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Semiotics and Avant-garde Theatre

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2009

Jiří Veltruský
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Extract

This article deals with a very short period in the long history of the semiotic conception of theatre. It concentrates on the relationship between the theatrical avantgarde and the theories developed during some twenty years in Czechoslovakia, by Otakar Zich on the one hand and the members of the Prague Linguistic Circle on the other. Broadly speaking, this is the Prague School theory of theatre. A Polish scholar has called it “semiotics of theatre in statu nascendi.” This designation is no doubt pertinent as far as the recent development of the discipline is concerned; its more remote past still remains largely unexplored. But another commentator went much further, claiming that until 1931, the year when Zich's treatise on the theatre and Mukařovský's article on Chaplin's City Lights appeared, “dramatic poetics—the descriptive science of the drama and theatrical performance—had made little progress since its Aristotelian origins.” In fact, semiotics is a very old discipline and the semiotic interpretation of the theatre was not invented in Czechoslovakia between the two World Wars.

Type
Special Section: Prague School Semiotics
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , May 1995 , pp. 87 - 95
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1995

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References

ENDNOTES

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