Art and Identity : Between Authenticity and Elusive Representation (original) (raw)
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Art, History, and Anachronic Interventions Since 1990
The theoretical contributions to modern historiography discussed in Chapter 1 differ in many respects yet are united in their attribution of specific roles to the historian. Assumed to be male in most of the texts discussed herein, he is envisioned as a mastermind of universalization and synthetization; an impartial guarantor of objectivity; a practical politician anchored in the present; an emphatic interpreter able to incarnate historical subjects; and a distant, anachronic observer of his contemporaries. Each of these assigned roles represents a distinct methodical approach to and practice of history. But despite this performative foregrounding of the historian's role, historical scholarship in and of itself has produced surprisingly little authorship criticism. Artistic historiography, on the other hand, comes with a rich-albeit ambivalent-art-theoretical legacy that places immense weight on the role of the artist. Art that deals with history thus provides abundant material for reflection on authorial (self-)conceptions and on how various (artistic) subjectivities might handle the "raw material" of history-its documents, persons, and stories. Examining the works of three female artists working in the field of history, this chapter illustrates how artistic, auctorial subjectivity and the author's task of representing absent voices can be negotiated, especially when encountering other historical subjects.
2010
As for biographers, let them worry I am already looking forward to seeing them go astray. Sigmund Freud Never mind my soul. Just be sure you have my tie right. James Joyce 1. Between logic, epistemology and narratology It was in the 1970s that the debate surrounding the logical-semantic status of fictional discourse began to develop. The first and most important contribution to that debate was an article by John Searle, in which the American linguist argued that true assertions made in serious discourse and fictive assertions made in fictional discourse are similar to the extent that both can be considered instances of the speech act of assertion-making (Searle, 1975). The logical difference distinguishing historical writings from fictional writings according to this thesis lies in the illocutionary intention of the sender. The only dissimilarity between senders making true assertions in historical texts (journalism, biography, autobiography, etc) and senders making fictive assertions in fictional texts is that the latter pretend to be making assertions, though not with the intention to deceive. The two situations also differ from a pragmatic point of view since while in fictional discourse all rules of sincerity are suspended, in historical discourse these latter cannot be waived. Thus the pragmatic status of fiction guarantees the (external) sender a certain immunity which is excluded from the pragmatic status of true discourse.[2] It was during that same period that what are now considered classic works of historiography began examining the narrative and discursive strategies of the historical text in their consideration of what it means to 'make history' (Veyne, 1971; Elton, 1970; White, 1973). These studies privileged an epistemological approach but also began to reflect on the narratological characteristics of historical texts, underlining the extent to which their narrative and rhetorical organisation is similar to that of fictional texts. However, these writings ignored the contemporary debate regarding the logical status of fictional discourse, and thus missed the opportunity to connect two areas of investigation. Narratology also ignored the problem, at least up until the publication in 1991 of Genette's Fiction and diction which contains a chapter entitled "Fictional narrative, Factual narrative". Following in the footsteps of Searle, Genette takes up the discussion regarding the problem of the narratological (and logical) status of true discourse on the basis of the categories developed in his "Discours du récit" (in Genette, 1972), concluding that order, duration and frequency are similar in both types of discourse, whilst differences can be detected in the areas of mode and voice. Mode, according to Genette (1993: 65), differs because it is only in narrative fiction that we get direct access to the subjectivity of another person insofar as it is only possible to guess at, with any degree of certainty, that which is invented. Similarly, Genette affirms that the voice of a historical text coincides with the voice of the actual author and, in giving Searle's thesis a narratological slant, he arrives at the same pragmatic conclusion: the factual account implies that the authors of that account align themselves with what is recounted, and assume that what they recount is truthful (Genette, 1993: 70).[3] In other words, Genette allows that historical discourse is to some extent free to adopt certain narrative strategies of fictional discourse; however, on the one hand he excludes that it can adopt the strategy of introspection and therefore the modality of omniscience, while on the other he stresses its absolute commitment to truth.[4] The Searle-Genette dialogue confirms the widely held belief that whilst the status of fictional accounts are thought to be ambiguous, true accounts are thought to be unproblematic. Indeed, Genette's conclusion, like Searle's before him, reduces the problem of the logical-semantic status of true discourse to the principle of referentiality: the truth value of historical discourse, in other words, would gain implicit confirmation from the existence in the 'real' world of the named beings and the recounted events. Whilst we might accept that this conclusion accounts for many of the problems pertaining to the highly varied genre of what we perceive as history, it does not present a satisfactory model for assessing the nature of biography, that essentially hybrid form which continually transcends the boundaries of pure history to enter the domain of fiction. Genette's claim regarding the category of mode, i.e. that true accounts exclude the possibility of direct access to the subjectivity of others is in fact problematic.[5] Indeed, one of the most obvious similarities linking biography to the novel is precisely its tendency to organise itself about the category of character, something which often provokes introspective voyeurism or, as Nabokov has said, tends to characterise the biographer as a 'psycho-plagiarist' (in Edel, 1984: 21). 2. The commitment to scholarship Nevertheless, true accounts can certainly be distinguished from fictional accounts if we consider one rather important point-a point common to both the biographical account and the historical account. Historical discourse is characterised by a particular method which functions pragmatically as a truth-giving manoeuvre. The historian and the biographer must not only 'tell the truth', that is, they must make assertions about things which have or have had a referent in the 'real world'-they must also demonstrate that what they are claiming is true. According to Le Goff, this demonstration is achieved through a set of gestures that constitute the 'historical method', which the French historian calls 'the commitment to scholarship'. Le Goff's thesis is that
The artist is not present: conceptualizing autobiography (the case of Stanislavsky, Brook and Barba)
This paper will try to articulate a preliminary framework for the analysis of three self-referencing narratives My life in Art (1921), by Stanislavski, Threads of Time (1998) by Peter Brook, On Directing and Dramaturgy: Burning the House (2010) by Eugenio Barba, as texts that produce knowledge in the discipline of theatre direction. The history of the western theatre can be studied through the lives and work of these innovative and representative theatre directors. We want to know what is the form and function of these texts and in what ways can Discourse Studies and Genre Theory help us characterize them in order to establish a framework for future theatre autobiographers. The autobiography can be conceived as a rhetorical space inhabited by the autobiographer, the subject who writes. From My life in art (1924), Stanislavski's emerges as a paradigm of the traditional autobiography, one which today would be considered a little boring (due to its length and detail), given the creativity the genre has attained (Ekin, 1994). Finally, Barba (2010) represents himself as a post-postmodern autobiographer who uses the genre in an extremely creative way, to the point of making us doubt whether Directing and Dramaturgy: Burning the House (2010) should be adscribed to the genre as this text presents a fragmented self, impressionistic, given in glimses, at times collectively constructed by different voices. Barba emerges as a person who does not seem to attempt to give a rationale of his personality (Lejeune (1975). Brook emerges as a deep spiritual person always in search of cutting edge experiences, restless, curious, as he moves from The Conference of the Birds to The Mahabharata to The Man who. As genres are verbal artifacts that evolve in time (Bazerman, 2013), it is understandable that each of the three texts cristalizes in a different way, representing a different moment in time, a different output of the genre. " The discursive genre " has been framed as a theoretical construction that designs verbal human activity that evolves in time (Bazerman, 2013). It refers to typical forms by which we express ourselves (Bakhtin, 1986). This concept allows us to establish relationships between discursive situations, that is to say, forms of human activity, with texts as pieces shaped by language and rhetoric. Generally speaking, genres are texts with a communicative intention which belong to specific discourse communities. They are communicative events with dynamic characteristics and they are both interactive structures and thinking structures, This human practice as it is displayed to us by 12
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"Art Vs Identity: Between Authenticity and Elusive Representation"
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My present study puts under light the intrinsic tie that connects self, history and art. This triad enhances me to raise the following questions: How do we write? What do we write? Are we only containers within/through which thoughts think and express themselves? Or, are we conscious of what we write, and therefore, what is outlined and reproduced is no more than a presentation of history, and one’s history in art?
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The artist is not present: conceptualizing autobiography (the case of Stanislavski, Brook and Barba)
This paper will try to articulate a preliminary framework for the analysis of three self-referencing narratives My life in Art (1921), by Stanislavski, Threads of Time (1998) by Peter Brook, On Directing and Dramaturgy: Burning the House (2010) by Eugenio Barba, as texts that produce knowledge in the discipline of theatre direction. The history of the western theatre can be studied through the lives and work of these innovative and representative theatre directors. We want to know what is the form and function of these texts and in what ways can Discourse Studies and Genre Theory help us characterize them in order to establish a framework for future theatre autobiographers. The autobiography can be conceived as a rhetorical space inhabited by the autobiographer, the subject who writes. From My life in art (1924), Stanislavski's emerges as a paradigm of the traditional autobiography, one which today would be considered a little boring (due to its length and detail), given the creativity the genre has attained (Ekin, 1994). Finally, Barba (2010) represents himself as a post-postmodern autobiographer who uses the genre in an extremely creative way, to the point of making us doubt whether Directing and Dramaturgy: Burning the House (2010) should be adscribed to the genre as this text presents a fragmented self, impressionistic, given in glimses, at times collectively constructed by different voices. Barba emerges as a person who does not seem to attempt to give a rationale of his personality (Lejeune (1975). Brook emerges as a deep spiritual person always in search of cutting edge experiences, restless, curious, as he moves from The Conference of the Birds to The Mahabharata to The Man who. As genres are verbal artifacts that evolve in time (Bazerman, 2013), it is understandable that each of the three texts cristalizes in a different way, representing a different moment in time, a different output of the genre. " The discursive genre " has been framed as a theoretical construction that designs verbal human activity that evolves in time (Bazerman, 2013). It refers to typical forms by which we express ourselves (Bakhtin, 1986). This concept allows us to establish relationships between discursive situations, that is to say, forms of human activity, with texts as pieces shaped by language and rhetoric. Generally speaking, genres are texts with a communicative intention which belong to specific discourse communities. They are communicative events with dynamic characteristics and they are both interactive structures and thinking structures, This human practice as it is displayed to us by 12