SFB - Sonderforschungsbereich Kulturen des Performativen

ABSTRACTS:

Dialogicity and Performativity: The Theatralization of Cultural Media in Early Modern England

The notion of early modern English culture as a culture of performativity is being supported by the importance of the theatre - the theatre of Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson - in this period. Within a few decades after its inception, the theatre turned into the leading medium of Elizabethan culture. As the New Historicism has emphasized, it can be regarded as a symbolisation of the pervasive theatricality of early modern representations of power. The theatre had a stake in political power, providing it with a semiotics of (self-) representation, while simultaneously subverting it by exposing the performance character of performance. Drawing on these premisses, this project will extend its investigation to other genres and media, such as masques and pageants, poetry and epic, airs and madrigals, homilies and historiography, to look at the ways in which these cultural forms and practices share in the dialogic and performative qualities of the theatre, and to highlight their function within courtly, ecclesiastic or academic representations of authority.
Each sub-project is situated within its own research context and has its own specific aims and methods. But all sub-projects share basic assumptions concerning the concept of ‘performativity': (1) ‘Performance' in the sense of generative linguistics as processive and creative actualization of competence; (2) in the sense of speech-act-theory as doing things with words; (3) in the anthropological sense as having affinities to rituals and ceremonies; (4) aesthetically, in the sense of theatrical performances, as mise-en-scène, thereby foregrounding the surplus of meaning produced by the presence of performing bodies; (5) in the technologically and economically defined sense - equally valid in early modern court contexts - of achievement in competitions.
All sub-projects aim at defining the surplus of meaning gained by focussing on the dynamic process character and the materiality of the body in various modes of representation. Performance always involves the embodiment of language and the fashioning and display of the body and its affects. The projects thus share the anthropological focus on how early modern distinctions of race, rank/estate and gender are inscribed in, and performed by, the body.

SUB-PROJECTS:

1. Dr. des. Tobias Döring
Performances of Mourning in Early Modern English Theatre and Culture

This study sets out to conduct an anatomy of mourning by investigating textual representations and public spectacles which traditionally signify,the personal emotion of grief. Convergences and potential differences between the inward feeling and the outward features that denote the mourner make this a contested field of political performances. The modes and memories of mourning are studied through their various manifestations in history plays, epitaphs, laments, revenge tragedies, social rituals and funeral practices in the transitional period from the Tudor to the Stuart monarchy.

2. Dr. Indira Ghose
Laughter and the Shakespearean Theatre

This project attempts an anthropological analysis of laughter in the early modern period by focusing on the cultural performances of early modern society. In an approach modeled on the pathbreaking work of Clifford Geertz, Shakespearean theatre can be seen as providing a commentary on society and displaying the meanings circulating within a given society at a given historical moment. This would involve laying bare meanings and concerns that might well lie obscured in everyday life. Thus this study shall attempt to explore the anxieties and uncertainties in the social fabric that are revealed by a closer look at laughter.
Questions that shall be looked at are:
- how are early modern discourses about laughter inscribed in the plays?
- how is laughter represented in the plays?
- what is the relationship between laughter on stage and the audience in the early modern theatre?
The phenomenon of laughter in the context of Shakespearean theatre needs to be examined against the historical backdrop of a widening gap between popular and elite culture at this time and an increased regulation of laughter. A more nuanced understanding of this phenomenon will involve taking into account both power relations that structure society as well as artistic pressures bearing on the Renaissance theatre.

3. Dr. des. Andrew Johnston
Staging Secrecy

Late medieval and early modern English literature discusses issues of secrecy in diverse and often contradictory forms. On the one hand there seems to be an officially recognized sphere of secrecy, performed in a more or less ritual manner (auricular confession, the Privy Council). On the other hand, we witness the emergence of unauthorized social practices which create new and uncontrolled spaces of secrecy (heresy, intrigue and conspiracy). While the authorized spheres of secrecy appear to be fully integrated into their culture's public modes of representation, the staging of the subversive ones demands special strategies. Since even secrecy cannot exist without an - albeit exclusive - modecum of visibility, both contemporaries and modern scholars are faced with a paradox: they have to represent and perceive that which by definition ought to defy representation and perception. Thus, this project has set itself the goal to trace the changing discourses of secrecy and secrecy's changing representation within different media and social practices, for instance on the stage and in literature but also in the rituals and activities of professional plotters, informers and agents from the age of the Lollards to the time of the Gunpowder Plot.

4. Irmgard Maassen
Performing Love in Early Modern English Drama

Love, in simultaneously being a private emotion and serving as a legitimating basis of social relations, involves a paradox: it requires the public, socially conventionalised performance of a private, subjective feeling. Early modern England had its own specific repertoire of expressive acts and performative codes to display the emotion, and go through the motions, of love. This project is looking at the morphological transformations and the cultural and historical functions of performances of love in early modern drama. While most critics have hitherto conceived of ‘love' as a discursive formation, tracing the textual inscriptions of desire in literature, this project instead aims to approach love from the outside, through the performance of attitudes and actions, gestures and postures. It regards, and investigates, love as a performative construct rather than as an innermost feeling. In particular, the dramatic presentation of the body, the self-fashioning of the lovers, the rituals, props and the playful bricolage of different social and cultural scripts of loving will be analysed.
Performances of love on the Elizabethan stage will be related to folk customs (charivari, courtship games, betrothal), to normative conduct precepts (marriage manuals, conduct books, sermons, love-débats) and to alternative forms of literary representations of love (sonnets, romances). Special attention will be given to the ambiguity of the sexual body which, in close analogy to the aesthetics of theatrical performance, vacillates between authenticity and dissembling, between being affected by love and displaying affection. By focusing on the historical period when the emergence of the modern notion of love is shaped by cultural practices derived from, and dominated by, the medium of the theatre, this project contributes to the investigation of the formation of early modern subjectivity. It will add to the well-known parameters of rank and gender those of person – the construct of essential selfhood - and persona – the mask constructed in performing the self.

5. Prof. Dr. Manfred Pfister
Dialogization of Texts in English Renaissance Literature

Our investigation of other genres draws on the structures of the Elizabethan theatre, where action is based on dialogic speech, and performance becomes the dominant form of representation. In the theatre the author loses authority, delegating authorial control to other participants in the performance: to his characters, in whose dialogic interactions the claim for absolute truth is constantly fractured into a variety of conflicting positions and attitudes which have to be perpetually renegotiated; to his actors, who translate the letters on the page into a multitude of voices, and who, with their own voices and bodies, invest the written text with additional meaning; and to the audience, who, in its bodily presence and interventions, becomes part of the performance itself.
The main hypothesis is that other media and genres of the early modern period show a similar destabilization of authorial control. Two genres, or discursive formations, will be studied diachronically from the early 16th to the early 17th c. for the performative strategies that turn discursive and constative texts into dialogic texts: (1) Historiography (from Polydore Vergil and Thomas More to Hall, Holinshed, Stow and Ralegh), the historiographical epic (Daniel, Drayton) and the history play from Bale to Shakespeare; and (2) Humanism and Reformation as cultures of dialogue, debate and polemics. Dialogization can already be traced in Erasmian dialogues, as they are adapted by Thomas Morus (Dialogue of Comfort agaynst Trybulacion), staged as débats in interludes or else integrated into narrative texts (e.g. Lyly).
Apart from actual literary dialogues, two other forms of philosophical-theological contest will be considered in this project: homilies and pamphlets. Homilies are of interest because of the tensions between the authoritatively pre-scribed text, as in the Tudor Homilies, and its actual performances in public readings or in individually conceived sermons such as those written by John Donne. The role played by body and voice as well as the forms and functions of dialogue become relevant here - dialogue, as insertion into the narrative but also as question-and-answer-game between the preacher and his audience. The differences between Anglican and Puritan performative cultures will be focussed on here, as also in the analysis of theological and polemical pamphlets, in particular of the Marprelate Controversy. In this controversy Anglican and Puritan parties, while arguing about differing theological views and religious practices, ridiculed and insulted their opponents in spectacular manner, staging a ‘carnival of ideas' by wildly posturing and gesticulating to each other and to the audience.

6. Dr. des. Susanne Rupp
Airs and Madrigals: Performativity of Text, Music and Performance

Due to the influence of the theatre – the central cultural medium in early modern England – performativity manifests itself in various other genres and media of the period. Taking this into account the question arises how this phenomenon also affects vocal music. In order to answer this question the performative potential of airs and madrigals with regards to text, music and performance shall be looked at.
One type of performativity can be found within the text: The text is, in the sense defined by speech act theory, performative in itself. In and through it speech acts can be performed, such as courting or seducing. The text will thus refer to conventional patterns of representation or behaviour which it either fulfills, exaggerates or undermines. A text can be considered performative in the sense that it acts out a plot, or presents affects of e.g. joy or sadness. By doing this the text interactively addresses the desired person or other people present and also brings into play the body of the speaking/singing subject.
The literary text gains a further performative dimension when it is set to music. The music follows the performative dynamics of the text: Whereas medieval music theory expected music to represent universal harmonies, the music theory of Humanism and the Renaissance shifted the emphasis towards music's ability to express situational and individual affects. This idea refers equally to affects which are expressed by the singer while performing, as well as to the affects which are roused in the listeners. The task of music is to interpret and intensify the affective, gestic and actional potential of the text. It is in this sense that music becomes performative itself.
The performance, which adds to the airs and madrigals the actual performative dimension, has to be reconstructed from text and music as well as from other historical sources and documents (e.g. staged performances of songs in plays, iconography). With regard to performance two aspects are of particular interest within the framework of this project: (1) the human voice as performing medium; (2) the singer's relation to his/her role, his/her fictional addressee and his/her actual audience. Investigating the specific materiality of performance enables us to dynamize the (musical) text and to recover new dimensions of meaning that have escaped more traditional methods and models.

| oben | Projektliste | Homepage | SUCHEN | Stand: 12/02




	A4 Dialogicity and Performativity: The Theatralization of Cultural Media in Early Modern England
	ABSTRACTS: Dialogicity and Performativity: The Theatralization of Cultural Media in Early Modern England The notion of early modern English culture as a culture of performativity is being supported by the importance of the theatre - the theatre of Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson - in this period. Within a few decades after its inception, the theatre turned into the leading medium of Elizabethan culture. As the New Historicism has emphasized, it can be regarded as a symbolisation of the pervasive theatricality of early modern representations of power. The theatre had a stake in political power, providing it with a semiotics of (self-) representation, while simultaneously subverting it by exposing the performance character of performance. Drawing on these premisses, this project will extend its investigation to other genres and media, such as masques and pageants, poetry and epic, airs and madrigals, homilies and historiography, to look at the ways in which these cultural forms and practices share in the dialogic and performative qualities of the theatre, and to highlight their function within courtly, ecclesiastic or academic representations of authority. Each sub-project is situated within its own research context and has its own specific aims and methods. But all sub-projects share basic assumptions concerning the concept of ‘performativity': (1) ‘Performance' in the sense of generative linguistics as processive and creative actualization of competence; (2) in the sense of speech-act-theory as doing things with words; (3) in the anthropological sense as having affinities to rituals and ceremonies; (4) aesthetically, in the sense of theatrical performances, as mise-en-scène, thereby foregrounding the surplus of meaning produced by the presence of performing bodies; (5) in the technologically and economically defined sense - equally valid in early modern court contexts - of achievement in competitions. All sub-projects aim at defining the surplus of meaning gained by focussing on the dynamic process character and the materiality of the body in various modes of representation. Performance always involves the embodiment of language and the fashioning and display of the body and its affects. The projects thus share the anthropological focus on how early modern distinctions of race, rank/estate and gender are inscribed in, and performed by, the body. SUB-PROJECTS: 1. Dr. des. Tobias Döring Performances of Mourning in Early Modern English Theatre and Culture This study sets out to conduct an anatomy of mourning by investigating textual representations and public spectacles which traditionally signify,the personal emotion of grief. Convergences and potential differences between the inward feeling and the outward features that denote the mourner make this a contested field of political performances. The modes and memories of mourning are studied through their various manifestations in history plays, epitaphs, laments, revenge tragedies, social rituals and funeral practices in the transitional period from the Tudor to the Stuart monarchy. 2. Dr. Indira Ghose Laughter and the Shakespearean Theatre This project attempts an anthropological analysis of laughter in the early modern period by focusing on the cultural performances of early modern society. In an approach modeled on the pathbreaking work of Clifford Geertz, Shakespearean theatre can be seen as providing a commentary on society and displaying the meanings circulating within a given society at a given historical moment. This would involve laying bare meanings and concerns that might well lie obscured in everyday life. Thus this study shall attempt to explore the anxieties and uncertainties in the social fabric that are revealed by a closer look at laughter. Questions that shall be looked at are: - how are early modern discourses about laughter inscribed in the plays? - how is laughter represented in the plays? - what is the relationship between laughter on stage and the audience in the early modern theatre? The phenomenon of laughter in the context of Shakespearean theatre needs to be examined against the historical backdrop of a widening gap between popular and elite culture at this time and an increased regulation of laughter. A more nuanced understanding of this phenomenon will involve taking into account both power relations that structure society as well as artistic pressures bearing on the Renaissance theatre. 3. Dr. des. Andrew Johnston Staging Secrecy Late medieval and early modern English literature discusses issues of secrecy in diverse and often contradictory forms. On the one hand there seems to be an officially recognized sphere of secrecy, performed in a more or less ritual manner (auricular confession, the Privy Council). On the other hand, we witness the emergence of unauthorized social practices which create new and uncontrolled spaces of secrecy (heresy, intrigue and conspiracy). While the authorized spheres of secrecy appear to be fully integrated into their culture's public modes of representation, the staging of the subversive ones demands special strategies. Since even secrecy cannot exist without an - albeit exclusive - modecum of visibility, both contemporaries and modern scholars are faced with a paradox: they have to represent and perceive that which by definition ought to defy representation and perception. Thus, this project has set itself the goal to trace the changing discourses of secrecy and secrecy's changing representation within different media and social practices, for instance on the stage and in literature but also in the rituals and activities of professional plotters, informers and agents from the age of the Lollards to the time of the Gunpowder Plot. 4. Irmgard Maassen Performing Love in Early Modern English Drama Love, in simultaneously being a private emotion and serving as a legitimating basis of social relations, involves a paradox: it requires the public, socially conventionalised performance of a private, subjective feeling. Early modern England had its own specific repertoire of expressive acts and performative codes to display the emotion, and go through the motions, of love. This project is looking at the morphological transformations and the cultural and historical functions of performances of love in early modern drama. While most critics have hitherto conceived of ‘love' as a discursive formation, tracing the textual inscriptions of desire in literature, this project instead aims to approach love from the outside, through the performance of attitudes and actions, gestures and postures. It regards, and investigates, love as a performative construct rather than as an innermost feeling. In particular, the dramatic presentation of the body, the self-fashioning of the lovers, the rituals, props and the playful bricolage of different social and cultural scripts of loving will be analysed. Performances of love on the Elizabethan stage will be related to folk customs (charivari, courtship games, betrothal), to normative conduct precepts (marriage manuals, conduct books, sermons, love-débats) and to alternative forms of literary representations of love (sonnets, romances). Special attention will be given to the ambiguity of the sexual body which, in close analogy to the aesthetics of theatrical performance, vacillates between authenticity and dissembling, between being affected by love and displaying affection. By focusing on the historical period when the emergence of the modern notion of love is shaped by cultural practices derived from, and dominated by, the medium of the theatre, this project contributes to the investigation of the formation of early modern subjectivity. It will add to the well-known parameters of rank and gender those of person – the construct of essential selfhood - and persona – the mask constructed in performing the self. 5. Prof. Dr. Manfred Pfister Dialogization of Texts in English Renaissance Literature Our investigation of other genres draws on the structures of the Elizabethan theatre, where action is based on dialogic speech, and performance becomes the dominant form of representation. In the theatre the author loses authority, delegating authorial control to other participants in the performance: to his characters, in whose dialogic interactions the claim for absolute truth is constantly fractured into a variety of conflicting positions and attitudes which have to be perpetually renegotiated; to his actors, who translate the letters on the page into a multitude of voices, and who, with their own voices and bodies, invest the written text with additional meaning; and to the audience, who, in its bodily presence and interventions, becomes part of the performance itself. The main hypothesis is that other media and genres of the early modern period show a similar destabilization of authorial control. Two genres, or discursive formations, will be studied diachronically from the early 16th to the early 17th c. for the performative strategies that turn discursive and constative texts into dialogic texts: (1) Historiography (from Polydore Vergil and Thomas More to Hall, Holinshed, Stow and Ralegh), the historiographical epic (Daniel, Drayton) and the history play from Bale to Shakespeare; and (2) Humanism and Reformation as cultures of dialogue, debate and polemics. Dialogization can already be traced in Erasmian dialogues, as they are adapted by Thomas Morus (Dialogue of Comfort agaynst Trybulacion), staged as débats in interludes or else integrated into narrative texts (e.g. Lyly). Apart from actual literary dialogues, two other forms of philosophical-theological contest will be considered in this project: homilies and pamphlets. Homilies are of interest because of the tensions between the authoritatively pre-scribed text, as in the Tudor Homilies, and its actual performances in public readings or in individually conceived sermons such as those written by John Donne. The role played by body and voice as well as the forms and functions of dialogue become relevant here - dialogue, as insertion into the narrative but also as question-and-answer-game between the preacher and his audience. The differences between Anglican and Puritan performative cultures will be focussed on here, as also in the analysis of theological and polemical pamphlets, in particular of the Marprelate Controversy. In this controversy Anglican and Puritan parties, while arguing about differing theological views and religious practices, ridiculed and insulted their opponents in spectacular manner, staging a ‘carnival of ideas' by wildly posturing and gesticulating to each other and to the audience. 6. Dr. des. Susanne Rupp Airs and Madrigals: Performativity of Text, Music and Performance Due to the influence of the theatre – the central cultural medium in early modern England – performativity manifests itself in various other genres and media of the period. Taking this into account the question arises how this phenomenon also affects vocal music. In order to answer this question the performative potential of airs and madrigals with regards to text, music and performance shall be looked at. One type of performativity can be found within the text: The text is, in the sense defined by speech act theory, performative in itself. In and through it speech acts can be performed, such as courting or seducing. The text will thus refer to conventional patterns of representation or behaviour which it either fulfills, exaggerates or undermines. A text can be considered performative in the sense that it acts out a plot, or presents affects of e.g. joy or sadness. By doing this the text interactively addresses the desired person or other people present and also brings into play the body of the speaking/singing subject. The literary text gains a further performative dimension when it is set to music. The music follows the performative dynamics of the text: Whereas medieval music theory expected music to represent universal harmonies, the music theory of Humanism and the Renaissance shifted the emphasis towards music's ability to express situational and individual affects. This idea refers equally to affects which are expressed by the singer while performing, as well as to the affects which are roused in the listeners. The task of music is to interpret and intensify the affective, gestic and actional potential of the text. It is in this sense that music becomes performative itself. The performance, which adds to the airs and madrigals the actual performative dimension, has to be reconstructed from text and music as well as from other historical sources and documents (e.g. staged performances of songs in plays, iconography). With regard to performance two aspects are of particular interest within the framework of this project: (1) the human voice as performing medium; (2) the singer's relation to his/her role, his/her fictional addressee and his/her actual audience. Investigating the specific materiality of performance enables us to dynamize the (musical) text and to recover new dimensions of meaning that have escaped more traditional methods and models. \| oben \| Projektliste \| Homepage \| SUCHEN \| Stand: 12/02