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Home > Literature and Theatre Studies > Eroticism and Death in Theatre and Performance
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Eroticism and Death in Theatre and Performance

Editor: Karoline Gritzner

Price: £18.99 (free postage)

"

“[Howard] Barker’s bold historical afterword is a fine end point to a genuinely and wonderfully diverse collection on an inescapably powerful subject. Try as they might, the exponents of a modest, 21st-century naturalism in the theatre cannot drown out the resonant possibilities of tragedy and its multifarious articulations of the seminal connection between sexual desire and death.”

-Mark Brown,
Critical Stages

About the book

Eros and Death are the two central drives and compulsions of the human psyche, and their dynamic interconnectedness has been pervasive in the formation of Western thought and culture.

The essays brought together in this collection offer new perspectives on the eros/death relation in a wide selection of dramatic texts, theatrical practices and cultural performances.

Topics explored range from Greek tragedy, Shakespearean theatre, the work of Georg Büchner, Bertolt Brecht, the kiss of death in opera, the theatricality of Parisian culture, to the performance of conjuring, contemporary British drama, body art, the live performances of Nick Cave and erotic encounters in One to One performances.

  • More about the book

    Many of the essays locate their discussions of erotic desire and death as conflicting and entwining passions in specific cultural-historical contexts and provide a sense of how drama and theatre reflect and influence changing attitudes towards sexuality and death.

    As well as offering particular historical perspectives, the collection contains essays that engage with contemporary dramatic writing and experimental theatre/performance practice, such as the drama of Howard Barker, the performance work of La Fura dels Baus, and the explicit body performances of Ron Athey.

    Various ways of eroticising death in theatre and through performance are addressed, as well as the question of whether there is something intrinsically theatrical about our encounters with the ultimately unknowable nature of sexual desire and our relation to death.

    The book combines theoretically informed criticism (drawing on psychoanalytical and philosophical models by Freud, Bataille, Lacan, Zizek, Lingis and others) with detailed text and performance analyses, giving a sense of the powerful appeal which death and the erotic exert on the human imagination.

    The collection also includes essay contributions by dramatists David Rudkin, Dic Edwards, David Ian Rabey and an Afterword by Howard Barker.

  • View the table of contents

    Contents


     List of Figuresvii
     Acknowledgementsviii
     Contributorsix
     Introduction
    Karoline Gritzner
    1
    1Some Erōs–Thanatos interfaces in Attic Tragedy
    David Rudkin
    12
    2Dying for love: the tragicomedy of Shakespeare's Cleopatra
    Robert Wilcher
    28
    3Desire and destruction in the drama of Georg Buchner
    Karoline Gritzner
    46
    4Labyrinths of the taboo: theatrical journeys of eroticism and death in Parisian culture
    Richard J. Hand
    64
    5The kiss of love and death: Eros and Thanatos in the opera
    Dieter Borchmeyer
    80
    6Eros/sex, death/murder: sensuality, homicide and culture in Musil, Brecht and the Neue Sachlichkeit
    George Hunka
    95
    7The living corpse: a metaphysic for theatre
    Dic Edwards
    109
    8Flirting with disaster
    David Ian Rabey
    123
    9Howard Barker's ‘monstrous assaults’: eroticism, death and the antique text
    Graham Saunders
    144
    10‘Welcome to the house of fun’: Eros, Thanatos and the uncanny in grand illusions
    Michael Mangan
    160
    11Visions of Xs: experiencing La Fura dels Baus's XXX and Ron Athey's Solar Anus
    Roberta Mock
    178
    12La petite mort: erotic encounters in One to One performance
    Rachel Zerihan
    202
    13Saint Nick: a parallax view of Nick Cave
    David Pattie
    224
    14Afterword: The corpse and its sexuality
    Howard Barker
    242
     Bibliography246
     Index261

  • About the Editor/s:

    Karoline Gritzner

    Karoline Gritzner is a Lecturer in Drama and Theatre Studies at Aberystwyth University.

    Her research interests include contemporary British drama, modern European theatre, gender and sexuality, aesthetics and Critical Theory.

    In 2004 she co-organised a symposium on ‘Theatrical Aesthetics of Eroticism and Death’ at Aberystwyth University.

ISBN: 978-1-902806-92-1 Format: Paperback, 288pp Published: Oct 2010

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