What is special, distinct, modern about modernity? In How the World Became a Stage, William Egginton argues that the experience of modernity is fundamentally spatial rather than subjective and proposes replacing the vocabulary of subjectivity with the concepts of presence and theatricality. Following a Heideggerian injunctive to search for the roots of epochal change not in philosophies so much as in basic skills and practices, he describes the spatiality of modernity on the basis of a close historical analysis of the practices of spectacle from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period, paying particular attention to stage practices in France and Spain. He recounts how the space in which the world is disclosed changed from the full, magically charged space of presence to the empty, fungible, and theatrical space of the stage.
Innehållsförteckning
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Legend of Saint Genesius
1. Actors, Agents, and Avatars
Avatars
Performativity
Theatricality
2. Real Presence, Sympathetic Magic, and the Power of Gesture
Magic
Presence
Performances
Religious Spectacle
Political Spectacle
Seeds of Theatricality
3. Saint Genesius on the Stage of the World
Diderot’s Paradox
Metatheater
Actors and Martyrs
4. A Tale of Two Cities: The Evolution of Renaissance Stage Practices in Madrid and Paris
Italian Innovations
Theories and Theaters in Paris
Theories and Theaters in Madri
Tales from the Crypt
True Pretense: Lope’s Lo fingido verdadero and the Structure of Theatrical Space
5. Theatricality versus Subjectivi ty
Philosophical Subjectivity
Political Subjectivity
Aesthetic Subjectivit
Theatricality and Media Theory
Epilogue
Notes
Index
Om författaren
William Egginton is Assistant Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York and the translator of Lisa Block de Behar’s
Borges: The Passion of an Endless Quotation, also published by SUNY Press.
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