Biopolitics, Materiality and Meaning in Modern European Drama

Puts modernist theatre from the realist-naturalist tradition to the historical avant-garde in conversation with new materialist, posthumanist philosophy

Arguing that existing modernization theories have been unnecessarily one-sided, Hedwig Fraunhofer offers a rewriting of modernity that cuts across binary methodologies - nature and culture, mind and matter, epistemology and ontology, critique and affirmative writing, dramatic and postdramatic theatre.

She specifically reworks the biopolitical exclusions that mark modern western epistemology, leading up to modernity's totalitarian crisis point.

Fraunhofer reveals the performativity of theatre in its double sense - as theatrical production and as the intra-activity of a dynamic system of multiple relations between human and more-than-human actors, energies and affects. In modern theatre, public and private, human and more-than-human, materiality and meaning collapse in a common life.

Hedwig Fraunhofer is Professor of French and German at Georgia College.