Sunday, August 4, 2019
Analysis of The World of Wrestling by Roland Barthes Essay -- The Worl
Analysis of The World of Wrestling by Roland Barthes Roland Barthes's essay on "The World of Wrestling" draws analogically on the ancient theatre to contextualize wrestling as a cultural myth where the grandiloquence of the ancient is preserved and the spectacle of excess is displayed. Barthes's critique -- which is above all a rewriting of what was to understand what is -- is useful here insofar as it may be applied back to theatre as another open-air spectacle. But in this case, not the theatre of the ancients, but the Middle English pageant presents the locus for discussing the sport of presentation, or, if you prefer, the performance of the sport. More specifically, what we see by looking at the Harrowing of Hell -- the dramatic moment in the cycle plays that narratizes doctrinal redemption more graphically than any other play in the cycle -- as spectacle offers a matrix for the multiple relationships between performance and audience and the means of producing that performance which, in turn, necessarily produces the audience. Â Â Â Â Â The implications of the spectacle could sensibly be applied to the complete texts of the cycle plays, and perhaps more appropriately to the full range of the pageant and its concomitant festivities. The direction of pseudo-historical criticism, especially of the Elizabethan stage, certainly provides a well-plowed ground for advancing the festive and carnivalesque inherently present in the establishment and event of theater. Nevertheless, my discussion here is both more limited and more expansive: its limits are constructed by the choice of an individual play recurrent through the four extant manuscripts of what has come to be called the Corpus Christi plays; its expansion is expressed through a delivery that aims to implicate the particular moment of this play in the operations of a dominant church-state apparatus, which is, ostensibly, a model of maintaining hegemony in Western culture. The Harrowing provides a singular instance in which the mechanisms of control of the apparatus appear to extend and exploit their relationship with the audience (i.e. congregation). The play is constructed beyond the canonized operations of the sacred, originating a narrative beyond (yet within) the authorized vulgate; it is constructed only through church authority yet maint... ...thorizing. It seems we are not merely to claim, as Hardin Craig does, that the plays are "a theological intelligence motivated by structural imagination that lasted from age to age in the development of a great cycle of mystery plays." Instead, we should interrogate the multiple dimensions of artistry and artificiality of the play; our task is to ask how these plays operate as a performative moment coming directly from the dominant arms of orthodoxy while still being influenced by the severely limited mass culture. We may find, then, at the center of the controlling mechanisms of the church-state apparatus, the necessitated desire for community that even Satan validates and proclaims: Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Nay, I pray the do not so; Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Vmthynke the better in thy mynde; Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Or els let me with the go, Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â I pray the leyffe me not behynde! The desire, of course, extends past Satan's plea, for the homogenized desire of the congregation ultimately -- which is in history written and yet to be -- is directed toward a different answer from Jesus: one that affirms salvation and again confirms the church's orthodox pageantry of performance. Analysis of The World of Wrestling by Roland Barthes Essay -- The Worl Analysis of The World of Wrestling by Roland Barthes Roland Barthes's essay on "The World of Wrestling" draws analogically on the ancient theatre to contextualize wrestling as a cultural myth where the grandiloquence of the ancient is preserved and the spectacle of excess is displayed. Barthes's critique -- which is above all a rewriting of what was to understand what is -- is useful here insofar as it may be applied back to theatre as another open-air spectacle. But in this case, not the theatre of the ancients, but the Middle English pageant presents the locus for discussing the sport of presentation, or, if you prefer, the performance of the sport. More specifically, what we see by looking at the Harrowing of Hell -- the dramatic moment in the cycle plays that narratizes doctrinal redemption more graphically than any other play in the cycle -- as spectacle offers a matrix for the multiple relationships between performance and audience and the means of producing that performance which, in turn, necessarily produces the audience. Â Â Â Â Â The implications of the spectacle could sensibly be applied to the complete texts of the cycle plays, and perhaps more appropriately to the full range of the pageant and its concomitant festivities. The direction of pseudo-historical criticism, especially of the Elizabethan stage, certainly provides a well-plowed ground for advancing the festive and carnivalesque inherently present in the establishment and event of theater. Nevertheless, my discussion here is both more limited and more expansive: its limits are constructed by the choice of an individual play recurrent through the four extant manuscripts of what has come to be called the Corpus Christi plays; its expansion is expressed through a delivery that aims to implicate the particular moment of this play in the operations of a dominant church-state apparatus, which is, ostensibly, a model of maintaining hegemony in Western culture. The Harrowing provides a singular instance in which the mechanisms of control of the apparatus appear to extend and exploit their relationship with the audience (i.e. congregation). The play is constructed beyond the canonized operations of the sacred, originating a narrative beyond (yet within) the authorized vulgate; it is constructed only through church authority yet maint... ...thorizing. It seems we are not merely to claim, as Hardin Craig does, that the plays are "a theological intelligence motivated by structural imagination that lasted from age to age in the development of a great cycle of mystery plays." Instead, we should interrogate the multiple dimensions of artistry and artificiality of the play; our task is to ask how these plays operate as a performative moment coming directly from the dominant arms of orthodoxy while still being influenced by the severely limited mass culture. We may find, then, at the center of the controlling mechanisms of the church-state apparatus, the necessitated desire for community that even Satan validates and proclaims: Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Nay, I pray the do not so; Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Vmthynke the better in thy mynde; Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Or els let me with the go, Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â I pray the leyffe me not behynde! The desire, of course, extends past Satan's plea, for the homogenized desire of the congregation ultimately -- which is in history written and yet to be -- is directed toward a different answer from Jesus: one that affirms salvation and again confirms the church's orthodox pageantry of performance.
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