Liveness

Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture addresses what may be the single most important question facing all kinds of performance today. What is the status of live performance in a culture dominated by mass media?

Since its first appearance, Philip Auslander's ground-breaking book has helped to reconfigure a new area of study. Looking at specific instances of live performance such as theatre, rock music, sport, and courtroom testimony, Liveness offers penetrating insights into media culture, suggesting that media technology has encroached on live events to the point where many are hardly live at all. In this new edition, the author thoroughly updates his provocative argument to take into account new digital and media technologies, and cultural, social and legal developments.

In tackling some of the last great shibboleths surrounding the high cultural status of the live event, this book will continue to shape discussion and to provoke lively debate on a crucial artistic dilemma: what is live performance and what can it mean to us now?

Philip Auslander is a Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture of the Georgia Institute of Technology where he teaches Performance Studies, Media Studies, and Popular Music. He is a contributing editor to the US-based TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies and the Journal of American Drama and Theater, as well as the UK-based Performance Research and Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media. He contributes regularly to these and other journals and has published five books, including Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance (University of Michigan, 1992), From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism (Routledge, 1997), and Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (Routledge 1999). He received the prestigious Callaway Prize for the Best Book in Theatre or Drama for Liveness. His most recent book is Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music (University of Michigan, 2006). Auslander is the editor of Performance: Critical Concepts, a reference collection in four volumes published by Routledge in 2003 and, with Carrie Sandahl, co-editor of Bodies in Commotion: Performance and Disability (University of Michigan Press, 2005). In addition to his scholarly work on performance, Prof. Auslander writes art criticism for ArtForum and other publications.