Matthew Wilson Smith

From Bayreuth to Cyberspace

The Total Work Of Art

Georg Büchner

Henry J. Schmidt

Most translations first copyrighted in 1977.

The Major Works, Contexts, Criticism

Richard Begam

This captivating book—the first of its kind—will appeal to scholars of literature, music, theater, and modernity as well as to sophisticated opera lovers everywhere.

Modernism and Opera

A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- X -- Y -- Z

Arnold Aronson

Et Aronson

Derek E.. Ostergard

Joseph Urban

Derek E. Ostergard

Associate Professor of German and Theater & Performance Studies Matthew Wilson Smith

Wallach Art Gallery

Previous research on Joseph Urban (1872-1933) has focused on his architectural career; yet after moving from Vienna to the U.S. in 1912, he devoted much of his energies to the stage, especially productions for the Metropolitan Opera and the Ziegfeld Follies. A seminal figure in the history of American theater, he introduced to the U.S. the sophistication of European developments in stage design, experiments with lighting, and painterly effects which paralleled developments in modernist literature, painting, and dance. Architect of Dreams documents more than 100 finely rendered watercolors, photographs, and three-dimensional stage models. Arnold Aronson (professor of theatre arts at Columbia University) contributes a major essay. In other essays, Derek E. Ostergard contextualizes Urban's architecture, and Matthew Wilson Smith examines Urban's work in film.

The Theatrical Vision of Joseph Urban

Architect of Dreams

Nineteenth-century investigations into the nervous system produced extraordinary discoveries that changed ways of thinking far beyond the scientific community. Over the course of the century, scientists began to conceive of the subject not principally as soul, mind, or even brain, but instead as a complex of organically interacting mechanisms, many of them operating more or less autonomously and unconsciously. Meanwhile, theatrical works of the time by Shelley, Wagner, Dickens, Buchner, Zola, and Strindberg, sought to play directly on the nerves of the spectators through non-representational means, comprising a coherent genre Matthew Wilson Smith has dubbed the "theaters of sensation." The Nervous Stage examines the relations between theatrical practices and the scientific study of the nervous system, arguing that to a significant degree, modern theater emerged out of the interaction between these two apparently disparate fields. In six chapters, The Nervous Stage makes three fundamental contributions to scholarship on comparative literature, specifically in the areas of drama/performance, cognitive literary studies, and the beginnings of global modernism. Through a series of revisionist readings of specific theatrical works and artists, Smith demonstrates that a number of literary texts were deeply engaged in dialogue with the neurological sciences of their period, and that an appreciation of this dialogue helps us better to understand their significance for their own historical period as well as for our own. Furthermore, it argues that a number of lesser-known works--ranging from certain "closet dramas" such as Shelley's The Cenci to popular melodramas such as Augustin Daly's Under the Gaslight--had much greater cultural significance than has been acknowledged heretofore.

Nineteenth-Century Neuroscience and the Birth of Modern Theatre

The Nervous Stage

The Total Work of Art provides a broad survey that incorporates many canonical artists into a single narrative. With particular attention to the influence of the Total Work of Art on modern theatre and performance, this brief introduction will also be of interest to students in such fields as film studies, music history, history of art, cultural studies, and modern European literatures.

Matthew Wilson Smith

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