Performance and Modernity

Auteur

Julia A. Walker is Associate Professor of English and Drama, with joint appointments in the English and Performing Arts Departments at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of Expressionism and Modernism in the American Theatre: Bodies, Voice, Words (Cambridge University Press, 2005), along with numerous published essays.

Texte du rabat

How do ideas take shape? How do concepts emerge into form? This book argues that they take shape quite literally in the human body, often appearing on stage in new styles of performance. Focusing on the historical period of modernity, Performance and Modernity: Enacting Change on the Globalizing Stage demonstrates how the unforeseen impact of economic, industrial, political, social, and psychological change was registered in bodily metaphors that took shape on stage. In new styles of performance-acting, dance, music, pageantry, avant-garde provocations, film, video and networked media-this book finds fresh evidence for how modernity has been understood and lived, both by stage actors, who, in modelling new habits, gave emerging experiences an epistemological shape, and by their audiences, who, in borrowing the strategies performers enacted, learned to adapt to a modernizing world.

Contenu

1. Money: Transacting Value on the Romantic Stage; 2. The Railroad: The Throughline to Modern Consciousness on the Naturalist Stage; 3. The Nation-State: Eurhythmics and the Bohemian Model of Affiliation; 4. Advertising: Avant-Garde Provocations and the Commercialization of Aesthetic Taste; 5. Air Conditioning: Psychological Realism and the Circulation of 'Cool'.