The Poetics Of Difference And Displacement

Intercultural theater is a prominent phenomena of twentieth-century international theater. This books views intercultural theatre as a process of displacement and re-placement of various cultural and theatrical forces, a process which the author describes as 'the poetics of displacement'.

Diasporic Avant-Gardes draws into dialogue two differing traditions of poetic practice: the diasporic and the avant-garde. This interdisciplinary collection examines the unacknowledged affinities (and crucial differences) between avant-garde and diasporic formal strategies and social formations. The essays foreground the creation of experimental forms and investigate the specific contexts of cultural displacement and language use that inform their poetics.

The Methuen Drama Handbook of Interculturalism and Performance explores ground-breaking new directions and critical discourse in the field of intercultural theatre and performance while surveying key debates concerning interculturalism as an aesthetic and ethical series of encounters in theatre and performance from the 1960s onwards. The handbook's global coverage challenges understandings of intercultural theatre and performance that continue to prioritise case studies emerging primarily from the West and executed by elite artists. By building on a growing field of scholarship on intercultural theatre and performance that examines minoritarian and grassroots work, the volume offers an alternative and multi-vocal view of what interculturalism might offer as a theoretical keyword to the future of theatre and performance studies, while also contributing an energized reassessment of the vociferous debates that have long accompanied its critical and practical usage in a performance context. By exploring anew what happens when interculturalism and performance intersect as embodied practice, The Methuen Drama Handbook of Interculturalism and Performance offers new perspectives on a seminal theoretical concept still as useful as it is controversial. Featuring a series of indispensable research tools, including a fully annotated bibliography, this is the essential scholarly handbook for anyone working in intercultural theatre and performance, and performance studies.

Does gender have a poetics: What difference does gender make? How does it affect writing, reading, and the functions of text in society? The Poetics of Gender is a brilliant assembly of leading feminist critics whose collective effort presents the most up-to-date research on these important issues. The range of techniques and theories represented here are applied across a broad spectrum of texts and cultural forms, extending from women's writing of the Renaissance and the fiction of George Sand to the relation between quiltmaking and nineteenth-century literary forms, the pornography of Georges Bataille, and the theories of Julia Kristeva.

"This thesis examines representations of nation, race and gender in three postcolonial texts: Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children; Meena Alexander's autobiographical memoirs Fault Lines; and Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi's collection of short stories entitled Imaginary Maps. All three texts reconfigure conventional accounts of nationhood by positing fictions based on what I am calling the poetics of displacement. The diasporic perspective provides Salman Rushdie's novel with the ability to suggest hybrid identities arising from the experience of cultural migration. In Meena Alexander's autobiography, displacement is figured in terms of both a diasporic and feminist vision that allows for the deconstruction of masculinist narratives of identity and nation. Mahasweta Devi's short stories, by contrast, represent displacement in terms of the violences and dislocations suffered by the Indian subaltern as a result of ecological degradation and cultural uprootment. In looking at these differential articulations of displacement, this thesis thus attempts to illustrate that what is often seen as an unified body of postcolonial literature emerges from a heterogeneous set of textual practices which are the products of varying social, cultural, political and economic contexts. In this way, this thesis rethinks the categories of nation, race and gender in order to consider the bases upon which people make claims to identity along with the boundaries of inclusion or exclusion often invoked by such claims." --

The essays in this collection explore the concept of 'transubstantiation', its adaptations and transformations in English and European culture from the Elizabethans to the twentieth century. Favoring an interartistic and comparative perspective, a wide range of critical approaches, from the philosophical to the semiological, from cultural materialism to gender and queer studies, are brought to bear on authors ranging from Descartes, Shakespeare and Joyce, to Macpherson, Madox Ford, and Winterson, as well as on contemporary sculpture and an Italian adaptation of Conrad for the screen in an unusually comic vein. The volume, edited by Douglas Burnham of Staffordshire University and by Enrico Giaccherini of Pisa University, will be of interest to those concerned with the cultural history of Christianity and with the remarkable critical and theoretical insights generated by contemporary approaches to this traditional theme.

Situates the act of critical reading in the context of poetic aesthetics. This volume situates the act of critical reading in the context of poetic aesthetics. Running alongside recent post-structuralist theories, the textuality of such matters as literary discourse, history, media, philosophy and religion has emerged as a focal point of debate in the humanities. The essays here examine how questions of the canon, genres, and transformation of texts challenge the present epistemological situation; taking an interdisciplinary approach to textual readings, their methodology is drawn from a range of literary figures and critics, including Lessing, Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and Derrida. The study also addresses the controversial predicament of subjectivity asone of the key terms in current literary and historical scholarship.

Diaspora constitutes a powerful descriptor for the modern condition of the contemporary poet, the spokesperson for the psyche of America. The poems in American Diaspora; Poetry of Displacement focus on the struggles and pleasures of creating a home-physical and mental-out of displacement, exile, migration, and alienation. To fully explore the concept of diaspora, the editors have broadened the scope of their definition to include not only the physical act of moving and immigration but also the spiritual and emotional dislocations that can occur-as for Emily Dickinson and other poets - even in a life spent entirely in one location. More than one hundred and thirty contemporary poets reflect and mediate, rage and bless, as they tell their own stories. In short, this is an anthology of American poetry that draws upon the sensitivity, tenderness, rebelliousness, patience, and spirituality that point to the future of our nation.

This book is a historical study of the use of Asian theatre for modern Western theatre as practiced by its founding fathers, including Aurélien Lugné-Poe, Adolphe Appia, Gordon Craig, W. B. Yeats, Jacques Copeau, Charles Dullin, Antonin Artaud, V. E. Meyerhold, Sergei Eisenstein, and Bertolt Brecht. It investigates the theories and practices of these leading figures in their transnational and cross-cultural relationship with Asian theatrical traditions and their interpretations and appropriations of the Asian traditions in their reactional struggles against the dominance of commercialism and naturalism. From the historical and aesthetic perspectives of traditional Asian theatres, it approaches this intercultural phenomenon as a (Euro)centred process of displacement of the aesthetically and culturally differentiated Asian theatrical traditions and of their historical differences and identities. Looking into the displaced and distorted mirror of Asian theatre, the founding fathers of modern Western theatre saw, in their imagination of the 'ghostly' Other, nothing but a (self-)reflection or, more precisely, a (self-)projection and emplacement, of their competing ideas and theories preconceived for the construction, and the future development, of modern Western theatre.