Stage Fright

In this superb examination of theatricality and its detractors, Martin Puchner takes a close look at the theories of Stéphane Mallarmé, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, William Butler Yeats, Bertolt Brecht, and Samuel Beckett... In order to circumvent theatricality, Puchner observes, these authors shared common strategies: the superimposition of stage directions, choral figures, narratives, and commentators on the action, and characters who observe their own actions—all designed to disrupt mimesis, illusion, and theatrical virtuosity... [An] important study.

A breathtaking tour de force through different languages, genres, and millennia from Plato to the Wooster Group, Stage Fright opens up a theoretical path for the reintegration of theater studies into the German studies discourse... Puchner argues persuasively that theater plays a constitutive role in modernism and proposes theatricality as the divisive aesthetical moment in the opposition between modernism and the avant-garde... Puchner's book is original and exciting even in its asides and footnotes... an intellectual treat and a must-read for any scholar dealing with twentieth-century literature and culture.

After this study, a lot of polemic energy spent in debate between pro-theatricalists and anti-theatricalists, between adherents of modernism and those of the avant-garde, can be spared. The fault lines between solipsistic and elitist modernism on the one side, and a collaborative and political avant-garde on the other, must be drawn anew. As Puchner brilliantly demonstrates, the radical difference must be thought, first and foremost, along the parameters of anti-theatrical modernism versus the theatrical avant-garde... By doing justice to the minute details of... the dramas and theories of Mallarmé, Joyce, Stein, Yeats, Brecht and Beckett, Puchner makes a compelling case for the central thesis of the book. Moreover, Puchner... provides a new vocabulary to analyze modernism's 'hate affair' with the theater.