Martin Puchner
H. Gordon Garbedian Chair in English and Comparative Literature
Co-Chair, Theatre Ph.D. Program
Research -- Philosophy
Plato's Shadows: An Essay on Theater and Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
This project asks how philosophy makes use of the theater and how the theater in turn stages ideas. I examine playwrights such as Wilde, Shaw, Sartre, and
Stoppard who construct theaters of ideas, and conversely philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Kenneth Burke, and Gilles Deleuze whose
philosophy is infused with the theater. The project takes its point of departure from a reading of Plato as a playwright, and a history of stage adaptations of
Plato's plays constitutes its backbone.
Alain Badiou, Rhapsody for the Theatre, edited by Martin Puchner, in Theatre Survey 49:2 (November 2008).
Theater and Philosophy: a lecture by Alain Badiou, with responses by Martin Puchner and Bruno Bosteels, organized by Emily Apter at NYU on November 7,
2008. Listen to audio recording.
"Performing the Open: Actors, Animals, Philosophers," in Animals and Performance, special issue, edited by Una Chaudhuri, TDR 193 (spring 2007).
"Plato's Shadows," in Performing the Matrix, edited by Meike Wagner (Munich: Podium, 2008).
"Kierkegaards Shattenrisse," in Bild und Einbildungskraft, edited by Bernd Hüppauf and Christoph Wulf (Munich: Fink Verlag, 2006). English edition
forthcoming.
"Kenneth Burke: Theater, Philosophy, and the Limits of Performance," in Staging Philosophy, edited by David Krasner and David Saltz (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 2006).
"Doing Logic with a Hammer: Wittgenstein's Tractatus and the Polemics of Logical Positivism,"Journal of the History of Ideas 66:2 (spring 2005): 285-300.
"De Sade's Theatrical Passions," The Yale Journal of Criticism, 18:1 (spring 2005): 111-125.
"The Theater in Modernist Thought," New Literary History, 33.3 (Summer 2002): 521–532.
Also see:
"Nothing But the Truths," Bookforum (March/April 2009)