Performativity and Performance (Essays from the English Institute)

by Andrew Parker

From the age of Aristotle to the age of AIDS, writers, thinkers, performers and activists have wresteled 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'? br br 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 in the theatre, in the streets, in philosophy, in questions of race and gender, in the sentences we speak. br br Essays reexplore the classical definition of katharsis, its reinvention in the Renaiissance, 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. br br b /b b i Performativity and Performance /i /b takes stock of the uses, implications, reimagined histories, and new opportunities these changing concepts now embrace. br br b /b Judith Butler, Elin Diamond, Andrew Ford, Timothy Gould, Stephen Orgel, Cindy Patton, Andrew Parker, Joseph Roach, Sandra L. Richards, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, Theory

Paperback Bunko

First published October 24, 1995

About the author

Andrew Parker is a zoologist who has worked on Biomimetics. He worked at the Natural History Museum in London, and from 1990 to 1999 he was a Royal Society University Research Fellow and is a Research Associate of the Australian Museum and University of Sydney and from 1999 until 2005 he worked at the University of Oxford. As of 2018 Parker is a Visiting Research Fellow at Green Templeton College where he is head of a Research Team into photonic structures and eyes.

Reviews

[Amanda Grace · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interacting with performativity as a linguistic concept was new for me—ignorant as I was of the term's etymology—and the collected essays from this seminar tend, for newcomers, toward the inaccessible, mostly due to side-winding arguments (and occasionally due to showmanship in lexicon). However, all the articles included here conveyed ideas I found fruitful to ponder on, regardless of my conviction to agree or disagree with the authors' theses.