Joseph Cermatori | Skidmore College (original) (raw)
Videos by Joseph Cermatori
Sponsored by Johns Hopkins University Press and Skidmore College Tuesday, April 26, 2022 A di... more Sponsored by Johns Hopkins University Press and Skidmore College
Tuesday, April 26, 2022
A discussion and celebration of
*Baroque Modernity: An Aesthetics of Theater*
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021)
Roundtable participants
Moderator:
Douglas Mao (Johns Hopkins University)
Panelists:
Matthew Buckley (Rutgers University)
Rebecca Schneider (Brown University)
Matthew Wilson Smith (Stanford University)
Respondent:
Joseph Cermatori (Skidmore College)
Available for purchase online:
https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/12551/baroque-modernity
48 views
Papers by Joseph Cermatori
CoSMO: Comparative Studies in Modernism, 2023
This paper revisits Walter Benjamin's unpublished "Announcement of the Journal Angelus Novus," on... more This paper revisits Walter Benjamin's unpublished "Announcement of the Journal Angelus Novus," one of relatively few texts Benjamin is known to have written in 1922, European modernism's widely recognized annus mirabilis. The announcement followed numerous, transformative essays and fragments of 1921 and was written alongside his dissertation on The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism, encompassing a pivotal moment in Benjamin's philosophical maturation. Heralding the new, never realized journal, the announcement articulates what might be deemed "the task of the editor," which it describes as a quest for "philosophical universality". The Angelus Novus journal would proceed form the fact of modern social discontinuities toward the elaboration of universal philosophical truths through the criticism of literary works. This paper reconsiders Benjamin's editorial ambitions as part of his individual philosophical development and within a broader context of "total modernism," discussing the announcement's continued relevance for our contemporary world.
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CoSMO: Comparative Studies in Modernism, 2022
Upon his recent death, this article revisits the major contributions of Dr. Hans-Thies Lehmann to... more Upon his recent death, this article revisits the major contributions of Dr. Hans-Thies Lehmann to contemporary debates on theatre aesthetics. Lehmann's concept of a postdramatic theatre-that is, a theatre that has moved beyond the central importance of dramatic texts-is surveyed some two decades after he made his primary interventions in the field. The article furthermore reviews Lehmann's influence in the Anglophone discipline of theatre studies and in the global field of theatre production.
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Salmagundi, 2022
Response to Adam Phillips's 2022 essay "The Pleasures of Censorship," part of a special section o... more Response to Adam Phillips's 2022 essay "The Pleasures of Censorship," part of a special section on "Forbidden Pleasure, Flirtation, Censorship, & the Good Life: On Adam Phillips" in Salmagundi Magazine, featuring essays by Stephen Greenblatt, Robert Boyers, Emily Fox-Gordon, Phillip Lopate, Elizabeth Benedict, Mark Edmundson, Adam Phillips, and Joseph Cermatori. For Phillips's essay, see: https://salmagundi.skidmore.edu/articles/375-the-pleasures-of-censorship
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Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 2018
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Criticism, 2019
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PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 2020
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PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 2021
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portive, yet clear-eyed, mentorship. D.A. Hadfield’s and Margaret D. Stetz’s pieces offer feminis... more portive, yet clear-eyed, mentorship. D.A. Hadfield’s and Margaret D. Stetz’s pieces offer feminist literary critics and cultural historians the most eyeopening discussions in the collection. They provide similarly distressing accounts of Shaw’s discouraging women playwrights, specifically Janet Achurch (Hadfield) and George Egerton (the penname of Mary Chavelita Dunne [Stetz]). Hadfield shows how Shaw championed Achurch as an actress but undermined her dramaturgical efforts. And Stetz sees Shaw’s response to Egerton’s writing as bordering on the “abusive” (138). Hadfield’s conclusion applies cogently to both these discussions: Shaw’s “success in writing women was built in no small part on his ability to keep them from writing themselves” (130). Virginia Costello’s examination of the relationship between Shaw and the uncompromising anarchist and dramatic critic Emma Goldman further reveals “Shaw privileging aesthetics over politics, which results in aesthetics limiting his politics” ...
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PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 2021
I had purchased my ticket to Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance (Part One) the night before, but cau... more I had purchased my ticket to Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance (Part One) the night before, but cautiously. The show was scheduled to end its Broadway run soon and Covid-19 was looking ever more unpredictable. For both reasons, I wagered the March 10 matinee was probably going to be my last chance to see the production. Italy had just gone into national lockdown on March 9. Neither I nor any of my loved ones had begun stockpiling masks or hand sanitizer yet. Still, when deciding whether to traverse Manhattan by cab or subway that day, I opted to walk, just to minimize risk where I could.
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In the last chapter of Franz Kafka’s Amerika, Karl Rossman arrives at the racetrack where the Nat... more In the last chapter of Franz Kafka’s Amerika, Karl Rossman arrives at the racetrack where the Nature Theater of Oklahoma is holding its auditions. Suddenly he sees a low stage with “hundreds of women dressed as angels in white robes and with great wings on their shoulders [...] blowing on long trumpets that glittered like gold” (Kafka [1927] 1974:274). The performers perch awkwardly on high pedestals that are hidden by their flowing robes: “[T]hese women looked gigantic, except that the smallness of their heads spoiled a little the impression of size, and their loose hair looked too short and almost absurd hanging between the great wings and framing their faces” (274).
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A fter meeting at a Vatican convention of over 250 international artists and scientists in 2009, ... more A fter meeting at a Vatican convention of over 250 international artists and scientists in 2009, the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt and American stage director Robert Wilson decided to undertake a collaboration. The result is Adam’s Passion, a ninety-minute work of music theatre that pairs Pärt’s music with Wilson’s mise-en-scène, which premiered in May 2015 at the Noblessner Foundry in Estonia’s capital city, Tallinn. The work has been beautifully documented in a new DVD and is the subject of an hour-long documentary, The Lost Paradise, both from the German production company Accentus.
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Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, 2020
During his short lifetime, Reza Abdoh (1963-1995) was hailed as a trailblazing theater artist in ... more During his short lifetime, Reza Abdoh (1963-1995) was hailed as a trailblazing theater artist in the avant-garde art scenes of both Los Angeles and New York, where he created a series of massive performance spectacles that sought to intervene critically in the American political status quo. His 1992 piece The Law of Remains stages a furious response to the US American AIDS crisis, depicting it through the allegorical lens of a film being made by Andy Warhol based on the life of queer serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer. Performed in the ruins of an abandoned hotel ballroom, the piece drew attention in The New York Times for being "one of the angriest theater pieces ever hurled at a New York audience." This article analyzes the political dimension of Abdoh's theater by focusing on specific gestural elements that occur at key moments in The Law of Remains. Doing so, it brings together theories of gesture from Hans-Thies Lehmann, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, and Walter Benjamin, and configures these viewpoints into a constellation through which the politics of gesture in Abdoh can be illuminated. What emerges in Abdoh is a politics of "hopeless hope," one uniquely meaningful for our planetary present tense.
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Accelerate Magazine, 2019
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PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 2021
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PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 2018
Abdoh’s theatre refused any easy solutions of the sort we might seek for this question, but at th... more Abdoh’s theatre refused any easy solutions of the sort we might seek for this question, but at the same time, it always rejected the comforts of passivity. He offered no answers that could form bridges to happier futures; he promised nothing, but still risked the near hopelessness of artistic production in times of smothering unfreedom. When asked by Howard Ross Patlis in an interview for Theatre Week, “What is it you want to communicate to your audience?” he replied, “That it is not enough to think of a world that is more livable . . . but that you have to act on it.”
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Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 2018
This article reevaluates Michael Fried’s antitheatrical aesthetics—expounded primarily in “Art an... more This article reevaluates Michael Fried’s antitheatrical aesthetics—expounded primarily in “Art and Objecthood” (1967) and Absorption and Theatricality (1980)—by constellating Fried’s work alongside Péter Szondi’s writings on modern drama and Paul de Man’s theories of allegory. This theoretical juxtaposition reveals, first, that the phenomenon Fried describes as “absorption” parallels a form of mimetic, bourgeois drama hegemonic in European theatre from the time of Diderot to Ibsen, and second, that Fried’s concept of “theatricality” corresponds significantly to the notion of allegory developed in de Man’s work. Fried’s writings thus advance a theory of modernity organized around the rise and fall of mimesis in performance, one in which mimetic drama comes programmatically to eclipse allegory and theatricality during the Enlightenment, only to then fall into crisis around the turn of the twentieth century with the rise of modernism, understood as a moment marked by the reemergence of allegory and theatricality in the arts. In this way, Fried’s views of theatricality overlap considerably with the origins of postdramatic theatre demonstrated influentially in theatre studies by Hans-Thies Lehmann, and these overlaps require our field to rethink now well-established positions on Fried and Lehmann alike. A new view of theatre history is required, one that accounts both for the emergence of supposedly postdramatic forms and for this general reappearance of theatricality and allegory in modern times.
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ABSTRACT: This article focuses on Gertrude Stein’s 1927 opera Four Saints in Three Acts, which ta... more ABSTRACT: This article focuses on Gertrude Stein’s 1927 opera Four Saints in Three Acts, which takes a pair of baroque saints for its protagonists and which debuted in a 1934 production replete with deliberate citations of baroque stage design, gesture, and visual art – details that have gone almost entirely unacknowledged in the past several decades’ scholarship on Stein. It recovers these forgotten production details by juxtaposing a reading of Stein’s text and performance theories with Walter Benjamin’s vision of baroque theatre as articulated in The Origin of German Trauerspiel. Interpreting Stein’s methods within the frame of baroque theatrical allegory, it suggests Stein’s situation within a larger tradition of baroque modernism. It argues that Stein found, within the concept of the baroque, a productive means of challen- ging norms of representation across a wide array of registers – linguistic, aesthetic, sexual, racial, and historiographic.
KEYWORDS: Gertrude Stein, Walter Benjamin, baroque theatre, gesture, allegory, citationality, Four Saints in Three Acts
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Sponsored by Johns Hopkins University Press and Skidmore College Tuesday, April 26, 2022 A di... more Sponsored by Johns Hopkins University Press and Skidmore College
Tuesday, April 26, 2022
A discussion and celebration of
*Baroque Modernity: An Aesthetics of Theater*
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021)
Roundtable participants
Moderator:
Douglas Mao (Johns Hopkins University)
Panelists:
Matthew Buckley (Rutgers University)
Rebecca Schneider (Brown University)
Matthew Wilson Smith (Stanford University)
Respondent:
Joseph Cermatori (Skidmore College)
Available for purchase online:
https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/12551/baroque-modernity
48 views
CoSMO: Comparative Studies in Modernism, 2023
This paper revisits Walter Benjamin's unpublished "Announcement of the Journal Angelus Novus," on... more This paper revisits Walter Benjamin's unpublished "Announcement of the Journal Angelus Novus," one of relatively few texts Benjamin is known to have written in 1922, European modernism's widely recognized annus mirabilis. The announcement followed numerous, transformative essays and fragments of 1921 and was written alongside his dissertation on The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism, encompassing a pivotal moment in Benjamin's philosophical maturation. Heralding the new, never realized journal, the announcement articulates what might be deemed "the task of the editor," which it describes as a quest for "philosophical universality". The Angelus Novus journal would proceed form the fact of modern social discontinuities toward the elaboration of universal philosophical truths through the criticism of literary works. This paper reconsiders Benjamin's editorial ambitions as part of his individual philosophical development and within a broader context of "total modernism," discussing the announcement's continued relevance for our contemporary world.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
CoSMO: Comparative Studies in Modernism, 2022
Upon his recent death, this article revisits the major contributions of Dr. Hans-Thies Lehmann to... more Upon his recent death, this article revisits the major contributions of Dr. Hans-Thies Lehmann to contemporary debates on theatre aesthetics. Lehmann's concept of a postdramatic theatre-that is, a theatre that has moved beyond the central importance of dramatic texts-is surveyed some two decades after he made his primary interventions in the field. The article furthermore reviews Lehmann's influence in the Anglophone discipline of theatre studies and in the global field of theatre production.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Salmagundi, 2022
Response to Adam Phillips's 2022 essay "The Pleasures of Censorship," part of a special section o... more Response to Adam Phillips's 2022 essay "The Pleasures of Censorship," part of a special section on "Forbidden Pleasure, Flirtation, Censorship, & the Good Life: On Adam Phillips" in Salmagundi Magazine, featuring essays by Stephen Greenblatt, Robert Boyers, Emily Fox-Gordon, Phillip Lopate, Elizabeth Benedict, Mark Edmundson, Adam Phillips, and Joseph Cermatori. For Phillips's essay, see: https://salmagundi.skidmore.edu/articles/375-the-pleasures-of-censorship
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 2018
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Criticism, 2019
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PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 2020
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 2021
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
portive, yet clear-eyed, mentorship. D.A. Hadfield’s and Margaret D. Stetz’s pieces offer feminis... more portive, yet clear-eyed, mentorship. D.A. Hadfield’s and Margaret D. Stetz’s pieces offer feminist literary critics and cultural historians the most eyeopening discussions in the collection. They provide similarly distressing accounts of Shaw’s discouraging women playwrights, specifically Janet Achurch (Hadfield) and George Egerton (the penname of Mary Chavelita Dunne [Stetz]). Hadfield shows how Shaw championed Achurch as an actress but undermined her dramaturgical efforts. And Stetz sees Shaw’s response to Egerton’s writing as bordering on the “abusive” (138). Hadfield’s conclusion applies cogently to both these discussions: Shaw’s “success in writing women was built in no small part on his ability to keep them from writing themselves” (130). Virginia Costello’s examination of the relationship between Shaw and the uncompromising anarchist and dramatic critic Emma Goldman further reveals “Shaw privileging aesthetics over politics, which results in aesthetics limiting his politics” ...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 2021
I had purchased my ticket to Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance (Part One) the night before, but cau... more I had purchased my ticket to Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance (Part One) the night before, but cautiously. The show was scheduled to end its Broadway run soon and Covid-19 was looking ever more unpredictable. For both reasons, I wagered the March 10 matinee was probably going to be my last chance to see the production. Italy had just gone into national lockdown on March 9. Neither I nor any of my loved ones had begun stockpiling masks or hand sanitizer yet. Still, when deciding whether to traverse Manhattan by cab or subway that day, I opted to walk, just to minimize risk where I could.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
In the last chapter of Franz Kafka’s Amerika, Karl Rossman arrives at the racetrack where the Nat... more In the last chapter of Franz Kafka’s Amerika, Karl Rossman arrives at the racetrack where the Nature Theater of Oklahoma is holding its auditions. Suddenly he sees a low stage with “hundreds of women dressed as angels in white robes and with great wings on their shoulders [...] blowing on long trumpets that glittered like gold” (Kafka [1927] 1974:274). The performers perch awkwardly on high pedestals that are hidden by their flowing robes: “[T]hese women looked gigantic, except that the smallness of their heads spoiled a little the impression of size, and their loose hair looked too short and almost absurd hanging between the great wings and framing their faces” (274).
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
A fter meeting at a Vatican convention of over 250 international artists and scientists in 2009, ... more A fter meeting at a Vatican convention of over 250 international artists and scientists in 2009, the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt and American stage director Robert Wilson decided to undertake a collaboration. The result is Adam’s Passion, a ninety-minute work of music theatre that pairs Pärt’s music with Wilson’s mise-en-scène, which premiered in May 2015 at the Noblessner Foundry in Estonia’s capital city, Tallinn. The work has been beautifully documented in a new DVD and is the subject of an hour-long documentary, The Lost Paradise, both from the German production company Accentus.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, 2020
During his short lifetime, Reza Abdoh (1963-1995) was hailed as a trailblazing theater artist in ... more During his short lifetime, Reza Abdoh (1963-1995) was hailed as a trailblazing theater artist in the avant-garde art scenes of both Los Angeles and New York, where he created a series of massive performance spectacles that sought to intervene critically in the American political status quo. His 1992 piece The Law of Remains stages a furious response to the US American AIDS crisis, depicting it through the allegorical lens of a film being made by Andy Warhol based on the life of queer serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer. Performed in the ruins of an abandoned hotel ballroom, the piece drew attention in The New York Times for being "one of the angriest theater pieces ever hurled at a New York audience." This article analyzes the political dimension of Abdoh's theater by focusing on specific gestural elements that occur at key moments in The Law of Remains. Doing so, it brings together theories of gesture from Hans-Thies Lehmann, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, and Walter Benjamin, and configures these viewpoints into a constellation through which the politics of gesture in Abdoh can be illuminated. What emerges in Abdoh is a politics of "hopeless hope," one uniquely meaningful for our planetary present tense.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Accelerate Magazine, 2019
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 2021
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
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PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 2018
Abdoh’s theatre refused any easy solutions of the sort we might seek for this question, but at th... more Abdoh’s theatre refused any easy solutions of the sort we might seek for this question, but at the same time, it always rejected the comforts of passivity. He offered no answers that could form bridges to happier futures; he promised nothing, but still risked the near hopelessness of artistic production in times of smothering unfreedom. When asked by Howard Ross Patlis in an interview for Theatre Week, “What is it you want to communicate to your audience?” he replied, “That it is not enough to think of a world that is more livable . . . but that you have to act on it.”
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 2018
This article reevaluates Michael Fried’s antitheatrical aesthetics—expounded primarily in “Art an... more This article reevaluates Michael Fried’s antitheatrical aesthetics—expounded primarily in “Art and Objecthood” (1967) and Absorption and Theatricality (1980)—by constellating Fried’s work alongside Péter Szondi’s writings on modern drama and Paul de Man’s theories of allegory. This theoretical juxtaposition reveals, first, that the phenomenon Fried describes as “absorption” parallels a form of mimetic, bourgeois drama hegemonic in European theatre from the time of Diderot to Ibsen, and second, that Fried’s concept of “theatricality” corresponds significantly to the notion of allegory developed in de Man’s work. Fried’s writings thus advance a theory of modernity organized around the rise and fall of mimesis in performance, one in which mimetic drama comes programmatically to eclipse allegory and theatricality during the Enlightenment, only to then fall into crisis around the turn of the twentieth century with the rise of modernism, understood as a moment marked by the reemergence of allegory and theatricality in the arts. In this way, Fried’s views of theatricality overlap considerably with the origins of postdramatic theatre demonstrated influentially in theatre studies by Hans-Thies Lehmann, and these overlaps require our field to rethink now well-established positions on Fried and Lehmann alike. A new view of theatre history is required, one that accounts both for the emergence of supposedly postdramatic forms and for this general reappearance of theatricality and allegory in modern times.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
ABSTRACT: This article focuses on Gertrude Stein’s 1927 opera Four Saints in Three Acts, which ta... more ABSTRACT: This article focuses on Gertrude Stein’s 1927 opera Four Saints in Three Acts, which takes a pair of baroque saints for its protagonists and which debuted in a 1934 production replete with deliberate citations of baroque stage design, gesture, and visual art – details that have gone almost entirely unacknowledged in the past several decades’ scholarship on Stein. It recovers these forgotten production details by juxtaposing a reading of Stein’s text and performance theories with Walter Benjamin’s vision of baroque theatre as articulated in The Origin of German Trauerspiel. Interpreting Stein’s methods within the frame of baroque theatrical allegory, it suggests Stein’s situation within a larger tradition of baroque modernism. It argues that Stein found, within the concept of the baroque, a productive means of challen- ging norms of representation across a wide array of registers – linguistic, aesthetic, sexual, racial, and historiographic.
KEYWORDS: Gertrude Stein, Walter Benjamin, baroque theatre, gesture, allegory, citationality, Four Saints in Three Acts
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Modern Drama, 2023
This review surveys Shannon Jackson’s Back Stages: Essays across Art, Performance, and Public Lif... more This review surveys Shannon Jackson’s Back Stages: Essays across Art, Performance, and Public Life, which collects eighteen of Jackson’s previously un-anthologized essays, together with a new introduction and epilogue, and provides a rich overview of her recent views of performance, contemporary art, and radical politics.
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Modern Drama, 2014
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The Village Voice, 2017
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Theater, 2007
REVIEW: New Downtown Now: An Anthology of New Theater from Downtown New York edited by Mac We... more REVIEW:
New Downtown Now: An Anthology of New Theater from Downtown New York
edited by Mac Wellman and Young Jean Lee
2006: University of Minnesota Press
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PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 2015
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Salmagundi, 2018
A spate of recent English-language publications now signals a new attentiveness to Benjamin’s pre... more A spate of recent English-language publications now signals a new attentiveness to Benjamin’s previously untranslated literary output. We seem to be living through a moment of resurgent interest in his life and work, one that is perhaps not fully incompatible with a simple academic imperative “to make the most” of him. Within our current political climate, marked by a mounting sense of crisis that has only intensified in recent years, he and his cohort have come to seem urgent once again, and for a new generation of readers to boot. These stories, poems, and plays offer readers a chance to know his thought differently and more intimately than ever, not just as a custodian and dialectician of the literary tradition, but as an active participant in it as well.
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PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 2015
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PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 2020
From the 1950s until today, some six years after his death, Herbert Blau has been regarded as one... more From the 1950s until today, some six years after his death, Herbert Blau has been regarded as one of the United States’ most significant theatre intel- lectuals. That rare combination of theorist, educator, and artist, his career spanned more than six decades, twelve books, three performance companies, numerous distinguished academic appointments, and countless students and collaborators. As a stage director, he introduced American audiences to Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, and Jean Genet. His San Francisco Actor’s Workshop production of Waiting for Godot, at San Quentin State Prison, launched him to widespread attention by appearing prominently in the introduction to Martin Esslin’s Theatre of the Absurd. During the 1960s, he called for a desublimated future free from state repressive violence: the marriage of socialism and surrealism. He denounced the commercial American theatre and proposed its decentralization in his influential book The Impossible Theatre. Later, as co-artistic director (with Jules Irving) of the Lincoln Center Repertory Theatre, he stuck his finger in the eye of New York’s banker class with a production of Danton’s Death, tailor-made to outrage his patrons. Drummed out of town, he founded innovative training programs at CalArts and Oberlin and nurtured the careers of Allan Kaprow, Nam June Paik, and María Irene Fornés, to name just three. When European poststruc- turalism arrived in North America during the 1970s, it entered theatre (and later performance) studies largely through Blau’s intervention. It risks understatement to say that his life was one of enormous creative fecundity.
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Criticism, 2019
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Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021
A groundbreaking study on the vital role of baroque theater in shaping modernist philosophy, lite... more A groundbreaking study on the vital role of baroque theater in shaping modernist philosophy, literature, and performance.
Baroque style—with its emphasis on ostentation, adornment, and spectacle—might seem incompatible with the dominant forms of art since the Industrial Revolution, but between 1875 and 1935, European and American modernists connected to the theater became fascinated with it. In Baroque Modernity, Joseph Cermatori argues that the memory of seventeenth-century baroque stages helped produce new forms of theater, space, and experience around the turn of the twentieth century. In response, modern theater helped give rise to the development of the baroque as a modern philosophical idea.
The book focuses on avant-gardists whose writing takes place between theory and performance: philosophical theater-makers and theatrical philosophers including Friedrich Nietzsche, Stéphane Mallarmé, Walter Benjamin, and Gertrude Stein. Moving between page and stage, this study tracks the remnants of seventeenth-century theater through modernist aesthetics across an array of otherwise disparate materials, including modern opera, Bertolt Brecht's Epic Theater, poetic tragedies, and miracle plays. By reexamining the twentieth century's engagements with Gianlorenzo Bernini, William Shakespeare, Claudio Monteverdi, Calderón de la Barca, and other seventeenth-century predecessors, the book delineates an enduring tradition of baroque performance. Along the way, Cermatori expands our familiar narratives of "the modern" and traces a history of theatricality that reverberates into the twenty-first century.
Baroque Modernity will appeal to readers in a wide array of disciplines, including comparative literature, theater and performance, art and music history, intellectual history, and aesthetic theory.
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