The omnidirectional microphone: Performance literature as social project
Item
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Title
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The omnidirectional microphone: Performance literature as social project
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:fa2f3d6d5892:10585
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identifier
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10935
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Creator
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Frost, Corey,
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Contributor
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Ammiel Alcalay
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Date
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2010
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature | Performing arts | Community | Identity | Performance | Poetry | Slam | Spoken Word
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Abstract
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Beginning with the metaphor of an omnidirectional microphone---which detects sound from all directions and records ambient sounds as well as single voices---the author proposes that the study of spoken word performance has the potential to shift literary criticism towards a more contextual, relational, non-evaluative understanding of literature. Because spoken word is a highly social, community-based practice, it requires attention to contexts as well as texts, and this study conceptualizes the form through the relationships among poems, performers, and audience---as well as critics and skeptics.;This study is the first to look at spoken word as a global phenomenon, drawing on research into writing-performance communities in New York, Montreal, London, and Melbourne. The first part lays out a careful but capacious definition of spoken word---a term with different connotations in different countries---to include not just poetry but also storytelling and text-based performance art. In the second part, an episodic genealogy connects the form to flashpoints in the history of 20th-century art and literature, from Dada to Beat poetry to the invention of the slam.;The third part of the dissertation asks, why does an activity that means so much to so many participants make so many others uncomfortable or even angry? Why do critics decry spoken word as "the death of art"? Employing ideas from Bourdieu, Agamben, cultural studies and performance studies, the author examines how aesthetics and identity are intertwined in a loop of community-building and exclusionary violence, and how the multiple overlapping identities of spoken word scenes potentially create a "whatever" community in which taste does not dictate identity. Spoken word is also shown to be a form in which identity is constantly redefined through parodic performativity. The final part theorizes the relationships between performance and voice, memory, and technology, postulating that spoken word has appeared at this point in history because of our changing relationship to text and recorded audio. Throughout, the dissertation argues that if we focus less on evaluating poetry as good or bad, we may understand what makes our experience of literature---to borrow terms from J. L. Austin---happy or unhappy.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
