Literature as Performance: Founding Spaces for Voice

Date
2005
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Producer
Director
Performer
Choreographer
Costume Designer
Music
Videographer
Lighting Designer
Set Designer
Crew Member
Funder
Rehearsal Director
Concert Coordinator
Moderator
Panelist
Alternative Title
Department
Haverford College. Department of English
Type
Thesis
Original Format
Running Time
File Format
Place of Publication
Date Span
Copyright Date
Award
Language
eng
Note
Table of Contents
Terms of Use
Rights Holder
Access Restrictions
Open Access
Tripod URL
Identifier
Abstract
In the recent history of literary studies, audience-oriented criticism emerges as a dominant trope for understanding the relationships between texts, authors, and readers. Barthes’s reclassification of the reader as a producer, and his elevation of an open, plural, “text” over a “work” that “closes on a signified,” emphasizes modern conceptions of reading as a form of writing. Yet, the specific processes that poststructuralism advances point back to older modes of criticism in an illustration of the dynamic relationship between history and literature. Thus, as Derrida resists logocentrism and dismantles traditional metaphysical hierarchies, viewing writing as both written and spoken language, he reaffirms the necessity of the text. I want to remain in the post-structuralist mode of thinking, allowing for the reader’s interpretive authority, but through that mode of thinking point out the inextricable link to the text itself, which provides the reader with voice. Granting the text performative power allows it to retain prescriptive agency and escape classification as a closed/fixed “work” for consumption. I propose reading the productive collapse of hierarchies such as speech/writing and speech/action in Henry James’s The Bostonians through the lens of performance in order to explicate and expand upon Derrida’s deconstructive practices. Ultimately, through the reverse process of using a text to read theory, rather than theory to read a text, I want to suggest that literature performs what culture has yet to articulate.
Description
Citation
Collections