"I am the man," wrote Artaud, "who has best charted his inmost self." Antonin Artaud was a great poet who, like Poe, Holderlin, and Nerval, wanted to live in the infinite and asked that the human spirit burn in absolute freedom. To society, he was a madman. Artaud, however, was not insane but in luciferian pursuit of what society keeps hidden. The man who wrote Van Gogh the Man Suicided by Society raged against the insanity of social institutions with insight that proves more prescient with every passing year. Today, as Artaud's vatic thunder still crashes above the "larval confusion" he despised, what is most striking in his writings is an extravagant lucidity. This collection gives us quintessential Artaud on the occult, magic, the theater, mind and body, the cosmos, rebellion, and revolution in its deepest sense.

Translated by Clayton Eschleman A collection of writings ranging from cogent theoretical works to scatological glossolalia written during and after Artaud's incarceration in an aslum at Rodez creating one of the most powerful outpourings ever recorded.

Antonin Artaud’s novelised biography of the 3rd-century Roman Emperor Heliogabalus is simultaneously his most accessible and his most extreme book. Written in 1933, at the time when Artaud was preparing to stage his legendary Theatre of Cruelty, HELIOGABALUS is a powerful concoction of sexual excess, self-deification and terminal violence. Reflecting its author’s preoccupations of the time with the occult, magic, Satan, and a range of esoteric religions, the book shows Artaud at his most lucid as he assembles an entire world-view from raw material of insanity, sexual obsession and anger. Artaud arranges his account of Heliogabalus’s reign around the breaking of corporeal borders and the expulsion of body fluids, often inventing incidents from the Emperor’s life in order to make more explicit his own passionate denunciations of modern existence. No reader of this, Artaud’s most inflammatory work – translated into English here for the very first time – will emerge unscathed from the experience. Translated by Alexis Lykiard and with an introduction by Stephen Barber (author and cultural historian).

An essential volume for theater artists and students alike, this anthology includes the full texts of sixteen important examples of avant-garde drama from the most daring and influential artistic movements of the first half of the twentieth century, including Symbolism, Futurism, Expressionism, Dada, and Surrealism. Each play is accompanied by a bio-critical introduction by the editor, and a critical essay, frequently written by the playwright, which elaborates on the play’s dramatic and aesthetic concerns. A new introduction by Robert Knopf and Julia Listengarten contextualizes the plays in light of recent critical developments in avant-garde studies. By examining the groundbreaking theatrical experiments of Jarry, Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Artaud, and others, the book foregrounds the avant-garde’s enduring influence on the development of modern theater.

"Artaud remains one of the significant and influential theorists of modern theatre."—Gerald Rabkin, Rutgers University

This book proposes, following Antonin Artaud, an investigation exploring the virtual body, neurology and the brain as fields of contestation, seeking a clearer understanding of Artaud's transformations that ultimately leads into examining the relevance Artaud may have for an adequate theory of the current media environment. New Media and the Artaud Effect is the only current full-length study of the relation of Artaud’s work to dilemmas of digital art, media and society today. It is also singular in that it combines a far-reaching discussion of the theoretical implications and ramifications of the ‘late’ or ‘final’ Artaud, with a treatment of individual media works, sometimes directly inspired from Artaud’s travails. Artaud has long been justly regarded as one of the seminal influences in mid- and late-20th century performance and theater: it is argued here that Artaud’s insights are if anything more applicable to digital/post-digital society and the plethora of works that are made possible by it.

This is the first book in more than twenty-five years to examine the complex historical, cultural, and aesthetic relationship between theater and film, and the effect that each has had on the other’s development.Robert Knopf here assembles essays from performers, directors, writers, and critics that illuminate this ongoing inquiry. The book is divided into five parts—historical influence, comparisons and contrasts, writing, directing, and acting—with interludes by major artists whose work and words have shaped the development of theater and film. A comprehensive bibliography and filmography support further work in this area.The book contains contributions from Susan Sontag, Stanley Kauffmann, Sarah Bey-Cheng, Bertolt Brecht, Ingmar Bergman, Harold Pinter, David Mamet, Julia Taymor, Judi Dench, Sam Waterston, Orson Welles, Antonin Artaud, and Milos Forman, among others.

"Beginning in 1993 with Artaud: Blows and Bombs, Stephen Barber has quietly, independently forged one of the most singular and enriching bodies of work in contemporary writing." -David Peace Over the three decades since 1990, Stephen Barber has written many essays and experimental writings around film and digital arts. For the first time, this collection in two parts assembles all of those writings, many otherwise unavailable, over seventy in all. Many of those writings explore unknown elements of vital bodies of work that remain inspirational for contemporary art, writing and film. Others interrogate the transmutations of cities - especially those of Europe and of Japan - across those three decades, anatomizing their urban futures. These writings are often residues from, or accompaniments to, Stephen Barber’s thirty books, short writings which possess their own distinctive and accumulating presence, and can display the interrogative resilience to explore preoccupations with greater intensity and pointedness than an entire book. THE RESIDUES, PART ONE collects 38 writings on subjects including Antonin Artaud, Jean Genet, Tatsumi Hijikata, Pierre Guyotat, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Drama. Antonin Artaud is one of the two or three most influential innovators of the twentieth centruy, whose theoried, production ideas along with his writings and plays have broght a new poetic impulse and dynamic intensity to the stage, replacing the naturalistic theatre that preceded his own. In this volume of COLLECTED WORK, we see Artaud's early formulations of his theories on theatre in general, and the genesis of the theatre of cruelty. In particular, the volume contains the famous manifestos of the revolutionary Alfred Jarry Theatre, productions plans, notes and critical articles. Also included is a series of articles on literature and the plastic arts, written during the same period. The variety and humour of such a wide range of work certainly constitutes a fertile source for those seeking a new approach to theatre and its allied arts. Translated and with an introduction by Victor Corti.

A collection of manifestos originally published in 1938, in which the French artist and philosopher attacks conventional assumptions about the drama, and calls for the influx of irrational material - based on dreams, religion, and emotion - in order to make the theater vital for modern audiences.