Performativity & Performance
from the 1993 English Institute Conference
click here to see conference information
Routledge 1995
Your Price: $19.99
Editors:
Andrew Parker & Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Contributors: |
|
Andrew Parker & Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick |
Introduction: Performativity and Performance |
Timothy Gould |
The Unhappy Performative |
Joseph Roach |
Culture and Performance in the Circum-Atlantic World |
Sandra L. Richards |
Writing the Absent Potential: Drama, Performance, and the Canon of African-American Literature |
Cathy Caruth |
Traumatic Awakenings |
Andrew Ford |
Katharsis: The Ancient Problem |
Stephen Orgel |
The Play of Conscience |
Elin Diamond |
The Shudder of Catharsis in Twentieth-Century Performance |
Cindy Patton |
Performativity and Spatial Distinction: The End of AIDS Epidemiology |
Judith Butler |
Burning Acts – Injurious Speech |
From the age of Aristotle to the age of AIDS, writers, thinkers, performers and activists have wrestled with what “performance” is all about. Suddenly, theatre studies has transformed itself the study of plays to the study of performance. At the same moment, “performativity” – a new concept in language theory – has become a ubiquitous term in literary studies. What do these transformations have to do with one another. Is “performativity” necessarily theatrical? Are performances necessarily ‘performative’?
This volume of new work by leading scholars in a range of fields grapples with the nature of these two key terms whose traces can be found everywhere: in the theatre, in the streets, in philosophy, in questions of race and gender, in the sentences we speak.
Essays reexplore the classical definition of katharsis, its reinvention in the Renaissance, performance in circum-Atlantic cultures and in African American literature, in Austin’s language theory, ideas in twentieth-century performance, and the performative nature of language in activism and hate-speech legislation.
Performativity and Performance takes stock of the uses, implications, reimagined histories, and new opportunities these changing concepts now embrace.
240 pages
Dimensions: 6 x 9 inches; 229 x 153 mm