Refiguring the Self through the Other: The Spectacular Function of Mimicry in Shakespeare, Marivaux and Tieck

Abstract

Diane Kuprel does a review about the performance situation, dramatic figures engage in the ludic activity of mimicry by playing roles in the presence of other figures who function, passively or actively, as audience. To recast this in more ontologically weighted terms, the performance situation presents the process by which the subject (actor), in representing the self-as-other (character), submits to a self-dispossession, and expropriates and appropriates otherness as its own in its directedness toward others (audience). For this essay, she analyses three dramas: Troilus and Cressida by Shakespeare, L’île des esclaves by Marivaux and Die verkehrte welt by Tieck.