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’ (censorship as a repressive, external threat to essential freedoms) that has been adopted by ‘political critics’ working on the early modern period (particularly British cultural materialists), which ‘makes available in the Renaissance a certain essentially moral notion of critical opposition’. ‘By extension,’ argues Burt, ‘a similar kind of critical opposition becomes available in the present.’4 This situation may well have come about, as Robert Young has noted, because cultural materialism as a broadly leftist critical practice has pretty much supplanted or displaced the
the colonising dangers of attempting to speak for the past – something Stephen Greenblatt and other New Historicists have characterised themselves as doing and which comes through in their anecdotal style, no matter how ‘thick’ a description one provides of the cultural phenomenon under scrutiny.14 Despite the value of this reminder, however, these responses also understate New Historicism’s, and more so Cultural Materialism’s, at least theoretical investment in a self-conscious examination of early modern culture. From the start, its major theorists, including
. 2 Wotton, The Elements of Architecture , p. 4. 3 Harris, Untimely Matter , pp. 16–20. 4 See Jonathan Dollimore, ‘Introduction: Shakespeare, Cultural Materialism and New Historicism’, in
. 178; Raymond Williams discusses Wales in ‘Are We Becoming More Divided’ in Daniel Williams (ed.), Who Speaks for Wales? Nation, Culture, Identity (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), pp. 186–90 (p. 189). 19 Hywel Dix, After Raymond Williams: Cultural Materialism and the Break-Up of
can illuminate many of the episodes and characters of the poem. Spenserians have always produced biographical, textual, prosodic, and other historically-based works. In the past decades, many studies that emphasize deconstructive, gender, and psychoanalytic approaches have also appeared. Valuable and insightful as they are, such studies employ categories that were not part of the mental equipment available to original readers of The Faerie Queene and cannot bring us closer to the original readers’ experience. The New Historicism and Cultural Materialism 1 “A Letter
) by building a heavy industrial ‘base’: given this, a cultural superstructure will somehow build itself. In more Althusserian form … the problems of historical and cultural materialism are not so much solved as shuffled away or evaded.18 In the title essay of The Poverty of Theory Thompson’s main focus may be on ‘the enemy on the left’, but there are a number of places where he links his onslaught against Althusser with his antipathy towards ‘bourgeois’ trends in the social sciences. Lamenting the way that the ‘decade of heroes’ of 1936–46 gave way to the Cold War
This book explores the development of Robert Lepage’s distinctive approach to stage direction in the early (1984–94) and middle (1995–2008) stages of his career, arguing that globalisation had a defining effect in shaping his aesthetic and professional trajectory. It combines examination of Lepage’s theatremaking techniques with discussion of his work’s effects on audiences, calling on Lepage’s own statements as well as existing scholarship and critical response. In addition to globalisation theory, the book draws on cinema studies, queer theory, and theories of affect and reception. As such, it offers an unprecedented conceptual framework, drawing together what has previously been a scattered field of research. Each of six chapters treats a particular aspect of globalisation, using this as a means to explore one or more of Lepage’s productions. These aspects include the relationship of the local (in Lepage’s case, his background in Québec) to the global; the place of individual experience within global late modernity; the effects of screen media on human perception; the particular affect of ‘feeling global’; the place of branding in contemporary creative systems; and the relationship of creative industries to neoliberal economies. Making theatre global: Robert Lepage’s original stage productions will be of interest to scholars of contemporary theatre, advanced-level undergraduates with an interest in the application of theoretical approaches to theatrical creation and reception, and arts lovers keen for new perspectives on one of the most talked-about theatre artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Princess, The Guardian , 3 July 2002 . Brown , Paul , ‘“ This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”: The Tempest and the discourse of colonialism’ , pp. 48–71 in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (eds), Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism . Manchester
, aimless, disconnected and alienated – but also suffused with libido and creative of some of the most remarkable insights, poetry and dramatic moments of these great plays’. 24 While cultural materialism and new historicism have offered us the reductive functionalism of an ‘automaton-like’ subject determined by an Althusserian or Foucauldian matrix of ideology and power, Grady
Minnesota Press, 1978) and Alan Sinfield, ‘Protestantism: Questions of Subjectivity and Control’ in Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 27 These beliefs may be referred to as either ‘Melanchthonian’ or ‘Philippist’. 28 Stillman, ‘Deadly Stinging Adders’, pp. 247–8. Famously, Sidney was sent as an ambassador to the imperial court to communicate Elizabeth’s condolences to Maximilian’s son and heir, Rudolf II (see H. R. Woudhuysen, ‘Sidney, Sir Philip (1554–1586)’, in Oxford Dictionary of