New forms of art, culture and theory have recently emerged through engagements with the realities of the social world and everyday life which are not primarily about representation but rather about participation and narration. These new forms are based on viewer responses and engagement, thus performatively creating open-ended situations rather than autonomous works with closure. Performative theory, drawing mostly on studies of speech acts, proves adequate to describe and analyse these new forms of art and culture and their engagement with the real. Performative Realism scrutinizes a range of contemporary works that experiment with audience participation and processuality within art and culture, as well as it takes issue with theories of performativity and performance. Performative Realism contains contributions from leading Danish scholars working within a broad range of academic fields such as Media Studies, Art History, Theatre Studies and Cultural Studies. The issues addressed covers Scandinavian as well as international installation art, performance art, theatre, photography, movies, literature and role-playing.

Rites of Realism shifts the discussion of cinematic realism away from the usual focus on verisimilitude and faithfulness of record toward a notion of "performative realism," a realism that does not simply represent a given reality but enacts actual social tensions. These essays by a range of film scholars propose stimulating new approaches to the critical evaluation of modern realist films and such referential genres as reenactment, historical film, adaptation, portrait film, and documentary. By providing close readings of classic and contemporary works, Rites of Realism signals the need to return to a focus on films as the main innovators of realist representation. The collection is inspired by André Bazin's theories on film's inherent heterogeneity and unique ability to register contingency (the singular, one-time event). This volume features two new translations: of Bazin's seminal essay "Death Every Afternoon" and Serge Daney's essay reinterpreting Bazin's defense of the long shot as a way to set the stage for a clash or risky confrontation between man and animal. These pieces evince key concerns—particularly the link between cinematic realism and contingency—that the other essays explore further. Among the topics addressed are the provocative mimesis of Luis Buñuel's Land Without Bread; the adaptation of trial documents in Carl Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc; the use of the tableaux vivant by Wim Wenders and Peter Greenaway; and Pier Paolo Pasolini's strategies of analogy in his transposition of The Gospel According to St. Matthew from Palestine to southern Italy. Essays consider the work of filmmakers including Michelangelo Antonioni, Maya Deren, Mike Leigh, Cesare Zavattini, Zhang Yuan, and Abbas Kiarostami. Contributors: Paul Arthur, André Bazin, Mark A. Cohen, Serge Daney, Mary Ann Doane, James F. Lastra, Ivone Margulies, Abé Mark Normes, Brigitte Peucker, Richard Porton, Philip Rosen, Catherine Russell, James Schamus, Noa Steimatsky, Xiaobing Tang

Judith Butler’s new book shows how an ethic of nonviolence must be connected to a broader political struggle for social equality. Further, it argues that nonviolence is often misunderstood as a passive practice that emanates from a calm region of the soul, or as an individualist ethical relation to existing forms of power. But, in fact, nonviolence is an ethical position found in the midst of the political field. An aggressive form of nonviolence accepts that hostility is part of our psychic constitution, but values ambivalence as a way of checking the conversion of aggression into violence. One contemporary challenge to a politics of nonviolence points out that there is a difference of opinion on what counts as violence and nonviolence. The distinction between them can be mobilised in the service of ratifying the state’s monopoly on violence. Considering nonviolence as an ethical problem within a political philosophy requires a critique of individualism as well as an understanding of the psychosocial dimensions of violence. Butler draws upon Foucault, Fanon, Freud, and Benjamin to consider how the interdiction against violence fails to include lives regarded as ungrievable. By considering how ‘racial phantasms’ inform justifications of state and administrative violence, Butler tracks how violence is often attributed to those who are most severely exposed to its lethal effects. The struggle for nonviolence is found in movements for social transformation that reframe the grievability of lives in light of social equality and whose ethical claims follow from an insight into the interdependency of life as the basis of social and political equality.

DIVA collection of essays rethinking and reviving realism as a focus for film theory, particularly emphasizing the relation of the genre to issues of the body./div

"The nineteenth century realist author was a contradictory figure. He was the focus of literary criticism, but obscured his creative role by insisting on presenting his works as 'copies' of reality. He was a celebrity who found himself subservient to publishers and the public, in a newly-industrialised literary marketplace. He was the owner of his work who was divested of his property by imperfect copyright laws, playwrights who adapted his novels for the stage, and sequel-writers. This combination of a conspicuous yet precarious status with a self-effacing attitude was expressed by an image of the author as a plural, Protean subject, possessing the faculty of sympathetic imagination - which the realists incorporated in their works in the form of a series of fictional characters who functioned as 'doubles' of the author. Paraschas focuses on two realists, Honorede Balzac and George Eliot, and traces this authorial scenario from its origins in the late eighteenth century to its demise in the early twentieth century, examining its presence in the works of E.T.A. Hoffmann, Friedrich Schlegel, Charles Baudelaire and Andre Gide."

This book is the first study of the prolific German filmmaker, performance artist, and TV host Christoph Schlingensief (1960–2010) that identifies him as a practitioner of realism in the theater and lays out how theatrical realism can offer an aesthetic frame sturdy enough to hold together his experiments across media and genres. This volume traces Schlingensief’s developing realism through his theater work in conventional theater venues, in less conventional venues, his opera work focusing on the production of Wagner’s Parsifal at Bayreuth, and his art installations on revolving platforms called Animatographs. This book will be of great interest to scholars of theater, film, and performance art and practitioners.