The Theatre of Death: The Uncanny in Mimesis Tadeusz Kantor, Aby Warburg, and an Iconography of the Actor; Or, must one die to be dead. Twitchin, Mischa The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author For additional information about this publication click this link. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/jspui/handle/123456789/8626 Information about this research object was correct at the time of download; we occasionally make corrections to records, please therefore check the published record when citing. For more information contact
[email protected] The Theatre of Death: The Uncanny in Mimesis Tadeusz Kantor, Aby Warburg, and an Iconography of the Actor; Or, must one die to be dead? Mischa Twitchin Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. 1 The Theatre of Death: the Uncanny in Mimesis (Abstract) The aim of this thesis is to explore an heuristic analogy as proposed in its very title: how does a concept of the “uncanny in mimesis” and of the “theatre of death” give content to each other – historically and theoretically – as distinct from the one providing either a description of, or even a metaphor for, the other? Thus, while the title for this concept of theatre derives from an eponymous manifesto of Tadeusz Kantor’s, the thesis does not aim to explain what the concept might mean in this historically specific instance only. Rather, it aims to develop a comparative analysis, through the question of mimesis, allowing for different theatre artists to be related within what will be proposed as a “minor” tradition of modernist art theatre (that “of death”).