Performing Transversally - by Kenneth A Loparo (Paperback)

About the Book

"Performing Transversally" expands on Bryan Reynolds' controversial transversal theory in exciting ways while offering groundbreaking analyses of Shakespeare's plays--"Hamlet," "Othello," "Macbeth," "Taming of the Shrew," "Titus Andronicus," "Henry V," "The Tempest," and "Coriolanus"--and textual, filmic, and theatrical adaptations of them.

Book Synopsis

Performing Transversally expands on Bryan Reynolds' controversial transversal theory in exciting ways while offering groundbreaking analyses of Shakespeare's plays - Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, Henry V, The Tempest, and Coriolanus - and textual, filmic, and theatrical adaptations of them. With his collaborators, Reynolds challenges traditional readings of Shakespeare, re-evaluating the critical methodologies that characterize them, in regard to issues of cultural difference, authorship, representation, agency, and iconography. Reynolds demonstrates the value of his 'investigative-expansive mode, ' outlining a 'transversal poetics' that points toward a critical future that is more aware of its subjective interconnectedness with the topics and audiences it seeks to engage than is reflected in most Shakespeare criticism and literary-cultural scholarship.

Review Quotes

"Performing Transversally is an innovative example of collaborative scholarship aimed at opening the classic Shakespearean text to unexpected interpretive contexts and possibilities. Whether exploring the sado-masochistic dynamics of Othello or bringing Shakespeare and Dario Fo into productive dialogue, Reynolds and his collaborators use Shakespeare to explore uncharted emotional and cognitive landscapes.... Performing Transversally offers a highly-caffeinated alternative to conventional criticism." - Jean E. Howard, William E. Ransford Professor of English, Columbia University

"In Performing Transversally, Reynolds takes his collaborators and us on a dazzling, even mind-altering trip through what Reynolds calls 'Shakespace, ' offering us trenchant sociohistorical readings both of Shakespeare's plays and adaptations of them by Dryden, Polanski, Brecht, Césaire, Wilson, Fo, and Taymor. Reynolds powerfully reaffirms the agency of the subject and offers hope for theoretical intervention as a viable form of political activism conceived quite daringly here as the transcendence of all conceptual, emotional, social, and physical limits." - Richard Burt, author of Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares

"Transferring models of collaborative authorship from theatre and performance to academic discourse, Performing Transversally productively sets out to re-imagine a critical terrain for Shakespeare in which text and critic are in constant movement, where dispersals, expansions, variabilities, metamorphoses, reconfigurations, alternatives, and contradictions rule. Offering multivocal, processual accounts of how such conversations and negotiations invite links between fields of discourse, Reynolds and co-performers are master jugglers, keeping multiple texts, objects, ideas and ideologies simultaneously in view." - Barbara Hodgdon, University of Michigan

"In Performing Transversally, Bryan Reynolds and a group of collaborators challenge critical orthodoxy by venturing into 'transversal territory' and into the overlapping realm of 'Shakespace.'. . . Because it insists that 'transversality' is the liberating, responsibility-conferring space where we can begin to understand and empathize with other people and other cultures, and because it insistently characterizes Shakespearean performance as 'transversal, ' the book amounts to an important and marvelously high-spirited contribution to the turn toward ethics in literary and cultural studies." - Paul Yachnin, Tomlinson Professor of Shakespeare Studies, McGill University

About the Author

BRYAN REYNOLDS is Associate Professor of Drama at the University of
California at Irvine, USA. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard, where he studied Shakespeare under Marjorie Garber and Stephen Greenblatt.

Bryan has recently been named as one of Gary Taylor's '6 most brilliant Renaissance scholars in the world under 40'