front cover of An Aesthetics of Narrative Performance
An Aesthetics of Narrative Performance
Transnational Theater, Literature, and Film in Contemporary Germany
Claudia Breger
The Ohio State University Press, 2012
The contemporary moment has been described in terms of both a “narrative” and a “performative turn,” but the overlap between these two has largely escaped attention. This curious gap is explained by the ways in which scholars across the humanities have defined narrative and performance as opposite forces, emphasizing their respective affiliations with time vs. space and identity constitution vs. its undoing. Although the opposition has been acknowledged as false by many in this simple form, its shifting instantiations continue to shape the ways we make sense of the arts as well as society. Instead, An Aesthetics of Narrative Performance: Transnational Theater, Literature, and Film in Contemporary Germany by Claudia Breger maps the complexities of imaginative worldmaking in contemporary culture through an aesthetics of narrative performance: an ensemble of techniques exploring the interplay of rupture and recontextualization in the process of configuration. Interlacing diverging definitions of both narrative and performance, the study outlines two clusters of such techniques—scenic narration and narrative “presencing” in performance vs. forms of narrative theatricalization—and analyzes the cultural work they do in individual works in three different media: literature, film, and theater. These readings focus on the rich configurations of contemporary worldmaking “at location Germany.” In the discussed representations of German unification, contemporary cultures of migration, and the transnational War on Terror, the aesthetics of narrative performance finds its identity as a multifaceted imaginative response to the post/modern crisis of narrative authority.
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front cover of Recontextualizing Texts
Recontextualizing Texts
Narrative Performance in Modern Japanese Fiction
Atsuko Sakaki
Harvard University Press, 1999
Offering the first systematic examination of five modern Japanese fictional narratives, all of them available in English translations, Atsuko Sakaki explores Natsume Sōseki’s Kokoro and Kusamakura (The Three-Cornered World); Ibuse Masuji’s Kuroi ame (Black Rain); Mori Ōgai’s Gan (Wild Geese); and Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s Manji (Quicksand). Her close reading of each text reveals a hitherto unexplored area of communication between narrator and audience, as well as between “implied author” and “implied reader.” By using this approach, the author situates each of these works not in its historical, cultural, or economic contexts but in the situation the text itself produces.
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front cover of Through the Looking Glass
Through the Looking Glass
The Narrative Performance of Anarkali
Aisha Dad
Harvard University Press

Anarkali, an Orientalized persona assigned to the harem of the Mughal Emperor Akbar, is also the lover of Akbar’s son, Salim, the future Mughal Emperor Jahangir. Her body and narrative occupy the liminal and contentious space between Akbar and Salim especially as construed under the male gaze of seventeenth-century European travelers. But while both Akbar and Salim are historically attested personalities, Anarkali is not. And yet, her narrative is pervasive in South Asia, appearing in everything from architecture to film. Up to this point studies of the enigma of Anarkali have centered on uncovering her historicity. But in the tragic performance of the poetics of the body, Anarkali embodies the ultimate conflation of the female body with narrative construction.

Informed by oral poetics, performance theory, and memory studies, Through the Looking Glass approaches Anarkali not as a historical enigma but rather as a qissa, an oral narrative. The so-called evidence of her historicity is the performance and reperformance of her qissa across different media: the Tomb of Anarkali in Lahore; early travel writings; Imtiaz Ali Taj’s seminal play Anarkali; and the Indian Cinema films Anarkali and Mughal-e-Azam. The poetics and performance of her body fundamentally signify the foreign and domestic anxieties at stake in the imperial personalities of Akbar and Salim.

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