Sarah Balkin – författare

Theater’s materiality and reliance on human actors has traditionally put it at odds with modernist principles of aesthetic autonomy and depersonalization. Spectral Characters argues that modern dramatists in fact emphasized the extent to which humans are fictional, made and changed by costumes, settings, props, and spoken dialogue. Examining work by Ibsen, Wilde, Strindberg, Genet, Kopit, and Beckett, the book takes up the apparent deadness of characters whose selves are made of other people, whose thoughts become exteriorized communication technologies, and whose bodies merge with walls and furniture. The ghostly, vampiric, and telepathic qualities of these characters, Sarah Balkin argues, mark a new relationship between the material and the imaginary in modern theater. By considering characters whose bodies respond to language, whose attempts to realize their individuality collapse into inanimacy, and who sometimes don’t appear at all, the book posits a new genealogy of modernist drama that emphasizes its continuities with nineteenth-century melodrama and realism.

This is an Element book about stand-up comedy and public speech. It focuses on the controversies generated when the distinction between the two breaks down, when stand-up enters - or is pushed - into the public sphere and is interpreted according to the scripts that govern popular political and media rhetoric rather than the traditional generic conventions of comic performance. These controversies raise a larger set of questions about the comedian's public role. They draw attention to the intention of jokes and their effects in the world. And they force us to consider how the limits of comic performance - what can be said, by whom, and why - respond to, and can reshape, public discourse across changing media contexts.

This is an Element book about stand-up comedy and public speech. It focuses on the controversies generated when the distinction between the two breaks down, when stand-up enters - or is pushed - into the public sphere and is interpreted according to the scripts that govern popular political and media rhetoric rather than the traditional generic conventions of comic performance. These controversies raise a larger set of questions about the comedian's public role. They draw attention to the intention of jokes and their effects in the world. And they force us to consider how the limits of comic performance - what can be said, by whom, and why - respond to, and can reshape, public discourse across changing media contexts.

When the term 'deadpan' first appeared during the early twentieth century, it meant 'expressionless face. Sarah Balkin upends received wisdom in this original study of deadpan's emergence, which takes the vaudeville era as an endpoint rather than a beginning. Drawing on examples from Britain, the United States, and Australia, she investigates deadpan's earlier history in theater, comic opera, lecture culture, minstrelsy, cakewalking, burlesque, and vaudeville. In doing so, she reveals the terms performance makers, audiences, and critics used to describe deadpan before the style was named. She shows how deadpan mimicked and parodied socially central values and attitudes to make audiences laugh during a period better known for earnestness and self-control. She also explores how classed, racialized, and gendered comic conventions shifted across cultural contexts. This is the untold story of how deadpan became legible to audiences.