Performances of Authorial Presence and Absence

This book takes Roland Barthes's famous proclamation of 'The Death of the Author' as a starting point to investigate concepts of authorial presence and absence on various levels of text and performance. By offering a new understanding of 'the author' as neither a source of unquestioned authority nor an obsolete construct, but rather as a performative figure, the book illuminates wide-ranging aesthetic and political aspects of 'authorial death' by asking: how is the author constructed through cultural and political imaginaries and erasures, intertextual and intertheatrical references, re-performances and self-referentiality? And what are the politics and ethics of these constructions?

Enters into a dialogue with existing scholarship in critical theory, theatre and performance studies, cultural studies and philosophy to offer its own original conceptual paradigms Offers conceptual departures from key texts written by authors including Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, and the Russian Formalists Develops the concept of inter-theatricality as a performative dialogue

Autorentext

Silvija Jestrovic teaches in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. She is the author of Theatre of Estrangement: Theory, Practice, Ideology (2006) and Performance Space Utopia: Cities of War, Cities of Exile (2013).

Klappentext

This book takes Roland Barthes s famous proclamation of The Death of the Author as a starting point to investigate concepts of authorial presence and absence on various levels of text and performance. By offering a new understanding of the author as neither a source of unquestioned authority nor an obsolete construct, but rather as a performative figure, the book illuminates wide-ranging aesthetic and political aspects of authorial death by asking: how is the author constructed through cultural and political imaginaries and erasures, intertextual and intertheatrical references, re-performances and self-referentiality? And what are the politics and ethics of these constructions?

Inhalt

1. Chapter 1: The Paradox of the Author's Death: an Introduction.- 2. Chapter 2: Author as a Heteroglossic Figure.- 3. Chapter 3: Embodiment and Textualization.- 4. Chapter 4: Performing the Self.- 5. Chapter 5: Resurrection as Adaptation: (Re)Makes, Deconstructions and the Gun.- 6. Chapter 6: The Author is Present .- 7. Chapter 7: The Artist is (Meaningfully) Absent.- 8. Chapter 8: Coda: In Other Deaths.-

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