This book takes Roland Barthes’s famous proclamation of ‘The Death of the Author’ as a starting point to investigate concepts of authorial presence and absence on various levels of text and performance. By offering a new understanding of ‘the author’ as neither a source of unquestioned authority nor an obsolete construct, but rather as a performative figure, the book illuminates wide-ranging aesthetic and political aspects of ‘authorial death’ by asking: how is the author constructed through cultural and political imaginaries and erasures, intertextual and intertheatrical references, re-performances and self-referentiality? And what are the politics and ethics of these constructions?
1.
Chapter 1: The Paradox of the Authors Death: an Introduction.-
2.
Chapter 2: Author as a Heteroglossic Figure.-
3.
Chapter 3: Embodiment and
Textualization.-
4.
Chapter 4: Performing the Self.-
5.
Chapter 5:
Resurrection as Adaptation: (Re)Makes, Deconstructions and the Gun.-
6.
Chapter 6: The Author is Present.-
7.
Chapter 7: The Artist is (Meaningfully)
Absent.-
8.
Chapter 8: Coda: In Other Deaths.-
Silvija Jestrovic teaches in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. She is the author of Theatre of Estrangement: Theory, Practice, Ideology (2006) and Performance Space Utopia: Cities of War, Cities of Exile (2013).
