Paul H. Gray

Performance and the bardic ambition of Vachel Lindsay

Vachel Lindsays poetic career is best understood in light of the bardic tradition in America. Harking back to Whitman and anticipating such contemporary poets as Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg, Lindsay believed that poetry should play a central role in shaping the nation. Calling his message The Gospel of Beauty, Lindsay argued that aesthetic imagination was the single most important quality of good citizenship. He deplored the notion of poetry as a product for the cultural elite as well as its isolation from other arts. To counteract these tendencies, Lindsay developed a poetic style that incorporated not only popular Americal culture but such allied arts as drawing, music, and dance. Performance was particularly important to Lindsay because it was both a part of the fabric of his poetry and the most effective means of communicating his bardic vision to the American public.

Performance, postmodernism, and politics

CRITICAL GENEALOGIES: HISTORICAL SITUATIONS FOR POSTMODERN LITERARY STUDIES. By Jonathan Arac. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987; pp. vi‐350;

Strange Bedfellows: My Life and Hard Times in a Speech Communication Department.

32.50; paper,

The evolution of expression: S. S. Curry's debt to elocution

15.00.

Minding the stops: Performance and affective stylistics

The treatment of oral interpretation as communication has led to some unfortunate theoretical positions. The problem, however, lies not with the concept of communication, but with notions of performance that have nothing to do with that concept.

The uses of theory

A salient characteristic of the expression movement was its avowed rejection of elocutionary methodology. No expressionist attacked elocution with more vehemence than S. S. Curry. In his most famous work, The Province of Expression, Curry included a detailed refutation of elocutionary theory from Sheridan to Delsarte. Although Curry and his followers were later attacked by academicians such as Woolbert and Parrish for abandoning the best accomplishments of elocution, the criticism was probably unjustified. A close examination of Currys later writings and unpublished manuscripts and lectures reveals a considerable debt to elocutionary ‐methods and principles.

Issues: A TPQ forum

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.