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The Speech-Gesture Complex
Modernism, Theatre, Cinema
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Book Presentation:
Places the performative gesture at the point of intersection between literature, theatre and cinema
This new study examines the representation of gesture in modernist writing, performance and cinema. Deploying a new theoretical term, ‘the speech-gesture complex’, Anthony Paraskeva identifies a relationship between speech and gesture which is neither exclusively literary nor performative and which, he argues, is fundamental to the aesthetics and politics of modernist authors. In discussions of works by Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Henry James, Wyndham Lewis, Vladimir Nabokov and Samuel Beckett, Paraskeva shows how this relationship is closely informed by their attention to the performed gestures of actors in theatre and cinema.
Key Features
*Provides new close readings of major and neglected work by Kafka, Joyce, James, Lewis, Nabokov and Beckett, revealing their complex relations with both theatre and cinema*Establishes a new critical-theoretical category, and highlights an unexplored dialogue between Ibsen, Benjamin, Adorno, Griffith, Eisenstein, Chaplin, Brecht, Artaud, Lang, Meyerhold, Duse and Garbo*Analyses central and neglected modernist texts alongside stage productions, styles of acting, film history and performance theory
About the Author:
Anthony Paraskeva is Senior Lecturer in English at Roehampton University. He is currently completing his second monograph, Samuel Beckett and Cinema.
Press Reviews:
The book combines an eloquent, robust style with ground-breaking argument and close pragmatic readings, placing modernist texts within European avant-garde contexts and experimental thinking about the body, triangulating theatre, cinema and writing. The gesture-complex idea is wonderfully original, woven into a superb texture by Paraskeva’s open-minded, rich sense of period and modernist multimedia event. ― Professor Adam Piette, University of Sheffield
The Speech-Gesture Complex offers an invigorating new critical approach to hitherto underappreciated intersections among 20th century literature, theatre, and cinema. Paraskeva’s nuanced rewriting of generic history both provokes and inspires. ― Scott W. Klein, Professor of English, Wake Forest University
See the publisher website: Edinburgh University Press
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