Bryan Reynolds

Bryan Reynolds
Full name Bryan Reynolds
Born 1965
Scarsdale, New York, United States
Era 21st-century
Region Western Critical Theory
School Performance Studies, Post-structuralism, Shakespeare
Main interests Performativity, Shakespeare, Critical theory, Theatre
Notable ideas Transversal poetics: a sociopolitical theory, performance aesthetics, and research methodology

Bryan Reynolds (born 1965) is an American critical theorist, performance theorist, and Shakespeare scholar who developed the combined social theory, performance aesthetics, and research methodology known as transversal poetics. He is also a playwright, director, and cofounder of the Transversal Theater Company, a collective of American and Dutch artists, which has produced several of his works. Reynolds received his bachelor degree in English Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and his master's and doctoral degrees in English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. He is a Professor of Drama at the University of California, Irvine, where he has taught since 1998. He has held visiting professorships at the University of London-Drama, the University of Amsterdam-Theater Studies, Utrecht University-Theater Studies, University of Cologne-American Studies, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main-American Studies, and University College Utrecht-Arts and Humanities, and he has taught at Deleuze Camp at Schloss Wahn, University of Cologne, Germany, and the Grotowski Institute in Wrocław, Poland, among other academic and performing arts institutions.

Contents

Critical works

“The Devil’s House, 'or worse’” is the first published text for Reynolds’ transversal theory. In this article, transversal theory is delineated through an analysis of early modern English theater, both on the public stage and as in social performances in society at large. The article argues for the power of theater to simultaneously alter subjectivity and social identity as well as the political, economic, and social conditions under which they operate. Using spatial and temporal models for both abstract and material relations within and between individuals and groups, as well as in relation to things, transversal theory explains changes in human cognition, perspective, and experience, particularly those that move subjectivity away from habit, singularity, and stasis.

Becoming Criminal shows how the dissident activities and idiosyncratic languages of gypsies, rogues, vagabonds, and cutpurses interacted with normative society and culture. Reynolds argues that the real and imaginary “criminal culture” on the streets and in popular minds has been overlooked or misunderstood by scholars. He traces the effect of criminal culture to its emergence in the sixteenth century, when this community related daily with dominant aspects of English ideology and culture and modeled its own cultural characteristics in response to the conventions of the time. According to Reynolds, their behavior and thought is most evident in the period’s commercial literature, such as in pamphlet literature and the works of Shakespeare, Jonson, Fletcher, and Brome, and in its material and symbolic relationships to the public theatre.

Reynolds’ transversal poetics project, expanded from his early works, is used in Performing Transversally to discuss historical and contemporary examples. He discusses the applicability of the critical concept, ranging from the sociology of Erving Goffman to the feminism and psychoanalytics of Julia Kristeva to the dramatic and theatrical criticism of Antonin Artaud and Herbert Blau. Performing Transversally navigates the ever-increasing cultural cartography of Shakespace, a term invented by Reynolds and Donald Hedrick in Shakespeare Without Class: Misappropriations of Cultural Capital, to designate past, present, and future Shakespeare influenced spaces of text, performance, and culture. Throughout the book, Reynolds emphasizes the importance of accountability, whether in the classroom, in academic research, on the stage or screen, or in everyday lives.

In Transversal Enterprises, with a number of collaborators, Reynolds analyzes plays by early modern English dramatists in the context of shifts in English history. He relates transversal poetics to other academic disciplines, including science and theology, to explore a transformation in views on space and place in relation to subjectivity and consciousness. Witches, werewolves, occultists, academicians, transvestites, baboons, moors, and gypsies, among other creatures, all reflect, for Reynolds, a metamorphic and intersubjective phenomenology for which art or artifice is requisite.

Transversal Subjects traces the genealogy of Transversal Poetics from discourses on human rights, compassion, and psychopathology in the work of Montaigne and Rousseau through Husserl, Arendt, Baudrillard, Agamben, Habermas, Rancière, and others. In so doing, Reynolds makes the case that subjectivity is an emergent, shifting, and mobile phenomenon that is transversal to the subject. This allows access to affecters and enablers of transversal processes that work to empower individuals and groups in their comprehension and experience of themselves, others, and the world.

Recent honours

2008: Silver Award: Experimental Web Site, 5th Annual Pcom Creative Awards (Creative Director, Bryan Reynolds; Designer/Illustrator/Animator/Programmer, Alex Sacui)[1]

2006: Honored as a Distinguished Alumnus of Scarsdale High School, New York. [2]

2005: “Chancellor’s Fellow” by the University of California [3]

2004: Honored by the University of Alabama’s Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies, directed by Gary Taylor, as "one of the six most brilliant Renaissance scholars in the world under 40," "for work on ‘transversal poetics.’" [4]

Publications

Books written

Books edited

Plays

Selected articles

Reviews of his works

External links