MLA-Panel 2025: Narrating Spectacle around 1800, New Orleans
Modern Language Associate Conference
New Orleans, LA
January 9-12, 2025
Narrating Spectacle around 1800
Audiences for eighteenth-century theater were more likely to be reading accounts of performances on the page than seeing them on the stage. Georg Lichtenberg’s vivid accounts of performances by David Garrick (1770s) arguably enthralled more readers than ever beheld the famous actor in person. More importantly, narrative accounts of performance were central to many discourses and genres: aesthetics, philosophy, politics, and the theory and practice of the novel. G.E. Lessing employed an imagined performance at a critical juncture in his groundbreaking aesthetic treatise, Laokoon (1766). Philosophers from Rousseau and Diderot to Herder and Hegel relied on theatrical examples for their claims. Narrated theatricality was at the heart of both Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft’s rhetoric in the pamphlet wars after the French Revolution (1790s). From Partridge’s interactive gawping at Hamlet in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) to the stratification of social class by audience behaviors in Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778), and from Anton Reiser’s to Wilhelm Meister’s theatrical experiments in the eponymous novels by Moritz and Goethe (1785-1796), narrativized performances play pivotal roles in influential novels in England and on the continent. In the first book-length attempt to theorize the novel, meanwhile, Friedrich von Blanckenberg relied heavily on narrations of Shakespeare’s plays to stage his innovative claims for the seriousness of the ‘new’ artform (1774).
This panel explores the narrative production of visuality and spectacular effect. As Ros Ballaster has shown, eighteenth-century novels aimed to produce a sense of “being there” (Fictions of Presence, 2020). The pointedly remediated absence of textual prose here creates an illusion of what Erika Fischer-Lichte designates as a central feature of performance: “co-presence” (The Transformative Power of Performance, 2008). What can narrated scenes of acting teach us about the nature of performance? What does the novel’s drive to recreate theatrical experience say about the nature of narration? How does the reproduction of co-presence impact the claims of texts in philosophy, politics, and aesthetics?
- The roles of theater in 18th and early 19th-century novels
- The roles of theater in theories of the novel
- The ekphrastic narration of theatrical scenery and performance
- The narrative strategies of recreating performative ‘co-presence’ (Erika Fischer-Licthe)
- The narrative reproduction of theatrical effects
- Narration and ‘catharsis’
- The “Stage Life of Props” (Andrew Sofer) in narration
- The narrative production of theatrical wonder
- Energeia and enargeia in narration
- Rhetorical techniques of presence in the 18th-century thought and literary practice
- Dynamic performance (Darstellung) and its implications for stage and page
- Politics and Narrated Theatricality
- Aesthetics and Narrated Theatricality
- Philosophy and Narrated Theatricality
Please send abstracts (c. 250 words) to Tove Holmes (tove.holmes@mcgill.ca) and Ellwood Wiggins (wiggins1@uw.edu) by March 20, 2024.
Contact Information
Ellwood Wiggins
Contact Email
wiggins1@uw.edu
URL