Anthony Kubiak

Using Aristotle's Poetics as a point of departure, the author traces the forms or "stages" or terror as a cultural and performative principle through English Renaissance and Restoration plays, through the modern and postmodern, to contemporary terrorist "theatres." He ends with a look at hybrid modes of performance (experimental theatre, performance art, installations, and, of course, the "theatrical" terrorist act and the spectacles of the totalitarian...