Trauma-Tragedy: Symptoms of Contemporary Performance

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Trauma-tragedy investigates the extent to which performance can represent the 'unrepresentable' of trauma. Throughout, there is a focus on how such representations might be achieved and if they could help us to understand trauma on personal and social levels. In a world increasingly preoccupied with and exposed to traumas, this volume considers what performance offers as a means of commentary that other cultural products do not. The book's clear and coherent navigation of complex relation between performance and trauma and its analysis of key practitioners and performances (from Sarah Kane to Societas Raffaello Sanzio, Harold Pinter to Forced Entertainment, and Phillip Pullman to Franco B) make it accessible and useful to students of performance and trauma studies, yet rigorous and incisive for scholars and specialists. Duggan explores ideas around the phenomenological and socio-political efficacy and impact of performance in relation to trauma. Ultimately, the book advances a new performance theory or mode, 'trauma-tragedy', that suggests much contemporary performance can generate the sensation of being present in trauma through its structural embodiment in performance, or 'presence-in-trauma effects'. -- .

Reviews

His [Duggan] monograph is inspiring, incisive and illustrative of the multiplicities of modes and forms that theatrical and performative engagements with trauma may assume. Last but not least, given that the topic is difficult and even painful to confront with directly, Duggans book is enjoyable and achieves a certain balance in this troubled territory., Pavel Drbek, Routledge, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 19 November 2013|Patrick Duggans Trauma-tragedy: Symptoms of contemporary performance is an insightful and timely intervention in the study of late twentieth-century drama and performance., Kevin Wallace, De Gruyter, Book Reviews, 2014|[...] Trauma-tragedy offers an inspiring new insight into the possibilities of theatre in negotiating different kinds of trauma. The book is surely alluring for scholars of Theatre Studies, Trauma and Memory Studies, and practitioners alike., Lisa Skwirblies, Studies in Theatre and Performance, Book Reviews, 2014 -- .

Author Bio

Patrick Duggan is Lecturer in Drama at the University of Exeter.