Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future [Hardcover]

Bryan Reynolds (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 20, 2003 | ISBN-10: 0312293313 | ISBN-13: 978-0312293314 | Edition: 1

Performing Transversally expands on Bryan Reynolds' controversial transversal theory in exciting ways while offering groundbreaking analyses of Shakespeare's plays--Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, Henry V, The Tempest, and Coriolanus--and textual, filmic, and theatrical adaptations of them. With his collaborators, Reynolds challenges traditional readings of Shakespeare, reevaluating the critical methodologies that characterize them, in regard to issues of cultural difference, authorship, representation, agency, and iconography. Reynolds demonstrates the value of his “investigative-expansive mode,” outlining a “transversal poetics” that points toward a critical future that is more aware of its subjective interconnectedness with the topics and audiences it seeks to engage than is reflected in most Shakespeare criticism and literary-cultural scholarship.

 

http://www.bryanreynolds.com/

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Performing Transversally is an innovative example of collaborative scholarship aimed at opening the classic Shakespearean text to unexpected interpretive contexts and possibilities. Whether exploring the sado-masochistic dynamics of Othello or bringing Shakespeare and Dario Fo into productive dialogue, Reynolds and his collaborators use Shakespeare to explore uncharted emotional and cognitive landscapes.... Performing Transversally offers a highly-caffeinated alternative to conventional criticism."--Jean E. Howard, William E. Ransford Professor of English, Columbia University

"In Performing Transversally, Reynolds takes his collaborators and us on a dazzling, even mind-altering trip through what Reynolds calls 'Shakespace,' offering us trenchant sociohistorical readings both of Shakespeare's plays and adaptations of them by Dryden, Polanski, Brecht, Césaire, Wilson, Fo, and Taymor. Reynolds powerfully reaffirms the agency of the subject and offers hope for theoretical intervention as a viable form of political activism conceived quite daringly here as the transcendence of all conceptual, emotional, social, and physical limits."--Richard Burt, author of Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares

"Transferring models of collaborative authorship from theatre and performance to academic discourse, Performing Transversally productively sets out to re-imagine a critical terrain for Shakespeare in which text and critic are in constant movement, where dispersals, expansions, variabilities, metamorphoses, reconfigurations, alternatives, and contradictions rule. Offering multivocal, processual accounts of how such conversations and negotiations invite links between fields of discourse, Reynolds and co-performers are master jugglers, keeping multiple texts, objects, ideas and ideologies simultaneously in view."--Barbara Hodgdon, University of Michigan

"In Performing Transversally, Bryan Reynolds and a group of collaborators challenge critical orthodoxy by venturing into 'transversal territory' and into the overlapping realm of 'Shakespace.'. . . Because it insists that 'transversality' is the liberating, responsibility-conferring space where we can begin to understand and empathize with other people and other cultures, and because it insistently characterizes Shakespearean performance as 'transversal,' the book amounts to an important and marvelously high-spirited contribution to the turn toward ethics in literary and cultural studies."--Paul Yachnin, Tomlinson Professor of Shakespeare Studies, McGill University

From the Inside Flap

"Performing Transversally is an innovative example of collaborative scholarship aimed at opening the classic Shakespearean text to unexpected interpretive contexts and possibilities. Whether exploring the sado-masochistic dynamics of Othello or bringing Shakespeare and Dario Fo into productive dialogue, Reynolds and his collaborators use Shakespeare to explore uncharted emotional and cognitive landscapes.... Performing Transversally offers a highly-caffeinated alternative to conventional criticism."--Jean E. Howard, William E. Ransford Professor of English, Columbia University

"In Performing Transversally, Reynolds takes his collaborators and us on a dazzling, even mind-altering trip through what Reynolds calls 'Shakespace,' offering us trenchant sociohistorical readings both of Shakespeare's plays and adaptations of them by Dryden, Polanski, Brecht, Césaire, Wilson, Fo, and Taymor. Reynolds powerfully reaffirms the agency of the subject and offers hope for theoretical intervention as a viable form of political activism conceived quite daringly here as the transcendence of all conceptual, emotional, social, and physical limits."--Richard Burt, author of Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares

"Transferring models of collaborative authorship from theatre and performance to academic discourse, Performing Transversally productively sets out to re-imagine a critical terrain for Shakespeare in which text and critic are in constant movement, where dispersals, expansions, variabilities, metamorphoses, reconfigurations, alternatives, and contradictions rule. Offering multivocal, processual accounts of how such conversations and negotiations invite links between fields of discourse, Reynolds and co-performers are master jugglers, keeping multiple texts, objects, ideas and ideologies simultaneously in view."--Barbara Hodgdon, University of Michigan

"In Performing Transversally, Bryan Reynolds and a group of collaborators challenge critical orthodoxy by venturing into 'transversal territory' and into the overlapping realm of 'Shakespace.'. . . Because it insists that 'transversality' is the liberating, responsibility-conferring space where we can begin to understand and empathize with other people and other cultures, and because it insistently characterizes Shakespearean performance as 'transversal,' the book amounts to an important and marvelously high-spirited contribution to the turn toward ethics in literary and cultural studies."--Paul Yachnin, Tomlinson Professor of Shakespeare Studies, McGill University

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 340 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan; 1 edition (September 20, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312293313
• ISBN-13: 978-0312293314
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,038,394 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Bryan Reynolds grew up in Scarsdale, New York. After a short career racing motorcycles, he attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his bachelor degree in English Literature. He then went on to receive his master's and doctoral degrees in English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. Reynolds is currently Professor of Drama and Chancellor's Fellow at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Transversal Subjects: From Montaigne to Deleuze after Derrida (2009), Transversal Enterprises in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: Fugitive Explorations (2006), Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future (2003), Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England (2002), and coeditor of The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies: Tarrying with the Subjunctive (2011), Critical Responses to Kiran Desai (2009), Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern English Stage (2005), and Shakespeare Without Class: Misappropriations of Cultural Capital (2000). Reynolds is also the Artistic Director and resident playwright of the Transversal Theater Company, a collective of American and Dutch artists, which has toured many of his plays internationally in addition to runs in the United States and The Netherlands. Reynolds has held visiting professorships at the University of London, the University of Amsterdam, Utrecht University, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University-Frankfurt am Main, University College Utrecht, and the University of Cologne; and he has taught at a range of academic and performing arts institutions worldwide, including philosophy at Deleuze Camp at the University of Cologne and acting at the Grotowski Institute in Wrocław.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The New Hot Thing, February 15, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future (Hardcover)

This is a great book. I bought it because everyone was talking about it at the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies Conference last fall, and as I did it could not believe that I was spending $65 on a book, something I have never done before. But since I am a Shakespeare scholar -- I suppose I can call myself that now even though it is only my third year in grad school -- I figured that I need to have the new hot thing. What I did not know is that all the hipe was more than justified. Reynolds et al. are unrelentingly captivating in every respect: funny, smart, rigorous, engaging... Most important to me, however, is that this book is about change, responsibility, and empowerment. Shakespeare is just Reynolds' vehicle, that he uses to take his readers into "Shakespace," a conceptual and emotional space of expansion and learning, an other world where we can all move transversally. Thanks Reynolds et al. for getting my brain reeling, and getting me excited about my work!

5 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Move Over New Historicism, March 24, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future (Hardcover)

This book has not only emerged brilliantly out of the new historicism's wake, utilizing everything productive the new historicism had to offer, but it creates a wake in which new historicists -- especially the more myopic ones -- continue to flounder. Reynolds and his fellow transversal movers and shakers launch cogent critique after critique, both implicitly and explicitly, of new historicist criticism (while improving upon the Althusserian and Foucaultian theory behind it), supplanting its often fly-by-night and defeatist rhetoric with optimism, rigor, and relevance to concerns of today the likes of which most new historicists never imagined or cared to imagine possible. Reynolds' performance-oriented and expansive method enables analyses of Shakespeare's plays and adaptations of them -- of the "Shakespace" (one of his many playful coinages) through which they move -- that are far-reaching in value and application across history, cultures, and academic fields. I would even go so far as to say that Reynolds is a visionary with the scope of Raymond Williams, and, like Williams, Reynolds envisions and wants to inspire -- with his "transversal poetics" -- a better future. For Reynolds, although clearly a lover of Shakespeare, Shakespeare is just one of many points of departure for transversal adventures to elsewheres of learning, empowerment, agency, and evolution. There is no book on Shakespeare that I would want my students to read more than this one.

5 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Steal This Book, February 15, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future (Hardcover)

Performing Transversally constitutes a major intervention in early modern studies that will no doubt be as important as Dollimore's Radical Tragedy but at the same time infinitely more useful to the future of critical inquiry across disciplines, ranging from theater studies to film studies. Reynolds' transversal poetics is the most exciting approach to lit-crit since deconstruction emerged on the scene in the 60s, and I am certain that the impact will be no less great. If it sounds like I love this book, it is because I do. It is rare in this profession to be truly inspired by scholarship, and Reynolds -- along with his many brilliant collaborators -- never ceases to inspire, with page after page of scintillating wit, groundbreaking ideas, and unwavering dedication to ethical and pedagogical concerns. This book has changed the way I think about authorship, performance, Shakespeare, and my selves, all the while reminding me of my responsibilities as a academic and even as a citizen. Buy it, read it, live it, you will be happy you did.