Special Topics In Rhetoric

The seminar will begin with a consideration of the anti-theatrical prejudice and the impact of the Reformation and the Counter Reformation on the performance of sincerity. Discussions will be organized around a series of distinct sites, aesthetic, juridical and medical, through which questions of the sincere and the authentic were tested in the early modern era. Questions of theology will be considered, particularly with reference to the substance of conversion, and the seminar will investigate the emergence of Acting Theory; the birth of the novel; traditions of painting; the anatomy lesson; and discourses on evidence and proof as legal categories.
The last two meetings will consider the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in an exploration of how we might have arrived where we are, especially with regard to questions of sincerity and martyrdom, terror, and truth.
Jane Taylor holds the Wole Soyinka Chair of Drama and Theatre Studies at Leeds University. A South African, she has worked extensively both in the creative arts and in literary and cultural criticism. With both creative and scholarly interest in puppetry, Taylor has written plays for Handspring Puppet Company, such as Ubu and the Truth Commission, and has edited a critical study of the performance troupe. Taylor is currently working on a large-scale study of the performance of sincerity, examining the impact of the Reformation on modes of self-presentation.