Exploring Textual Action
Published on 31. December 2010
440 pages
978-87-7934-726-7 (ISBN)
Description
Exploring Textual Action questions how we analyse works of art after the performative turn and shows how the interplay of performativity (textual action), space and topography, and the converging of genres and art forms is essential in modern drama, theatre, prose fiction, poetry and film. The volume also fosters a keen concern for the development of congenial theory. Its 14 detailed essays analyse works of art ranging from Balzac, Melville and George Eliot, to Breton, Kafka, Benjamin, Blixen and Woolf; and from W.C. Williams, Bresson and Scorsese, to Sarraute, Duras, Reygadas, Dumont and Waltz. The approach of these studies discloses the art works as creative and dynamic utterances with active and shaping forces so powerful, and consequential, that they have the potential to transform human perception and blur clear distinctions between art and real life. Using an alternative and dynamic method and suggesting a direction towards the detailed analysis of literature, art, media and culture, Exploring Textual Action addresses current debates within the humanities.
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Anders M. Gullestad | Patrizia Lombardo
Exploring Textual Action
Book
03/2011
Aarhus University Press
€70.70
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Content
- Cover
- Title Page
- Colophon
- Contents
- Exploring Textual Action
- Preface
- Elaborations
- Explorations
- Acknowledgements
- Suggested Readings
- Part 1: Elaborations
- Performativity1/Performativity2
- J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine
- Daniel Deronda as fictional example
- Gwendolen's performativity
- Daniel's anomalous speech acts
- Works Cited
- "Speak again. Speak like rain" - The Mediality of Performance
- Svend Erik Larsen, Aarhus University
- The mediality of performance
- Text as performance
- The empire writes back
- The boundaries of performance
- "Holding each other's hands for safety"
- Works Cited
- Powering Textual Action: Duras' Space in Véra Baxter ou Les Plages de l'Atlantique
- Lars Sætre, University of Bergen
- I Preliminaries: theoretical elaborations
- II Véra Baxter or The Atlantic Beaches
- III First spatial segment
- IV Second spatial segment
- V Third spatial segment
- VI Converging phenomena in Véra Baxter or The Atlantic Beaches
- VII In conclusion
- Works Cited
- Culture as Performance - Developing a Concept of Performance
- Erika Fischer-Lichte, Freie Universität Berlin
- First argument: Interaction or co-presence of actors and spectators
- Second argument: Materiality and transitoriness
- Third argument: The emergence of meanings
- Fourth argument: The performance as event
- Conclusions
- Works Cited
- Interaction and Framing in the Performance Insideout by Sasha Waltz
- Mads Thygesen, Aarhus University
- Insideout - discursive frames
- The performance - mise en scène vs. autopoiesis
- Performative actions
- Conclusions and perspectives
- Works Cited
- Re-thinking the "Performative Turn": Fashioned Bodies, Sartorial Semiotics and the Performance of Culture, 1900-1930
- Randi Koppen, University of Bergen
- The performative turn
- Appropriations and re-deployments
- Quack, Quack
- Works Cited
- Bazin, Bresson and Scorsese: Performative Power and the Impure Art of Cinema
- Patrizia Lombardo, University of Geneva
- Bazin, Bresson and the impurity of cinema
- Quiet performative: minimalist gestures and actions
- The case of Scorsese
- Performing history, the past and the present
- Silent and spoken performative actions
- Works Cited
- Part 2: Explorations
- Topography and Textual Action in the Urban Prose of Balzac and Breton
- Atle Kittang, University of Bergen
- The labyrinths of Balzac's urban spaces
- Breton's trilogy: A presentation
- Love, encounter, textual action
- A surrealist love story
- Textual action and the dynamics of desire
- The feedback loop of texuality and life
- A brief concluding remark
- Works Cited
- Producing ".images we never saw before we remembered them". Memory as Textual Action in Walter Benjamin's Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert
- Ragnhild Evang Reinton, University of Oslo
- The aesthetic dimension
- Memory
- The language of things
- The child
- Works Cited
- Virginia Woolf and the Ambiguities of Domestic Space
- Tone Selboe, University of Oslo
- Houses of the past
- Sexuality and social culture
- Roger Fry and modern domestic architecture
- Aesthetics and domesticity in To the Lighthouse
- Works Cited
- Dead Time, Empty Spaces: Landscape as Sensibility and Performance
- Asbjørn Grønstad, University of Bergen
- Landscape - a condensed history
- The new landscape film
- Conceptions of landscape
- Landscape as sensibility, performance, duration
- Dead time, empty spaces
- Tropologies of inertia, slowness and appearing: Three cases
- Conclusion
- Works Cited
- Textual Action in W.C. Williams' Paterson
- Anders Kristian Strand, University of Bergen
- The structure of Paterson
- The pouring river
- The eddies and whirls of poetic language
- The river as "hints to composition"
- Conclusion
- Works Cited
- The Reader Address as Performativity in Nathalie Sarraute's L'Usage de la parole
- Jorunn S. Gjerden, University of Bergen
- Intersubjectivity and "the terrible desire to establish contact"
- Passion performative
- Narrating voice, anonymity and intimacy
- Reading as creation of sameness or as proximity of alterity
- Works Cited
- Loving the Alien: Bartleby and the Power of Non-Preference
- Anders M. Gullestad, University of Bergen
- Enter Bartleby
- An army of Bartlebys
- On the indeterminacy of "preferring not to"
- The mutating formula
- Works Cited
- Contributors
- Index
