Theaterwissenschaft in the History of Theatre Study

E-ISSN： 1475-4533|32|2|123-136

ISSN： 0040-5574

Source： Theatre Survey, Vol.32, Iss.2, 1991-11, pp. : 123-136

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Abstract

Recent surveys of theatre theory and historiography have given only very limited attention to a critical episode in the organization, development and legitimation of modern theatre scholarship, the Theaterwissenschaft writings of German-language theorists of theatre study in the first half of the twentieth century. I propose to survey briefly the major moments in this group's emergence, characterize the theoretical approaches associated with some principal figures in the group, outline something of their influence (or reception), and make a few suggestions about their importance for further study. Their work has been undergoing a steady re-appraisal in the contemporary German theatre academy, and some members of the group, like Hans Knudsen and Artur Kutscher, were sufficiently self-conscious about the process of institution-building that their own history has itself been subject to historiographic comment. Consequently I will offer some German reconsiderations of the structure and significance of the field where they seem appropriate. Though there is some sense in the current American construction of this group as “positivist,” the label does not quite acknowledge the variety of theatre theories in which their relatively adequate theory of empirical evidence can be applied, nor does it do justice to the group's interest in theatre as a social phenomenon. The work of the group is so varied in relation to its empirical basis, and so involved in the emerging discourses of sociology, anthropology, and psychology, that it gives us reason to doubt any narrow construction of the theatre-historical tradition as theoretically naive or one-dimensional.