Aesthetics is a field still rooted in an understanding of a unified process where small numbers of people produce, commodify, and consume objects called "art." Disunified Aesthetics deconstructs the literary object by invoking the critic's stance toward the written works with which they engage. Lynette Hunter's performative explorations provide a distinctly different way of understanding contemporary creative processes. Disunified Aesthetics takes up twenty-first-century aesthetics through an investigation of recent Canadian writing. The book is both a series of insights into literature and poetics of the last two decades and a story about moving from a traditional view of the relation between the artist, art, and its reception, to a more radically democratic view of aesthetics and ethics. Hunter addresses a range of Canadian women's writing, as well as close studies of the work of Robert Kroetsch, Lee Maracle, Nicole Brossard, Frank Davey, Alice Munro, Daphne Marlatt, and bpNichol. Disunified Aesthetics is a creative, challenging, and original investigation of textuality, performance, and aesthetics by a leading and innovative scholar.

This collection offers writings on the body with a focus on performance, defined as both staged performance and everyday performance. Traditionally, theorizations of the body have either analyzed its impact on its socio-historical environment or treated the body as a self-enclosed semiotic and affective system. This collection makes a conscious effort to merge these two approaches. It is interested in interactions between bodies and other bodies, bodies and environments, and bodies and objects.

This book centres on a philosophical analysis of creative acts in the Burning Man Festival and their roles in wider social change. With particular focus on the Ten Principles of Burning Man, Linda Noveroske posits a re-interpretation of common notions of “self” and “other” as they apply to identity, difference, and the ways that these personal impulses ripple outward from changing individuals into changing societies. Such radical re-imagination of ideology can be most powerful when it occurs in spaces of otherness, of heterotopia. This study casts Burning Man as a heterotopia to not only destabilizes what we think we know about visual art, performance, and creative encounters, but also bring these acts into an attitude of immediacy that facilitates previously unimagined behaviour and opens out artistic drive into the unknown. This book would be of value for scholars and practitioners in Performance Studies, Theatre and Dance, Art History, Psychology, Phenomenology, Architecture and Urban Studies.

This book discusses affective practices in performance through the study of four contemporary performers – Keith Hennessy, Ilya Noé, Caro Novella, and duskin drum – to suggest a tentative rhetoric of performativity generating political affect and permeating attempts at social justice that are often alterior to discourse. The first part of the book makes a case for the political work done alongside discourse by performers practising with materials that are not-known, in ways that are directly relevant to people carrying out their daily lives. In the second part of the book, four case study chapters circle around figures of irresolvable paradox – hendiadys, enthymeme, anecdote, allegory – that gesture to what is not-known, to study strategies for processes of becoming, knowing and valuing. These figures also shape some elements of these performances that make up a suggested rhetorical stance for performativity.

This volume investigates performances as situated "machineries of knowing" (Karin Knorr Cetina), exploring them as relational processes for, in and with which performers as well as spectators actively (re)generate diverse practices of knowing, knowledges and epistemologies. Performance cultures are distinct but interconnected environments of knowledge practice. Their characteristic features depend not least on historical as well as contemporary practices and processes of interweaving performance cultures. The book presents case studies from diverse locations around the globe, including Argentina, Canada, China, Greece, India, Poland, Singapore, and the United States. Authored by leading scholars in theater, performance and dance studies, its chapters probe not only what kinds of knowledges are (re)generated in performances, for example cultural, social, aesthetic and/or spiritual knowledges; the contributions investigate also how performers and spectators practice knowing (and not-knowing) in performances, paying particular attention to practices and processes of interweaving performance cultures and the ways in which they contribute to shaping performances as dynamic "machineries of knowing" today. Ideal for researchers, students and practitioners of theater, performance and dance, (Re)Generating Knowledges in Performance explores vital knowledge-serving functions of performance, investigating and emphasizing in particular the impact and potential of practices and processes of interweaving of performance cultures that enable performers and spectators to (re)generate crucial knowledges in increasingly diverse ways.

Considering both making political performance and making performance politically, this collection explores engagements of political resistance, public practice and performance media, on various scales of production within structures of neoliberal and liberal government and power.

This collection of essays examines the works of the most famous writer of plays in the English language within the most culturally pervasive genre in which they are performed. Though Realist productions of Shakespeare are central to the ways in which his work is produced and consumed in the 21st century-and has been for the last 100 years-scholars are divided on the socio-political, historical, and ethical effects of this marriage of content and style. The book is divided into two sections, the first of which focuses on how Realist performance style influences our understanding of Shakespeare’s characters. These chapters engage in close readings of multiple performances, interrogating the ways in which actors’ specific characterizations contribute to extremely varied interpretations of a single character. The second section then considers audiences’ experiences of Shakespearean texts in Realist performance. The essays in this section-all written by theatre directors-imagine out what might constitute Realism. Each chapter focuses on a particular production, or set of productions by a single company, and considers how the practitioners utilized critically informed notions of what constitutes “the real” to reframe what Realism looks like on stage. This is a book of arguments by both theatre practitioners and scholars. Rather than presenting a unified critical position, this collection seeks to stimulate the debate around Realist Shakespeare performance, and to attend to the political consequences of particular aesthetic choices for the audience, as well as for Shakespeare critics and theatre artists.