Contours of the Theatrical Avant-Garde: Performance and Textuality

by James M. Harding (Editor), Laurence Senelick (Contributor), Sally Banes (Contributor)

This collection of essays explores the development of avant-garde theater and its relation to questions of textuality, authority, and the academy. Although the canon of modern and contemporary drama would be difficult to imagine without the influential legacy of the movements and strands of the historical avant-garde, this critical history is often overlooked in courses on modern and contemporary drama and theater.
Though primarily focusing on issues of textuality and performance, the essays regard the antitextualism of the avant-garde as indicative of the wide variety of anti-cultural sentiments that have characterized avant-garde performance. The volume begins with the anti-textual sentiments of the avant-garde, then offers antitextual models, explores specific performances, and ends with a critical analysis of the avant-garde. Uniting the array of opinions articulated is a belief that despite the problems that haunt the traditions of avant-garde theater, it can nonetheless offer continued valuable insights into the industries of literature, theater, scholarship, and culture.
James M. Harding is Assistant Professor of English, Mary Washington College. He is author of Adorno and a " Writing of the Ruins. "

312 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2000

About the author

James M. Harding is the author of The Ghosts of the Avant-Garde(s): Exorcising Experimental Theatre and Performance (Michigan, 2013), Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists and the American Avant-Garde (Michigan, 2010), and Adorno and "A Writing of the Ruins": Essays on Modern Aesthetics and Anglo-American Literature and Culture (SUNY, 1997). He is an internationally known scholar whose work focuses on the history of experimental theatre, on post 9/11 theatre and performance, on the intersection of surveillance and performance, and on performance studies more generally. His articles have appeared in TDR, Performance International, Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Modern Drama, and PMLA. He is currently finishing a new monograph tentatively entitled Performance, Transparency and the Cultures of Surveillance and a co-edited anthology entitled Center-Staging the Sixties: Mainstream and Popular Performance in a Turbulent Decade.

Harding is proud to be a Maryland alumnus, having completed his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in 1991 at College Park. Before joining the faculty at Maryland, he was Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick, UK, was twice a Visiting Professor at the Insitut für Theaterwissenschaft at the Freie Universität, Berlin, and was Professor of English at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, VA.