The End of Rhetoric and the Residuum of Pain: Bodying Language in the Theatre of Howard Barker

Abstract

Language is the setting, the referent, and the subjection of Barker's theatre, an attempt to read experience, to map out – or struggle through – a scaffolding of tropes that can hint at a structure of Being. In the exhaustion of language's moves and counter-moves, what remains is the ravaged body, the death mask of a différed humanism – pain. This article essays a close reading of Howard Barker's epic work The Ecstatic Bible, utilizing a strategy of rhetorical mapping following the work of Paul de Man, confronting language with its limit (or perhaps its apotheosis) in the pain-wracked body, whose terrible vulnerability has been explored at length in the work of Elaine Scarry. The Ecstatic Bible stands revealed as a fable of deconstruction worked through, live, before the audience.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.