Ny bok: Lars Sætre, Patrizia Lombardo og Anders M. Gullestad (eds.): Exploring Textual Action

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New publication:

Lars Sætre, Patrizia Lombardo and Anders M. Gullestad (eds.): Exploring Textual Action, Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2010 (439 pp., ISBN 978 87 7934 4600)

An inter-disciplinary aesthetic and cultural analysis, Exploring Textual Action questions how we analyse works of art after the performative turn, and initiates basic research on performativity (textual action), space and topography, and the converging of genres and art forms, bringing out how their interplay is essential in modern drama, theatre, prose fiction, poetry and film. In a shared approach to these art forms and genres the volume’s individual essays are detailed analyses of art works, media and culture of historical and current modernity. 

The 14 close-reading essays analyse works of art ranging from Balzac, Melville and George Eliot; over Breton, Kafka, Woolf and Bloomsbury; further to Benjamin, Blixen, W.C. Williams, Bresson and Scorsese; and finally to Dumont, Reygadas, Angelopoulos, Sarraute, Duras and Waltz.

Meanwhile, the volume also fosters a keen concern for the development of congenial theory. Constructively addressed in the essays is the trajectory from Austin and Bachelard; over Bazin, Derrida, Hillis Miller, Butler and Fischer-Lichte; to Deleuze/Guattari, Rancière, Lefebvre, Mitchell, Silverman, Moxey and Kittang, to name but a few.

Explored is the truly creative powering of space into textual action, as well as the ensuing, ongoing reassignment of subjectivities, communities, discursivity and knowledge. The approach of these studies discloses the art works as creative and dynamic utterances with active and shaping forces sufficiently powerful and consequential to transform human perception and blur distinctions between art and real life.

Addressing current debates in the Humanities, Exploring Textual Action suggests a direction to research in its detailed analyses of literature, art, media and culture by putting an alternative, dynamic method into use.

The anthology stems from the ongoing efforts of the Bergen-based, international research group and project ”Text, Action and Space (TAS)”. Contributors to this volume besides Lars Sætre, Patrizia Lombardo and Anders M. Gullestad are J. Hillis Miller, Svend Erik Larsen, Atle Kittang, Erika Fischer-Lichte, Mads Thygesen, Randi Koppen, Ragnhild Evang Reinton, Tone Selboe, Asbjørn Grønstad, Anders Kristian Strand, and Jorunn Svensen Gjerden. 

Publisher is Aarhus University Press, Denmark.