Skip to content
You are not logged in |Login  
     
Limit search to available items
Record:   Prev Next
Resources
More Information
Bestseller
BestsellerE-book
Author Arjomand, Minou, author.

Title Staged : show trials, political theater, and the aesthetics of judgment / Minou Arjomand.

Publication Info. New York : Columbia University Press, [2018]

Item Status

Description 1 online resource (xv, 232 pages) : illustrations
Physical Medium polychrome
Description text file
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary Theater requires artifice, justice demands truth. Are these demands as irreconcilable as the pejorative term "show trials" suggests? After the Second World War, canonical directors and playwrights sought to claim a new public role for theater by restaging the era's great trials as shows. The Nuremberg trials, the Eichmann trial, and the Auschwitz trials were all performed multiple times, first in courts and then in theaters. Does justice require both courtrooms and stages?In Staged, Minou Arjomand draws on a rich archive of postwar German and American rehearsals and performances to reveal how theater can become a place for forms of storytelling and judgment that are inadmissible in a court of law but indispensable for public life. She unveils the affinities between dramatists like Bertolt Brecht, Erwin Piscator, and Peter Weiss and philosophers such as Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin, showing how they responded to the rise of fascism with a new politics of performance. Linking performance with theories of aesthetics, history, and politics, Arjomand argues that it is not subject matter that makes theater political but rather the act of judging a performance in the company of others. Staged weaves together theater history and political philosophy into a powerful and timely case for the importance of theaters as public institutions.
Contents Frontmatter -- Contents -- ILLUSTRATIONS -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- Introduction: Show Trials and Political Theater -- Chapter One. Hannah Arendt: Judging in Dark Times -- Chapter Two. Bertolt Brecht: Poetic Justice -- Chapter Three. Erwin Piscator: Theater After Auschwitz -- Chapter Four. Trials in Nuremberg -- Conclusion. Archives, Law, and Theater Today -- NOTES -- BIBLIOGRAPHY -- INDEX.
Local Note eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - North America
Subject Theater -- Political aspects.
Theater -- Political aspects.
Legal drama -- History and criticism.
Legal drama.
Genre/Form Legal drama.
Subject Political plays -- History and criticism.
Political plays.
Aesthetics -- Political aspects.
Aesthetics -- Political aspects.
Theater -- Philosophy.
Theater -- Philosophy.
Trials.
Trials.
War crime trials.
War crime trials.
Genre/Form Electronic books.
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Other Form: Print version: Arjomand, Minou. Staged. New York : Columbia University Press, [2018] 9780231184885 (DLC) 2018008518 (OCoLC)1035460965
ISBN 9780231545730 (electronic book)
0231545738 (electronic book)
0231184883
9780231184885