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Odysseus in Academe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 August 2016

Extract

The past sixty years of theatre studies recall the travels of Odysseus. It had a narrow escape from being devoured and digested by the Gallic Cyclops that dwelt in the Cave of Theory. It lingered in the Lotos-land of performance studies, gorging on a bottomless buffet of human activity. It hearkened to siren songs luring it to seductive but slippery shoals of anthropology, ethnography, sociology, and neuroscience. Some of its crew has suffered a Circean transformation into omnivorously rooting cultural critics. Its vocabulary has been inflated by Aeolus, king of winds. Meanwhile, back home there languishes its consort, History, knotting and unknotting a tapestry of documentary material and archival research while urged to bed by suitors from foreign realms.

Type
Essays: A Call for the Future
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 2016 

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References

Endnote

1. Shank, Theodore, “Theatre Research as an Academic Discipline in the U.S.A.,Maske und Kothurn 25.1–2 (1979): 117–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 121, 123.