Judicial criticism : performance and aesthetics in Anglo-American copyright law, 1770-1911
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- With the appearance of performing rights--the right to perform a theatrical or musical work--in nineteenth-century Anglo-American copyright law, performance became a commodity. The law, as the creator of that commodity, exercised the power to define both what performance was and how to value performance, economically and aesthetically. "Judicial Criticism: Performance and Aesthetics in Anglo-American Copyright Law, 1770-1911, " explores litigation, legislation, and contemporary debates to trace the emergence of legal theories of theater and music and to document how those legal theories altered artistic and commercial practices. Through close readings of performing rights lawsuits, I interrogate the development of the performance-commodity, the abstract dramatic or musical work defined by copyright law. The appearance of performing rights shifted the discourse of performance from personal and political spheres to the economic realm. Jurists worked diligently to reconcile claims about a performance's aesthetic value with its economic value. In the process, they theorized ontologies of drama, worried over the inherently public nature of performance, and parsed how contributions by actors affected a work's success. I offer evidence of how performing rights laws influenced theater-making, best evinced by the phenomenon of the "copyright performance" and the rise of literary drama. And I consider how and why performing rights laws developed in markedly different fashions for theatrical and musical performances. Narrating the law's slow development, I document performance's incongruous relationship to commodity capitalism at the moment copyright law wrote performance into that system.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2013 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Miller, Derek, 1923- |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Theater and Performance Studies. |
| Primary advisor | Rayner, Alice |
| Thesis advisor | Rayner, Alice |
| Thesis advisor | Berger, Karol, 1947- |
| Thesis advisor | Goldstein, Paul, 1943- |
| Thesis advisor | Hill, Leslie |
| Advisor | Berger, Karol, 1947- |
| Advisor | Goldstein, Paul, 1943- |
| Advisor | Hill, Leslie |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Derek Miller. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Theater and Performance Studies. |
| Thesis | Ph.D. Stanford University 2013 |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2013 by Derek Kahn Miller
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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