Beyond Failure: New Essays on the Cultural History of Failure in Theatre and Performance
- Submitting institution
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The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- TFIS4
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
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10.4324/9781351247733
- Publisher
- Routledge
- ISBN
- 9781351247733
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2018
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
-
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Tony Fisher’s ‘Beyond Failure: New Essays on the Cultural History of Failure in Theatre and Performance’, co-edited with Eve Katsouraki, is a 100,000-word, commissioned peer-reviewed collection comprising 11 chapters. The book extends debates around the poetics of failure to incorporate wider cultural politics, theoretical positions and histories of failure. Research undertaken by both co-editors identified a contemporary focus on postdramatic performance when considering the poetics of failure, so the remit of the volume sought to emphasize instead dialogical engagement between failure’s different discourses thereby drawing on wider areas of research, experience and aesthetic practices. The volume thus includes essays on post-colonial, feminist and queer approaches to failure and its ‘poetics’, mobilized alongside essays exploring its pedagogical, social, historical and philosophical significations. It presents a ‘cultural history of failure’ that takes account of a variety of theoretical positions, as well as the growing interdisciplinary interest in failure; but it also shows how apparently eclectic positions share a common challenge: to surpass the limits of the poetics of failure and the tendency toward cultural nihilism. To address that challenge, Fisher and Katsouraki steered the volume’s contributors to engage with the book’s central argument that to critique the discourse on failure requires an imaginative leap ‘beyond’ failure, to release its political potential. Each of the volume’s essays thus seeks new openings and ways of thinking failure beyond its negative lessons. Fisher and Katsouraki shared equal responsibility for the conception and delivery of the volume, and worked closely with the contributors to ensure its intellectual aims were realized. Fisher and Katsouraki co-authored the book’s 8,700-word introduction, outlining key controversies in the field, as well as relating them to the book’s central objective. Fisher also contributed a 12,000-word chapter that traces the concept of failure against a historical genealogy of the theatre metaphor.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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