THE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND AESTHETICS
presents a lecture
by
Prof. Martin Puchner
Harvard University
on
Scenes of Instruction: How the Buddha, Confucius, Jesus and Socrates Created a New Performance Genre
January 30, 2018, at 5.30 p.m. SAA auditorium.
A short description of the talk: In one of the striking patterns of world history, charismatic teachers emerged within a few hundred years of each other in the centuries before the Common Era, introducing new forms of thinking and living. One of the things they had in common was that they did not write. Instead, they insisted on live teaching. But when they died, students began to transform the words and deeds of these teachers into writing, creating a new performance genre in the process. Soon, these new, vivid texts availed themselves of new technologies such as paper and print as well as new formats, such as the book. The story of these teachers and their students combines performance, writing and technology in ways that speak to our own revolution in reading and writing methods.