Information about the author:
Elena D. Galtsova
Elena D. Galtsova, DSc in Philology, Leading Research Fellow, Head of Laboratory “Rossica”, A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Povarskaya 25 a, 121069 Moscow, Russia; Professor, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Leninskie Gory 1/51, GSP-1, 119991 Moscow, Russia; Professor, Russian State University for the Humanities, Misskaja sq. 6, 125993 GSP-3, Moscow, Russia.
ORCID ID: https:////orcid.org/0000-0002-2292-287X
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Abstract:
This article examines the category of “theatricality” in literary and theatrical theory — a popular, polysemantic, and, therefore, rather vague concept. Without claiming to exhaust all its meanings, we focus on certain aspects related to the understanding of the term and phenomenon in Symbolist and avant-garde culture, as well as in semiotic studies (primarily French theatrical semiology of the 1960s – 1980s, Anne Ubersfeld, Patrice Pavis, and Michel Corvin), which attempt a positivistic interpretation. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the complex interweaving of reflections on actual theatrical phenomena and the metaphorical use of the term in relation to non-theatrical phenomena in the late 19th and 20th centuries. We examine this issue based on material from French culture, drawing on a number of phenomena and theories developed by Russian culture. The concept of “theatricality” develops in this context simultaneously as a designation for the rejection of classical notions of theater and the search for a new theater, as one of the formulas embodying the awareness of the utopian nature of such searches, and as a more or less radical notion of the expansion of “theatricality” beyond the theater, not only into the realm of literature but also into the realm of cultural anthropology.
Keywords: theatricality, French culture of the late 19th and 20th centuries, Symbolism, avant-garde, S. Mallarmé, A. Artaud, G. Chulkov, N. Evreinov, French theatrical semiotics.
