Overview

Places the performative gesture at the point of intersection between literature, theatre and cinema This new study examines the representation of gesture in modernist writing, performance and cinema. Deploying a new theoretical term, 'the speech-gesture complex', Anthony Paraskeva identifies a relationship between speech and gesture which is neither exclusively literary nor performative and which, he argues, is fundamental to the aesthetics and politics of modernist authors. In discussions of works by Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Henry James, Wyndham Lewis, Vladimir Nabokov and Samuel Beckett, Paraskeva shows how this relationship is closely informed by their attention to the performed gestures of actors in theatre and cinema. Key Features *Provides new close readings of major and neglected work by Kafka, Joyce, James, Lewis, Nabokov and Beckett, revealing their complex relations with both theatre and cinema*Establishes a new critical-theoretical category, and highlights an unexplored dialogue between Ibsen, Benjamin, Adorno, Griffith, Eisenstein, Chaplin, Brecht, Artaud, Lang, Meyerhold, Duse and Garbo*Analyses central and neglected modernist texts alongside stage productions, styles of acting, film history and performance theory

Full Product Details

Author:   Anthony Paraskeva (Senior Lecturer, Roehampton University)
Publisher:   Edinburgh University Press
Imprint:   Edinburgh University Press
Weight:   0.326kg
ISBN:  

9781474473200

ISBN 10:   1474473202
Pages:   208
Publication Date:   25 August 2020
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements; Introduction; Kafka’s Amerika: The Aesthetics and Politics of Incompletion; Unstable categories: Naturalist and Modernist Performance Style; Performative Absence and Mechanical Reproduction; Theatre, Cinema and the Universal Language of Gesture; 1. James Joyce; ‘our sad want of signs’: Imperceptible Gestures in Ibsen and Joyce; Paralysis and Spectatorship: Henry James, Eleanora Duse, Yeats and Dubliners; Slips of the Hand in Exiles; ‘In the beginning was the gest’: ‘Circe’, Early Cinema and the ‘Art of Gestures’; 2. Wyndham Lewis; The Clown and the Über-Marionette in Enemy of the Stars; The Childermass: Lewis Vs Chaplin in the Afterlife; The Politics of Gesture: The Bailiff, Hitler and the Society of the Spectacle; 3. The Transition to Sound; Nabokov, Lewis and Garbo; Late Modernism and the Resistance to Sound; 4. Samuel Beckett; Hand-writing in Nacht und Träume; The Politics of Depersonalisation in Catastrophe; Bibliography.

Reviews

"The book combines an eloquent, robust style with ground-breaking argument and close pragmatic readings, placing modernist texts within European avant-garde contexts and experimental thinking about the body, triangulating theatre, cinema and writing. The gesture-complex idea is wonderfully original, woven into a superb texture by Paraskeva's open-minded, rich sense of period and modernist multimedia event.-- ""Professor Adam Piette, University of Sheffield"" The Speech-Gesture Complex offers an invigorating new critical approach to hitherto underappreciated intersections among 20th century literature, theatre, and cinema. Paraskeva's nuanced rewriting of generic history both provokes and inspires.-- ""Scott W. Klein, Professor of English, Wake Forest University"""

The book combines an eloquent, robust style with ground-breaking argument and close pragmatic readings, placing modernist texts within European avant-garde contexts and experimental thinking about the body, triangulating theatre, cinema and writing. The gesture-complex idea is wonderfully original, woven into a superb texture by Paraskeva's open-minded, rich sense of period and modernist multimedia event.-- ""Professor Adam Piette, University of Sheffield"" The Speech-Gesture Complex offers an invigorating new critical approach to hitherto underappreciated intersections among 20th century literature, theatre, and cinema. Paraskeva's nuanced rewriting of generic history both provokes and inspires.-- ""Scott W. Klein, Professor of English, Wake Forest University""

Author Information

Anthony Paraskeva is Senior Lecturer in English at Roehampton University. He is currently completing his second monograph, Samuel Beckett and Cinema.

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