Linda M. Park‐Fuller

Performing absence: The staged personal narrative as testimony

This study centers on autobiographical staged personal narrative, applying insights from studies in conversational personal narrative, the staging of collected stories, and. therapeutic testimony. The author pays specific attention to Holocaust narrative, Linda Alcoffs “The Problem of Speaking for Others, “ and contemporary essays about performed autobiographical narrative.

Charting Alternative Performance and Evaluative Practices.

This essay specifies some recent performance work, occurring with increasing frequency, in many performance studies classrooms. This work is discussed under four headings: storymaking, replication of life performance, performance art, and improvisations. The essay also identifies some issues that students and teachers might wish to take into account when encountering the presentation of such texts. The purpose of the essay is to provide performance studies practitioners (a) a list and some defining characteristics of some current performance events to guide classroom assignments and practices, (b) a brief description of some key critical concerns associated with these performance events, and (c) a consideration of some of the implications of doing such performances in the classroom.

Disaster Narrative Emergent/cies: Performing Loss, Identity and Resistance

The essay investigates narratives of disaster experiences as performed in over five hundred oral histories, diaries, interviews, letters, and other sources drawn from US-related disasters over one hundred years’ time. Based on analysis of the stories, the study establishes disaster narratives as a specific type of cultural performance with characteristic aesthetic strategies and performative intents; articulates their reflexive and emergent qualities to be restoring/creating identity and social critique; and shows how ethnodramas of disaster narratives, particularly Playback Theatre, radically re-contextualize disaster narratives by opening them to new viewpoints and speakers, fostering dialogue, debate, and social action.

Minding the stops: Performance and affective stylistics

Because performance particularizes and reifies all the component elements of the literary experience, it can be a valuable test of descriptions of the reading process. A comparison of performance practice and theory with one of the most famous descriptions of reading in contemporary literary theory, Stanley Fishs affective stylistics, demonstrates the accuracy of its claims. The study concludes that Fishs later rejection of affective stylistics is inconsistent with the neo‐pragmatism he currently espouses.