Theater as Metaphor

Elena Penskaya, Joachim Küpper, Elena Penskaya, Joachim Küpper

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783110736533
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110622102
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The papers of the present volume investigate the potential of the metaphor of life as theater for literary, philosophical, juridical and epistemological discourses from the Middle Ages through modernity, and focusing on traditions as manifold as French, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian and Latin-American.

Notes on Contributors

Ekaterina Boltunova is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Humanities at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow. Professor Boltunova was a 2017–2018 Visiting Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago; in 2008–2009 she taught as a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. She has given lectures at Yale University (2017), Smith College (2017), Amherst College (2017), and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (2009) and participated in multiple international research projects. Her research interests include the cultural and political history of the Russian Empire and the USSR; the topography and semiotics of power; the imperial discourse of war; historical memory; and Soviet as well as post-Soviet reception of the imperial space. She is the author of Peter the Great’s Guard as a Military Corporation (2011, in Russian); “Reception of Imperial and Tsarist Spheres of Authority in Russia, 1990s–2010s”, in: Ab Imperio, vol. 2 (2016), pp. 261–309; “Russian Officer Corps and Military Efficiency: 1800–1914”, in: Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, vol. 16 (2015), pp. 413–422; “Imperial Throne Halls and Discourse of Power in the Topography of Early Modern Russia (late 17th – 18th centuries)”, in: The Emperor’s House: Palaces from Augustus to the Age of Absolutism (2015), pp. 341–352, and many other texts.

Kirsten Dickhaut is a Professor of Romance Literatures at the University of Stuttgart. Her main fields of research are intermediality, drama in early modern times, and magic/sorcery/witchcraft. Recent publications: K. Dickhaut (ed.), Art of Deception. Kunst der Täuschung: Über Status und Bedeutung von ästhetischer und dämonischer Illusion in der Frühen Neuzeit (1400–1700) in Italien und Frankreich (2016); “Plaire et instruire ou comment Molière présente les valeurs religieuses dans L’École des femmes”, in: Le fait religieux dans les littératures française et québécoise: Présences, résurgences et oublis (2017), ed. G. Dupuis, K.-D. Ertler, A. Ferraro, and Y. Völkl, pp. 61–84.

Erika Fischer-Lichte is the Director of the International Research Center ‘Interweaving Performance Cultures’ at Freie Universität Berlin. She is a member of the Academia Europaea, the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, the German National Academy of Sciences, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Research fields: history and theory of theater; aesthetics. Her main book publications include Transformative Aesthetics (2018); Tragedy’s Endurance: Performances of Greek Tragedies and Cultural Identity in Germany Since 1800 (2017); The Politics of Interweaving Performance Cultures (2014); Dionysus Resurrected (2014); The Transformative Power of Performance (2008).

Andrey Golubkov, cand. phil., is a philologist and literary critic. He serves as a Senior Researcher at the Gorky Institute of World Literature (Russian Academy of Sciences), and as an Associate Professor at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow. Academic interests include the French literary sphere in the ages of the Renaissance, the seventeenth century, and the Enlightenment; the French cultural tradition of galanterie; and the history of the anecdote in Western culture. He has penned a number of articles on the above topics and is author of the book Preciosity and the Gallant Tradition in the 17th-Century French Salon Literature (2017).

Julia V. Ivanova is an Associate Professor at the School of Philology and a Leading Research Fellow at the Poletayev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow. She has written on Neo-Latin humanist literature, Counterreformation political thought, and Renaissance medicine. Her more recent publications are dedicated to the history of method in the early modern humanities, Prospero Alpini’s idea of Egyptian medicine, and G. Vico’s juridical thought.

Joachim Küpper is Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Literatures at Freie Universität Berlin. He has published widely on literary, historiographical, and philosophical texts from Homer to the twentieth century. His most recent publication is a book dealing with a network theory of cultural dynamics (The Cultural Net, 2018). In the course of his career, he has been awarded the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz prize as well as the Leibniz prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. In 2010, he received an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council, Brussels. Küpper was the founding director of the Dahlem Humanities Center, Berlin. Currently, he serves as the director of the international network ‘Principles of Cultural Dynamics’. He is a member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, the North-Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, the German National Academy of Sciences as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Olga Kuptsova, PhD, is a Professor at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow as well as a Senior Researcher at the Russian State Institute for Art Studies; in addition, she has been a visiting professor at the Maison des sciences de l’homme, Paris. Her publications include: From the History of Soviet Theater Criticism, 1917–1926 (1984); Essays on Russian Theatrical Culture (2003); The Life of the Estate Myth: Lost and Found Paradise (2008); “Le théâtre à Moscou: voie sans issue ou periode de transition”, in: Revue russe (2000), pp. 35–43; “Meyerhold et la France, lettres des années 1920–1930”, in: Les voyages du théâtre: Russie / France (2001), ed. H. Henry and E. Galtsova, pp. 101–118; “Theaterspiele in Garten und Parkanlagen russischer Landsitze um 1800: Versuch einer Typologie”, in: Die Gartenkunst (2013), ed. A. Ananieva, G. Grünig, and A. Veselova, pp. 173–180.

Peter W. Marx holds the Chair for Media and Theater Studies at the University of Cologne. He is also the director of the Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung Köln, one of the largest archives for theater and performance culture in Europe. His research focus is on theater historiography, Shakespeare in performance, and the formation of theater as a cultural practice in the early modern period. His most recent book, Hamlets Reise nach Deutschland, was published in 2018.

Jan Mosch was a member of the ERC-funded research project ‘Early Modern European Drama and the Cultural Net’ at Freie Universität Berlin and is finalizing his doctoral thesis, which explores how the post-Reformation ‘scribbling age’ (Robert Burton) informs the uneasy negotiation of heteronomy and individual agency in plays by Shakespeare and Racine. As a junior lecturer, he has b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Introduction
• I: Early Modern Variations
• II: The Romantic Turn
• III: Twentieth-Century Experimentations and Theoretical Explorations
• Notes on Contributors