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The work of Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) is the most seminal, shattered and inspirational of the twentieth century, extending across literature, film, performance, manifesto, sound art, drawing, and a sequence of exploratory journeys. For the twentieth-first century, too, it is the most extreme, challenging and vital body of work - able to anatomise and negate all compromised cultures, and engender new theories, images and texts of the body, revolution, madness and the creative act.Stephen Barber's intensively researched and highly acclaimed work on Artaud, originally published in three books spanning almost twenty years, has revealed Artaud's work to English-language readers in all of its intricacy and extraordinary capacity for transmutation. As a definitive research archive on Artaud's work, "The Anatomy Of Cruelty" collects all of this material, as well as a previously unpublished postscript on the impact of the first translations of Artaud into English, during the 1960s: forming a unique critical biography based on primary sources and interviews with Artaud's surviving collaborators. It also features sections looking in depth at his unparalelled and interconnected work in theatre, film, visual art and sound recordings (notably his astonishing screams); and a study of his very last work - over four hundred notebooks, pierced with knives and burns, in which he embedded his final, most incendiary words. Plus: 6 full-page photographs and illustrations, a complete filmography, and selected bibliography. For all readers engaged with Artaud's work, this compendium is both comprehensive and indispensable. Includes material first published in "Blows & Bombs", "Screaming Body" and "Terminal Curses".

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The life and work of Antonin Artaud possess a raw power. Long after his death, Artaud's body of work continues to ricochet strongly through contemporary culture. The facts of Artaud's life are stark and austere. He was a writer whose work extended provocatively but disastrously into many unknown channels. His extreme challenge was rejected by the Surrealist movement in Paris. His most productive work comes only after a sequence of journeys, and a long asylum incarceration. Artaud's work keeps coming back in new ways. It metamorphoses, struggling to resist any facile systematization. It is in a state of constant transformation, and proves fertile in all of its collisions with the creative works it has encountered, both during Artaud's own lifetime and in the fifty-five years since his death. As with the other vital figures who emerged - in tension - through the French language during the twentieth century, such as Jean Genet, Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Pierre Guyotat, Artaud was relentless in his determination to make new images of the human body. His work probes issues of abandonment, confinement and creativity, and produces crucial images of the resuscitation of life and language.Antonin Artaud was born in Marseilles in 1896 and died in the peripheries of Paris, fifty-two years later. His work exists as a strange set of traces. We can discover stubborn and ferocious splinters of a will to create material which, although utterly fragmented, tenaciously persists - in the form of writings, drawings, recordings, and photographic images. Artaud was glacial in his attitude. He was often infinitely distant from the people to whom he was closest, and from the cultural and political issues of his time. The residue of his life's trajectory is fierce and volatile. It appears as the burning light of a constellation of dead stars. His work is a painful movement through many silences and journeys. Points of apparently intractable breakdown are twinned with sudden breakthroughs into physical and linguistic intensity. From a distance, Artaud's life indicates failure and misery. It was a constant refusal of security and illusion. His work compulsively attacks ideas of society, family, religion and the body, with great emphasis and discipline. Artaud suffered nervous torture throughout his life and became a drug addict, undergoing repetitiously unsuccessful detoxification treatments. He worked with but also against the Surrealist movement. .....

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The Anatomy of Cruelty

The Anatomy of Cruelty

0985762527

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