translation and introduction by Verena H. Meyer

This is a review of the much awaited “Kita dan Wayang” (Jakarta: Lembaga Penunjang Pembangunan Nasional, 1982, ISBN 9795113062; ASIN: D7HUU), an interpretation of the Indonesian puppet theatre texts, written by Franz Magnis Suseno, a scholar-priest and activist settled in Indonesia, and its English version, translated with an introduction by Verena Meyer, a research scholar in the field (International Journal of Dharma Studies, 2016, 4:3 DOI: 10.1186/s40613-016-0028-6).

Between the genetic criticism and cultural history: the theatrical texts of Nivalda Costa

Propõe-se realizar uma leitura crítica do dossiê da Série de estudos cênicos sobre poder e espaço, da dramaturga baiana Nivalda Costa, desenvolvida no período da Ditadura Militar. Para tanto, adotam-se os pressupostos da Crítica Genética e da História Cultural, a fim de ler e interpretar movimentos de gênese, ressaltando dimensões sociais e históricas dos documentos que compõem aquele projeto. O diálogo entre tais campos permite o estudo de determinada prática de escrita, a partir da configuração de uma rede, em que se podem emergir tendências socioculturais.