The speech-gesture complex : modernism, theatre, cinema / Anthony Paraskeva.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Paraskeva, Anthony, author.

Series:

Edinburgh critical studies in modernism, drama and performance

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Speech and gesture.

Gesture in literature.

Gesture in motion pictures.

Modernism (Literature).

Physical Description:

vi, 199 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, [2013]

Summary:

Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernism, Drama and Performance, This series of monographs extends our understanding of performance and Modernism by stressing the relationships between them and initiates new conversations between scholars, theatre and performance artists, and students. Series Editor: Olga Taxidou, University of Edinburgh, Places the performative gesture at the point of intersection between literature, theatre and cinema, This new study examines the representation of gesture in modernist writing, performance and cinema. Deploying a new theoretical term, 'the speech-gesture complex', Anthony Paraskeva identifies a relationship between speech and gesture which is neither exclusively literary nor performative and which, he argues, is fundamental to the aesthetics and politics of modernist authors. In discussions of works by Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Henry James, Wyndham Lewis, Vladimir Nabokov and Samuel Beckett, Paraskeva shows how this relationship is closely informed by their attention to the performed gestures of actors in theatre and cinema. Key Features: Provides new close readings of major and neglected work by Kafka, Joyce, James, Lewis, Nabokov and Beckett, revealing their complex relations with both theatre and cinema, Establishes a new critical-theoretical category, and highlights an unexplored dialogue between Ibsen, Benjamin, Adorno, Griffith, Eisenstein, Chaplin, Brecht, Artaud, Lang, Meyerhold, Duse and Garbo, Analyses central and neglected modernist texts alongside stage productions, styles of acting, film history and performance theory Book jacket.

Contents:

Kafka's Amerika: The Aesthetics and Politics of Incompletion 1

Unstable Categories: Naturalist and Modernist Performance Style 14

Performative Absence and Mechanical Reproduction 18

Theatre, Cinema and the Universal Language of Gesture 26

1 James Joyce 38

'our sad want of signs': Imperceptible Gestures in Ibsen and Joyce 38

Paralysis and Spectatorship: Henry James, Eleanora Duse, Yeats and Dubliners 43

Slips of the Hand in Exiles 55

'In the beginning was the gest': 'Circe', Early Cinema and the 'Art of Gestures' 64

2 Wyndham Lewis 88

The Clown and the Über-Marionette in Enemy of the Stars 88

The Childermass: Lewis vs Chaplin in the Afterlife 100

The Politics of Gesture: The Bailiff, Hitler and the Society of the Spectacle 110

3 The Transition to Sound 132

Nabokov, Lewis and Garbo 132

Late Modernism and the Resistance to Sound 148

4 Samuel Beckett 162

Hand-writing in Nacht und Träume 162

The Politics of Depersonalisation in Catastrophe 167.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 172-191) and index.

ISBN:

9780748684892

0748684891

OCLC:

861618382