Performativity/Theatricality 

György Fogarasi: Performativity/Theatricality
The paper starts out from the difference between Theatre Studies and Performance Studies to outline the problem of performativity and its relation to theatricality. After an investigation of the ordinary Austinian notion of the performative, it traces its critical rethinking first in the concept of the super-performative, and then in the perverformative (or afformative), in order finally to provide a new concept of theatricality. Full Text in Hungarian

Concepts

Andrew Parker - Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: Performativity and Performance
The touchstone of this paper is Austin's seminal work on performatives. The authors examine the theatrical aspects of performative utterances, as well as the way such utterances enhance the establishment and sustainment of various power relations in the discursive field of gender, and of queer identities in particular. Full Text in Hungarian

Glen McGillivray: The Discursive Formation of Theatricality as a Critical Concept
The metaphor of theatricality has, in recent years, been recuperated as a key term in the fields of Theatre and Performance Studies. This scholarly "re-valuing" of the term arises, in part, as a reaction to performativity, a term that has achieved a certain discursive dominance in the field. Rather than taking sides in favour of one or the other, in this essay I argue that theatricality is critically formed by this struggle. Historically, theatrical metaphors have been employed in anti-theatricalist discourses to suggest ideas of inauthenticity and deception; most famously, in art critic Michael Fried's "Art and Objecthood" (1998). Yet, for the European avantgarde, theatricality was the "essence" of theatre. What appears to be a contradiction seems less so when it is understood that "truth" in these instances lies not in what is claimed for theatricality, but in the juxtaposition of it and another term. This essay analyses how the metaphor of theatricality is flexibly applied in the service of particular arguments as either ally or foe. At stake is the assertion of interpretive authority that allows only one interpretation in the struggle for discursive dominance. Full Text in Hungarian

Fields

Joachim Fiebach: From Oral Traditions to Televised "Realities"
The essay provides an extremely multi-faceted approach of theatricality. Traditional Aristotelian theater, Yoruba itinerant thetater, medieval court etiquette, Brecht's epic theater, everyday social role-playing, (post)modern media-complex (etc.): Fiebach reveals that all the diverse examples of theatrical activities are determined by a specific reality-constituting performance, embedded into power systems. Thus, besides its descriptive character, the essay gives an indication as well, by posing the necessity of a profound and specific media criticism as the theatricality-researcher's most urgent task. Full Text in Hungarian

Samuel Weber: Scene and Screen: Electronic Media and Theatricality
The essay consists of three parts: first, it focuses on Aristotle's Poetics, secondly, it interprets some passages in Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus, and finally, it examines Walter Benjamin's short essay on "Theater and Radio". The stake of the argument is, on the one hand, to shed light on the presuppositions and limitations of the Aristotelian notion of theatre conceived in terms of tragedy as the mimesis of a self-contained and complete action, whereas on the other hand, the aim is to offer an alternative conception of theatre, which can provide a more effective analytical tool, even in the age of electronic media. Benjamin's text, which draws on the Brechtian conception of epic theatre to reinvent a notion of theatricality in medial perspective, plays a decisive role in the latter attempt. The two conceptions are articulated, within the Sophoclean play, in terms of the relation between Oedipus and Tiresias. Full Text in Hungarian

Walter Benjamin: Theatre and Radio
This short sketch investigates the ambivalence inherent in the competitive as well as potentially co-operative relation between theatre and radio, rethinking this relationship from the perspective of Brecht's conception of epic theatre. Full Text in Hungarian

Analyses

Vera Kérchy: An Ironical-Allegorical Reading of Theatre: Zsótér's Lame Marionettes (Sándor Zsótér: Pentheszileia)
The article collates Kleist's essay on the marionette theatre and its interpretation by de Man in its interpretation of Zsótér's production Pentheszileia. The "live marionettes", human puppets as the allegories of the material textual agency make Zsótér's performance the exemplary model of "material theatre". Full Text in Hungarian

Samuel Weber: Double Take: Acting and Writing in Genet's "The Strange Word Urb"
The opening argument sketches the convergence of theatre and television by highlighting the relation of theatre to media from a new angle. After that, the essay first spells out the Aristotelian conception, which attempts to marginalize the spatial and scenic aspects of theatre, then, locating the subversive force of theatre in its spatiality, as well as its power to disrupt and reorganize space, the essay proceeds to produce a local, but detailed analysis of Jean Genet's related notions. Genet's text "The Strange Word Urb" (L'Étrange mot d'...) serves as the apropos of such an analysis. With unceasing attention also to the theatrical and gestural workings of Genet's writing, the paper attempts to rethink the ambivalent materiality of theatrical performance. In the wake of Genet's text, a close connection is established between that materiality and the relation to the dead (or various customs of burial), since the latter is based on the possibility of detachment, just like theatre itself (as far as it is conceived in terms of the division and framing of space). Full Text in Hungarian

András Müllner: Your Own Voice?
The essay focuses on the peculiar position of the human voice (and through it, of human presence) within theories articulated in terms of an opposition between orality and literacy. In contrast to such theorizing, I argue that through the montage character of the recorded voice (a quality usually veiled by simulative oversecuring) we can glimpse the divided, inscribed nature of the organic voice, that is, the materiality of phonic communication. Avantguard experiments with voice, by Antonin Artaud or Tibor Hajas, serve illustrative instances for this process. Full Text in Hungarian

György Fogarasi: Beyond the Rear: Theatricality in Hitchcock
This paper seeks to critically investigate Benjamin's opposition between theatre and cinema, and to elaborate an alternative rendering of that relation, through an analysis of lighting and visibility. The analysis centers around the theatrical aspect of Hitchcock's movies, and the theatricalization in Rear Window in particular. Thus, emphasis is given to the techniques of asymmetricalization both within vision and hearing. Full Text in Hungarian

Walter Benjamin: The Telephone
This autobiographical note contains a brief argument on the early days of the telephone, its uncanny and dislocating effects, and the way it disrupted the integrity of private, familial space. Full Text in Hungarian

Students' Workshop

Tamás Bodroghalmi: Bodyplay, Playbody (Speculation on the Body in Being John Malkovich)
The article is about the postmodern traits in the movie Being John Malkovich, such as the problematization of everyday reality, appearance of small competing narratives and resolving oppositions between body and soul, human and animal, puppet and puppeteer. Beyond the analysis of self-reflexive and ironic characteristics, emphasis is laid on the body image conveyed by the movie as well as on the functions such an image serves. Full Text in Hungarian

Eszter Gabriella Bajnóczi: Transgressive Aesthetics in Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis
The article scrutinizes the operation of "terrorist aesthetics" in Sara Kane's drama entitled 4.48 Psychosis. Topics such as suicide, brutality and transgression, as well as formal fragmentedness opposing unified signification (Kristeva's "poetic language"), and the ambiguity of the text as fictive or autobiographical together result in the defencelessness of the receiver-viewer-reader, the subversive situation of the terrorist. Full Text in Hungarian