The Speech-Gesture Complex: Modernism, Theatre, Cinema

ISBN-13: 9780748684892 / Angielski / Twarda / 2013 / 208 str.

Anthony Paraskeva

Opis

This book places the performative gesture at the centre of debate between literature, theatre and cinema. This new study examines the representation of gesture in modernist writing, performance and cinema. Deploying a new theoretical term, 'the speech-gesture complex', Anthony Paraskeva identifies a relationship between speech and gesture which is neither exclusively literary nor performative and which, he argues, is fundamental to the aesthetics and politics of modernist authors. In discussions of works by Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Henry James, Wyndham Lewis, Vladimir Nabokov and Samuel Beckett, Paraskeva shows how this relationship is closely informed by their attention to the performed gestures of actors in theatre and cinema. It provides new close readings of major and neglected work by Kafka, Joyce, Henry James, Wyndham Lewis, Nabokov and Beckett, revealing their complex relations with both theatre and cinema. It establishes a new critical-theoretical category, and highlights an unexplored dialogue between Ibsen, Benjamin, Adorno, Griffith, Eisenstein, Chaplin, Brecht, Artaud, Lang, Meyerhold, Duse and Garbo. It analyses central and neglected modernist texts alongside stage productions, styles of acting, film history and performance theory.

Spis treści

Acknowledgements; Introduction; Kafka’s Amerika: The Aesthetics and Politics of Incompletion; Unstable categories: Naturalist and Modernist Performance Style; Performative Absence and Mechanical Reproduction; Theatre, Cinema and the Universal Language of Gesture; 1. James Joyce; ‘our sad want of signs’: Imperceptible Gestures in Ibsen and Joyce; Paralysis and Spectatorship: Henry James, Eleanora Duse, Yeats and Dubliners; Slips of the Hand in Exiles; ‘In the beginning was the gest’: ‘Circe’, Early Cinema and the ‘Art of Gestures’; 2. Wyndham Lewis; The Clown and the Über-Marionette in Enemy of the Stars; The Childermass: Lewis Vs Chaplin in the Afterlife; The Politics of Gesture: The Bailiff, Hitler and the Society of the Spectacle; 3. The Transition to Sound; Nabokov, Lewis and Garbo; Late Modernism and the Resistance to Sound; 4. Samuel Beckett; Hand-writing in Nacht und Träume; The Politics of Depersonalisation in Catastrophe; Bibliography.