| Paper 205-a | Pageantry into Spectacle: Owen Barfield, Mary Douglas, and the Theatricality of Consciousness
(Language: English)
Jefferey H. Taylor, Department of English, Metropolitan State University of Denver, Colorado
Index terms: Anthropology, Language and Literature - Middle English, Performance Arts - Drama, Social History |
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| Paper 205-c | Multisensory Memories: Recollecting Anastasius in Image, Space, and Voice
(Language: English)
Alison Locke Perchuk, Department of Art, California State University, Channel Islands
Index terms: Architecture - Religious, Art History - General, Liturgy, Monasticism |
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| Abstract | Paper -a:
Owen Barfield's concept of participated consciousness is manifested in the ritualized pageantry of the late medieval Mystery cycles. 'Pageantry into Spectacle' describes the shift in theatricality from the participated, communal medieval drama to the spectacle of modern performance in which participation is fully suppressed in theatricality as it is in consciousness itself. Mary Douglas's Grid-Group theory offers similar mapping of shifts in social-cosmology and constructs of meaning. The shifting contours of social-cosmology reveal the patterning of consciousness in linguistic performativity and its inscription in theatricality. Hence, Barfieldian analysis of late medieval drama uncovers the fractured idolatry of modern camera-consciousness.
Paper -b:
Making use of performance theory and audience theory, this paper aims to analyse the experience of a medieval morality play audience. In what ways do they participate in and co-create the performance? How do they interpret and relate to the representative central character, his thoughts, actions and choices? By what mechanisms does the morality play elicit such participative responses? While the notorious Mankind has its audience sing a rude song and contribute to a collection in order to see a devil, the more subtle 'inner' involvement of mind, heart and soul - of consciousness and conscience - demanded by other morality plays represents a no less real type of audience participation.
Paper -c:
Recent scholarship recognizes that image-text connections exceed the merely iconographic. Within ecclesiastical environments, the performance, sound, and meaning of words pronounced before images affect the perceived content of those images and their relevance to persons engaged in liturgical activities. Spatial organization undergirds this process, determining visual and physical access and structuring relations among images, altars, and bodies. This paper analyzes the 12th-century monastic church at Castel S. Elia (VT) in Italy, arguing that its right transept was the site of complex recollective processes that operated differently during daily liturgy, on the feast of the sainted abbot Anastasius, and at the death or commemoration of the monastery's abbots.
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