Odysseus in Academe

Extract

The past sixty years of theatre studies recall the travels of Odysseus. It had a narrow escape from being devoured and digested by the Gallic Cyclops that dwelt in the Cave of Theory. It lingered in the Lotos-land of performance studies, gorging on a bottomless buffet of human activity. It hearkened to siren songs luring it to seductive but slippery shoals of anthropology, ethnography, sociology, and neuroscience. Some of its crew has suffered a Circean transformation into omnivorously rooting cultural critics. Its vocabulary has been inflated by Aeolus, king of winds. Meanwhile, back home there languishes its consort, History, knotting and unknotting a tapestry of documentary material and archival research while urged to bed by suitors from foreign realms.