My latest installment at Jacket2 tackles Artaud’s glossolalia in his translation of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass: “By overwriting Carroll’s text with veritable nonsense, Artaud is inserting his own theory of neologisms. Artaud has spent most of his life trying to escape the strictures of reality as we understand it—reaching for an expression that is beyond language. Carroll’s text was the springboard for creating new words that pointed nowhere and everywhere at once…” You can read the whole thing here.
Antonin Artaud: Asylums & After
September 8, 2016 by
There’s a new post up at Jacket2: “On his way back from Ireland in 1937, Artaud was put into a straight jacket. Once back on French soil, he was turned over to the authorities. This was the beginning of a nine-year stint in hospitals with Artaud in what biographer Martin Esslin called a ‘near-catatonic state.’”
Artaud: From Theater to Asylum
August 29, 2016 by
Lucas Van Leyden, Lot and His Daughters
A new post now up at Jacket2: https://jacket2.org/commentary/artaud-theater-asylum
“Artaud’s seminal theater text, The Theater and Its Double, took a long time to publish. Although the essays were composed between 1932 and 1935, the book didn’t appear until 1938, once Artaud had already been institutionalized. The inspirations for Artaud’s theory of performance, which he named the Theater of Cruelty, range from Lucas Van Leyden’s Lot and His Daughters to Balinese theater to the Marx Brothers. Artaud wanted to create an experience from ‘a kind of unique language half-way between gesture and thought.'[2]”
Diversity vs. Inclusion
August 26, 2016 by
I went to a talk today about social justice in the classroom. The speaker explained the difference between diversity & inclusion by telling us that when Harvard Law School began admitting women into the school, the women were frequently chastised for being late. There weren’t women’s restrooms in the law quad yet, so they were scrambling across the street between classes. The school was practicing diversity but not inclusion. I’m glad to think more about the ways in which groups and individuals might have barriers that are invisible to me or the institution. If we want to create equity in higher ed, we’ve got to identify the barriers and help lift people up.
New Artaud Post @ Jacket2
August 21, 2016 by
Artaud’s separation from the Surrealists was not amicable. A rough break was perhaps inevitable considering the Surrealists’ tendency toward confrontation and disruption, a disposition further provoked by the view that Artaud was a sell-out.
Read more here.
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