This best-selling volume contains several of the German author's most controversial dramas, in which he radically questions how culture, myth, art, and social relations create history. Includes: "Hamletmachine, Correction, The Task, Quartet, Despoiled Shore," and "Gundling's Life." One of the most original theatrical minds of our time, Muller, who resided in East Berlin before his death in 1995, was a frequent collaborator of Robert Wilson.
This collection of articles by both German literature specialists and German theater experts grew out of the Comparative Drama Conference held annually between February and March from 1977 to 1999 in Gainesville, Florida. At the center of the contributors' work is the productive tension between the literary and the performance aspects of German drama and theater. At the same time, the reception is truly American, since the German playwrights, directors, theorists, and dramatists discussed have gone through creative filters in the researching, performing, and teaching of German drama and theater on various campuses across the United States during the last third of the twentieth century.
Many modern playwrights have dramatized the process of theatrical creation within their plays. In doing so, they have disregarded the "do not disturb" sign on the rehearsal room door, and have opened the art of theater to a particular kind of scrutiny. This scrutiny is unusual given the long-standing tradition of secrecy that surrounds theatrical rehearsal. Viewing modern drama generally as a drama that juxtaposes authority and freedom, and viewing contemporary criticism as essentially an extended debate on the issue of meaning's closure, this study invokes the critical perspectives M. M. Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, and Bertolt Brecht to create a general theory of rehearsal practice that differentiates it from the practice of performance. Working with notions of textual authority explored in a variety of critical contexts, this volume attempts to explore the theoretical ramifications of metatheatrical representations of rehearsal.
First broadcast in the not too distant past on a television station in Minnesota, Mystery Science Theater 3000 soon grew out of its humble beginnings and found a new home on cable television. This simple show about a man and two robots forced to watch bad movies became a cult classic, and episodes of the series continue to be packaged in DVD collections to this day. Before its final run, the show received Emmy nominations and a Peabody award for Television excellence, and in 2007, Time magazine declared MST3K one of “The 100 Best Shows of All-Time.” In Reading Mystery Science Theater 3000: Critical Approaches, Shelley S. Rees presents a collection of essays that examines the complex relationship between narrative and audience constructed by this baffling but beloved television show. Invoking literary theory, cultural criticism, pedagogy, feminist criticism, humor theory, rhetorical analysis, and film and media studies, these essays affirm the show’s narrative and rhetorical intricacy. The first section, “Rhetoric and the Empowered Audience,” addresses MST3K’s function as an exercise in rhetorical resistance. Part Two, “Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Genre,” analyzes MST3K through distinct generic traditions, including humor studies, traditional science fiction tropes, and the B-movie. Finally, the third section addresses postmodern and intertextual readings of the show. By providing an academic treatment of an iconic television phenomenon, these essays argue that Mystery Science Theater 3000 is worthy of serious scholarly attention. Though aimed at a discerning readership of academics, this collection will also appeal to the intellectual nature of the show’s well-educated audience.
This volume bears potent testimony, not only to the dense complexity of Hamlet’s emotional dynamics, but also to the enduring fascination that audiences, adaptors, and academics have with what may well be Shakespeare’s moodiest play. Its chapters explore emotion in Hamlet, as well as the myriad emotions surrounding Hamlet’s debts to the medieval past, its relationship to the cultural milieu in which it was produced, its celebrated performance history, and its profound impact beyond the early modern era. Its component chapters are not unified by a single methodological approach. Some deal with a single emotion in Hamlet, while others analyse the emotional trajectory of a single character, and still others focus on a given emotional expression (e.g., sighing or crying). Some bring modern methodologies for studying emotion to bear on Hamlet, others explore how Hamlet anticipates modern discourses on emotion, and still others ask how Hamlet itself can complicate and contribute to our current understanding of emotion.
This issue marks the 10th anniversary of The Shakespearean International Yearbook. On this occasion, the special section celebrates the achievement of senior Shakespearean scholar Robert Weimann, whose work on the Elizabethan theatre and early modern performance culture has so influenced contemporary scholarship. Ten essays in this issue of Yearbook, including one by the honoree himself, focus on those aspects of Shakespearean studies which Weimann has impacted most profoundly: the idea and practice of a "popular tradition", the materialist critique of early modern theater, the practices of early modern authorship, acting and theatricality, and his celebrated bifold articulation of authority and representation. In addition to this extensive exploration of Weimann's work, the volume includes essays on The Comedy of Errors, Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare and Lucretius, and Shakespeare on BBC television. The Shakespearean International Yearbook continues to provide an annual survey of important issues and developments in contemporary Shakespeare studies. Among the contributors are Shakespearean scholars from Ireland, Japan, France, Germany, South Africa, UK, and the US.
This book investigates the aesthetic and political dialectics of East Berlin to argue how its theater and opera stages incited artists to act out, fuel, and resist the troubled construction of political legitimacy. This volume investigates three case studies of how leading East Berlin stages excavated fragmentary materials from Weimar dramatist Bertolt Brecht’s oeuvre and repurposed them for their post‐fascist society: Uta Birnbaum’s 1967 Man Equals Man at the Berliner Ensemble, Joachim Herz’s 1977 Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny at the Komische Oper, and Heiner Muller’s own productions of his trailblazing plays. In each instance, reused theatrical artifacts dialectically expressed the contradictions inherent in East German political legitimacy, at once amplifying and critiquing it. Illuminated by original archival research and translations of letters and artistic ephemera published in English for the first time, and engaging with alternative East German feminist epistemologies, this book’s critical investigation of culture and political legitimacy in the shadow of Germany’s fascist past resonates beyond the Iron Curtain into the twenty‐first century. Its final chapter examines how performative artifacts influence the process of political legitimation in more recent history, ranging from Checkpoint Charlie tourism to the January 6, 2021 US insurrection. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars in theater and performance studies, art history, musicology, German studies, anthropology, and political science.
Heiner Muller lived through Germany's tumultuous history from Hitler's rise through Soviet occupation to the building and eventual demolition of the Berlin Wall. One of his earliest memories was of his father being beaten by Brownshirts and taken away to a concentration camp; later, Muller chose to stay in the Soviet Zone even when his father defected to the West. His work presents a phantasmagoric vision of culture and history. Though a committed Marxist, Muller loathed the East German government, and his works were often censured for their caustic portrait of a Germany whose history was an unending act of division and violence.
