Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

In LivenessPhilip Auslander addresses what may be the single most important question facing all kinds of performance today: What is the status of live performance in a culture dominated by mass media? By looking at specific instances of live performance such as theatre, rock music, sport and courtroom testimony, Livenessoffers penetrating insights into media culture. This provocative book tackles some of the enduring 'sacred truths' surrounding the high cultural status of the live event.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgements (p. ix)
• 1 Introduction: "An Orchid in the Land of Technology" (p. 1)
• 2 Live performance in a mediatized culture (p. 10)
• Teevee's playhouse (p. 11)
• Is it live, or ? (p. 23)
• Against ontology (p. 38)
• Got live if you want it (p. 54)
• 3 Tryin' to make it real: live performance, simulation, and the discourse of authenticity in rock culture (p. 61)
• Rock culture and the discourse of authenticity (p. 62)
• Seeing is believing (p. 73)
• I want my MTV (p. 85)
• Panic Clapton (p. 94)
• 4 Legally live: law, performance, memory (p. 112)
• Teevee's courthouse, or the resistible rise of the videotape trial (p. 114)
• You don't own me: performance and copyright (p. 131)
• Law and remembrance (p. 153)
• 5 Conclusion (p. 158)
• Bibliography (p. 163)
• Index (p. 173)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Auslander (Georgia Institute of Technology) challenges the widely held claim that live performance is fundamentally (ontologically) different than mediated performances. The distinction, he writes, is collapsing "because live events are increasingly either made to be reproduced or are becoming ever more identical with mediatized ones." The author focuses on the history and development of television, demonstrating that the immediacy of liveness has been replaced by televisual intimacy; on rock music, looking at how authenticity is no longer the exclusive domain of liveness; and on copyright law, undermining the idea that liveness lies fundamentally outside of and beyond legal control and restriction. Drawing from the media and cultural theories of Baudrillard and Jameson, and challenging in particular Peggy Phelan's Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (CH, Jan'04, 31-2578), the book offers a meticulously developed argument that liveness is bound up in dominant culture's economy of exchange in a manner finally little different from its mediatized counterparts. Auslander improves on the first edition (1999) by offering some 25 pages of new material, additions that in part reflect the rapidity of change in recent mass media. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. W.W. Demastes Louisiana State University