Exploring Textual Action

Edited By Lars Sætre, Patrizia Lombardo, Anders M. Gullestad

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.

Sujets

• Philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: Aarhus University Press
• Date de parution: 31 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9788779347267
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

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Exploring Textual
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Text, Action
and Space
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 fction, poetry and flm. 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” Exploring
life.
TextualUsing an alternative and dynamic method and suggesting a
direction towards the detailed analysis of literature, art, media Actionand culture, Exploring Textual Action addresses current debates
within the humanities.
Edited by Lars Sætre,
Patrizia Lombardo,
Anders M. Gullestad
ISBN 978 87 7934 460 0
Aarhus University Press Aarhus University Pressa
Omslag_ExploringTextualAction.indd 1 19/11/10 14.18
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oExploring Textual ActionExploring Textual Action
Edited by Lars Sætre,
Patrizia Lombardo,
Anders M. Gullestad
aAarhus University Press | Exploring Textual Action
Acta Jutlandica. Humanities Series 2010/5
© The authors and Aarhus University Press 2010
Cover design: Jørgen Sparre
Cover illustration: Lee Miller: “Portrait of Space”, 1937.
© Lee Miller Archives, England 2010. All rights reserved.
ISSN 0065‑1354 (Acta Jutlandica)
ISSN 0901‑0556 (Humanities Series 5)
ISBN 978 87 7934 726 7
Aarhus University Press
Aarhus
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8200 Aarhus N
Denmark
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2400 Copenhagen NV
Denmark
www.unipress.dk
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www.oxbowbooks.com
Published with the fnancial support of the University of Bergen, The Research
Council of Norway and the Faculty of Humanities at the University of
Bergen.‑
Contents
Preface: Exploring Textual Action 7
Part 1:
Elaborations
J. Hillis Mille Ur,niversity of California, Irvine
Performativity /Performativity 31
1 2
Svend Erik Larsen A, arhus University
“Speak again. Speak like rain” –
The Mediality of Performance 59
Lars Sætre U, niversity of Bergen
Powering Textual Action:
Duras’ Space in
Véra Baxter ou Les Plages de l’Atlantique 83
Erika FischerLichte, Freie Universität Berlin
Culture as Performance –
Developing a Concept of Performance 123
Mads Thygesen A, arhus University
Interaction and Framing in the
Performance Insideout by Sasha Waltz 141
Randi Koppen, University of Bergen
Re-thinking the “Performative Turn”:
Fashioned Bodies, Sartorial Semiotics
and the Performance of Culture, 1900-1930 165
Patrizia Lombard Uo,niversity of Geneva
Bazin, Bresson and Scorsese:
Performative Power and the Impure Art of
Cinema 187Part 2:
Explorations
Atle Kittang U , niversity of Bergen
Topography and Textual Action in the
Urban Prose of Balzac and Breton 223
Ragnhild Evang Reinto Un,niversity of Oslo
Producing “…images we never
saw before we remembered them”.
Memory as Textual Action in Walter
Benjamin’s Berliner Kindheit um
Neunzeh nhundert 253
Tone Selboe U, niversity of Oslo
Virginia Woolf
and the Ambiguities of Domestic Space 283
Asbjørn Grønstad U ,niversity of Bergen
Dead Time, Empty Spaces: Landscape as
Sensibility and Performance 311
Anders Kristian Stran Udn, iversity of Bergen
Textual Action
in W.C. Williams’ Paterson 333
Jorunn S. Gjerden U , niversity of Bergen
The Reader Address as Performativity
in Nathalie Sarraute’s L’Usage de la parole 367
Anders M. Gullestad U ,niversity of Bergen
Loving the Alien:
Bartleby and the Power of Non-Preference 395
Contributors 423
Index 429Exploring Textual Action
Preface
The present volume is the frst publication to stem from
the research project “Text, Action and Space. Performative
language and topographical patterns as converging areas in
1modern drama, prose fction and flm”, or “TAS” for short.
The individual essays collected in this anthology are the re‑
sult of shared investigations in an area where the concerns
of both aesthetic and cultural analysis meet. Initiating basic
research by approaching modern drama, prose fction, poetry
and flm in a focused inter ‑aesthetic framework, they discuss
the theoretical implications of some of the most important
debates within the Humanities during the last 50 years. These
1 “Text, Action and Space” was initiated by Lars Sætre and Atle Kit ‑
tang at the University of Bergen in 2006, with as project leaderSætre .
Along with these two, Patrizia Lombardo (University of Geneva)
and Svend Erik Larsen (Aarhus University) make up its leadership
group. For this volume, Ragnhild Evang Reinton (University of
Oslo) and Anders M. Gullestad (University of Bergen) have served as
additional members of the editorial group. TAS consists of scholars
from Norway, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and the United
States, and represents a plethora of disciplines in the Humanities:
comparative, Anglo ‑American, Germanic, Italian and French literary
studies, theatre studies, dramaturgy, and flm studies.
7are centered on three main, interrelated basic questions: re ‑
spectively, that of performativity, of space or topography , and
of the converging of genres and art forms .
To start with the last of the three, modernity has been
characterised by a vast move that can be traced in modern
literature and art up to contemporary media: the converg ‑
ing of genres, from the Romantic mélange des genres to the
present ruptures of the various artistic expressions,‑ dramati
cally reshaping their identities. Epic traits have entered mod ‑
ern drama; features of recent dramatic art have emerged in
prose fction; writers re ‑circulate the same materials in series
of works within drama and fction, sometimes also in flm
and TV. Partly inspired by literature, flm has cultivated its
paradoxical specifcity as an aesthetically “impure” and ‑ inter
medial art form; video installations have changed the world
of painting; the division between theatre and flm is becoming
increasingly blurred; the use of cyber tech nologies in special
effects has proliferated in flm and other media. And – as was
already the case for the founders of the Romantic literary
thjournal, the Athenaeum – during the 19 and particularly the
th20 century, criticism and philosophy have infuenced artists
to such a degree that fragments from different philosophers
and theorists from Søren Kierkegaard or Friedrich Nietzsche
to Jacques Derrida or Roland Barthes can appear as creative
elements in their works. Undoubtedly, the “impurity” of the
converging of genres marks aesthetic confgurations with an
imprint of other forms or media, pointing to an exchange
and fusion of their respective characteristics.
Why do genres and art forms converge ? In which contexts
are the shared forms inscribed? What aesthetic strategies are
made possible by such convergence ? What cultural effects
does it have? These and related questions are discussed in the
anthology in order to highlight how the aesthetic transactions
install changes with a vast existential and cultural impact on
8human perception, imagination, refection and interaction –
between people, as well as between people, nologies and tech
the material world. In particular, such an impact is the case
with the shared capacity of fction, drama, poetry and flm to
function as localised performatives. That capacity opens up
further questions: what is the relationship between space and
topographies, on the one hand, and performativity and textual
action, on the other? What existential contents, meanings or
values in the recent history of modernity do phenomena in
performati