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Theatre, Communication, Critical Realism. By Tobin Nellhaus. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010; pp. 236. $80.00 cloth.

Of the three terms in the title of Tobin Nellhaus’s new study—Theatre, Communication, Critical Realism—none stands as the foundation of the others’ emergence. The book is at once a contribution to media studies, a model for a new theatre historiography, and an apologia for the philosophical school known as critical realism. Its fragmented plot follows the rise of print culture and its multitudinous effects on theatre history. The story begins with the rise of literacy and drama in classical Athens and makes stops in medieval Europe and the English Renaissance before considering the rise of the eighteenth-century public sphere, and the vagaries of modernism and postmodernism. Nellhaus is an ambitious writer; the scope of his study and the vigor of his argumentation make it impossible to ignore the role that media studies must play in the future of theatre history. Notably, the word media rarely appears in this text. Nellhaus prefers instead to use communication, to mark his departure from any technodeterminism that would connect the material of a medium directly to discursive paradigms (as, for example, in Friedrich Kittler). The determining factor here is not which media are used but how they are deployed in a particular society, an arrangement Nellhaus calls a “communication framework” (53). A lateral relationship thus begins to articulate itself, with society as the mediating term between media and theatre. Nellhaus relies on critical realism (a term bearing no relation to Brecht and his dramaturgies) as a sociological model—one deriving from the philosophical school of the same name most associated with Roy Bhaskar but also developed by Margaret S. Archer, Andrew Collier, and others. An outgrowth of American pragmatism (Charles S. Peirce is a key figure for Nellhaus), critical realism carves a pathway between, on the one hand, an empiricist positivism that privileges only what is observable as real and therefore worthy of study and, on the other hand, a social constructivism that claims that perception (or discourse) is the only real. Positioning itself between these extremes, critical realism argues that there is a “real world” that each culture accesses through different socially conditioned epistemologies, although, in Nellhaus’s words, “the specter haunting epistemology is ontology” (179). Critical realism has had its greatest impact in sociology, from which Nellhaus derives his social model. Society, in critical realism, is composed of structures (socioeconomic configurations), agents (who act on the real world within the social structure’s models), and discourses (the field of ideas). Nellhaus casually mentions that the latter layer, implied within critical realism, is his addition, its articulation necessary here to underscore its relevance to aesthetic history (14). The kinds of discourse and performance possible in any given society are shaped by its communication frameworks, the “practical procedures and social exigencies of everyday communication” (94). With this neat