CALL FOR PAPERS | FROM BOOK TO STAGE: PROSE, POETRY, AND THEATRICALITY | v. 32, n. 73, 2027

The dossier “From Book to Stage: Prose, Poetry, and Theatricality” starts from an understanding of theatricality as an aesthetic category that goes beyond the limits of the dramatic text and of theatrical representation. In dialogue with Anne Ubersfeld (2013), theatricality is understood as something that can manifest itself in writing itself, through the organization of voices, the spatialization of discourse, the construction of action, rhythm, and visuality, producing a scenic virtuality that calls for representation even in texts not originally intended for the stage. This perspective is articulated with the reflection of Anatol Rosenfeld (2008), for whom the lyric, epic, and dramatic modalities are not watertight categories, but historically permeable forms of organizing language. The interlocution between literature and theater can thus be understood as a space of circulation among different modes of constructing discourse, in which narrativity, poeticity, and dramaticity are combined and continually reconfigured.

When this virtuality is realized on stage, adaptation ceases to mean a simple transposition of a text to another medium. As Patrice Pavis (2005) demonstrates, the spectacle constitutes an autonomous system of signification, produced by the articulation of word, body, space, image, sound, objects, lighting, and acting, so that every staging produces a new reading of the literary work. This understanding becomes even broader in the contemporary theatricalities analyzed by Sílvia Fernandes (2013), in which dramaturgy, performance, document, autobiography, and intermediality shift the boundaries between literature and theater, making theatricality an aesthetic operation that reorganizes writing, presence, memory, image, and event. Between the book and the stage, therefore, what is established is not a relation of fidelity or equivalence, but a field of transformations in which different materialities produce new experiences of language and new regimes of signification.

It is within this theoretical horizon that the dossier “From Book to Stage: Prose, Poetry, and Theatricality” proposes to bring together research that investigates the multiple relations between literature and theater, considering both the presence of theatrical elements in literary works and the processes of transforming narrative and poetic texts into scenic spectacles. The dossier will gather works that propose dialogues between writing and the scene, observing how theatricality can emerge in novels, short stories, novellas, poems, and other literary forms, as well as analyzing the different modalities of adaptation, re-creation, and circulation of works between the literary and the theatrical fields.

Based on the horizon outlined above, articles that address the following will be particularly welcome:

• Relations between literature and theater in different historical periods;
• Theatricality in prose, poetry, and hybrid forms of writing;
• Stage adaptations of novels, short stories, novellas, and poems;
• Dramaturgical re-readings of literary works;
• Modern and contemporary theater in dialogue with literature;
• Literary narratives and staging processes;
• Writing, orality, and the construction of the scene;
• Dramaturgies derived from non-dramatic texts;
• Intermediality and the transit between literature, theater, and other arts;
• Studies on authors, works, and movements that strain the boundaries between the literary and the theatrical;
• Archives, manuscripts, directors’ notebooks, and documentation of creative processes involving literature and theater;
• Autobiography, memory, and testimony in theater.

 

The dossier welcomes contributions from literary and theater studies, encouraging comparative, historical, critical, and interdisciplinary approaches that broaden the understanding of the multiple forms of interlocution between the book and the stage.