This book offers a theory and methodology of performance analysis as an alternative to traditional play-analysis. The underlying theme is that theatre performance is a descriptive text generated by the theatre medium and that the process of generating meaning takes place in the actual encounter between a theatre performance and the spectator. Many new understandings result, including how the theatre medium is iconic in the new sense of operating images of real or mental models, and how this impacts on the verbal text and stage metaphor; how poetic principles structure fictional worlds and...

This book offers a theory of the archaic mode of fictional thinking and a methodology for the analysis of fictional worlds. It presupposes the mutual independence of the description of a fictional world, in any language or medium, and the described fictional world. Such a world is generated by an autonomous fictional structure, which reflects the spontaneous expectations of the spectator, and thematic specification. A model of this structure is presented, comprising seven layers: personified, mythical, praxical, naive, ironic, aesthetic, and the fictional experience on the level of...

This book offers a theory of the archaic mode of fictional thinking and a methodology for the analysis of fictional worlds. It presupposes the mutual independence of the description of a fictional world, in any language or medium, and the described fictional world. Such a world is generated by an autonomous fictional structure, which reflects the spontaneous expectations of the spectator, and thematic specification. A model of this structure is presented, comprising seven layers: personified, mythical, praxical, naive, ironic, aesthetic, and the fictional experience on the level of...

While assimilating theoretical insights from Aristotle to the present day, the wholly original approach to the study of comedy contests the theory of comedy s ritual origin; challenges the age-old and continuing attempts to determine the structure of action that characterizes comedy; and suggests instead that structures of action are shared by all genres, and that it is the specific mood that accounts for their differences. Author Eli Rozik questions the traditional semiotic view that all meaning is in the text, and suggests that, in generating comedic meaning, the spectator s contribution...

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...

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...

Eli Rozik explores the principles that generated the theatre medium, and its possible roots in the preverbal imagistic mode of thinking. This mode characterizes the remnants of preverbal thinking, such as unconscious thinking (dreaming), the embryonic speech of toddlers, and their imaginative play and drawings prior to mastering verbal thinking. The book is a recapitulation of major findings regarding the nature of the theatre and includes new unpublished studies. It address the principles of imagistic, metaphoric, symbolic and fictional thinking, which characterize the theatre, as well as...

Shakespeare's playwrighting and possibly his directing reflect a consistent intent to explore principles that, in his days, were perceived as foreign to the dramatic idiom. This is evident within the framework of contemporary theatre theories at the time. Eli Rozik's novel reading of the play-scripts provides the classical and synchronic theoretical background required to capture Shakespeare's innovative approach, and is a major contribution to the history of European theatre practice and theory.

Eli Rozik explores the principles that generated the theatre medium, and its possible roots in the preverbal imagistic mode of thinking. This mode characterizes the remnants of preverbal thinking, such as unconscious thinking (dreaming), the embryonic speech of toddlers, and their imaginative play and drawings prior to mastering verbal thinking. The book is a recapitulation of major findings regarding the nature of the theatre and includes new unpublished studies. It address the principles of imagistic, metaphoric, symbolic and fictional thinking, which characterize the theatre, as well as...