Giulia Salzano

This article proposes an interpretation of the theatrical experience mobilising Alfred Schütz’s theoretical framework and conceptual tools. The text presents the accounts of some theatre operators (actors, directors, students in training, both amateurs and professionals) from whose words it is possible to seize, without forcing or over-interpretate them, the expendability, the relevance and the topicality of the Schützian thought and lexicon. Such an approach allows not only to question and investigate the phenomenological status of the artistic world but also to sketch a “dramatization” of the phenomenology of the social world proposed by the Viennese intellectual. In this perspective the text focuses on the processes of typification, sedimentation and reorganization of the stock of knowledge, on the structuring of the socio-spatio-temporal sphere and on the negotiation between expressed and interpreted meaning, in order to analyse how they work in the theatrical experience.

This article aims to develop a comparison between Alfred Schutz’s and José Ortega y Gasset’s social theories. By examining the annotations found on the copy of Ortega’s Man and People, located in Schutz’s Hand‑Bibliothek at the Sozialwissenschaftliches Archiv Konstanz, the paper focuses on the way in which the two authors conceptualized themes such as empathy, lifeworld, and taken‑for‑granted, highlighting elements of continuity and divergence. This comparative analysis reveals the significant role that intersubjectivity plays for both thinkers, through which it is possible to read in filigree their comparison with other eminent voices of the phenomenological landscape, with whom Ortega and Schutz did not confront directly, and to redefine their complex relationship with Husserl’s perspective on the topic.