Peter Sellars and the persistence of modernity

Abstract

If language is subjective, if the sign is unstable, if meaning is endlessly deferred, how is it possible to assume a position of moral critique? Confronted by persistent social crisis, the American theatre and opera director Peter Sellars struggles to establish an ethical aesthetics after the neutralisation of the adversarial forms of modernism and the avant-garde His work and career provide an example of the cultural confusion faced by socially-conscious artists in postmodemity. This thesis analyses Sellars’s search, asking if his work represents an imaginative overcoming of postmodern impasses, or a nostalgic regression to the certainties of modernism.