Performance models have received increasing attention in the theoretical move towards open texts. Conceptions of open, reader-based or audience-based texts have paralleled the questioning of rational, authority-driven modes of knowledge. Literary theory’s stress on performance leads back, paradoxically, to the exploration of practical knowledge - skills, intuition, wisdom. Michael Robinson’s leading article examines the mutually defining properties of (female) gender and performance in the nineteenth century. Wittgenstein’s role in the shift of philosophy towards the inquiry into the uses of language is explored by the late Peter Stern on ‘Wittgenstein and Literature’, and by Peter Hughes on Wittgenstein’s difficulty with Shakespeare. Henriette Herwig looks at the role of signs in Kafka, Derrida and Pierce. Drew Milne examines the challenge to Aristotle’s theory of tragedy made by Augusto Boal’s ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ in Latin America. A rich variety of performance media and genres is presented in this volume. The important Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov is being performed again in new productions in Russia; Lesley Milne reports on The White Guard in Moscow and Kiev, and Patrick Miles translates the previously censored scenes of the play. Kleist’s classic essay on the marionette theatre, in a new translation by David Paisey, recasts the metaphor ‘all the world’s a stage’ for modern times. The interpretation/translation by wellknown translator Harry Guest of Alain Bosquet’s poem ‘Your blood: some sort of epic’; translations of a short story by Charles Cros by lain White and of an episode of Witold Gombrowicz’s novel Trans-Atlantyk by George Hyde; a prize-winning radio dialogue from Sweden by Lars l,Jeberg, with his introduction, and a BBC radio play by Gabriel Josipovici. Hannah Vincent’s adaptation of Kafka’s short story The Burrow for the stage won her a very well-received production at the Young Writer’s Festival at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in 1988. This volume contains the annual bibliography of comparative literature for the year 1989.
