Abstract
In the 1980s, theatre semiotics faced an epistemological crisis with respect to its approach to the theatre. This crisis was also confronted by the whole epistemological edifice of formalism towards the end of the 1970s; that is, the end of the formalist paradigm that began with the Russian Formalists and reached its maximum development during the 1960s and 1970s with European and particularly French semiotics and structuralism. This crisis brought structural semiotics to an end but the signs of the crisis were apparent from the very beginning of the structural and semiotic enterprise.
In order to understand the end of that type of theatre semiotics, one must understand the epistemological underpinnings of literary and theatre theory from the beginning of the twentieth-century until approximately the end of the 1970s. I explore these underpinnings here and their relation to theatre semiotics and its eventual dead end, which, in fact, came at the very same time that the whole edifice of structuralism collapsed with the advent of the postmodern condition and post-structuralism.
About the author
His research interests include Latin American colonial and post-colonial literature, feminism, Latin American narrative and theatre, and literary theory. His recent major publications include Intersecciones: Ensayos sobre teatro. Antropología, Semiótica, Teatro Latinoamericano, Post-Modernismo, Post-Colonialismo, y Feminismo (1999); Intersecciones II: Ensayos sobre cultura y literatura en la condición post-moderna y post-colonial (2002); New Intersections: Essays on Culture and Literature in the Post-Modern and Post-Colonial Condition (2002); and Interseccitions III: Globalización y Cultura: Ensayos sobre arquitectura, Cultura, Pintura, Música y Literatura (2005).
© Walter de Gruyter
