Bryan Reynolds
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.
Critical works
- “The Devil’s House, ‘or worse’: Transversal Power and Antitheatrical Discourse in Early Modern England” (1997)
“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: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England (2002)
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.
- Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future (2003)
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.
- Transversal Enterprises in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: Fugitive Explorations (2006)
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: From Montaigne to Deleuze after Derrida (2009)
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
- Transversal Subjects: From Montaigne to Deleuze after Derrida (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
- Transversal Enterprises in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: Fugitive Explorations (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
- Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
- Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).
Books edited
- The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies: Tarrying with the Subjunctive, Co-Editor, with Paul Cefalu (Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
- Critical Responses to Kiran Desai, Co-Editor, with Sunita Sinha (New Delhi, India: Atlantic Publishers 2009).
- Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern English Stage, Co-Editor, with William West (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
- Shakespeare Without Class: Misappropriations of Cultural Capital, Co-Editor, with Donald Hedrick (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000).
Plays
- Unbuckled (play), The Anthology of Contemporary Plays 2004 (Sibiu, Romania: Annual Publication of the Sibiu International Theatre Festival, 2004).
- Productions: Directors Bryan Reynolds & Jef Vowell, The Flight Theatre, Hollywood, California, July 2004; Andrei Muresanu Theatre, Sfântu-Gheorghe, Romania, June 2004; Ariel Theatre, Târgu Mureş, Romania, June 2004; The National Theatre, Cluj, Romania, June 2004; Festivalul International de Teatru de la Sibiu, Romania, May–June 2004.[5]
- Woof, Daddy (play).
- Productions: Director Amanda McRaven, Linhart Theater, New York City, August 2007. Director Amanda McRaven, Exit Theatre, San Francisco, September 2006. Director Eli Simon: Rampa-Teatr Na Targówku, Warsaw, Poland, April 2005; Teatr Polski-Malarnia, Poznan, Poland, April 2005; Teatr Kana, Szczecin, Poland, April 2005. Director Bryan Reynolds, Melkweg Theater, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, September 2008.
- Railroad (play), Plays International (London: The Performing Arts Trust, October, 2006).
- Productions: Director Robert Cohen: Sibiu International Theatre Festival, Romania, May–June 2006; The National Theatre, Cluj, Romania, May 2006.
- Blue Shade (play), in Plays International (London: The Performing Arts Trust, October, 2008) and in English and Romanian (Cluj: Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj Press, 2007).
- Productions: Director Robert Cohen: Teatr Lalek, Wrocław, Poland, June 2007; Teatr Modjeska, Legnica, Poland, June 2007; Teatr 77, Łódź, Poland, May 2007; Divadlo DISK, Academy of Performing Arts (DAMU), Prague, Czech Republic, May 2007; Teatrul Mic, 17th Annual National Theatre Festival, Bucharest, Romania, November 2007. Director Răzvan Mureşan, The National Theatre, Cluj, Romania, April 2008 (in rep); Teatrul Tineretului, 23rd Annual Festival of Theater, Piatra Neamț, Romania, October 2008 [6]; Romanian National Theater, 18th Annual National Theater Festival, Bucharest, Romania, November 2008 [7]. Director Bryan Reynolds, Rozentheater, Amsterdam Fringe Festival, Netherlands, September 2009 [8]; Utrecht University Theater, Netherlands, September 2009; Severins-Burg-Theater, Cologne, Germany, May 2010.
- Lumping in Fargo (musical).
- Eve’s Rapture (play).
- Productions: Director Robert Cohen, Hayworth Theatre, Los Angeles, May–June 2009.
- The Green Knight (play).
- Productions: Director Bryan Reynolds, World Premiere, 17th Annual Festivalul International de Teatru de la Sibiu, Cisnădioara Fortress, Romania, June 2010.
- Macbeth adapted and directed by Bryan Reynolds, Studio-T, University College Utrecht, Netherlands, September 2010.
- Romeo & Juliet adapted and directed by Bryan Reynolds, Studio-T, University College Utrecht, Netherlands, September 2011.
Selected articles
- "The Devil’s House, ‘or worse’: Transversal Power and Antitheatrical Discourse in Early Modern England," Theatre Journal 49:2 (May 1997).
- "The Transversality of Michel de Certeau: Foucault's Panoptic Discourse and the Cartographic Impulse," with Joseph Fitzpatrick in Diacritics 29:3 (Fall 1999).
- "The Making of Authorships: Transversal Navigation in the Wake of Hamlet, Robert Wilson, Wolfgang Wiens, and Shakespace," with D.J. Hopkins, in Shakespeare After Mass Media, Ed. Richard Burt (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
- "The Reckoning of Moll Cutpurse: A Transversal Enterprise," with Janna Segal, Rogues and Early Modern English Culture, Eds. Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004).
- “Transversal Poetics and Fugitive Explorations: Subject Performance, Early Modern English Theatre, and Macbeth,” in Early Theatre 7:2 (2004).
- "EuroShakespace and the Witness-Function: Convergences of History, Memory, and Affective Presence," in Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation, Performance vol. 4, Ed. Lawrence Gunter (University of Łódź Press, 2007).
- "Transversal Acting," with Chris Marshall in Semiotic Review of Books 17.1 (2007).
- "From Homo Academicus to Poeta Publicus: Celebrity and Transversal Knowledge in Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (c. 1589)," with Henry Turner, Writing Robert Greene: New Essays on England’s First Professional Writer, Eds. Edward Gieskes and Kirk Melnikoff (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate Press, 2008). [11]
Reviews of his works
- Shakespeare Without Class
- Worthen, W.B. Review of Hedrick and Reynolds, Shakespeare Without Class. “Recent Studies in Tudor and Stuart Drama,” Studies in English Literature. 42.2 (2002) 399-448.
- Taylor, Mark. Review of Hedrick and Reynolds, Shakespeare Without Class. Renaissance Quarterly 56:3 (Autumn 2003): 936-39.
- Becoming Criminal
- Beier, A.L. Review of Reynolds, Becoming Criminal. Modern Philology. (May 2005) 102:4: 550-7.
- CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. Review of Reynolds, Becoming Criminal. August 2006 v43 i11-12 p1995(1).
- Cohen, Stephen. Review of Reynolds, Becoming Criminal. The Sixteenth Century Journal. 35:2 (Summer 2004): 576-577.
- Cunningham, Karen. Review of Reynolds, Becoming Criminal. Theatre Survey, 45:1 (May 2004): 149-151.
- Engel, William. Review of Reynolds, Becoming Criminal. Seventeenth-Century News, Volume 61, 3&4 (Fall-Winter 2003): 286-289.
- Hodgdon, Barbara. Review of Reynolds, Becoming Criminal. Studies in English Literature. 43:2 (Spring 2003): 501-502.
- Steve Mentz, Review of Reynolds, Becoming Criminal. CLIO: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History. 33:1 (Fall 2003 ): 73-77.
- --- Review of Reynolds, Becoming Criminal. The Shakespeare Newsletter (Spring 2003): 9-10.
- Mowry, Melissa. Review of Reynolds, Becoming Criminal. Journal of British Studies. Jan 2005 v44 i1 p178(9).
- Nesvet, Rebecca. Review of Reynolds, Becoming Criminal. EMLS 2004.
- Pollard, Tanya. Review of Reynolds, Becoming Criminal. Renaissance Quarterly. 57:2 (Summer 2004): 750-51.
- Review of Reynolds, Becoming Criminal. Reference & Research Book News. Feb 2004 v19 i1 p237(1).
- Performing Transversally
- Berek, Peter. Review of Reynolds, Performing Transversally. Renaissance Quarterly. 57:4 (2004), 1527-29.
- Cartelli, Thomas. Review of Reynolds, Performing Transversally. Theatre Journal. May 2005 v57 i2 p329(3).
- Rematerializing Shakespeare
- Boehrer, Bruce. Review of Reynolds and William West Ed., Rematerializing Shakespeare in Recent Studies in Tudor and Stuart Drama, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 47.2 (2007) 491-550: 525-528.
- Transversal Enterprises
- Cohen, Adam Max. Review of Reynolds, Transversal Enterprises. Early Theatre, Vol. 11: 1 (2008).
- Engel, William E. Review of Reynolds, Transversal Enterprises. “A Rich Harvest: Recent Books on Shakespeare.” Sewanee Review, Volume 117, Number 4, Fall 2009, pp. 655–665.
- Cefalu, Paul. Review of Reynolds, Transversal Enterprises. Shakespeare Quarterly. 58.2 (2007) 257-260.
- Hansen, Matthew C., Review of Reynolds, Transversal Enterprises. The Year's Work in English Studies. 87:1 (2008) 336-506.
- Hawkes, David. Review of Reynolds, Transversal Enterprises. Theatre Survey. 50:1 (2009), 141-143.
- Transversal Subjects
- Oliver Davis, Review of Reynolds, Transversal Subjects. French Studies, Volume 64, Issue 2: 228-229 [12].
- Other works
- Sherman, Donovan. Review of Blue Shade. Theatre Journal. Vol. 60.1 (March 2008): 137-9.
- Rothkopf, Joshua. Review of Woof, Daddy Time Out New York
- Zayas, Jose. Review of Woof, Daddy New York Theatre
- Portwood, Jerry. Review of Woof, Daddy Backstage
- Lester, Rob. Review of Woof, Daddy Edge New York
- Lo, Jeffrey. Review of Blue Shade New University
- Nathaniel Eaton. Review of Woof, Daddy San Francisco Weekly
- Fernie, Ewan. "Terrible Action: Recent Criticism and Questions of Agency." Shakespeare. Volume 2, Number 01 / June 2006.
- Genosko, Gary. Felix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction. 57-9. (Continuum Press, 2002).
- Guibbory, Achsah. "Recent Studies in the English Renaissance." Studies in English Literature, Vol. 45, 2005.
- Lanier, Douglas. "Shakespeare and Cultural Studies: An Overview," Shakespeare. 2:2 December 2006).
- Munro, Lucy. The Year’s Work in English Studies. 81:1 (Oxford University Press, 2006).
- McManus, Clare. The Year’s Work in English Studies. 81:1 (Oxford University Press, 2006).
- Nesvet, Rebecca. "Vagabonds, Players and Shakespeare," Literature Compass. 1:1 (January 2003 - December 2004).
- Kirol, Agata. Review of Lumping in Fargo Gazeta Wyborcza Trójmiasto
- Rudziński, Łukasz. Review of Lumping in Fargo Polski Wortal Teatralny
- Lehnhof, Kent. Review of Lumping in Fargo Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3:2 (2008).
- Natalia Klimczak. Review of lecture "Szekspir jest sexy" Serwis Teatralny "Teatr dla Was".
- Marianne Fritz. Review of Eve's Rapture SoCal "EVES RAPTURE ROCKS, FORSOOTH!".
- Deborah Klugman. Review of Eve's Rapture LA Weekly "GO!".
- Kyle Moore. Review of Eve's Rapture The Tolucan Times "Genesis: Reloaded".
- Reyna. Review of Eve's Rapture Boys Buzz "Eve's Rapture Steals Reyna's Heart".
- Ben Miles. Review of Eve's Rapture Show Magazine
- James A. Mackenzie, “The Transversal Power of Collaboration in the Production of Critical Theory,” Humanity Journal (2010) [13].
- Interviews
External links
Persondata |
Name |
Reynolds, Bryan |
Alternative names |
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Short description |
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Date of birth |
1965 |
Place of birth |
Scarsdale, New York, United States |
Date of death |
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Place of death |
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