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L'Esprit Créateur Western orchestration to include "Hindu and ancient Greek scales, Balinese sonorities, Gregorian plainchant" (43). In 1948 Pierre Boulez wrote that "music must be hysteria and collective bewitchment, violently present—following the direction of Antonin Artaud" (45). In May of 1948 the first piece of Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrète was broadcast. It was, as Weiss notes, a "pivotal year in the history of twentieth century music" (43). Weiss uses moments such as these as markers in a history still listening to itself develop, for it is a history of radio arts. Weiss restores the specificity of the radiophonie dimension (still often considered a bastard form, derived from theatre, music and the written arts), while re-situating it, as a distinct cultural form, in the midst of current theoretical debates on the linkages between the physical and the technological, the psychological and the musicological, as well as the more familiar themes of textuality and subjectivity. Weiss's text presents the fragments of a grand narrative of noise spliced together, from Russolo's Art of noise to Artaud's glossolalia, to the more systematic linguistic distortions of Gregory Whitehead. These sounds are homeless. Like Artaud's broadcast they do not "take place" but rather traverse space both public and private. Like Nietzsche's dream of "words in motion," they travel as if to keep up with our thoughts (60). They are not masterpieces but they correspond to what Artaud called "the crude and epileptic rhythm of these times" (Le Théâtre et son double, 1964 [ 1938]: 116). Phantasmic Radio follows their hallucinatory journeys but repeatedly returns with them to the question of the body as if to coax unforeseen and unheard of voices from these figures . Weiss is particularly skillful in reading Artaud's glossolalia as a kind of material poetics in which the violence and pleasure of the experience of a physicalised sound assume precedence over the phatic, communicative aspects of linguistic production. This emphasis amplifies another aspect of Weiss's project here, apart from giving voice to the silent history of radical radiophony, which is precisely to analyse what lies beneath these nodal points of language (just as it was Artaud's project to bring them into being), and thereby to extend interpretative practice to its limits, to fine-tune the analytical ear to the sounds of the instinctual drives, like a textual ultrasound . This is academic writing at its vibrant best, reminding the reader of the voltaic potentials of thought to endlessly renew itself in making strange something as familiar to our lives as radio and to rediscover in the works of Artaud and Cage, as well as less celebrated artists such as Valere Novarina, Christof Migone and Gregory Whitehead, the inexhaustible versions, inversions, reversions and perversions of the human voice which offer to all who have eyes to hear, a massive expansion of sensuous receptivity. Edward Scheer University of Newcastle NSW, Australia Molière mis en scène. Œuvres et critiques 22:2 (1997). Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag. Pp. 183. This welcome volume of fifteen essays, plus a thoughtful introduction by David Whitton, gives a very wide range of information on the theory and practice of staging Molière that will be of interest not only to specialists of theatricality, but to all who study the plays, especially Tartuffe, which figures most prominently, Le Misanthrope, Don Juan, and L'Ecole des femmes. While the offerings on Anglo-French productions are richest, there are five articles devoted to stagings in other countries. After a quick review of the American situation, Jim Carmody concentrates mainly on the Belgrader/Berc version of Scapin in New York and the Falls/Bartlett Misanthrope in La JoIIa. Alain-Michel Rocheleau and Bruce Griffiths offer in-depth views of the historical evolution of Molière on the Québécois and Welsh stages. Bilha Blum contributes a summary of ten years of Israeli productions that begs for a more expanded treatment not only of the productions themselves, but of the fascinating reception phenomena accompanying Molière plays in the Middle East. Sonia Simkova provides just that sort of analysis of the significance of his theater in Slovakia in the...

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