Overview
Traditional theatre semiotics promoted a scientific approach to theatre
studies, albeit viewing semiotics as the unique discipline of research.
Theatre Sciences: A Plea for a Multidisciplinary Approach to Theatre
Studies suggests instead a multi-disciplinary approach, including the
following theoretical disciplines: narratology, mythology, pragmatics,
ethics, theatre irony, theory of genres, aesthetics, semiotics, theory
of nonverbal figures of speech, rhetoric, psychoanalysis, reception
theory, history, and sociology with semiotics being only one among
equals. These disciplines are presented from the perspective of their
possible contributions to a sound methodology of theatre-texts analysis.
Traditional theatre semiotics, moreover, holds the view that the actual
performance on stage is the genuine text of theatre, instead of the
play-script. Despite this paradigmatic shift, however, this viewpoint
has failed to produce commendable analyses of such texts.
The alternative presupposition put forward in this volume entails a
series of novel perceptions of the theatre-text and its possible impact
on the experiencing spectator, whose role in reading, interpreting and
experiencing the theatre-text is not less crucial than that of the text
itself. This view presupposes that the theatre-text is a description of a
fictional world generated by the theatre medium. The author also
contests the age-old view that a theatre/fictional-text reflects a
simple narrative structure, and suggests instead a complexity that
consists of seven layers: personified, mythical, praxical, naive,
ironic, modal and aesthetic with each one of them re-structuring the
previous layer. Prof. Rozik also presents and describes a semiotic layer
that lends communicative capacity to the description of a fictional
world, and two additional metaphoric and rhetoric layers, which
structure the theatre experience. The underlying purpose is to
illustrate the application of the aforementioned disciplines to these
fictional layers, and eventually their joint application to entire
theatre/fictional texts. Organization of the book reflects the structure
of a university course.