Performative pain: Building culture on the bodies of actors and artists.
Item
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Title
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Performative pain: Building culture on the bodies of actors and artists.
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Identifier
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AAI3037389
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identifier
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3037389
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Creator
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Carlson, Marla.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Marvin Carlson
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Date
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2002
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Theater
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Abstract
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This cross-historical study examines the performance of physical suffering as a means employed by social groups to create or to remake culture. I argue against a special status for pain as "incommunicable" or "transcendent," claims that could as well be made for any variety of sensory experience, and set out the reasons that Elaine Scarry's work on "the body in pain" is not a good enough foundation for understanding embodied performances---or even experiences---of pain. I use concepts from language theory to analyze pain and pain behavior in a communicative context, relying particularly upon J. L. Austin, Paul Grice, and M. M. Bakhtin.;The plays and other performances that I consider cannot be fully understood without asking why particular characters suffer on stage, and why the episodes of suffering are placed at particular points in the narrative. Some of these performances can be safely read as evidence of the way a culture wanted to remember itself; other, more marginal works, are of interest as attempts to challenge and perhaps to change a society. I trace the mapping of pain onto the problem of creating community in Tony Kushner's Angels in America and Sophocles' Philoctetes; the theatre of protest and resistance created during periods of extreme repression within postcolonial regimes, focusing especially on Griselda Gambaro's Antigona Furiosa and The Island, by Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona, and the relation to global culture of plays created in response to repression within a specific local context; Hrotsvit's tenth-century virgin-martyr dramas, which work to contain and neutralize a potentially subversive energy by configuring martyrdom as a species of ordeal; the saint play as a culture-building mechanism thoroughly imbricated with other late-medieval performances of spectacular suffering, reading Le Geu Saint Denis together with the public executions described by an anonymous bourgeois of Paris during the first half of the fifteenth century; and the framing of self-inflicted pain as art in the 1970s and 1990s by body artists such as Gina Pane, Marina Abramovic, Fakir Musafar, Bob Flanagan, and Ron Athey, and Orlan.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
