Antonin Artaud | LAURA WETHERINGTON

Mapping Antonin Artaud

November 5, 2016 by Laura Wetherington

The very last installment in my commentary series for Jacket2 is a Google Map that includes photos and videos embedded in the plot points of Artaud’s biography, his performances, and his legacy. You can check it out here: http://jacket2.org/commentary/mapping-antonin-artaud.

Thanks to all the kind people at Jacket2 & especially Jessica Lowenthal. I’ll miss working on this project & it’s an honor to be a part of the Jacket2 tribe. This has been one of my dream publications for a long time. I’m so happy to have gotten to work with these folks.

Filed Under: Events and Publications, French Literary Culture Tagged With: Antonin Artaud, Jacket2, Poetics

Artaud Through the Looking Glass

October 28, 2016 by Laura Wetherington

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.

Filed Under: Events and Publications, French Literary Culture Tagged With: Antonin Artaud, Glossolalia, Jacket2, Lewis Carroll, poetic translation

Antonin Artaud: Asylums & After

September 8, 2016 by Laura Wetherington

antonin-artaud-at-rodez

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.’”

Filed Under: Events and Publications, French Literary Culture Tagged With: Antonin Artaud, Jacket2

Artaud: From Theater to Asylum

August 29, 2016 by Laura Wetherington

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]”

Filed Under: Events and Publications Tagged With: Antonin Artaud

New Artaud Post @ Jacket2

August 21, 2016 by Laura Wetherington

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.