ENGL 2P53 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Voyeurism
13 Jan 2016
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Representations of violent events and those who experience them. Audience and actors were together looking out at some exoticized and deliberately tragic other. Even more discomforting than the voyeurism in which i felt a participant was the almost erotic quality of the manner in which the actors performed pain. Yes, the audience was moved, but by and towards what? (66) Salverson: limitations of melancholic identification, eroticism of violence. When anita performed this monologue [about a bosnian woman who had lost several family members] she spoke in a low and hushed voice filled with sadness. Anita, with the best of intentions, could imagine nothing, of the bosnian woman"s strength, her possible humour, her complexity or her courage, caught as she was in an almost romantic identification with what the woman had lost. Anita performed as if she was waiting to be confirmed, by the class/audience, as wearing the nobility of a victim.
