17500

SoSe 14: Porous Bodies/Entgrenzte Körper: interkulturelle Vergleiche performativer Praktiken zwischen Tradition und Widerständigkeit

Klaus Peter Köpping

Comments

The lecture series will be held in English (with German summaries and discussions in group seminar fashion with the students). The main focus will be on the presentation and representation of bodies in the performing and other art productions (re-hearsals as well as re-enactments) as vehicles to challenge the concept of boundaries. Bodies are here conceived in the Bakhtinian sense as porous. One attribute of the porous is the shifting of the performing body between groundedness and reaching out through the limbs. The other is the permeability of the skin, a "membrane" connecting in- and outside, as do the apertures of the various sense-organs (we can gaze orbe gazed at/into). Personhood as well as autonomy are notions which can only be concretized in bodies. This interactive grounding of sociality also makes bodies into "loaded signifyers", becoming the material stratum to express or convey messages about collective social and cultural conditions, ambiguously shifting between maintenance of traditionally held values and the subversion of these. The lectures will be framed by looking at various performative representations which may give a clue to changing perceptions about what "bodies" and "boundaries" signify, what "play", "game", "ritual" or "automaton" may mean in different times and places, when interventions through aesthetic, erotic, surgical or virtual medial techniques and practices occur. Requirements for "active participation" besides presence: and active discussion are: 1) One paper of 2000 words on a visit to an exhibition; 2) One paper of about 1000 words on a cinematic example shown in the class-room. Bibliographische Hinweise 1. Michel Feher, ed., 1989: Fragments for a History oft he Human Body. 3 vols. Zone-Books, MIT Press. 2. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Lacqueur (eds.), 1987: The Making oft he Modern Body. Univ. of California Press, Berkeley. 3. Irene Albers, Anselm Franke (Hg.), 2002:Animismus. Revisionen der Moderne. Diaphanes, Zürich . 4. Hillel Schwartz, 1998: The Culture oft he Copy. Zone-Books, MIT Press. 5. Barbara Maria Stafford, 1991: Body Criticism. Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine. MIT Press.. 6. Klaus-Peter Köpping, "Ostantative Schamlosigkeit in japanischen rituellen und ästhetischen Performances im Kulturvergleich", In: Katja Gvozdeva nd Hans Rudolf Velten (Hrsg.), 2011: Scham und Schamlosigkeit. Grenzverletzungen in Literatur und Kultur der Vormoderne. De-Gruyter; S. 473-491. close