Overview

Arguing that existing modernisation theories have been unnecessarily one-sided, Hedwig Fraunhofer offers a rewriting of modernity that cuts across binary methodologies nature and culture, mind and matter, epistemology and ontology, critique and affirmative writing, dramatic and postdramatic theatre. She specifically reworks the biopolitical exclusions that mark modern western epistemology, leading up to modernity's totalitarian crisis point. Fraunhofer reveals the performativity of theatre in its double sense as theatrical production and as the intra-activity of a dynamic system of multiple relations between human and more-than-human actors, energies and affects. In modern theatre, public and private, human and more-than-human, materiality and meaning collapse in a common life.

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9781474467438

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Reviews

"Biopolitics, Materiality and Meaning constitutes a literary-critical breath of fresh air, insofar as it takes contemporary biopolitics - with its primary emphasis on the post-human emergence of new materialist force - onto the terrain of modernist drama, putting the performativity of matter literally center stage.-- ""Jeffrey T. Nealon, Penn State University"" It is one of biopolitical reflection's most significant contemporary blindspots: what might theater have to tell us about the return of the immunitarian paradigm set in motion by the event of Covid-19? In this remarkable study, Professor Fraunhofer employs an avowedly feminist reading of gender to challenge ontological isolation, patriarchy and fascism in four male authors. Among the many highlights of Biopolitics, Materiality and Meaning in Modern European Drama is how Fraunhofer updates Kristeva's notion of abjection to offer powerfully prescient readings of contagion and performance. The result is a masterful account of how the modern stage generates and confounds modern immunitary boundaries.-- ""Timothy Campbell, Cornell University"""

Author Information

Hedwig (Hedy) Fraunhofer is Professor of French and German in the Department of World Languages & Cultures at Georgia College (U.S.). Working at the intersection of Comparative Literature, Drama and Theatre Studies, and Philosophy, she has published on the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, poststructuralism, new materialist philosophy, European drama, and the novelist Daniel Kehlmann.

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