ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

Despite recent work on theatricality, the term remains too often unexamined. What has “theatricality” been? In what historical contexts does the concept arise? Are there cognate terms? To what extent does “theatricality” relate to the theater? To what extent, on the contrary, does it describe not theater but those moments when other art forms cease to be themselves? Why does “theatricality” so often describe a slipping away from the human, a bestial mimetic practice? Why has theatricality become such an important theoretical term? Why, too, does theory continue to recognize itself as theater – and/or, why does it fail to do so? The aim of this seminar will be to investigate the theoretical and philosophical discourses surrounding theatricality and historical situations in which problems of theatricality arise.

Friday, March 24

Glen McGillivray, University of Western Sidney
“The Discursive Formation of Theatricality as a Critical Concept”
Katrin Pahl, Johns Hopkins University
“Hegel’s Tears”
Michael Taylor, Princeton University
“Theatricality, Absorption, and the Cogito”
Milan Pribisic, Loyola University
“’If Drama, Then Conflict’: Theatricality vs. Dramatism”

Saturday, March 25

Charitini Douvaldzi, Stanford University
“Mimetic Logos: Schopenhauer, Freud, and the Psychology of Zeugma”
Stathis Gourgouris, University of California, Los Angeles
“Nothing Sacred”
Elizabeth Drumm, Reed College
“Guernica on Stage: Theatricality and Modernist Art”
Martin Harries, New York University
“Beckett, Buster Keaton, Theatricality”

Sunday, March 26

Mary Ann Witt, North Carolina State University
“Metatheatricality and Modernity”
Rachel Price, Duke University
“Animal, Magnetism, Theatricality”
Ivone Margulies, Hunter College
“Theatricality and Archive in Eric Rohmer’s Triple Agent (2004)”
Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, Harvard University
“In A Snap… Shot”
Andrew Parker, Amherst College, Respondent