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Join us for a book talk discussing Joseph Cermatori’s Baroque Modernity — An Aesthetics of Theater. Cermatori’s groundbreaking study focuses on the role baroque theater played in shaping modernist philosophy, literature, and performance. Baroque style with its emphasis on ostentation, adornment, and spectacle might seem incompatible with the dominant forms of art since the Industrial Revolution, but between 1875 and 1935, European and American modernists connected to the theater became fascinated with it. In Baroque Modernity, Joseph Cermatori argues that the memory of seventeenth-century baroque stages helped produce new forms of theater, space, and experience around the turn of the twentieth century.
Joseph Cermatori is an assistant professor of English at Skidmore College. He specializes in the fields of comparative literature, modern and contemporary drama, performance studies, and critical theory. Beyond his research in twentieth-century modernism, his scholarship encompasses the broad history of art and ideas in Western culture from 1600 to the present, focusing on the philosophical content of artistic and creative forms. Baroque Modernity — An Aesthetics of Theater was the 2021 Winner of the Helen Tartar First Book Award from The American Comparative Literature Association.
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Baroque Modernity with Joseph Cermatori
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Join us for a book talk discussing Joseph Cermatori’s Baroque Modernity — An Aesthetics of Theater. Cermatori’s groundbreaking study focuses on the role baroque theater played in shaping modernist philosophy, literature, and performance. Baroque style with its emphasis on ostentation, adornment, and spectacle might seem incompatible with the dominant forms of art since the Industrial Revolution, but between 1875 and 1935, European and American modernists connected to the theater became fascinated with it. In Baroque Modernity, Joseph Cermatori argues that the memory of seventeenth-century baroque stages helped produce new forms of theater, space, and experience around the turn of the twentieth century.