Proseminar: Text and Performance

Semester and Year	FA 2010
Course Number	CORE-GG2013
Section	001
Instructor	Sharon Friedman, Julie Malnig
Days	Mon
Time	6:20 PM - 8:20 PM
Units	0.0
Level	G
Foundation Requirement

Description

This seminar introduces a range of critical perspectives that can be applied to literary, dramatic, and cinematic texts as well as a variety of performance forms. Several art forms are interdisciplinary in composition—e.g. inter-textual literature and experimental theatre—and call our attention to the relationship among the genres. How do these various art forms assume meaning   on stage or in study? Many of the questions that we pose to literary and performance texts, whether psychoanalytic, new historicist or political, suggest that the act of interpretation is creative, interdisciplinary, and produced in some way by the cultural situation of the reader/viewer as much as by the formal codes and strategies of the texts in question .  While playtext in performance is typically acknowledged to be the blueprint for performative action, new issues arising from such fields as semiotics, feminist theory and cultural studies have questioned where meaning resides in performance. In   directorial vision? In the performers’ interactions on stage? In the interpretive “readings” of live spectators? These   issues and questions will guide our investigation into the ways that text in each arena is defined, produced, and interpreted.

Course Type

Graduate Core (CORE-GG)