Bryan Reynolds (scholar)

Bryan Reynolds (born 1965), Claire Trevor Professor and Chancellor's Professor at the University of California-Irvine, is an American critical theorist, performance theorist, and Shakespeare scholar who developed the combined social theory, performance aesthetics, and research methodology known as transversal poetics. He is also a playwright, director, performer, and cofounder of the Transversal Theater Company, an Amsterdam-based collective of American and European artists, which has produced a number of his works. Reynolds received his bachelor's degree in English Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and his master's and doctoral degrees in English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. He has been a Professor of Drama at the University of California, Irvine since 1998. He has held visiting professorships at the University of London-Drama, the University of Amsterdam-Theater Studies, Utrecht University-Theater Studies, University of Cologne-American Studies, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main-American Studies, University College Utrecht-Arts and Humanities, the University of California, San Diego-Theatre, Literature, Cognitive Science, the American University of Beirut-English, University of Tsukuba-Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Nairobi-Department of Literature, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt-Communications, University of Lorraine-Arts, Sciences, & Business Management, INSEEC Business School (L'Institut des hautes études économiques et commerciales)-Marketing, Paris, Bordeaux, Lyon; and he has taught at Deleuze Camp at Schloss Wahn, University of Cologne, Germany, and the Grotowski Institute in Wrocław, Poland, among other academic and performing arts institutions. Reynolds is also a regular contributor to Freeskier Magazine, where he publishes articles derived from his ongoing research on extreme sports.
Early life.
Born in New York City to Donna Reynolds, a VP of marketing at General Foods, and Donald Reynolds, a VC, Reynolds’ family moved from the Upper East Side to the Westchester County suburb of Scarsdale when he was a toddler. He attended Heathcote Elementary School, where he played soccer for the famed Heathcote Hornets through 8th grade, which was coached by New York Cosmos first general manager Clive Toye. He was also an avid skate boarder, BMXer, and skier, which informs his research on action sports. Not an enthusiastic student, Reynolds was encouraged to leave Scarsdale High School for the more disciplinary Archbishop Stepinac High School in White Plains. As one of two Jewish students attending the Roman Catholic school at the time, Reynolds decided to return to Scarsdale for his junior and senior years, where he joined a special program, called CORE, for students who had difficulties making it to class. Reynolds graduated in 1983 with a D average. His pursuit of a career racing motorcycle motocross brought him out to San Diego in 1985, where he attended Grossmont Community College. From there, he went to UC Berkeley, and then Harvard University for his doctorate.
Critical works.
"The Devil's House, 'or worse'" is the first published text for Reynolds' transversal theory. In this article, transversal theory is delineated through an analysis of early modern English theater, both on the public stage and as in social performances in society at large. The article argues for the power of theater to simultaneously alter subjectivity and social identity as well as the political, economic, and social conditions under which they operate. Using spatial and temporal models for both abstract and material relations within and between individuals and groups, as well as in relation to things, transversal theory explains changes in human cognition, perspective, and experience, particularly those that move subjectivity away from habit, singularity, and stasis.
"Becoming Criminal" shows how the dissident activities and idiosyncratic languages of gypsies, rogues, vagabonds, and cutpurses interacted with normative society and culture. Reynolds argues that the real and imaginary "criminal culture" on the streets and in popular minds has been overlooked or misunderstood by scholars. He traces the effect of criminal culture to its emergence in the 16th century, when this community related daily with dominant aspects of English ideology and culture and modeled its own cultural characteristics in response to the conventions of the time. According to Reynolds, their behavior and thought is most evident in the period's commercial literature, such as in pamphlet literature and the works of Shakespeare, Jonson, Fletcher, and Brome, and in its material and symbolic relationships to the public theatre.
Reynolds' transversal poetics project, expanded from his early works, is used in "Performing Transversally" to discuss historical and contemporary examples. He discusses the applicability of the critical concept, ranging from the sociology of Erving Goffman to the feminism and psychoanalytics of Julia Kristeva to the dramatic and theatrical criticism of Antonin Artaud and Herbert Blau. "Performing Transversally" navigates the ever-increasing cultural cartography of Shakespace, a term invented by Reynolds and Donald Hedrick in "Shakespeare Without Class: Misappropriations of Cultural Capital," to designate past, present, and future Shakespeare influenced spaces of text, performance, and culture. Throughout the book, Reynolds emphasizes the importance of accountability, whether in the classroom, in academic research, on the stage or screen, or in everyday lives.
In "Transversal Enterprises," with a number of collaborators, Reynolds analyzes plays by early modern English dramatists in the context of shifts in English history. He relates transversal poetics to other academic disciplines, including science and theology, to explore a transformation in views on space and place in relation to subjectivity and consciousness. Witches, werewolves, occultists, academicians, transvestites, baboons, moors, and gypsies, among other creatures, all reflect, for Reynolds, a metamorphic and intersubjective phenomenology for which art or artifice is requisite.
"Transversal Subjects" traces the genealogy of Transversal Poetics from discourses on human rights, compassion, and psychopathology in the work of Montaigne and Rousseau through Husserl, Arendt, Baudrillard, Agamben, Habermas, Rancière, and others. In so doing, Reynolds makes the case that subjectivity is an emergent, shifting, and mobile phenomenon that is transversal to the subject. This allows access to affecters and enablers of transversal processes that work to empower individuals and groups in their comprehension and experience of themselves, others, and the world.
In this book, Reynolds and his collaborators explore relationships between intermedial theater, consciousness, memory, objects, subjectivity, and affect through productive engagement with the performance aesthetics, socio-cognitive theory, and critical methodology of transversal poetics alongside other leading philosophical approaches to performance. Intermedial Theater offers the first sustained analysis of the work of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jean Baudrillard, and Friedrich Nietzsche in relation to the contemporary European theater of Jan Lauwers and Needcompany, Romeo Castellucci and Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Thomas Ostermeier, Rodrigo García and La Carnicería Teatro, and the Transversal Theater Company. It connects contemporary uses of objects, simulacra, and technologies in both posthumanist discourse and postdramatic theater to the transhistorically and culturally mediating power of Shakespeare as a means by which to discuss the affective impact of intermedial theater on today's audiences.