Performing criticism: Reading as bricolage.
Item
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Title
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Performing criticism: Reading as bricolage.
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Identifier
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AAI9510681
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identifier
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9510681
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Creator
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Lavazzi, Thomas Gene.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Gerhard Joseph
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Date
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1994
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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, Modern | Literature, American | Theater
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Abstract
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This dissertation provides a theoretical framework for performance as a mode literary/cultural interpretation, and presents a collection of pieces that demonstrates various degrees of critical performance. These pieces, ranging from relatively conventional essays to multimedia performances, evolve from close readings of works from a wide range of genres (including autobiography, travel narrative, prose fiction, and lyric poetry) and literary periods (from the late Middle ages in England to post WWII America). The present gathering includes a Middle English lyric, a 16th-century English series of travel/voyage narratives, a late 17th-century English novel, a 19th-century American journal/diary, a 20th-century American poetic sequence, and a 20th-century American collection of lyric poems and an accompanying journal.;The dissertation starts from the premise that Texts (large T) are elusive Others that we try to reinscribe, define, interpret, offer for display in hermeneutical zoos (text, small t), but which we can never finally contain, control, or fully know; one way to further textualize this dilemma (there is no way out of Text) is to devise a method of interpretation that becomes itself a self-reflexive, multivoiced performance; to spotlight criticism as a staged act. To adapt Dilthey's formulation, which considers any work of art in its "wholeness" as metacommentary, the whole set of interrelations is the interpretation. This includes readers' and editors' voices, the social-economic conditions and places of performance, the various versions of a work, the discourses operating within the work, the pulsion forces pulsing through it (at a premorphemic and microphonic level, beneath--or within--its social/cultural/literary imaging), and, finally, the interpreter's bricolage performance--his heteroglossic improvisations based on these various discourses and on his sense of the total "event" or "happening" of the text. It is this complexly interactive network of relationships that the performative critical text attempts to present. It figures its subject as a Grail of voices.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
