Silvija Jestrovic

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?

The Author Dies Hard

Performances of Authorial Presence and Absence

Shirin M. Rai

Milija Gluhovic

Michael Saward

While political scientists and political theorists have long been interested in social and political performance, and theatre and performance researchers have often focused on the political dimensions of the live arts, the interdisciplinary nature of this labor has typically been assumed rather than rigorously explored. This volume brings together leading scholars in the fields of Politics and Performance--drawing on experts across the fields of literature, law,anthropology, sociology, psychology, and media and communiction, as well as politics and theatre and performance--to map out and deepen the evolving interdisciplinary engagement. Organized into seven thematic sections, the volume investigates the relationship between politics and performance to show thatcertain features of political transactions shared by performances are fundamental to both disciplines--and that to a large extent they also share a common communicational base and language.

The Oxford Handbook of Politics and Performance

The war in the Balkans that took place between 1991-1995 forms the context of this book. It has been variously viewed as ethnic strife, religious conflict, or civil war but seldom has it been described as a war against cities. Belgrade and Sarajevo offer a fascinating comparative case study, not only because the two cities belong to the same historical narrative of the breakdown of Yugoslavia, but because of the ways in which their various performances both complement and contradict one another. This book examines how performance and theatricality became modes of being and acting in the city, even strategies of physical and ethical survival; yet so often it is exile, both as marginalisation within and exodus from the city, that emerges as the defining consequence of living in Sarajevo or Belgrade in the 1990s.

Silvija Jestrovic

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