Performing Feeling in Cultures of Memory - (Palgrave MacMillan Memory Studies) by B Trezise (Hardcover)

About the Book

This is one of the first studies to map conjunctions between memory culture, feeling and the performed nature of emotions. In using performance theory as the investigative framework for these interests, Bryoni Trezise argues that feelings occur as performed cultural effects. The study makes clear the often invisible cultural practices that link how we experience reconstructions of the past to how we produce emotional responses out of them. The book traverses site-specific, virtual, televisual and theatrical memory practices, which reach from Holocaust memorials, to the digital aesthetics of Second Life and the trauma spectacles exposed by reality TV or challenged by radical theatre. Drawing together recent discussions on emotion and the senses, she argues that memory in the new millennium is characterised by an 'experiential turn' that underscores relations between bodily behaviours and sentimental responses. Through these, Trezise rethinks the dominant models that shape and frame arguments for how and why we remember the pasts of others.

Book Synopsis

Performing Feeling in Cultures of Memory brings memory studies into conversation with a focus on feelings as cultural actors. It charts a series of memory sites that range from canonical museums and memorials, to practices enabled by the virtual terrain of Second Life, popular 'trauma TV' programs and radical theatre practice.

About the Author

Bryoni Trezise is Lecturer in Performance Studies at the University of New South Wales, Australia, and a theatre reviewer and dramaturg. Her research in performance and memory has been widely published in journals including Theatre Research International, Memory Studies and Cultural Studies Review. She is co-editor, with Caroline Wake, of Visions and Revisions: Performance, Memory, Trauma (2013).