Arjomand Staged

Show Trials, Political Theater, and the Aesthetics of Judgment
1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-0-231-54573-0
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 100 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm

Theater requires artifice, justice demands truth. Are these demands as irreconcilable as the pejorative term “show trials” suggests? After the Second World War, canonical directors and playwrights sought to claim a new public role for theater by restaging the era’s great trials as shows. The Nuremberg trials, the Eichmann trial, and the Auschwitz trials were all performed multiple times, first in courts and then in theaters. Does justice require both courtrooms and stages?

In Staged, Minou Arjomand draws on a rich archive of postwar German and American rehearsals and performances to reveal how theater can become a place for forms of storytelling and judgment that are inadmissible in a court of law but indispensable for public life. She unveils the affinities between dramatists like Bertolt Brecht, Erwin Piscator, and Peter Weiss and philosophers such as Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin, showing how they responded to the rise of fascism with a new politics of performance. Linking performance with theories of aesthetics, history, and politics, Arjomand argues that it is not subject matter that makes theater political but rather the act of judging a performance in the company of others. Staged weaves together theater history and political philosophy into a powerful and timely case for the importance of theaters as public institutions.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Arjomand, Minou

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Theaterwissenschaft Theatergeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Genozid und ethnische Säuberung
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Sozialphilosophie, Politische Philosophie
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politische Gewalt Völkermord, Ethnische Säuberung, Kriegsverbrechen
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Geschichte der Westlichen Philosophie Westliche Philosophie: Transzendentalphilosophie, Kritizismus
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Dramen und Dramatiker

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Show Trials and Political Theater
1. Hannah Arendt: Judging in Dark Times
2. Bertolt Brecht: Poetic Justice
3. Erwin Piscator: Theater After Auschwitz
4. Trials in Nuremberg
Conclusion: Archives, Law, and Theater Today
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Arjomand Minou :

Minou Arjomand (PhD, Theater, Columbia) is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the translator and co-editor (with Ramona Mosse) of The Routledge Introduction to Theatre and Performance Studies by Erika Fischer-Licthe (2013) and has published articles in Modern Drama (2016), Maska: The Performing Arts Journal (2014), The Brecht Yearbook (2013), n+1, and Theatre Survey (2010).Minou Arjomand is an assistant professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin.