PMA 6610 - Theorizing Media & Performance

Spring. 4 credits.

N. Salvato.

This graduate seminar takes a transhistorical and global approach to understanding the influential ways in which live and mediated performances have been theorized. Moving from a consideration of treatises from antiquity to an investigation of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century scholarly work, as well as landing at points in between, we will explore the ways in which different aestheticians, historians, and other philosophically motivated thinkers have conceived such phenomena as dramatic construction, kinesthetic performance, embodied spectatorship, (mnemo)technics, live(li)ness, spec(tac)ularity, and ludic play. Close analysis of a variety of art objects, arrayed as case studies, will complement our intensive readings of dense theoretical texts. Authors may include Adorno, Aristotle, Bharata, Bergson, Boal, Brecht, Carlson, Deleuze, Flusser, Kant, Parikka, Soyinka, Stiegler, Zeami, and others. (HTC)