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Reviews 153 truth is that women's theatre continues to be "susceptible to loss" (2), making books like this one, by insightful critics like Aston, all the more urgent. PATR[CE PAVtS. Analyzing Pelformance: Theater, Dance, and Film. Translated by David Williams. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2003. Pp. 362. $59.50 (Hb); $24.95 (Pb). Reviewed by Susall Bennett, University ofCalgary An English-language translation of Patrice Pavis' [996 text, L' Analyse des spectacles, this book takes as its task the provision of new proposals for the analysis of perfonnance. Interested in providing non-expert readers with approaches to understanding the production and reception contexts for theatre, this is a useful primer arranged in three sections: "The Conditions of Analysis ," looking primarily at applicable theories; "The Components of the Stage," addressing key contributors such as the actor and other material elements; and "The Conditions of Reception," including discussion of intercultural approaches. The author has, of course, had a distinguished career in theatre studies and has published widely on a range of important topics. English-language readers probably recognize The III/ereultural Pelformanee Reader ([996) and Theatre at the Crossroads a/Culture ([992) as his major works. A strength of Analyzing Pelformance comes from Pavis' determination to move far beyond the semiotic analysis that has typified much dramatic analysis in continental Europe. He champions, instead, a theory of vectors, coupling the rigour of semiotics with a study of "the mechanisms of need (sociology) and desire (psychoanalysis) from the perspective of an anthropology of the actor and the spectator" (30). The systematic working-through of elements that constitute the live performance as well as of those that evoke the conditions of spectatorship provides for an overview that students might find very useful indeed in understanding the production- reception dynamic. Various illustrations - such as the author's typology of objects in the theatre, Valentin 's models of lighting directions, and instruments by the author and others for surveying theatre audiences - add concise and often provocative starting places for further thought. Pavis also provides very closely detailed analyses of aspects of specific performance texts (for example, detailed accounts of the workings of gesture in The Miser and of a gesture-desire vector in Vb-ike Meinhoj) that might be usefully tested by students in practical theatre courses. There is much to commend this text for in its attention to so many aspects of performance and in the clarity with which it addresses the various topics (kudos here must also go to David Williams, whose translation supports this). Yet, there is something fundamentally depressing about the publication of this 154 REVIEWS book with a leading North American press, and this derives from the author's apparently comfortable insularity. Pavis does comment early in his text that "there is practically no exchange between French semiology, Dutch empiricism , Swedish audience/reception studies, English pragmatism, German hermeneutics, or Italian historiography," seeing it as a "fact that research is nearly always carried out in isolation by and for a group of specialists working within the same critical tradition, often unaware of the other traditions that exist" (26). It is telling here that his list is restricted to Europe, since he goes on to wilfully ignore scholarship produced anywhere else in the world. While Eugenio Barba, Roland Barthes, Hans-Robert Jauss, Jean-Fran<;ois Lyotard, and other key European theorists are drawn upon heavily, there is scant reference to North American authors. Only Marvin Carlson, Stan Gamer, Bert States, and Richard Schechner are mentioned at all, and sometimes only so obliquely as to suggest lack of interest, if not dismissiveness: Is it necessary for the spectator - prime suspect of the production - first to confess? Like the distinguished American theorist who closes his excellent work on the Theories ofthe Theatre by admitting the need to reposition himself constantly, which he considers a"challenge, if one is, like me, culturally positioned on the dominant side of all the traditional discourses - a white. middle-class, academic. heterosexual male." Must one really be politically correct to understand correctly the performance of our lives? (268-69) Since the subsequent paragraph starts with, "More seriously," we can assume that Pavis has little time for identity-based writing and that what is stunningly absent from this book as a whole is a willingness to engage critical work outside Pavis' "natural" domain of Europe, even if this constitutes a body of scholarship in theatre and performance studies that has made the field so vibrant over the last twenty years. Given the comments in Part One on the lack of awareness among different European-based traditions, the author's breadth of European citation might have served a particular purpose in the original publication of his French-language text with Editions Nathan. But publication with a leading North American publisher in theatre and performance studies makes the absence of broad engagement all the more egregious. Further, it is baffling why the University of Michigan Press edition has added such a misleading subtitle: the book has almost nothing to say on dance and film per se. These are disciplines, moreover, where existing theoretical work would add to and/or challenge the principles that underlie Pavis' argument. The author does explicitly restrict himself to five fields of research - production -reception theory, sociosemiotics, cultural anthropology, phenomenology , and the theory of vectors (see Part One) - but, in general, these are hardly areas that have been ignored by North American and other non-European theorists in theatre and performance. He also shies away from engagement with Reviews 155 some of the most dynamic and significant critical approaches. Feminist scholarship , for example, garners a single mention, when Pavis supports Elizabeth Grosz's idea of "embodied subjectivity," although he quickly turns the discussion back to Michael Chekhov's principles of psychological gesture (240). I realize that most of us writing in the English language are seldom, if at all, well read in non-English language theory and criticism, and it might be argued that, under such circumstances, my criticisms here are unfair. Yet, if Analyzing Peiformance is to engage the target readership for its North American edition , it must, surely, show some interest in the scholarship those readers have produced. It is not good enough simply to gloss over insularity in the introduction ; it is, instead, way past time that we - scholars and publishers alike insist on the conversations and engagements that would make the current make-up of Pavis' text impossible. Analyzing Petformance is an interesting book, but, in the end, a lost opportunity. DANElL ALBRIGHT. Beckett and Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. 179, iIIustraled. $60 (Hb). Reviewed by Carl Lavery, De Mont/orr University, Leicester Important scholarship generally manifesls ilself in two ways. Either it shifts the terrain of the discipline by developing new insights, or it painslakingly pieces logether what everyone simply purports to know. Daniel Albright's recent book Beckett and Aesthetics belongs to the second category. In this slim, well-argued volume, Albright shows how Beckett's famous comment about failure in "Three Dialogues" (1949) is not simply a philosophical idea, something existential, but on the contrary, is an aesthetic principle that he developed and honed throughout his career. According 10 Albright, Beckett's perverse art "of muleness, incompelence and non-feasance of transmission" was born from an initial, naiVe hope "that writing mighl provide psychic aulhenticily" (2). On realising Ihe impossibililY of his utopian quest, Beckett, Albright claims, sel off in Ihe opposite direclion: toward debunking the scam of representalion, revealing the lie of art, and purposefully botching communication. Paradoxically, this approach allowed Beckett to play what Same, in a different context, calls the "game of loser wins" (248). For, as Albright notes, "if it is true that art can do little or nothing , then to provide little or nothing is a form of facing the truth" (2). One of the features of Albright's impressive book is his attempt to relate Beckett's aeslhetic of failure to other artistic movements and media. In his informative introduction, for instance, he highlights the influence of surrealism on Beckett's work. For Albright, Beckett's surrealism lies not in his sensi- ...

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