Date of Award
2008
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Program
Media Studies
Supervisor
Dr. Alison Hearn
Second Advisor
Dr. Jonathan Burston
Abstract
This thesis explores the shifting styles of self-presentation that are bound up with the Actors’ Studio’s promotional history. It argues that the self-presentational style inscribed by the promotional and pedagogical discourses of Method acting c. 1955 can be located within distinctly modem modes of capitalist production (cf. Ernest Sternberg’s Romantic and Modernist styles of self-presentation). It then explores ways in which a similar style of self-presentation seems to be perpetuated on the contemporary television show Inside the Actors Studio. After considering the additional inclusion of various “anti-Method” performance styles on ITAS, however, this thesis concludes that, although the discursive contours of Method self-presentation may seem to be intact, the program’s evocation of Romantic authenticity is wholly allegorical - a pastiche performed according to the logic of promotional culture.
Recommended Citation
Svec, Henry Adam, "“The World Can’t Tell You How You Are”: The Actors’ Studio, Inside the Actors Studio, and the Performance of Being" (2008). Digitized Theses. 4257.
https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/digitizedtheses/4257