Reading as Performance: Theatrical Books from Tristram Shandy to Artists' Books for Children
Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Comparative Literature
First Advisor
Trumpener, Katie
Abstract
This dissertation project explores the material book as a site of performance and reading as a process of theatricalization. To understand the phenomenological experience of reading, I focus on what I call theatrical books: books that activate their material surfaces to make us aware of our encounter with them. Theatrical books reveal reading as a process of continuous negotiation, a movement propelled by tension and they call attention to the theatrical elements of all book reading. My research takes up questions raised by Bert State’s study on the phenomenology of theater, Robin Bernstein’s work on scriptive things, Christopher Grobe’s idea of bookish performance, and Andrew Sofer’s concept of dark matter, and extends them both backward in time to the eighteenth-century and outward into puppet studies and into reading practices in everyday life. I bring into conversation early printed books, like the first edition of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759), with modern and contemporary artists’ books by Keith Godard, Remy Charlip, Bruno Munari, Shingu Susumu, Suzy Lee, and Komagata Katsumi, highlighting the book as not only an animate thing that scripts meaningful bodily movements but also a powerful interface from which imagination of virtual actions and events takes flight.
Recommended Citation
Huang, Honglan, "Reading as Performance: Theatrical Books from Tristram Shandy to Artists' Books for Children" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1077.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1077
