Title: Locating the image
Description: This dissertation uses performances of Heiner Muller's plays as a vector to approach the functioning of word and image in his works. Drawing from a range of concepts of the image, from literary theory to philosophy of mind, the dissertation analyzes how productions of Muller's plays have dealt with the difficulty of the images in his texts, focusing especially on those instances where the production has chosen not to create the image onstage. It devotes particular attention to the aural possibilities and potentialities in the plays: the use of sound to create what some critics have called "audial images" of elements in the text. Further, the dissertation compares how entirely non-visual media such as radio adaptations of those plays deal with these same difficult elements in the play texts. The dissertation balances literary interpretation of theater texts with consideration of their performance possibilities, "reading" performances of a play as one would read critical essays: as interpretations of a text that can provide new perspectives, insights, and emphases.

The first chapter considers concepts of image in relation to theater and to reading, synthesizing various philosophical and literary theoretical arguments to arrive at a linguistic understanding of the image. This chapter also locates Müller's work in the recently theorized "postdramatic theater." Chapter Two reads the play Bildbeschreibung as a meditation on ekphrasis and the nature of representation in theater, arguing through analysis of two stage productions and two radio productions that the text invokes and sets into opposition the representational and the creative functions of language. The third chapter examines the stage directions of Die Hamletmaschine in light of the flattened textual hierarchies of postdramatic theater, considering the status of their verbal images when the text is treated as an "audial track" in various media. The final chapter considers productions of Verkommenes lifer Medeamaterial Landschaft mit Argonauten, arguing that their shifting focus on the material characteristics and the signifying capabilities of language produce "audial images" as theorized by Heiner Goebbels, which function in manner compatible with a descriptionalist account of images.