Literature
On the literature front Wallace Bacon (1914–2001), considered by many the father of Performance theory, taught performance of literature as the ultimate act of humility. In his defining statement of performance theory Bacon writes "Our center is in the interaction between readers and texts which enriches, extends, clarifies, and (yes) alters the interior and even the exterior lives of students through the power of texts" (Literature in Performance, Vol 5 No 1, 1984; p. 84). In addition, Robert Breen's text Chamber Theatre is a cornerstone in the field for staging narrative texts though controversial in its assertions about the place of narrative details in chamber productions. Breen is also regarded by many as a founding theorist for the discipline along with advocate Louise Rosenblatt.
Read more about this topic: Performance Studies, Origins of And Basic Concepts in Performance Studies
Famous quotes containing the word literature:
“To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and given them an idea of something better. A better state of one’s feelings or simply the idea of a silence in one’s self that allows one to think or to feel. Which to me is the same.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man’s family.”
—J.M. (John Millington)
“The newspapers, I perceive, devote some of their columns specially to politics or government without charge; and this, one would say, is all that saves it; but as I love literature and to some extent the truth also, I never read those columns at any rate. I do not wish to blunt my sense of right so much.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)