Staging Words, Performing Worlds

Intertextuality and Nation in Contemporary Latin American Theater

Gail A. Bulman

2007
276 pages
ISBN 9781611482782
Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory

Staging Words, Performing Worlds presents new perspectives on Argentina, Cuba, Mexico, and Venezuela and their theater, by theorizing how, through performance, nation can be "re-imagined" and reconstructed. Each chapter frames the sociopolitical and theatrical national context and presents a theoretical analysis of the dramatic and ideological functions of intertexts in plays by Victor Hugo, Rascón Banda, Maruxa Vilalta, César Rengifo, Néstor Caballero, Eduardo Pavlovsky, and Rafael Spregelburd, among others. Bulman demonstrates how past artistic texts - other plays, stories, newspaper articles, songs, or paintings - can be reworked and "translated" to create a new theatrical spirit. The multiple levels of translation - intertext to text, text to script, script to performance - have implications for the ways texts are interpreted and for how they in turn "perform" their nation.

Well researched, theoretically sophisticated, and highly readable, Staging Words, Performing Worlds explores the problematic notion of nation today. It will be of interest to scholars, dramatists, playwrights, critics of Latin American theater, and to those working in world-theater and cultural studies.

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About the author:

Gail A. Bulman is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Syracuse University where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in Latin American narrative, theater, and culture. Her articles on contemporary Latin American theater have been published in Latin American Theatre Review, Gestos, Ollantay Theater Magazine, Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literatures, and Hispanófila. Professor Bulman has participated in international conferences on Latin American theater in Buenos Aires, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and in many cities in the United States. She lives in the Syracuse area with her husband and three children.

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