The Play within the Play. The Performance of Meta-Theatre and Self-Reflection, G. FISCHER et B. GREINER (dir.)

Gerhard FISCHER et Bernhard GREINER [dir.], The Play within the Play. The Performance of Meta-Theatre and Self-Reflection, Amsterdam / New York, Rodopi (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft), 2007, 460 p.
ISBN 978-90-420-2257-7


RÉSUMÉ

The thirty chapters of this innovative international study are all devoted to the topic of the play within the play. The authors explore the wide range of aesthetic, literary-theoretical and philosophical issues associated with this rhetorical device, not only in terms of its original meta-theatrical setting – from the baroque idea of a theatrum mundi onward to contemporary examples of postmodern self-referential dramaturgy – but also with regard to a variety of different generic applications, e.g. in narrative fiction, musical theatre and film. The authors, internationally recognized specialists in their respective fields, draw on recent debates in such areas as postcolonial studies, game and systems theories, media and performance studies, to analyze the specific qualities and characteristics of the play within the play: as ultimate affirmation of the ‘self' (the ‘Hamlet paradigm'), as a self-reflective agency of meta-theatrical discourse, and as a vehicle of intermedial and intercultural transformation. The challenging study, with its underlying premise of play as a key feature of cultural anthropology and human creativity, breaks new ground by placing the play within the play at the centre of a number of intersecting scholarly discourses on areas of topical concern to scholars in the humanities.


TABLE DES MATIÈRES

Acknowledgements
Gerhard FISCHER and Bernhard GREINER: The Play within the Play: Scholarly Perspectives
I. The Play within the Play and the Performance of Self-Reflection
Bernhard GREINER: The Birth of the Subject out of the Spirit of the Play within the Play: The Hamlet Paradigm
Yifen BEUS: Self-Reflexivity in the Play within the Play and its Cross-Genre Manifestation
Klaus R. SCHERPE: ‘Backstage Discourse': Staging the Other in Ethnographic and Colonial Literature
David ROBERTS: The Play within the Play and the Closure of Representation
Caroline SHEAFFER-JONES: Playing and not Playing in Jean Genet's The Balcony and The Blacks
II. The Play within the Play and Meta-Theatre
1. Self-Reflection and Self-Reference
Christian SINN: The Figure in the Carpet: Metadramatical Concepts in Jacob Bidermann's Cenodoxus (1602)
John GOLDER: Holding a Mirror up to Theatre: Baro, Gougenot, Scudéry and Corneille as Self-Referentialists in Paris, 1628-1635/36
Manfred JURGENSEN: Rehearsing the Endgame: Max Frisch's Biography: A Play
Barnard TURNER: Tom Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound (1968) and The Real Thing (1982): New Frames and Old
Ulrike LANDFESTER: The Invisible Fool: Botho Strauss's Postmodern Metadrama and the History of Theatrical Reality
2. The Theatre and its Audience
Shimon LEVY: Queen of a Bathtub: Hanoch Levin's Political, Aesthetic and Ethical Metatheatricality
Gad KAYNAR: The Disguised and Distanced Real(ity) Play within the Fictitious Play in Israeli Stage-Drama
Zahava CASPI: A Lacerated Culture, A Self-Reflective Theatre: The Case of Israeli Drama
III. Perspectives on the World: Comedy, Melancholy, theatrum mundi
Frank ZIPFEL: ‘Very Tragical Mirth': The Play within the Play as a Strategy for Interweaving Tragedy and Comedy
Herbert HERZMANN: Play and Reality in Austrian Drama: The Figure of the Magister Ludi
Helmut J. SCHNEIDER: Playing Tragedy: Detaching Tragedy from Itself in Classical Drama from Lessing to Büchner
Gerhard FISCHER: Playwrights Playing with History: The Play within the Play and German Historical Drama (Büchner, Brecht, Weiss, Müller)
Birgit HAAS: Postmodernism Unmasked: Rainald Goetz's Festung and Albert Ostermaier's The Making of B-Movie
IV. The Play within the Play as Agency of Socio-Cultural Reflection and Intercultural Appropriation
Lada Cale FELDMAN: The Context Within: The Play within the Play between Theatre Anthropology, System Theory and Postcolonial Critique
Maurice BLACKMAN : Intercultural Framing in Aimé Césaire's Une Tempête
Kyriaki FRANTZI: Re-Interpreting Shadow Material in an Ancient Greek Myth: Another Night: Medea
V. The Play within the Play as Agency of Intermedial Transformation
1. The Play within the Play and Opera
Yvonne NOBLE: John Gay and the Frame Play
Donald BEWLEY: Opera within Opera: Contexts for a Metastasian Interlude
Theresia BIRKENHAUER: Theatrical Transformation, Media Superimposition and Scenic Reflection: Pictorial Qualities of Modern Theatre and the Hofmannsthal/Strauss Opera Ariadne auf Naxos
2. The Play within the Play and Film
Erika GREBER: Pushkin in Love, or: A (Screen)Play within the Play. The Cinematic Potential of Romantic-Ironic Narration in Eugene Onegin
Alessandro ABBATE: The Text within the Text, the Screen within the Screen: Multi-Layered Representations in Michael Almereyda's Hamlet and Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet
Ken WOODGATE: ‘Gotta Dance' (in the Dark): Lars von Trier's Critique of the Musical Genre
3. The Play within the Play in Narrative Fiction
Tim MEHIGAN: The Game of the Narrative: Kleist's Fiction from a Game-Theoretical Perspective
Alexander HONOLD: French Beans and Mashed Potatoes: Agonistic Play and Symbolic Acting in Gottfried Keller's Prose Fiction
Ulrike GARDE: Playing with the Apparatus: Franz Kafka's ‘In the Penal Colony' and Barrie Kosky's Interpretation for the Melbourne International Arts Festival
Notes on Contributors
Index of Names


BIOGRAPHIE

Gerhard Fischer is Head of German Studies at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. His books on theatre include The Mudrooroo/Müller Project. A Theatrical Casebook (1993) and GRIPS. Geschichte eines populären Theaters, 1966-2000 (2002). As convenor of the Sydney German Studies Symposia he has edited a number of volumes on modern German literature, including Heiner Müller. ConTEXTS and HISTORY (1995) and (with David Roberts) Schreiben nach der Wende. Ein Jahrzehnt deutscher Literatur, 1989-1999 (2001).

Bernhard Greiner is Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Tübingen, Germany; from 2000-2002 he was the inaugural Walter Benjamin Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Recent publications include Kleists Dramen und Erzählungen. Experimente zum Fall der Kunst (2000) and Die Komödie: eine theatralische Sendung. Grundlagen und Interpretationen, second, rev. and enlarged edition (2006).