Michael S. Bowman

Killing Dillinger: A mystory

I want to show you some pictures and tell you some stories…

“Textual power” and the subject of oral interpretation: An alternate approach to performing literature

Contemporary theory in literary and performance studies has significantly effected oral interpretation pedagogy by broadening the idea of “text.” Consequently, many oral interpretation courses now feature the analysis and performance of a variety of noncanonical or “nonliterary” verbal art forms. In this essay, we propose to supplement the changes in oral interpretation pedagogy brought about by the introduction of new texts by describing an alternate approach to analyzing and performing texts based on semiotic theory and Robert Scholes’ model of reading.

“Novelizing” the stage: Chamber theatre after breen and Bakhtin

While Robert Breens chamber theatre is known and practiced in colleges and universities across the country, newer paradigms of literary and performance studies have disturbed the ground on which chamber theatre rests. As a result, some directors in interpretation/performance studies have begun to revise chamber theatre in light of recent theory, distancing themselves from some of its basic premises while relying on its techniques to stage whatever texts interest them. This essay attempts to describe and intervene in this revisionist enterprise in two ways: first, by identifying some of the paradoxes or limitations of chamber theatre as a staging idiom; and second, by outlining an approach to chamber theatre based on Bakhtins theory of the novel.

Telling Katrina Stories: Problems and Opportunities in Engaging Disaster

Like most others in critical/cultural and performance studies, we were trained to look at how discourses, sign systems, symbolic actions, and signifying practices of various sorts reinforce or alter relations of power. We learned that art (broadly conceived), criticism, pedagogy, and scholarship could be forms of engagement and intervention in those relations of power, although Stuart Hall convinced us that such engagement must be practiced ‘‘without guarantees.’’ 1 The question for us was never should one be engaged? Rather, the question*always*was over the manner and means of engagement: What form should engagement take? How do we perform as teachers, artists, and scholars so as to be efficacious*without relying on or appealing to some extrinsic or transcendent discourse to serve as the alibi for our actions or as a guarantor of their ‘‘correctness’’ or ‘‘truth’’? Although these questions have been salient to some extent for generations of communication scholars, and while they seem to have become more urgent as we wrestle with the nature and extent of our engagement in forums such as this one, they acquire a new meaning and valence, a special force, if you will, in the context of crisis. And for us, the crisis that has had an enduring effect on our understanding of what it means to be ‘‘engaged’’ as scholars in communication and performance studies was precipitated by the disasters that followed Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in the summer of 2005. As we approach the fifth anniversary of those life-changing events, we would like to use this occasion to talk about the problems we face in keeping those events alive in public memory and in making them an ongoing issue for deliberation in the public sphere: and by ‘‘we’’ in this sentence, we mean literally those of us who reside at the site of the disaster. In short, then, we want to address the problems of talking about Katrina and the failure of the levees in New Orleans in the context of the burden of the relationship between scholarship and public/political engagement.

Teaching politics: Intellectual work and institutional critique

THE POLITICAL RESPONSIBILITY OF THE CRITIC. By Jim Merod. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987; pp. xi‐267;

On the Bias: From Performance of Literature to Performance Composition

27.50; paper,

Cultural critique as performance: The example of Walter Benjamin

8.95. PROFESSING LITERATURE: AN INSTITUTIONAL HISTORY. By Gerald Graff. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987; pp. 1–315;

Performing Literature in an Age of Textuality.

24.95; paper,

“This spectacular visible body”: Politics and postmodernism in Pina Bausch's Tanztheater

11.95.