The Spectator and the Spectacle: Audiences in Modernity and Postmodernity
Cambridge University Press, 3/19/2009
EAN 9780521899765, ISBN10: 0521899761
Hardcover, 260 pages, 23.5 x 15.7 x 1.8 cm
Language: English
Spectators and audiences are everywhere in contemporary culture. However, even in conventional performance, whether in the theatre, in film or television, or at a sporting event, it is difficult to discuss spectators with any authority, since each of us experiences and understands the display in different ways and all methods of analyzing spectators are flawed or unreliable. This book provides instead a series of investigations into specific types of performance activity, and how they relate to their audiences. Specific topics discussed include the relationship of audiences to the rise of the director, the avant-garde, tourism, gambling, the effect of cinema on live performance and sport, including crowd violence. Spectatorship is an area of increasing importance in the field of theatre and performance studies, and this engaging study is a valuable contribution to the development of thinking about audiences and spectators.
Part I. The Problem of the Spectator
1. Introduction
assisting at the spectacle
2. The director, the spectator and the Eiffel Tower
3. The avant-garde and the audience
Part II. Shakespeare and the Politics of Spectation
4. Shakespeare and the Cold War
5. The spectator as tourist
6. Interculturalism and the global spectator
7. The body of the spectator
Part III. Subjectivity and the Spectator
8. Society, spectacle and sport
9. The aroused spectator
10. Memory, performance and the idea of the museum
11. Assisting belief
ritual and the spectator.