Writing and Anti-theatricality: The place of the theatrical and the emerging subject in Artaud and Mallarmé, w. Parul Tiwari

Monday 18 November, 3pm-4pm
John Medley Building, Room E261
University of Melbourne, Parkville Campus

This presentation is an overview of my research on two French authors, Stéphane Mallarmé and Antonin Artaud. This research explores the dialectic of theatricality and anti-theatricality in the context of modernism, developing their responses to the singular event of the removal of the idea of God and the resultant crisis in art. I make a case for a relation of written-ness in their responses: a desire for the return to the Universal through writing as a performing object in Artaud and a desire for re-writing the Void in Mallarmé. Through this relation, I develop a concept of “anti-theatrical theatricality”, whereby, in their own ways, Artaud and Mallarmé construct an idea of theatricality that is impossible in any theatre and another concept of “theatre of anti-theatricality”, and build their new theatres on the conditions of failure and superfluity of the theatrical. The argument is that the theatre and theatricality cannot be found on the same plane in Artaud and Mallarmé and, in this context, imagines what kind of subjectivities emerge in their response to the crisis of creation.

Parul Tiwari is a PhD candidate at the department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Gandhinagar. She has been a visiting student at the English and Theatre Studies department, University of Melbourne for the last two months. Her broad research interests are modernist theatre and literature and continental philosophy.