Along with Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco, Fernando Arrabal is a major exponent of the Theater of the Absurd. In this study Arrabal's plays are seen as a contemporary expression of a festive form of theater that flourished during the Middle Ages and that had its roots in the drama of Aeschylus and Aristophanes. With this view of Arrabal's work, Luis Arata explores the nature of play in art in the light of Jean Piaget's psychology. He thus offers a new way to approach festive and playful art.

Este libro es el primero en examinar lo radicalmente nuevo y desafiante Teatro Pánico, un grupo de obras compuestas por Arrabal entre 1957 y 1966, en el apogeo del movimiento avant-garde. ENGLISH VERSION This book is the first to examine closely the radically new and challenging Panic Theatre, a group of plays composed by Arrabal between 1957 and 1966, at the zenith of the avant-garde movement. El presente libro estudia el Teatro Pánico de Fernando Arrabal, un conjunto de textos concebidos durante los primeros años del autor en París, entre 1957 y 1966. Escritas en el momento de mayor auge de la vanguardia, las obras vehiculan una teatralidad radicalmente innovadora cuya piedra angular la constituye el lenguaje ceremonial. La ceremonia pánica que subyace a toda esa dramaturgia es objeto de un profundo análisis a la luz de Le Panique, texto programático del propio Arrabal en que el autor identifica los tres conceptos que desencadenan la creación artística: memoria, azar y confusión. El estudio se detiene en los procesos por los que la memoria determina que las obras abandonen la mímesis, y el azar articula los materiales recuperados de la memoria en tramas y estructuras hilvanadas con gran precisión. Asimismo se incide en cómo los sujetos, objetos, marcos espacio-temporales y palabras se ven sometidos a un proceso de confusión que genera una forma teatral absolutamente innovadora. El concepto de lo pánico, situado en el epicentro de esta experimentación formal, dota de coherencia y unicidad teórica a este aparentementeheterogéneo grupo de obras. Diego Santos Sánchez es Alexander von Humboldt Fellow en la Humboldt-Universität en Berlin. ENGLISH VERSION The Panic Theatre is a set of plays conceived by Fernando Arrabal between1957 and 1966, the author's first years in Paris. Composed at the zenith of the avant-garde movement, they convey a radically new and challenging theatricality whose cornerstone is their ceremonial shape. The plays' underlying panic ceremony is thoroughly studied in light of Arrabal's programmatic text Le Panique, that singles out three key concepts responsible for artistic creation: memory, chance and confusion. This study shows how memory determines the plays' departure from mimesis and how chance articulates the materials recalled from memory into precisely arranged plots. Furthermore, subjects, objects, spatial-temporal frames and words are subject to confusion, inan attempt to create an utterly innovative form of theatre. This group of seemingly heterogeneous plays is given theoretical coherence and consistency by placing the idea of panic at the centre of a great formal experimentation. Diego Santos Sánchez is an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at Humboldt-Universität in Berlin.

This is a study about the reshaping of tragedy and comedy in serious French drama in the quarter century following World War II. It offers an introduction to the most important plays of the period, which include those of Sartre, Arrabal, Beckett, Ionesco, Camus, Montherlant, Adamov and Genet.

Contents: Introduction: New Tragedy and Comedy; The Background: From^R La Machine infernale to Huis clos; More Sartre and Camus: Drama, Tragedy and Philosophy; Henry de Montherlant: Tragedy and Morality; Samuel Beckett: New Tragedy; EugÈne Ionesco: New Comedy; Arthur Adamov: Black Satire, Dreams and Politics; Jean Genet: Tragic Masquerades; Fernando Arrabal: Tragic Farce; Conclusion: The Death of Comody?; Select Bibliography; Index

Some 750 alphabetically-arranged entries provide insights into recent cultural and political developments within Spain, including the cultures of Catalonia, Galicia and the Basque country. Coverage spans from the end of the Civil War in 1939 to the present day, with emphasis on the changes following the demise of the Franco dictatorship in 1975. Entries range from shorter, factual articles to longer overview essays offering in-depth treatment of major issues. Culture is defined in its broadest sense. Entries include: *Antonio Gaudí * science * Antonio Banderas * golf * dance * education * politics * racism * urbanization This Encyclopedia is essential reading for anyone interested in Spanish culture. It provides essential cultural context for students of Spanish, European History, Comparative European Studies and Cultural Studies.

Most readers know Antonin Artaud as a theorist of the theatre and as a playwright, director and actor manqué. Now, John C. Stout’s highly original study installs Artaud as a writer and theorist of biography. In Alternate Genealogies Stout analyzes two separate but interrelated preoccupations central to Artaud’s work: the self-portrait and the family romance. He shows how Artaud, in several important but relatively neglected texts, rewrites the life stories of historical and literary figures with whom he identifies (for example, Paolo Ucello, Abelard, Van Gogh and Shelley’s Francesco Cenci) in an attempt to reinvent himself through the image, or life, of another. Throughout the book Stout focusses on Artaud’s struggles to recover the sense of self that eludes him and to master the reproductive process by recreating the family in — and as — his own fantasies of it. With this research John C. Stout has added considerably to our understanding of Artaud. His book will be much appreciated by theatre scholars, Artaud specialists, Freudians, Lacanians and both theorists and practitioners of life writing.

Using the character as a central element, this volume provides insights into the Theatre of the Absurd, highlighting its specific key characteristics. Adopting both semiotic-structuralist and mathematical approaches, its analysis of the absurdist character introduces new models of investigation, including a possible algebraic model operating on the scenic, dramatic and paradigmatic level of a play, not only exploring the relations, configurations, confrontations, functions and situations but also providing necessary information for a possible geometric model. The book also takes into consideration the relations established among the most important units of a dramatic work, character, cue, décor and régie, re-configuring the basic pattern. It will be useful for any reader interested in analyzing, staging or writing a play starting from a single character.

The book constitutes the first attempt to provide an overview of the reception of foreign drama in Spain during the Franco dictatorship. John London analyses performance, stage design, translation, censorship, and critical reviews in relation to the works of many authors, including Noel Coward, Arthur Miller, Eugene Ionesco, and Samuel Beckett. He compares the original reception of these dramatists with the treatment they were given in Spain. However, his study is also a reassessment of the Spanish drama of the period. Dr London argues that only by tracing the reception of non-Spanish drama can we understand the praise lavished on playwrights such as Antonio Buero Vallejo and Alfonso Sastre, alongside the simultaneous rejection of Spanish avant-garde styles. A concluding reinterpretation of the early plays of Fernando Arrabal indicates the richness of an alternative route largely ignored in histories of Spanish theatre.

The essays in Rethinking Media Change center on a variety of media forms at moments of disruption and cultural transformation. The editors' introduction sketches an aesthetics of media transition—patterns of development and social dispersion that operate across eras, media forms, and cultures. The book includes case studies of such earlier media as the book, the phonograph, early cinema, and television. It also examines contemporary digital forms, exploring their promise and strangeness. A final section probes aspects of visual culture in such environments as the evolving museum, movie spectaculars, and "the virtual window." The contributors reject apocalyptic scenarios of media revolution, demonstrating instead that media transition is always a mix of tradition and innovation, an accretive process in which emerging and established systems interact, shift, and collude with one another.