The Fascination with Crisis and the Crisis of Perception in Contemporary British Drama (original) (raw)

Abstract

Based on considerations of the connection between fascination, crisis, and the “Medusa effect,” this paper argues that contemporary drama tends to challenge the audience’s sense of safe spectatorship by stimulating perceptual crises, returning the spectators’ gaze, and exposing their tendencies of (in)attentional blindness. Besides plays by Martin Crimp, Carol Ann Duffy, and Rufus Norris, the analysis focuses on James Graham’s Quiz (2017), which dramatizes one of the most popular scandals in the history of British game shows and challenges the audience’s capacity of moral attention. As I argue, Quiz engages the audience in multi-levelled crises (a crisis of knowledge, a crisis of perception, and a crisis of judgement), which stimulates conceptual blending, tests spectators’ response-ability on an ethical, aesthetic, and political level, and eventually allows them to overcome the perceptual crisis created in the course of the play.

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References (26)

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  26. Shields, David. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. 2nd ed. London: Penguin, 2011. Print. Bionote Sibylle Baumbach is Professor of English Literature at Stuttgart University. Her research interests include early modern English literature and culture, cognitive literary studies, the aesthetics of fascination, and literary attention. She was a member of the German Young Academy, Humboldt fellow at Stanford University, and taught at the universities of Warwick, Gießen, Mainz, and Innsbruck. Her publications include monographs on Literature and Fascination (2015) and Shakespeare and the Art of Physiognomy (2008) as well as (co-)edited volumes on Regions of Culture -Regions of Identity (2010), A History of British Drama (2011), Travelling Concepts, Metaphors and Narratives (2012), A History of British Poetry (2015), and New Approaches to the Twenty-First-Century Anglo- phone Novel (2019).