The Unfinished Art of Theater : Avant-Garde Intellectuals in Mexico and Brazil /
The avant-garde posits the possibility of total rupture with the past. This book pulls back on this futuristic impulse by showing how theater became a key site for artists on the edge of capitalism to reconfigure the role of the aesthetic between 1917 and 1934. The book argues that this "unfini...
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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic eBook |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Evanston, Illinois :
Northwestern University Press,
2018.
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| Series: | Book collections on Project MUSE.
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Full text available: |
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| Summary: | The avant-garde posits the possibility of total rupture with the past. This book pulls back on this futuristic impulse by showing how theater became a key site for artists on the edge of capitalism to reconfigure the role of the aesthetic between 1917 and 1934. The book argues that this "unfinished art"-because of its weakness as a representative institution in Mexico and Brazil, where the bourgeois stage had not yet coalesced-was at the forefront of struggles to redefine the relationship between art and social change. Drawing on archival research, Townsend reveals the importance of avant-garde projects that belie the rhetoric of rupture and immediacy: ethnographic operas, populist puppet plays, children's radio programs, a philosophical drama about the birth of a new race, and an antifascist spectacle written for a theater shut down by the police. The book argues that avant-garde art is tied to the experience of dependency, delay, and the uneven development of capitalism. |
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| Item Description: | "The Unfinished Art of Theater began as a dissertation written at New York University." |
| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (312 pages). |
| ISBN: | 9780810137424 |
| Access: | Open Access |