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Author Goodall, Jane R.

Title Artaud and the gnostic drama / Jane Goodall
Published Oxford ; Melbourne : Clarendon Press, 1994

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Location Call no. Vol. Availability
 W'PONDS  840.912 A7853 Z/Goa  AVAILABLE
Description 230 pages ; 23 cm
Contents 1. The Mise-en-scene -- 2. Plotting the Point of Destruction -- 3. Becoming the Alien Protagonist -- 4. The Theatre of Cruelty -- 5. Voyaging into Gnosis -- 6. Houses of Correction -- 7. To Have Done .
Summary Artaud is a figure who, mythologized as an icon of failure and madness, has achieved the pathos of a martyrdom. One of the effects of this myth has been to draw the screen of pathos over the self-mythologizing and self-dramatizing which generate the extraordinary energies in Artaud's vast oeuvre
Jane Goodall argues that major post-structuralist critics such as Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault, who have enlisted Artaud in their own anti-orthodoxies, have refused to pay attention to the terms of his own heresy. In this refusal, they display an anxiety towards the gnostic drama and its heresies, which mount an assault that may be more powerful than their own upon the founding tenets of western thought
Like that of the Gnostics, Artaud's cosmology is inherently dramatic, setting creature against creator, force against form, matter against spirit, pious knowledge against heretical gnosis
Using the term 'heresy' in place of 'madness' to designate the impassioned thought processes which escape the terms of orthodox western epistemology, this book situates Artaud, as the most extravagant of heretics, in company with the Gnostics whose speculations served to define heresy in the beginnings of the Christian tradition
This study offers a reappraisal of the importance of Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) in contemporary critical debate, and examines the intricate parallels between his heretical dramaturgy and the heresies of ancient Gnosticism
Analysis French drama
Notes Includes index
Bibliography Bibliography: pages [221]-225
Notes Also issued online
Subject Artaud, Antonin, 1896-1948 -- Criticism and interpretation.
Artaud, Antonin, 1896-1948.
Drama -- Technique.
Gnosticism in literature.
LC no. 93025376
ISBN 0198151861