Theatre Sciences : A Plea for a Multidisciplinary Approach to Theatre Studies

ISBN-13: 9781845196288 / Angielski / Twarda / 2014 / 324 str.

Eli Rozik

Opis

Traditional theater semiotics promote a scientific approach to theater studies, albeit viewing semiotics as the unique discipline of research. This volume suggests instead a multidisciplinary approach, including the theoretical disciplines of narratology, mythology, pragmatics, ethics, theater irony, theory of genres, aesthetics, semiotics, theory of nonverbal figures of speech, rhetoric, psychoanalysis, reception theory, history, and sociology with semiotics being only one among many equals. These disciplines are presented from the perspective of their possible contributions to a sound methodology of theater-texts analysis. Traditional theater semiotics, moreover, holds the view that the actual performance on stage is the genuine text of theater, instead of the play-script. Despite this paradigmatic shift, however, this viewpoint has failed to produce commendable analyses of such texts. The alternative presupposition put forward in this book entails a series of novel perceptions of the theater-text and its possible impact on the experiencing spectator, whose role in reading, interpreting, and experiencing the theater-text is not less crucial than that of the text itself. This view presupposes that the theater-text is a description of a fictional world generated by the theater medium. The author also contests the age-old view that a theater-text reflects a simple narrative structure, and he proposes instead a complexity that consists of seven layers: personified, mythical, praxical, naive, ironic, modal, and aesthetic, with each one of them restructuring the previous layer. The author also presents and describes a semiotic layer that lends communicative capacity to the description of a fictional world and two additional metaphoric and rhetoric layers, which structure the theater experience. The underlying purpose is to illustrate the application of the aforementioned disciplines to these fictional layers and, eventually, their joint application to entire theater-texts."