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668 REVIEWS interrogation of the precepts of a system of theatre production and an acting theory where ideas of nature, logic, and truth were linked with emotion and issues of social construction were neglected. Tait exposes the circularity of Stanislavski's psychologism, where assumed inner emotions of outer bodies were staged in a way that suggested interiority, reiterated dominant ideas about femininity, and presented a socially logical appearance (that is, where true emotions were socially appropriate ones). Tait uses the work of MerleauPonty to challenge Stanislavski 's assumptions in an interesting way. This new approach affords many valuable insights into Chekhov's main plays. For example, Tait's examination of interrextuality and self-dramatization in The Seagull, where the characters, in their searches for love and fulfilment , frequently relate their own emotional experiences to literature, is particularly enlightening. Her examination of Three Sisters contrasts the emotional self-expression of the women, their aspirations about love and work, and their rejection of conformity to domestic roles with male emotional certainties and assertions of controL Themes of spaces and their emotional connotations recur: for example, the PTOZOroV's house and its usurpation by Natasha in Three Sisters, and, in The Cherry Orchard, the relationship of Ranevskaia and other characters to the estate. Occasionally, Tail's references to other works are so brief as to be obscure. For example, the reference to David Jones's statement that Stanislavski's truth was derived from nineteenth-century thought about verisimilitude necessitates referring to the source for clarity. And, of course, she enters into areas that are open to debate. In the section on Stanislavski's actor training. Tail makes use of Joseph Roach's important work The Player's Passion, including its claim that Stanislavski's system cannot be comprehended without Pavlov's science. Many writers have questioned the extent to which Soviet materialism dictated a link between Pavlov and Stanislavski's theories, and Tait's argument here cannot be upheld on close examination. Overall, however. this re-examination of Stanislavski and Chekhov explores the important area of the cultural representation of emotion within a particular theatre context and should be instrumental in the development of a "politics of emotions in theatre practice" (165). SHA NNON JA CKSON. Lines of Activity: Peljormance, Historiography, Hull-House Domesticity. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Pp. 379. illustrated. US$50 (Hb); US$24.95 (Pb). Reviewed hy Melanie Blood, Stale University ofNew York at Geneseo Lines of Activity: Pe/formance, Historiography, Hull-House Domesticity, by Shannon Jackson, is astounding in its scope and in its implications for the Reviews 669 making of history. Jackson convincingly argues that performance studies, itself a nexus of many critical tools, is the best model for studying the historical practices of an institution like Hull-House. Jackson goes far beyond the study of its recognized performance venues, theatre, dance, and music, which have been addressed in prior studies with more traditional historiographic methods, and looks at performance in such Hull-House venues as the Labor Museum, the Gymnasium, and the Jane Club. Most importantly, she examines the performance of selves that took place in the daily interactions between settlement workers and neighborhood residents, a practice unlike any artistic or social work practice today. Jackson inserts herself, the scholar, at an historical remove from the people and the places she studies. She describes her enactment of the history-making process: she gets ink smudges on her finger tips from the microfiche printer; she walks through the current Hull-House museum and simultaneously fetishizes the past and catches herself for doing so, and she interviews the elderly Dorothy Sigel Mittleman and recognizes the bodily traces in the behavior practiced in her years at Hull-House. In cach chapter, Jackson insists on the importance of the physical behavior of the historian and on understanding the perfonnative elements now present only in traces, in shadows to be read between the lines and interpreted from graphics: the reaction of an audience of neighborhood people, the gestural language and facial expressions that can contain more meaning than words themselves. Jackson's novel conceit of the perfonnance historian performing history has its limitations; her audience is not the live...

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