1993 Publication

Performativity & Performance

from the 1993 English Institute Conference

click here to see conference information

Routledge 1995

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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