Postmodern theatre

About: Postmodern theatre is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1441 publications have been published within this topic receiving 46774 citations.

The postmodern condition : a report on knowledge

Abstract: Many definitions of postmodernism focus on its nature as the aftermath of the modern industrial age when technology developed. This book extends that analysis to postmodernism by looking at the status of science, technology, and the arts, the significance of technocracy, and the way the flow of information is controlled in the Western world.

The Postmodern Condition

Abstract: I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sciences: But that progress in turn presupposes it. To the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably, the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university institution which in the past relied on it. The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language elements – narrative, but also denotative, prescriptive, descriptive, and so on. Conveyed within each cloud are pragmatic valencies specific to its kind. Each of us lives at the intersection of many of these. However, we do not necessarily establish stable language combinations, and the properties of the ones we do establish are not necessarily communicable. Thus the society of the future falls less within the province of a Newtonian anthropology (such as structuralism or systems theory) than a pragmatics of language particles. There are many different language games – a heterogeneity of elements. They only give rise to institutions in patches – local determinism. The decision makers, however, attempt to manage these clouds of sociality according to input/output matrices, following a logic which implies that their elements are commensurable and that the whole is determinable.

Theatre of the Oppressed

Abstract: As illiteracy has been shown to be a weapon of the ruling class, so Augusto Boal shows theatre to be a weapon, not only of bourgeois control but of revolution. He demonstrates the ways in which theatre has come to reflect ruling-class control, drawing on the theories of Aristotle and Machiavelli. He then shows the process reversed in Brechtian/Marxist poetics. All the theory is related to his own experience of revolutionary theatre in Latin America, and illustrated with practical examples of exercises and games used in the People's Theatre of Peru. This is now a classic text on radical drama. Boal restores theatre to its proper place as a popular form of communication and expression, and points to the revolutionary potential of transforming the spectator into the actor.

Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations

Abstract: In this timely volume, the authors systematically analyze postmodern t heory to evaluate its relevance for critical social theory and radical politics today. The authors claim that while postmodern theory provi des insights into contemporary developments, it lacks adequate methodo logical and political perspectives to provide a critical social theory and radical politics for the present age.

Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality

Abstract: Introduction: In Search of Postmodern Reason. 1 Morality without Ethics. 2 Forms of Togetherness. 3 Broken Lives, Broken Strategies. 4 A Catalogue of Postmodern Fears. 5 The Stranger Revisited -- and Revisiting. 6 Violence, Postmodern. 7 Tribal Moralities. 8 Morality and Politics. Index.