Agitated States: Performance in the American Theater of CrueltyFrom the earliest Puritan displays of piety and rectitude to the present-day epidemic of staged school massacres, the history of America has been characterized by a dual impulse: to cast public event and character as high drama, and to dismiss theater and theatricalization as un-American, even evil. This book rethinks American history as theater, and theater as the ethos and substance of American life, ironically repudiated at every turn by the culture it produces. Beginning with the writings of John Winthrop and others, through the Federalist and "romantic" stages of American cultural life, and into the modern and contemporary periods, Anthony Kubiak finds an America not usually discovered by traditional or materialist approaches to history. He deploys the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, the cultural theory of SlavojZizek, and the performance theory of Herbert Blau in an unparalleled reappraisal of dominant American identity, culture, and history. Anthony Kubiak is Associate Professor of English, University of South Florida. He is also author of Stages of Terror: Terrorism, Ideology, and Coercion as Theatre History. |
From inside the book
Page 230
... Plays by Early American Women , 1775-1850 . Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press , 1995 . Kubiak , Anthony . “ America / Amnesis , " Performance Research 5 , no . 1 ( 2000 ) : 30-36 . " Modern Theatre and Melville's Moby - Dick ...
... Plays by Early American Women , 1775-1850 . Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press , 1995 . Kubiak , Anthony . “ America / Amnesis , " Performance Research 5 , no . 1 ( 2000 ) : 30-36 . " Modern Theatre and Melville's Moby - Dick ...
Contents
ACT 1Warning Signs | 27 |
The Resistance to Theater in the Conquest of America | 53 |
ACT 2Confession | 77 |
Copyright | |
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actor Ahab American culture American Drama American theater anxiety appearance Artaud atrical audience authentic becomes beneath blackface blindness body Buried Child Cane Ridge character child concealed consciousness contrast critical critique death desire diary difference disappearance Dodge double emerges Ernesto Laclau example fact false father finally Finley Finley's foreclusion forgetting gender George hauntology Herbert Blau hidden identity ideology illusion Imaginary issue Jefferson's Judith Butler Karen Finley kind Kushner Lacan Lacanian lack Martha mask meaning memory merely minstrel show minstrelsy Moby-Dick Mormon multiple murder narrative Octoroon Oedipal ontology Paul Ingram perhaps play political poststructural present problem psychotic Puritan realism reality repressed Rip's scene scripted seemingly seems sense sexual Shepard Slavoj Žižek social space spectacle stage story substance suggests terror theater of cruelty theatrical thought Tiffany tion trans trauma Trueman truth unconscious University Press veil Vince violence virtual voice Wigglesworth words writing York