ENGL 481 E: Seminar in Literary Theory & Criticism "Performance Theory"

Prof Julia Walker

With the rise of what has become known as "performance studies," the study of theatre and drama has grown to include a variety of disciplinary approaches, with methodologies borrowed from anthropology, sociology, philosophy, literary and cultural studies, and queer theory.  Theorists such as Joseph Roach, Jon Erickson, Rebecca Schneider, Elin Diamond, Philip Auslander, and Peggy Phelan have done much to expand the models we use to discuss theatrical performance as an embodied, spatial, temporal, cultural and political event.  In the first part of this course, we will survey recent work in the field in order to gain an overall sense of contemporary performance theory.  In the second part of the semester, we will discuss the applicability of these models to historical performance practices, examining John Bulwer's 17th-century treatises Chirologia and Chironomia, the late-18th century elocutionary and rhetorical theories of Thomas Sheridan, James Burgh, and Gilbert Austin, the 19th-century expressive theories of Franccois Delsarte, and the 20th-century divide between the avant-garde experimentalism of Vsevelod Meyerhold and Bertolt Brecht and the psychological realism of Constantin Stanislavski and Lee Strasburg.  After recalibrating our theoretical models according to the specific conditions of historical performance practices, students will bring them to bear upon their reading of plays by William Shakespeare, John Gay, Richard Wagner, Bertolt Brecht, and a film by Elia Kazan.

Assignments: one in-class presentation and one final seminar paper.