Text Theory Research Articles

Teispool draamat: tekst nullindate teatris

The article examines the relations between Estonian dramaturgy and the rapidly renewing ‘post-dramatic’ theatre of the 2000s from two viewpoints: new text creation practices and how the poetics of texts have changed. In the 2000s, the share of original dramaturgy increased sharply: in the 1990s, about 25% of new productions were based on Estonian material, whereas by 2010 the percentage was 45%. A quite popular form was ‘director-dramaturgy’ (i.e. the director writes or compiles the text for production), which had started as early as the 1970s (e.g. works by Merle Karusoo and Mati Unt). Theatre criticism took up the concept of author’s theatre (e.g. Ivar Pollu), also emphasising one person’s control over both the text and directing the production. In this case, text-creation is processual: a text takes shape according to the author’s directorial strategies and the interaction between the director and the actors. The collective creation of texts and productions should be examined separately; this emerged powerfully in the 2000s and was primarily connected with smaller theatres. Quite often, text and production are created through the method of devising; the article tackles this approach on the basis of productions by Theatre NO99. In the case of group work, the issue of the text’s authorship is rather complicated, as it is a cooperative practice, where the authors’ functions are not clearly differentiated. The blending of text creation with theatre process influences the poetics of drama texts in various ways. The most important changes are as follows: a) a dominant or constituting role can be assumed by non-verbal means of theatre; the text written for them serves only as a general indication (e.g. the music in Uku Uusberg’s texts, and the methods of visual art in How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare of NO99); b) there is an instability in the text, which varies in different performances, resulting from improvisation as a strategy of text creation; c) a shift from the fictional to the factual, producing the impression of authenticity, e.g. by means of documentary material (e.g. Paavo Piik’s Panso ); d) monologue storytelling, usually autobiographical and documentary stories (e.g. Roy Strider’s The Rebels ); e) rewriting of classics continued (e.g. works by Mati Unt and Andrus Kivirahk). During the 2000s, the changes in Estonian dramaturgy have been more cutting than in the 1990s, a result of the tight intertwining of dramaturgic and directorial practices and strategies. In a wider perspective, the spread of new practices constitutes one part of the synchronisation of Estonian theatre with Western theatre, where the paradigm of post-dramatic theatre emerges. Legitimising post-dramatic theatre texts in the field of literature occurs more on an institutional basis and is based on individual cases rather than according to literary criteria.

The Political-Aesthetic Function of Song and Dance in Zimbabwean Theatre 1980–1996

This article focuses on the behaviour of the African body in performance as well as the internal organisation of the songs. In focusing on the body and mechanics of songs I want to investigate how the African body and vocal skill reflect, mediate and challenge the relations of domination and subordination between western dramatic theatre and indigenous cultural text. What identities of theatre emerge out of this process and how are they produced? I argue that Zimbabwean alternative theatre makers created a deconstructive theatre aesthetic, which adopted and separated elements of dramatic theatre for use in a radically new way. While the content of songs resists Rhodesian discourse, some of their stylistic features are adapted from western music making the notion of resistance an ambivalent one.

Ensuring Success in School is About More Than Getting A's: Layered Stories

I begin this paper with a reader’s theatre text that represents the multiple perspectives of a student, teacher, student teacher, and administrator about a high school class schedule change. In presenting a text that portrays multiple points of view upon what would seem to be an everyday experience in an urban high school, I aim to show the complexity of how different people in different roles respond and manage their context in response to a single policy decision. After the reader’s theater and before I continue with the rest of the paper, I invite you the reader to consider your interpretations of and associations with the text. I conclude by arguing that we need to be attuned to the complex ways that policy decisions inform and constrain the actions of people within educational contexts.Keywords: policy decisions; effects; urban schools; English language learners; layered stories; reader’s theater

Others, Spectatorship, and the Ethics of Verbatim Performance

In this article Patrick Duggan interrogates The Paper Birds' 2010 production Others to explore the political and ethical implications of embodying the (verbatim) texts of others. Built from a six-month exchange of letters between the company and a prisoner, a celebrity (a very non-committal Heather Mills, apparently), and an Iranian artist, Others fuses live music with verbatim and physical theatre texts to investigate the ‘otherness’ of women from vastly divergent cultural contexts. With equal measures of humour and honesty the performance deconstructs these voices both to highlight their particular concerns and problems and to interrogate larger issues relating to ‘others’ with whom we have conscious or unconscious contact. The ethical implications of continuing or discontinuing the correspondences with the three women are explored, and trauma and embodiment theories are used alongside Lévinasian and Russellian theories of ethics to ask what an encounter with such others might teach us about ourselves, about the traumatized other and about the ethics of encounter within performance texts. Patrick Duggan is Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Exeter. A practising director, he has also taught extensively in the UK and Ireland as well as in Germany and the United States. He is author of Trauma-Tragedy: Symptoms of Contemporary Performance (Manchester University Press, 2012) and co-edited Reverberations: Britishness, Aesthetics and Small-Scale Theatres (Intellect, 2013) and a special issue of the journal Performance Research ‘On Trauma’ (Taylor and Francis, 2011).

How the French Read

How the French Read Toril Moi (bio) For a long time, French intellectuals set the agenda for Anglophone critics' understanding of reading. In the 1960s, the journal Tel Quel, led by Philippe Sollers, could count on the collaboration of intellectuals and writers such as Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Derrida. Finely attuned to the most innovative intellectual movements of its time, Tel Quel set an ambitious intellectual agenda: to develop a radically modern theory of texts and textuality. In its pages, linguists and literary critics allied themselves with Marxists and other philosophers and with psychoanalysts to show us that the world had become word. The task of the critic was no longer to be the simple decoding of literary meaning, but to follow the slipstream of the forever elusive signifier, and thus to grasp the production of meaning in every medium. What came to be known as "French theory," or simply as "theory," exploded the traditional boundaries of literary criticism and prepared the ground for new kinds of critical interventions in new kinds of meaning making not just in literature but across media and technologies. Paradoxically, then, a revolutionary movement that began with writers and literary critics, and which took for granted that certain writers (Lautréamont, Mallarmé) had anticipated the new theoretical insights into the nature of language and signification, contributed to the undoing of the hegemony of literature and literary criticism in the humanities. All over the world, literary intellectuals followed the siren call from France. The old editors, philologists, and biographers in their elbow-patched tweed jackets and sagging corduroys were no match for the latest French haute culture. If 1966, which saw the publication of Foucault's The Order of Things and Lacan's Ecrits, remains the annum mirabilis of the new movement, 1967 runs a close second, for in that year Derrida published Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and Speech and Phenomena. When did it all come to an end? Was it with the news that Althusser had strangled his wife (1980)? With the death of Barthes (1980), Lacan (1981), and Foucault (1984)? With the publication of Kristeva's Black Sun [End Page 309] (1987)? Even Deleuze, who died in 1995, had published his major works by 1980. While each intellectual has his or her own specific trajectory, it is safe to say that by 1990, "French theory" had reached middle-age: still handsome, perhaps, but no longer an incandescent youth. In the English-speaking world, the legacy of "theory" lingers on, not just in the dominance of "critique" and the hermeneutics of suspicion, but in the widespread rejection of any mention of the acting and intending subject. Many critics remain persuaded that the subject is to be banished (the author is dead!), or if not entirely banished, then understood as a more or less performative effect of discourses or of the signifier or simply as an ideological illusion. For such critics, texts are not intentional acts or utterances, but simply effects of a specific logic of signification, or of the "materiality of the signifier." That there is a considerable tension between such views and the widespread Anglo-American investment in identity politics is obvious. For if the subject is dead, what does it matter whether the writer (or the reader) is a woman or a black American or a white bourgeois male? Of late, such beliefs have come under pressure. Gone are the days when Anglophone literary critics could take for granted that their task was to perform some form of ideological unmasking through close reading. We are now in the middle of a veritable revolution of ideas about reading. Dissatisfaction both with the paradigm of critique, in which the critic always appears as more knowing than the author, and with the paradigm of close reading, emerged already in 1997 when Eve Sedgwick contrasted the old "paranoid" with a new "reparative" reading.1 In 2000, Franco Moretti rejected the essentially canonizing "theological exercise" of close reading, defined as a "very solemn treatment of very few texts taken very seriously." Literary historians and critics faced with large quantities of data, he argued, should take up "distant reading": instead of reading the literary...

6, 7, 8. SINIF TÜRKÇE DERS KİTAPLARINDA YER ALAN TİYATRO METİNLERİ ÜZERİNE BİR İNCELEME

As a literary genre, theatre have to exist in 6th and 7th class course books which has a different place when compare the other genres. Since it has rich components and suitable to teach linguistic skills. The six course books which are accepted by MEB and still being used in schools are studied in this research. Theatre texts in this six books were invastigated. Original versions of this texts gathered. After the analyis of headlines of “Theatre Concept” and “Literary Kinds In Course Books” the method of study was mentioned. Than the original texts were compared to course book versions. The differences are questioned according to various aspects. As aresult it is found that theatre texts in course books are disqualified. Another finding is simple and short texts exist in course books.

Exploring a Multilingual Digital Edition of Early Modern European Theater

The Classics of Early Modern European Theater (EMOTHE) project, based at the University of Valencia (Spain) and directed by Professor Joan Oleza, represents a significant expansion, in a European direction, of the former experience of the international research team led by Oleza on early modern Spanish theater and new research tools and strategies. The group's previous focus was the creation of ARTELOPE, http://artelope.uv.es, a powerful database on Lope de Vega's plays (including summaries of their plots) published online in 2011.The main objective of EMOTHE is the creation of a repertory of classics of early modern European theatrical texts. The project's foundations have already been established by the ARTELOPE group, which has developed a database hosted on a server at the University of Valencia, where the different researchers have personalized privileges for remote access.1Included in the database is a repertory of plays from the four basic traditions of the early modern European theater (Italian, English, French, and Spanish) and the database uses the four corresponding languages. The edition of each play must contain at least two versions, one in the original language and the other in a language of translation. However, the aim is to present each play in the original language and in all three translations; there can also be different versions of the play. The structure is conceived as a galaxy of texts, as a set of planetary systems, in which each star (play) is the orbiting center of its planets, which are other texts related to it. These other texts may be translations of an original play into other languages (this is the most frequent case), but can also be different textual versions in the original language of that play, and may also be later adaptations of the play in the same language or in other languages. The database, for example, allows room for other texts of the same play reflecting different early testimonia in their original language, like in the case of La Estrella de Sevilla, a drama that has come down to us through two very different ancient testimonia. Also it is possible to insert subsequent adaptations, including those versions in different languages: this is, for instance, the case of the Italian comedy Gl'Ingannati, by the Intronati di Siena, adapted (not translated) into Spanish by Lope de Rueda as Los enganados, and the case of La verdad sospechosa, by Juan Ruiz de Alarcon, adapted to the French by Corneille with the title of Le Menteur. Some exceptional cases showing the European circulation of an extremely popular theme will incorporate more adaptations and derivative versions than translations: that is the case of plays featuring the figures of Don Juan or Faustus, for example.The original texts consist of reliable scholarly editions. Permissions to use already existing critical texts are requested, and, if necessary, copyright is paid. The team counts on the collaboration of prestigious editors who are specialists in the different theatrical traditions. In the case of the translations, we attempt to use translations of historical value, which exemplify the circulation of texts in Europe since the sixteenth century. If they cannot be found or do not exist, we use either translations by scholars associated with the team who transfer us their rights, or translations commissioned and subcontracted to specialists. A prose translation will be used if an existing verse translation cannot be found or if a new translation into verse is not feasible.The team's work is structured according to three research lines. Line 1 structures the data that is to be inserted into the different sections of the EMOTHE database and introduces the different versions of a text, where they are marked up in XML/TEI language through a tool already designed for this purpose, and prepared for its subsequent Web and EPUB publication. …

La figura de la Malinche en la literatura hispana del siglo XX

The article analyses the figure of La Malinche in three least-known theatrical texts of the 20th century Hispanic Literature: La aprendiz de bruja of the cuban writer, Alejo Carpentier, Todos los gatos son pardos of the mexican Carlos Fuentes and the spanish Ramón Sender’s Jubileo en el Zócalo. Starting from the historical events and the reality will be examined her enigmatic rol, her tragic and contradictory destination in these fictions. The different views of the three works make it possible to present the indian woman’s and her nation’s identity.

The Text and the Line of Action: Re-conceiving Watching the Script

This article discusses the creation of various prototypes of Watching the Script, a reading tool designed to enhance users’ interactions with theatrical texts by providing three key tools: a panel with an overview of the entire document; a reading view that shows the text in readable scale; and a stage view that shows text as speeches and associates them with coloured dots representing characters. The latter feature liberates speeches from their typographical sequence and associates them with mobile character dots, thus focusing the user’s attention of smaller units of text and the relationship between the text and the speaker.

Escritura femenina y cruce de culturas: aplicaciones en la dramaturgia de Caryl Churchill

La escritura femenina es una de las estrategias para confrontar a los mecanismos patriarcales construidos por la lógica occidental. A la luz de esta propuesta se han levantado diversas voces-otras que, en un ejercicio transdisciplinario, la han acogido para potenciar sus líneas de expresión y enriquecer sus discusiones y debates. Ese es el caso del cruce entre cultura y escritura bisexual y algunas de sus representaciones en el teatro contemporáneo. Los contextos culturales-postcoloniales desde los cuales se nutren las relaciones entre género y cultura estimulan a los creadores teatrales y les impulsan a exponer ese intercambio dialógico. El objetivo de este trabajo, por tanto, es observar cómo estos cruces son llevados al texto teatral - como escritura femenina - por la dramaturga británica contemporánea Caryl Churchill.

‘Giving’ and ‘Making’ in Early Runic Epigraphy

A survey of the early Germanic etymological semantics of 'giving' and 'making' is presented in light of the recent reaffirmation that early Nordic *taujan is etymologically related to Old Norse tœja 'grant, bestow, help, assist'. Contextualising the early runic fabricatory and dedicatory inscriptions in terms of sociological, textual and anthropological theory, a new interpretation of early runic pragmatics is developed. The new approach to early runic performance proferred seeks to explain the broader function (and context) of epigraphic production, not merely the most logical reading of individual texts. The early runic pragmatics of 'giving' and 'making' are employed as an analytical frame in which to analyse the socio-cultural as well as linguistic meaning of a series of both functionally and textually related, often significantly stylised Iron Age epigraphs found on a range of early Scandinavian media: runestones, moor finds and migration-era amulets.

From Alice to Alana: Sexualities and Children's Cultures in the Twenty-First Century

From Alice to Alana:Sexualities and Children's Cultures in the Twenty-First Century Lance Weldy (bio) and Thomas Crisp (bio) Welcome to our ending. As editors, we are referring, on a composition level, to the timing of our writing of this introduction. While it has been the subject of regular conversation between us, for logistical reasons it has been the final piece written for this special issue. This is partly because the content of this introductory essay was dependent upon securing our cover art and selecting the final articles for this issue. More philosophically, by deciding to open this essay with a "welcome to our ending," we hope to refer to the twenty-first-century demise of the sexually-innocent child. Of course, the preceding is a loaded, even clichéd, sentiment that operates under the culturally held assumption that there ever was a beginning to an innocence of the child—a notion challenged by such scholars as Anne Higonnet, James Kincaid, Richard Mohr, Tison Pugh, Jacqueline Rose, and many others. Nevertheless, the following essays invite further conversation about the controversial relationship between children and sexual cultures. It may be difficult to believe that it has been nearly fifteen years since the publication of Kenneth Kidd's special issue of the Quarterly on "lesbian/ gay literature for children and young adults" in 1998. In what has become a seminal introductory essay, Kidd explores the advent of children's and young adult literature with gay/lesbian themes, challenging notions of the genre as a post-1969 phenomenon. By pointing to representations of same-sex friendships and relationships among characters in children's literature, Kidd provides queer readings of canonical children's texts in an effort to "explore the range, intensity, and social resonances of same-sex friendships and relationships that are already central to writing for and about young people" (117). [End Page 367] Granted, in the years that have passed since the publication of Kidd's special issue, representations of queer characters are still limited. Nevertheless, the existence and range of ways in which gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender characters are depicted in children's and young adult texts has been the subject of several critical texts and anthologies. Perhaps most prominent among these are Michael Cart and Christine A. Jenkins's categorization (based upon the work of Rudine Sims Bishop) and analysis in The Heart Has Its Reasons: Young Adult Literature with Gay/Lesbian/Queer Content, 1969-2004 (2006); and Michelle Ann Abate and Kenneth Kidd's Over the Rainbow: Queer Children's and Young Adult Literature (2011), a collection of new and reprinted essays that queer historical (or "classic") children's texts, explore cultural politics surrounding lesbian/gay issues and families, or advocate for or model queer theories of children's textuality. Such explorations parallel the increasingly complex ways in which gender and sexuality are both played with and exploited in popular culture: take, for instance, Andrej Pejić, a self-identified male who makes his living as a female fashion model. The broadening interest in exploring and problematizing queer and gendered themes in scholarly books, articles, and conference papers testifies to the fact that this genre stands on its own as a body of literature worthy of critical discourse. As books for children and young adults have begun further exploring and complicating the topic of sexual identities, there have also been an increasing number of texts that push the cultural boundaries surrounding children and sexuality more generally. Popular constructions of the child continue to reflect society's simultaneous preoccupation with and repulsion by the notion of a sexualized child. As Stephen Bruhm and Natasha Hurley write, "There is currently a dominant narrative about children: children are (and should stay) innocent of sexual desires and intentions. At the same time, however, children are also officially, tacitly, assumed to be heterosexual" (ix). In Innocence, Heterosexuality, and the Queerness of Children's Literature (2011), Tison Pugh further explores the paradoxical relationship between proclamations of childhood innocence and the ways in which (primarily heterosexual) sexuality pervades texts written for children and young adults. He argues, The fundamental tension between innocence (the ostensibly normative foundation of children's sexual identity) and heterosexuality...

Scenes from Italian Convent Life: An Anthology of Convent Theatrical Texts and Contexts. Elissa B. Weaver, ed.

<i>Scenes from Italian Convent Life: An Anthology of Convent Theatrical Texts and Contexts</i>. Elissa B. Weaver, ed.

The Shared Cognitive Intent of Science and Theatre

Science and theatre are generally thought to share no common cognitive ground for the simple reason that the former appeals to the intellect, whereas the latter appeals to the emotions. Contrary to this view, I claim that like scientific texts, theatrical texts evince a cognitive intent and that, despite obvious differences, both types show similarities on three cognitive levels: (a) the use of equivalent systems of representation and communication; (b) the operation of a mode of thinking; and (c) the embodiment of a rhetorical structure.

Translatability and untranslatability of Tae-sok Oh's theater

This paper intends to examine the translation strategy of the English translation and publication of Tae-sok Oh's plays. The translation of a less commonly used language into the hegemonic language often requires more than a transfer of the textual dimension because of the differences of cultural hegemony between the languages. Thus, attention should be paid to non-textual factors in translation, including the role of translators, the publication process, book reviews and stage performance, in order to increase the translatability of theater texts. Also, as a theater text is ‘an open and moving text’ by its very nature, often refusing to be fixed and confined, the textual authority of the source text is subject to challenge. However, the instability of the source text in theater can allow and encourage theater translators to become engaged in the more active deciphering and reconstructing process. A foreign cultural dimension of the text is best transferred with the help of non-verbal language on the stage. These factors will increase the general translatability of a theater text.

The Legacy of Mystery Science Theater 3000: Text, Textual Production, Paracinema, and Media Literacy

Paracinema, as proposed by Jeffrey Sconce, an activity in which audiences seek out marginalized films and both celebrate and ridicule them (535), is a practice that offers lessons in media literacy and textual production. Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K) is an important cultural artifact that offers these lessons to mainstream audiences. Using Brian Ott's theory of textual production, and Ott and Cameron Walter's theory of intertextuality as textual strategies, this article demonstrates MST3K is an enactment of paracinematic practice. MST3K is a text that teaches paracinema's media literacy, particularly in a world where interactivity is conflated with a truly active audience.

Securing the Past: Conservation in Art, Architecture and Literature

Securing the Past: Conservation in Art, Architecture and Literature

Securing the Past: Conservation in Art, Architecture and Literature

Securing the Past: Conservation in Art, Architecture and Literature

Beyond orality

Drawing on narratives and images related to mythology, I explore the relationships between textuality, territory, and ontology among Amazonian cultures, and specifically the Napo Runa of Amazonian Ecuador. My argument is that the Napo Runa, as well as other indigenous peoples in the Americas, have developed their own complex theories of textuality in which cosmology is inscribed within the body, the social, and the surrounding territorial world. Drawing on the theory of Amazonian perspectivism, I analyze the Aycha Yura or “Tree of Flesh” myth and its underlying aesthetic, geographic, and ontological qualities. This macro-myth intersects with local mythologies of particular trees, species, and spirits, forming a complex shared narrative world of local differentiation, self and other transformations, and experiences of territoriality. An engagement with the ethnographic realities of so-called oral cultures shows the untranslatable ontological contours of their textual worlds, worlds that are distorted and reified by Western notions of orality and literacy. (With supplementary sound files)

Trauma, Apocalypse, and Ethics in Israeli Theater

In her article "Trauma, Apocalypse, and Ethics in Israeli Theater" Zahava Caspi traces the traumatic experience as a point of departure in apocalyptic plays in Israeli literature. Caspi argues that in Israeli apocalyptic plays a critical gap opens up between the fictional narrative that ends with destruction and the theatrical apparatus that creates a sense of continuity. The theatrical text delivers a message to the audience inviting them to increase their engagement with and accountability for continuity not merely during the theatrical event, but more significantly, once the performance is over. The play's moral imperative to provide a "positive" ending to the apocalyptic narrative in the world outside the auditorium thus counters the effect of its ending on the stage. Caspi postulates that it is the active involvement with the play by its audience what makes theater a more ethical medium than any other.