Reviews for Theatricality as Medium

The average rating for Theatricality as Medium based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-08-23 00:00:00 William Gaines Vast, sprawling. The book's concern is with theatrical "mediums" in several senses: as middle, as mediating entity, and finally in the sense that we're most familiar with. Theater is in this account an always-local event that nevertheless always disrupts locality. An elegant recurring idea suggests that Plato's Cave--as an enclosed system that also possesses an out to another world--is a sort of master-trope for the Western theater in general. I find the sections on the Greek theater much easier to read than those that address the German, in part because the author tends to re-translate many words of the translations that he uses into German, rendering some passages very difficult to read--almost physically difficult, frankly. The reading of "Oedipus at Colonus" is provocative, asserting that the whole play is a sort of allegory of the theater, in which theater gestures finally towards something uneffable. Or sublime. Or somesuch--I found this part provocative, but also confusing. The "kinda subversive, kinda not" paradigm is rampant throughout, although many of the readings it produces are interesting. The end result is, as I understood it, to suggest that theater--pace Auden?--makes a fragmented, deconstructive, displacing, and so forth experience actually happen.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-06-16 00:00:00 Norbert Bloyet My students have been a little skeptical, and we're looking forward to the second edition that reportedly takes account of the early critiques (namely that Erne claims to be establishing a model for how to read early printed Shax but doesn't really do it, except for a few limited examples in the final chapters). We found it very productive to speculate what, exactly, is going on in a reader's imagination when one reads the Folio -- and to think of the Folio as a reader's text -- but also hampered by the dearth of "case-studies" that one could use to find examples of readerly signs. I am also not sure that I'm convinced by the readerly signs, always, although I *am* convinced now that the folio texts are neither "performance" texts nor foul papers but texts composed "to the great varietie of readers."