Hysteria in Performance

Hysteria in Performance PDF Author: Jenn Cole
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0228007208
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
The nineteenth-century study of hysteria at the Salpêtrière hospital was a medical project, but also a theatrical one. The hysteric's public appearance was a continual ethical provocation, pointing not only to the vulnerability of her person but to the unstable position of her spectator. Hysteria in Performance sets out to uncover what kind of performance the hysterical attack is, as well as the nature of hysteria in and as performance as it occurred at Salpêtrière. The Salpêtrière documents undeniably show the gravity of the institutional violence committed against its female patients. Using the lenses of performance studies and performance theory, Jenn Cole expresses the overt and subtle damages done to hysterical women in Jean-Martin Charcot's hospital, drawing attention to the hysteric's resistance to these experiences: it is often simply by being herself that the hysteric points to the inherent weaknesses in these systemic modes of violence. In Hysteria in Performance, the hysteric becomes a figure who represents possibilities for ethical encounters within performance and everyday living. Revealing the fraught and exciting nature of theatrical representation, and continually drawing out the dilemmas and unexpected dynamics of witnessing the suffering of others, this groundbreaking study explores how Charcot's findings on hysteria produced a unique mixture of theatre and science that still has unexpected things to teach us.

Hysteria in Performance

Hysteria in Performance PDF Author: Jenn Cole
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0228007208
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book

Book Description
The nineteenth-century study of hysteria at the Salpêtrière hospital was a medical project, but also a theatrical one. The hysteric's public appearance was a continual ethical provocation, pointing not only to the vulnerability of her person but to the unstable position of her spectator. Hysteria in Performance sets out to uncover what kind of performance the hysterical attack is, as well as the nature of hysteria in and as performance as it occurred at Salpêtrière. The Salpêtrière documents undeniably show the gravity of the institutional violence committed against its female patients. Using the lenses of performance studies and performance theory, Jenn Cole expresses the overt and subtle damages done to hysterical women in Jean-Martin Charcot's hospital, drawing attention to the hysteric's resistance to these experiences: it is often simply by being herself that the hysteric points to the inherent weaknesses in these systemic modes of violence. In Hysteria in Performance, the hysteric becomes a figure who represents possibilities for ethical encounters within performance and everyday living. Revealing the fraught and exciting nature of theatrical representation, and continually drawing out the dilemmas and unexpected dynamics of witnessing the suffering of others, this groundbreaking study explores how Charcot's findings on hysteria produced a unique mixture of theatre and science that still has unexpected things to teach us.

Performing Hysteria

Performing Hysteria PDF Author: Johanna Braun
Publisher: Leuven University Press
ISBN: 946270211X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
We seem to be living in hysterical times. A simple Google search reveals the sheer bottomless well of “hysterical” discussions on diverse topics such as the #metoo movement, Trumpianism, border wars, Brexit, transgender liberation, Black Lives Matter, COVID-19, and climate change, to name only a few. Against the backdrop of such recent deployments of hysteria in popular discourse––particularly as they emerge in times of material and hermeneutic crisis––Performing Hysteria re-engages the notion of “hysteria”. Performing Hysteria rigorously mines late 20th- and early 21st-century (primarily visual) culture for signs of hysteria. The various essays in this volume contribute to the multilayered and complex discussions that surround and foster this resurgent interest in hysteria––covering such areas as art, literature, theatre, film, television, dance; crossing such disciplines as cultural studies, political science, philosophy, history, media, disability, race and ethnicity, and gender studies; and analysing stereotypical images and representations of the hysteric in relation to cultural sciences and media studies. Of particular importance is the volume's insistence on taking the intersection of hysteria and performance seriously.

Invention of Hysteria

Invention of Hysteria PDF Author: Georges Didi-Huberman
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262541807
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
The first English-language publication of a classic French book on the relationship between the development of photography and of the medical category of hysteria. In this classic of French cultural studies, Georges Didi-Huberman traces the intimate and reciprocal relationship between the disciplines of psychiatry and photography in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the immense photographic output of the Salpetriere hospital, the notorious Parisian asylum for insane and incurable women, Didi-Huberman shows the crucial role played by photography in the invention of the category of hysteria. Under the direction of the medical teacher and clinician Jean-Martin Charcot, the inmates of Salpetriere identified as hysterics were methodically photographed, providing skeptical colleagues with visual proof of hysteria's specific form. These images, many of which appear in this book, provided the materials for the multivolume album Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere. As Didi-Huberman shows, these photographs were far from simply objective documentation. The subjects were required to portray their hysterical "type"—they performed their own hysteria. Bribed by the special status they enjoyed in the purgatory of experimentation and threatened with transfer back to the inferno of the incurables, the women patiently posed for the photographs and submitted to presentations of hysterical attacks before the crowds that gathered for Charcot's "Tuesday Lectures." Charcot did not stop at voyeuristic observation. Through techniques such as hypnosis, electroshock therapy, and genital manipulation, he instigated the hysterical symptoms in his patients, eventually giving rise to hatred and resistance on their part. Didi-Huberman follows this path from complicity to antipathy in one of Charcot's favorite "cases," that of Augustine, whose image crops up again and again in the Iconographie. Augustine's virtuosic performance of hysteria ultimately became one of self-sacrifice, seen in pictures of ecstasy, crucifixion, and silent cries.

Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts

Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts PDF Author: Johanna Braun
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030663604
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
Hysteria is alive and well in our present time and is apparently spreading contagiously: especially the second decade of the twenty-first century has displayed an ever-increasing interest in the term. A quick Google search opens the gates to sheer endless swathes of discussions on hysteria, covering almost every aspect of public discourses. The arts—as it is often in such cases—seem conspicuously involved in and engaged with this hysterical discourse. Surprisingly, while the strong academic interest in hysteria throughout the twentieth century and most prominently at the turn of the century is well known and much discussed, the study of how these discourses have continued well into twenty-first-century art practices, is largely pressing on a blind spot. It is the aim of this volume to illustrate how hysteria was already well established within the arts alongside and at times even separately from the much-covered medical studies, and reveal how those current artistic practices very much continue a century spanning cross-fertilization between hysteria and the arts.

The Real Thing

The Real Thing PDF Author: Mady Schutzman
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 9780819563705
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
A provocative investigation of the links between contemporary advertising images and 19th-century medical discourse.

Performing Hysteria

Performing Hysteria PDF Author: Johanna Braun
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789461663139
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description


Hystories

Hystories PDF Author: Elaine Showalter
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780231104586
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 10

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Book Description
On psychopathology of everyday life

Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia

Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia PDF Author: C. Wald
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230288618
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Hysteria, trauma and melancholia are not only powerful tropes in contemporary culture, they are also prominent in the theatre. As the first study in its field, Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia explores the characteristics and concerns of the Drama of Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia through in-depth readings of representative plays.

Performing Nerves

Performing Nerves PDF Author: Anna Furse
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429753543
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Academic interest in hysteria has burgeoned in recent decades. The topic has been probed by feminist theorists, cultural studies specialists, literary scholars, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, medical and art historians, as well as novelists. The hysteric is construed as a powerless, voiceless subject, marginalised by the forces of the patriarchy that have been the root cause of their distress, dissembling, and disablement. In Performing Nerves, Anna Furse interweaves her artistic and academic practice, drawing on her own performance texts to explore four different versions of debilitating hysteric suffering. Each text is extensively annotated, revealing the dramaturgical logic and, in turn, the historical, medical, and cultural contexts behind their protagonists' illnesses, which are argued as environmentally caused in each case. This unique, reflective insight into a playwright and director’s craft offers not only an account of how mental suffering can manifest in different contexts and times, from the 19th century to today, but also a breadth of access to the ideas that can motivate creative research. This book is an invaluable resource for scholars of theatre studies, performance studies, dramaturgy, 20th-century history, gender studies, and medical humanities.

Hysteria Today

Hysteria Today PDF Author: Anouchka Grose
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429914679
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 119

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Book Description
Hysteria, one of the most diagnosed conditions in human history, is also one of the most problematic. Can it even be said to exist at all? Since the earliest medical texts people have had something to say about 'feminine complaints'. Over the centuries, theorisations of the root causes have lurched from the physiological to the psychological to the socio-political. Thanks to its dual association with femininity and with fakery, the notion of hysteria inevitably provokes questions about women, men, sex, bodies, minds, culture, happiness and unhappiness. To some, it may seem extraordinary that such a contested diagnosis could continue to merit any mention whatsoever. Hysteria Today is a collection of essays whose purpose is to reopen the case for hysteria and to see what relevance, if any, the term may have within contemporary clinical practice.