Class Notes - 12/04/12

Began with Group Discussions concerning Abstracts for the Work to Come

-readers are to provide feedback from the perspective of a professional evaluator

-attempt to learn what it takes to create a successful abstract and what it means to be a productive reviewer of such scholarly documents

After Group Discussions:

Amy: excited by the Abstracts for the Work to Come; let’s go around the table and briefly describe each of our projects and share some of the feedback that we received during the group discussion

Dorothy: abstract pertains to a film project that traces perceptions of blackness in America through comedy; Andrea’s feedback brought up the question of popular opinion and how it is affected through various objects of study

Andrea: abstract focuses on an 18^th Century poem cycle fraudulently claiming to be Medieval – reading this as a performative text, as the author set to reverse English perceptions of Scottish people by presenting the poem cycle as ‘old’; feedback pertained to finding an appropriate to integrate historicization into the scholarship

Derek: abstract centers on the 2012 Chicago teachers’ strike using many of the theorists discussed this semester; also drawing on Stuart Hall – see how representations of protest can close off meaning making and what strategies are used to combat that; Sara encouraged looking at an article related to the Rodney King beating

Sara: abstract looks at an alternative street theater movement in post-Soviet Poland; marked an instance of radical street performance as combating perception; how could such performance fight Soviet hegemony?; lots of newsletters are available surrounding the street theater (so know what the movement wanted), but not much exists concerning what actually happened and what change was effected; Derek pointed out that current viewpoints in Poland may be indicative of the change (or non-change) that was effected

Courtney: abstract concerning 1^st person character novels where the author is the protagonist; how does this position affect reader’s experience – if reader identifies with the narrator, is guilt felt in relation to that identification?; Cody helped clarify ideas surrounding identification and asked what it might mean if a reader did not identify with the narrator (would that be a source of guilt?)

Cody: abstract asks about performance as it relates to speechfulness or speechlessness and how these relate to audience response; speechless responses (eye rolls, sighs, etc.) are just as relevant as speech responses; suggestions involved looking at methodology (esp. concerning reader response) and considerations concerning gauging speechful or speechless response

Kelly: abstract relates to current concerns surrounding communication and its various occurrences; consider scene in the movie Bent; consider theater as a storytelling device – what happens if narrators explain what happens

Ming: abstract allows an opportunity to theorize about a past project; projects relates to the goal of selling an idea, but the idea must be defined clearly before moving forward; work has led to a question: is a safe space performed or enacted?; from feedback I now have clarity concerning what needs to be clarified

Jess: abstract continues research into the fat female body on stage (interest in ‘othered’ female bodies); does the actor’s body inform the character? (does a fat suit equate the fat body?); does what the actor looks physically matter if it does not match what is scripted?

Jenna: abstract gives an opportunity to follow up on thoughts generated during a trip to London this past summer; fascinated by the Tower of London which tries to manipulate visitors’ emotions (was Richard III guilty?); have an interesting way of organizing the museum product; Iris pointed out a dichotomy of thought within the project – must start in the middle space of the dichotomy and work outwards (dichotomy concerns traditional vs. new ways of organizing museum space)

Iris: currently writing a play dealing with issues surrounding rape and abstract deals with inspiration for this play that came from our reading of The Exonerated, which provided great ideas but did not have a clear call to action; Jenna talked about humor and how laughter can create an ‘in-group’ (does that automatically create an ‘out-group’?); must consider what creates sympathy

Jennifer: Whitney pointed out that the abstract idea is impossible but reflects a necessary area of study; want to know more about how we interact with texts; intrigued by a reverse-engineering of texts; consider a recent interactive version of Dracula; interested in texts created for specific spaces – how does a creative writer move into new technology?

Whitney: abstract explores the digital humanities; idea builds off the course and personal blogs maintained in class this semester; looking into how such blogs simultaneously construct the identity of their writers as well as an image of the digital humanities; Jennifer said to consider how blogs both use and replace traditional ways of doing scholarship and consider the options provided for editing in blog space that does not exist in traditional print media

Amy: like the idea of the possible vs. the impossible project; the impossible is useful to write down, as it can be equally valuable and lead to a thread that leads to the important project

Ellen: along with Amy, we are uploading comments to the abstracts directly to the course blog; encourage everyone to continue making comments on the blog; don’t forget, our next class will meet at Nick’s where we will talk about holes in the field.

Final Course Blog- Iris

I got a lot of inspiration for my newest play while reading "The Exonerated." For one, I learned that a play with distinctly dark themes can, and perhaps should, contain some moments of humor. But while "The Exonerated" was a play about the death penalty, I want to write a piece about rape. In my head, this piece is emotional and unsettling, but also has some surprising moments of levity. There has been a lot of discussion in popular culture lately about rape jokes, and more extreme kinds of humor in general- whether such humor is ever funny, or justified, or allowable. I want to write a play in which the audience laughs- several times, hopefully- but never at the victim. I envision an all-female cast because a lot of the proponents of these types of jokes are men, and I want to give the men in the audience access to a conversation that they may not otherwise have access to, a more honest conversation, about how women respond to rape.

The other thing that I learned from "The Exonerated" is that my play should contain a strong, specific call to action. I struggled with this in "The Exonerated"  because I felt it didn't have one. But in a play about rape, I think the call to action is simple- I want people to feel like they can talk about sexual assault, as they experienced it. I want to create a head space where people feel safe to share what happened to them, and how they feel about it- all the guilt, shame, excuses, regrets, and other non-P.C. things that people feel. I want everyone to feel like they can bring something to the conversation, and I want everyone to feel heard. I haven't heard that conversation take place before, and I think that that conversation could help people.

Abstract for Work to Come (Jenna)

Voting on History: Richard III in the Tower of London

In her book Destination Culture, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett contemplates the future of museums. She writes, “What is the fate of the 'museum product,' however it is defined, in today's tourism economy? The presumption in some quarters is that visitors are no longer interested in the quiet contemplation of objects in a cathedral of culture. They want to have an 'experience'” (139). In her chapter in Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage, Andrea Witcomb presents multimedia as “an opportunity [for the museum] to reinvent itself and ensure its own survival.” (35). Both of these concepts, that the modern museum must make use of experience and multimedia in order to compete in an economy of tourism, are present in historical exhibits at the Tower of London.

One of the more popular tourist destinations in the Tower of London is the Bloody Tower, the tower in which the “Princes in the Tower,” nephews of Richard III, were housed during Richard's early reign. Their bedchamber has been turned into an exhibit in which the “museum product” is not an object but an experience reliant upon multimedia. The chamber is staged to manipulate the emotions of its visitors so that, upon exiting the room, they will vote to condemn Richard III as the princes' murderer. Through use of video and music, the exhibit performs an atmosphere of intrigue that capitalizes on the Tudor tradition of vilifying Richard III. While reading material discussing the historical figures of Richard, the princes, and Henry VII is present in the chamber, the experiential nature of the room counteracts history and propagates popular opinion of Richard III. Under the influence of tourist expectation, this exhibit uses experience and multimedia to allow its visitors the opportunity to rewrite history. Is this the future of the museum?

Course Blog 22 (Derek)

Derek DiMatteo                                                                                                          2012.12.02

ENG-L512

Profs. Cook and MacKay

Course Blog 22: Abstract for the Work to Come

Please include a clear articulation of your object of study, your method of studying it, and how you are intervening in your field or discipline.

Theatricality, Representation, and Protest: The 2012 Chicago Teachers Union Strike

This study examines performances of education protest in America, focusing primarily on the genre of the teachers’ strike, particularly the 2012 Chicago Teachers Union Strike. Strikes often result in very visible performances of protest—e.g. newspaper op/eds, marches, rallies, and other demonstrations (and counter-demonstrations)—thus allowing for a rich examination of the intersection between theatricality, representation, and protest. Rallies and marches are forms of performance that, due to their polylogical staging (Levin), encompass an expressive volatility that resists domestication—and thus resists meaning. There is a struggle to frame the crisis in the media, to control the representation and thus fix the meaning for the spectators (Hall). The images repeated in the media can become a kind of “social blinding” that foreclose critical thought and debate (Taylor). If that happens, the protest will fail to move the spectator to think critically and “cast his vote,” as the spectator becomes transfixed by the illusion presented in the media, and “free discussion” of the root causes and core issues of the protest is sacrificed (Brecht). Teachers’ strikes and demonstrations are also at risk of a cultural backlash stemming from the effects of surrogation, as any teachers’ strike will activate the cultural memory of not only past teachers’ strikes but also the larger tradition of protest movements and demonstrations within US history (Roach). Therefore, this study will examine not only media representations of the strike, but also “audience” reception of these representations, union efforts to counteract government and media framing of the strike, and the problematics of surrogation. This study makes a valuable contribution to the field of education protest by making clear the relation between the theatricality of the performances surrounding the strike and the impact on civil society (Davis), with particular attention paid to the efficacy of certain performance strategies.

Course Blog 22 [Sara]: Abstract for the Work to Come

“Socialist Surrealism” and National Identity: Acts of Radical Imagination in Post-Soviet Poland

In the past four decades, the study of history, national memory in particular, witnessed a radical paradigmatic shift. Abandoning the approach of individual narrative analysis to explore the implications of collective memory as a collaborative social construct, sociologists and historians like Paul Connerton and Pierre Nora found that memory and identity transmission may operate simultaneously and competitively with narrative history, allowing the perseverance of a created collective memory to dominate and even usurp the individual’s memory of actual experienced events. Recent discoveries in cognitive neuroscience support this view of both individual and collective memories as plastic, embodied experiences rather than static, stored information; this perspective lends itself to new horizons in the study of meaning-making in revolutionary street theatre and participatory mass spectacle. 

In this paper, I argue that radical student groups such as the Alternative Orange Movement in 1980s and 1990s post-Soviet Poland flourished because they recognized the Soviets’ successful combination of visual iconicity and embodied experience in their revolution-era propaganda and subsequently pursued similar tactics to disrupt the intentionally fabricated Soviet sign systems. Rejecting rhetoric in favor of “socialist surrealism,” their leaders sought to alter Polish national identity by intervening at a physical rather than intellectual level. Alternative Orange’s site-specific “happenings” were purported to be gleefully devoid of meaning; they were acts of radical imagination that sought to reclaim the streets of Wroclaw by creatively engaging sites of Soviet significance and altering their cultural associations. In these acts of anti-meaning, the movement successfully disempowered Soviet-era sign systems and opened a space for the collective creation of a new national identity.

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SELECTED WORKS CITED

Cioffi, Kathleen M. Alternative Theatre in Poland, 1954-1989, Polish Theatre Archive. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996.

Cohen-Cruz, Jan. Radical Street Performance: An International Anthology, edited by Jan Cohen-Cruz, 302. London: Routledge, 1998.

Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember, Themes in the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Conquergood, Dwight. “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research.” TDR 46, no. 2 (2002): 145-56.

Abstract for Work to Come (Cody)

The performance that is beyond words

This study’s focus centers on performances that satisfy or operate within the double meaning of this paper’s title: (1) performances that are “beyond” words, that is, performances that are “wordless” or “without words” and (2) performances that render a spectator “speechless.”  I intentionally leave these two categories vague so as to allow for a diverse congregation of performances/performative materials from various artistic sources: literature and poetry, theatre, music, video and film, etc.  Nor do I demand that a single work satisfy both of these prerequisites.  Broadly, my interest is not so much in wordless works arousing wordless reactions as it is in the power of wordlessness to incite articulation and, the contrary, the power of words to incite inarticulacy or speechlessness.  What are the necessary prerequisites within a performance for speechful and speechless reactions?  Are the wordless reactions of tears, sighs, grunts, eye rolls, chuckles, screams, etc. just as valid and useful responses as the more articulate response of, say, the formal review or critique? And, more importantly, how do gender, race, class, and various social norms and expectations dictate speechless and speechful reactions?  In defining which works “fit” into this study, I look for works that, taking cues from Ngai’s stupimility, are likely to engender disparate feelings of either pleasure or offense, boredom and fascination within different spectators/readers or within the individual.  As such, I will consider: (1) John Barth’s short story “Glossolalia” along side the glossolalic vocals of Lisa Gerrard; (2) the variant and excessive uses of ellipses in Samuel Beckett’s Not I (both as text and performance) and Breath and Richard Bruce Nugent’s “Shadji,” “Smoke, Lilies and Jade,” and “Geisha Man”; (3) Derek Jarman’s soundless, home-movie-esque films The Art of Mirrors, Garden of Luxor, A Journey to Avebury, and War Requiem as well as other works that I discover along the course of research.  Along side a semiotic analysis of these works, I would equally like to include audience and reader reactions as a manner of incorporating practice within the theories that this study will exhibit. 

Course Blog #22: Paper Proposal for Work to Come (Whitney)

Academic blogs on digital humanities projects are digital spaces wherein personal scholarly construction and public disciplinary construction occur simultaneously. The blogger presents the desired public image of his or her scholarly identity in a very structured and specific way, while at the same time navigating the still shaky waters of an emerging discipline. In this paper, I propose to use performance studies as a conceptual framework with which to explore the tensions and synergies between these personal and collective identity constructions. I am choosing to work with digital humanities blogs because they represent complex layerings of digital performance. These blogs must simultaneously present themselves as personalized blog spaces, constructing specific presentations of scholars; brainstorming spaces where future digital humanities projects are discussed, constructing very self-aware presentations of digital work; and, finally, spaces that then index or literally link to the digital humanities work of these scholars, pulling both writer and reader outside the event of the blog’s performance and into another highly performative digital space.

My interest in these blogs is twofold. First, I want to connect them to Roach’s and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s ideas about definitions of cultural identity, but from the perspective of disciplinary identity. Roach’s arguments on surrogation and the processes’ reliance on both remembering and forgetting will be helpful in thinking about how these blogs and their writers both extend and replace traditional humanities work. What does it mean to participate in the construction of a new field and how much of that construction is reliant on the ghostings of what was there before? Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s work on interactive museum spaces will help me explore how the desire for interactivity and “experience” affects these spaces, and what possibilities this desire posits for the construction of new audiences.

The second element of interest in my research will engage both Bernstein’s and Taylor’s arguments. Bernstein’s ideas will be helpful to explore the function of these digital blog spaces as “scriptive things” for both the writer and reader/user. Additionally, using Taylor’s concepts of performance archives and repertoires, I will explore the possibility that these blogs create a simultaneous archival/repertory event. The blog’s text constructs the performed event that is the blog, simultaneously written and performed, but also provides discussions for future digital performances (the digital humanities projects) that are inseparable from the academic performance occurring on the blog at the moment of typing those discussions. Using these performance studies frameworks, I will analyze blogs like Michael Witmore’s “Wine Dark Sea” (winedarksea.org) in an attempt to understand how scholars are defining the emerging field of digital humanities through their deliberate performances within digital spaces.

Course Blog #22 (Justin): Abstract for the Work to Come – Actors, Palimpsests, & Bodyminds

Workshop proposal for a theatre conference:

The rehearsal process is a period of exploration, abstraction, elimination and loose repetition. Through impulse and choice, the actor’s body is scripted and re-scripted as it interacts with performance texts, acting spaces, directors’ concepts, and other performers’ bodies and movements. Thus, by simultaneously attending to external stimuli and internal response, the actor develops a routinized display through purposeful use of the ‘bodymind’ – a formulation of the ‘sensing’ body put forward by Phillip Zarrilli and other theorists of performance training. In rehearsal, the bodymind takes an actor through a process of generation, expulsion, and cohesion, eventually building to a performance deemed ‘frozen’ and ready for audience consumption.

Given this almost violent process of creation, the embodied activity perceived by a spectator functions much like a palimpsest – an object written on and written over that provides a dense amalgam of its current state and its previous incarnations. But can the actor’s body be read as a palimpsest? Are inspirations and emotions generated and discarded in the rehearsal hall still traced upon the performer’s bodymind and, in turn, distinguishable to a perceptive audience member? Are such traces a benefit or hindrance to audience reception?

Regardless of how ‘answerable’ the above questions may be, they point to important considerations for actor training: understanding a performer’s bodymind not as a mechanical device to be refashioned and reengineered but as a repository for ideas with varying lasting impressions for performer and spectator alike. For this conference, I propose a movement-based workshop in which Anne Bogart’s Viewpoints are explored as a means for understanding the actor’s ‘palimpsested bodymind.’ Viewpoints-based exercises will be used to explore an actor’s ability to create, discard, and re-imagine impulsive play.

Course Blog 22 - Work to Come - Jess

The female body has long been a site for power struggles, both political and aesthetic. A force of creation and destruction, women's bodies are confined, denied, and vied for. In The Fat Studies Reader, Christina Fisanick writes: "Femininity is not a descriptor, but rather an ideological system in which all people participate...The female body, then, is femininity's site for struggle and its vehicle for expression and coercion."(160) Using three examples of disparate womanhood - Hedda from Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, Sartje Baartman from Suzan-Lori Parks' Venus, and Helen from Neil LaBute's Fat Pig - I will attempt to negotiate how each playwright personifies "femininity", and how that compares and/or contrasts to the expectations of women in the historical moment in which the play was written. In the case of Venus, though it is a contemporary play, I will look at the historical moment it deals with, as well. Hedda's pregnancy, Sartje's race, and Helen's fatness are all marks of difference/other-ness in their respective societies, which are inscribed on their bodies. How do their bodies trouble our notions of femininity, power dynamics, and ways of being? I will also discuss how the actor's body would inform each play, potentially complicating the ideas of the play, or adding to its dramatic power. Should it be merely acting talent that directors take into consideration, or does the actor's body in our reality have to mesh with the play's reality? Theorists that will inform my research will be varied, but may include Judith Butler, Sandra Bartky, Michel Foucault, Peggy Phelan, and Julia Kristeva.



Fisanick, Christina. "Fatness (In)Visible: Polycystic Ovary Syndrome and the Rhetoric of Normative Femininity." The Fat Studies Reader. Eds. Esther D. Rothblum and Sondra Solovay. New York: New York UP, 2009. Print.

Abstract for the Work to Come (Courtney)

To think of the act of reading as a performance, in which the reader participates in a world-making involving herself and the text, is to make an intimate connection between reader and text. Novels in which a first-person narrator relays the story under the author’s name—that is, when the author is named as both narrator and character—further complicate this already complex relationship. I would like to rethink this scenario as one in which the reader’s speaking—either aloud or internally—of the narrator’s “I” builds a doubly imbricated relationship in which the reader “becomes” both character/narrator and author. While this scenario is not new in the history of the novel, it is altered in the twentieth century by a new mode of novels in which the narrator/character/author is a villain-protagonist, committing reprehensible or criminal acts. Novels like William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1959), narrated by William Lee, the name under which Burroughs published Junkie, Dennis Cooper’s Frisk (1991), and Bret Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park (2005), intermingle the relationships between author, text, and reader. Using as my model works like Lauren Berlant’s “Thinking about Feeling Historical,” from Political Emotions and Sianne Ngai’s “Stuplimity” from Ugly Feelings, I would like to identify and define the “guiltiness” of this interrelationship in which the reader enacts the abominations of a villain-protagonist under the guise of “realness”—in which the character is presented as real author. I would like to pose this form of readerly narrator/author enactment against an earlier form of author/character narration that is based on a model of believability. What differentiates this twentieth century version, in my opinion, is the way that it forces the reader into a “guilty” position, in which the choice to read is also the choice to perform the violence of the text.