Overview

With Wilde's Salome (1893) as an exemplary text, this book examines the conditions under which speech constructs ecstatic experience. The author considers Wilde's text as a complex Symbolist system of relations between rhetorical devices and attitudes toward language. By identifying the components of the system, the book provides a theoretical model for understanding the power of language to construct specific emotional states. The dramatic nature of Wilde's play further indicates that, contrary to popular perception, ecstasy is not beyond language but in it. Rapture possesses a voice, but this voice emanates from a communication system which is actually outside of the body which speaks it. Movement toward ecstasy is therefore not a release from system but a supreme manifestation of it.

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9780820414911

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...(T)his is a brilliant book of real power and originality. Its novelty and its power derive...from a serious and profound engagement with recent post-structuralist theories and debates on artistic and figurative language which are put to brilliant use in the explication of the concept of ecstatic speech...It is illuminating, and at points and in certain passages, a tour de force. The style is clear and readable especially in those areas where the concepts and the experience he refers to become especially complex or rarefied. (Nicholas K. Browne, University of California, Los Angeles)

Author Information

The Author: Karl Toepfer is Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts at San Jose State University, where he is also Graduate Coordinator. He is the author of Theatre, Aristocracy, and Pornocracy (1990), and the forthcoming Ideology and Iconography of Cinematic Ecstasy, as well as articles in Theater Three, Performing Arts Journal, The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, and Scandinavian Studies.

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