Reception and Adaptation: Magic Tricks, Mysteries, Con Games

This study of the reception and adaptation of magic tricks, murder mysteries, and con games calls for magic adaptations that create critical imaginative geographies (Said) and writerly (Barthes) spectators. Its argument begins in the cave of the magician, Alicandre, where a mystical incantation is heard: "Not in this life, but in the next." These words, and the scene from which they come in Tony Kushner's The Illusion, provide the guiding metaphor for the conceptual journey of this dissertation: the process of reincarnation. The first chapter investigates the deaths of powerful concepts in reader-response theory, rediscovers their existence in other fields such as speech-act theory, and then applies them in modified forms to the emergent field of performance studies. Chapter two analyzes the author as a magician who employs principles of deception by reading vertiginous short stories written by Jorge Luis Borges. I argue that his techniques for manipulating the willing suspension of disbelief (Coleridge) and for creating ineffable oggetti mediatori (impossible objects of proof) suggest that fantastic literature (not magical realism) is the nearest literary equivalent to experiencing magic performed live. With this Borgesian quality of magic's reality-slippage in mind, cross-cultural and cross-media comparisons of murder mysteries and con games are made in chapter three. Crime adaptations by Roald Dahl, Alfred Hitchcock, Pedro Almodovar, David Mamet and Ricky Jay are analyzed as different incarnations of specific source texts to compare techniques of deception across multiple media and to gauge whether these stories produce critical readers/spectators or naive ones. Chapter four accepts the challenge of performing magic that produces writerly spectators by physically reconstructing, narratively adapting and socio-historically questioning a nineteenth-century stage illusion through practice-based research. The scholarly praxis of magic as a performing art is further articulated in the experimental manifesto with which this dissertation concludes.