Author: Ute Berns File Type: pdf In this volume an international cast of scholars explores conceptions of the self in the literature and culture of the Early Modern England. Drawing on theories of performativity and performance, some contributors revisit monological speech and the soliloquy - that quintessential solo performance - on the stage of Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson. Other authors move beyond the theatre as they investigate solo performances in different cultural locations, from the public stage of the pillory to the mental stage of the writing self. All contributors analyse corporeality, speech, writing and even silence as interrelated modes of self-enactment, whether they read solo performances as a way of inventing, authorizing or even pathologizing the self, or as a mode of fashioning sovereignty. The contributions trace how the performers appropriate specific discourses, whether religious, medical or political, and how they negotiate hierarchies of gender, rank or cultural difference. The articles cut across a variety of genres including plays and masques, religious tracts, diaries and journals, poems and even signatures. The collection links research on the inward and self-reflexive dimension of solo-performances with studies foregrounding the public and interactive dimension of performative self-fashioning. The articles collected here offer new perspectives on Early Modern subjectivity and will be of interest to all scholars and students of the Early Modern period.

Author: Bertolt Brecht File Type: pdf Described by Brecht as a gangster play that would recall certain events familiar to us all, Arturo Ui is a witty and savage satire of the rise of Hitler - recast by Brecht into a fictional, small-time Chicago gangsters takeover of the citys greengrocery trade in the 1930s. The satirical allegory combines Brechts Epic style of theatre with black comedy and overt didacticism.Using a wide range of parody and pastiche - from Al Capone to Shakespeares Richard III and Goethes Faust - Brechts compelling parable continues to have relevance wherever totalitarianism appears today.Written during the Second World War in 1941, the play was one of the Berliner Ensembles most outstanding box-office successes in 1959, and has continued to attract a succession of major actors, including Leonard Rossiter, Christopher Plummer, Antony Sher and Al Pacino. This version of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is by Canadian theatre academic Jennifer Wise.

Author: Rosalind Krauss File Type: pdf

Author: Roberto Bolaño File Type: epub A stunning collection of short stories - mostly dealing with the sex trade - by the late Chilean master and author of The Savage Detectives. The Return contains thirteen unforgettable stories that seem to tell what Bolano called the secret story, the one well never know. Bent on returning to haunt you, Bolanos tales might concern the unexpected fate of a beautiful ex-girlfriend, or soccer, witchcraft, or a dream of meeting the poet Enrique Lihnthey always surprise. Consider the title story a young partygoer collapses in a Parisian disco and dies on the dance floor. Just as his soul is departing his body,it realizes strange happenings are afoot around his now dead body and what follows next defies the imagination (except Bolanos own). **htmlFrom Publishers Weekly Translator Chris Andrews deserves enormous recognition for introducing America to Bolano with Night in Chile back in 2003. Now, with the Bolano renaissance in full swing and the backlog of untranslated works narrowing, Andrews culls the short stories omitted from Last Evenings on Earth. Save perhaps the title storyin which a dead man follows his body through an increasingly noxious series of abusesthe stories have a subdued and sketchlike quality, from underworld confessionals like Snow and Joanna Silvestri, to tender reminiscences like Cell Mates and the heartbreaking missed romance of Clara. Devotees of Bolano will recognize the writers merciless (and often humorous) fusion of high art and dark human nature in small flights like Meeting with Enrique Lihn and comic bloodbaths like William Burns, though mercy plays a surprising role in several of the stories, as in the incredible Prefiguration of Lalo Cura, in which the cast and crew of high-concept pornos face their late-life requiem. The initiated and dedicated have a welcome feast of small desolations. (July) Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. From Booklist The late Bolano, a Chilean writer whose posthumous reputation only grows as more of his works are translated into English, practiced the short story and the novel with equal genius. This new collection of 13 stories proves to be a defining sampler of Bolanos style, thematic concerns, and favored character types. Stories involving love on the skids, sexual situations gone wrong, and breakups looming around the corner find their place in the rough-and-tumble lives of cops, gangsters, writers, political fomenters (At the time I used to hang out with anarchists and radical feminists and the books I read were more or less influenced by the company I was keeping), and even a ghost and a necrophiliac. Obvious autobiographical elements populate his stories, especially those dealing with writers lives and repressive dictatorial times (Bolano suffered imprisonment during the Pinochet era). At odds, intriguingly, with the bleak characters he depicts is his sensitive style (She had long brown hair, and her simple ponytail gathered all the grace in the world). --Brad Hooper html