Day Two: Aesthetic Texts

• Group Exercise - Please discuss and prepare to present to the class responses to the following questions (each group is assigned one number):

1. Why do we study performance theory? What does this add to the study of communication? In your personal academic interests, how might performance theory enhance your studies?
2. What do Pelias and Shaffer mean when they say that all human communication is performative? What are some qualities that typify a communicative act as performative?Give three examples of communicative acts you engaged in within the past month and describe how they are performative.
3. What defines an aesthetic text? Find an example online of an aesthetic text and a non-aesthetic text.
4. What do Pelias and Shaffer mean when they define performance as a transactional process? Who/what are the different agents that participate in this transaction?
5. What are the three modes of aesthetic communication? Give an example of each (either from your own life or popular culture -- you may search online and even show a clip)
6. How do genres of performances condition the interaction between performer and audience? Give three examples -- excluding the ones named in the book at the top of p. 114 -- of genres and their expected listener responses. 
7. What claims are put forth about a text when one categorizes it as "literary"? Why has the tendency in recent years "been to blur the lines between literary and nonliterary texts" (Pelias & Shaffer, p. 114)? Why do you think that scholars have recently recognized the classification of texts into established literary forms as not only unnecessary but harmful to certain marginalized groups?

• Prompt responses will guide us through a large-group discussion of the following:

1. Performance as a political act: All statements are statements of value; human curation of words to be uttered determines what is important and what is not, it assigns significance. "What [a speaker] decides to say is an indication, implicitly or explicitly, of what [s]he thinks is worth saying. In this sense, all of [a speaker's] statements are statements of value" (Pelias & Shaffer, p. 6).

• Ex. - asking someone about their weekend
• What about "factual" statements? Do they contain their own value biases?
• Performance ethnographer Dwight Conquergood talks about the "antitheatrical bias" in academia. Why do you think that is? What are some synonyms associated with the word "performance"? What do these associations imply about the relationship between performance and truth?

               2.   Performance as interpretive, temporal and emergent:

• Interpretive: requiring aesthetic judgement, subjective feeling and situated within personal, social and cultural contexts.
• Temporal: time-based. Performance is not an object or a product, it is a process.
• Emergent: the outcome of a performance cannot be formulated -- because of the many factors that affect a performance, including audience responses, the "liveness" of a performance is never the same twice.

               3.   Subjectivity: The interpretation of texts requires a subjective response, meaning that the performer and the listener call                        upon their personal conscious experiences such as perspectives, feelings, beliefs and desires. This framework questions the                      notion of objectivity or a capital-T Truth.

• Can there ever be two competing truths to reality?
• We will examine this topic further next week, when we debate the various perspectives presented in the RadioLab episode "Yellow Rain" -- a story from the Cold War, about a mysterious substance that fell from the sky in Southeast Asia at the end of the Vietnam war.
• Pick a side from which to prepare an argument: Hmong villagers in Laos or US scientists.
• Listen to the podcast over the weekend, noting arguments that would validate an advance the narrative your side is arguing.

               4.   Performance as dialogic: 

The term “dialogic” refers to two or more contributing agents, given various examples:

• • 1.) The performer and the author of interpretive text
  • Embodiment - a transformative act: time-based image functions to “both to deal with logical understanding and to penetrate to unconscious levels, to reach for the emotional denominator of all men, the nonverbal basis of human life,” (Youngblood, 387).
  • The difference between knowing something and emotionally connecting 
  • 2.) The performer and, if text is self-composed, the past self of the performer, or another performative identity 
  • Radiolab - Help! The act of self-bargaining addresses the most extreme examples of how we can play different roles as time progresses
  • 3.) The performer and the audience
  • Does a performer need to  have a certain audience response as an objective?
  • The importance of the role of the audience: the potentiality of audience responses is what makes performance temporal, emergent, dynamic and transformative.
  • The more the role of the audience is allowed to influence the development of the performance, the more these factors are present.
  • 4.) The performer and the media
  • Example, generative media
  • Are these examples performative?
  • 5.) The audience and the media
  • Examples of immersive media/art
  • Precognition -- The suits were only immersive to the dancers, but the LED wall responds to the overall movement of the room, making the audience a controller for the media

                 5.   Modes of Performance

• Lyric - Personal utterance, expression of individual speaker's private realization or discovery (think monologue)
• Dramatic - Shared conversation between two or more speakers (think dialogue)
• Epic - storyteller speaks directly to an audience while other speakers interact with each other or the scene (think narration)
• Where can you spot these modes within this example from the hit new musical Hamilton? How does Hamilton blur the boundaries of these neat categories of modes?

                6.   Genres - Burke's frame and genre analysis applied to performative acts

• The conditioning of audience expectations often happens subconsciously

                7.   Politics of literary canons -- Pelias and Shaffer say that "traditional literary forms include poetry, prose fiction (short stories and novels), drama, letters, diaries, autobiographies, speeches and essays. 

• How does the age of digital media necessitate a change in this system of categorization?
• Traditionally, who has decided what is a valid literary form? What kind of group gets this power? What does this mean for the study of, say, Black American slave songs?

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Expressive Language and the Cut-Up Assignment

• Expressive/sensuous language - "Expressive language avoids the ordinary, the cliche, the everyday. Striking in effect, it surprises, delights, enriches, moves and compels listeners" (Pelias & Shaffer, p. 118)
• Language and the senses - expressive language is the language of performance. If performance is a more embodied mode of communication (meaning, we experience the stories, rather than have them described to us) then the language of performance evokes our senses: "Sensuous language appeals to the listeners' visual auditory, tactile, olfactory and gustatory senses" (Pelias & Shaffer, p. 118)
• How can language, which we can only see or hear, evoke other senses?
• Synesthesia - the production of a sense impression relating to one sense or part of the body by stimulation of another sense or part of the body.
• Figurative speech - language devices that contain more than their literal sense. Give me a definition and an example of the following:
• Simile
• Metaphor
• Oxymoron
• Hyperbole
• Understatement
• Personification
• Apostrophe
• Allusion
• Poetic Rhythm - Presentation on rhythmic musical features

The Cut-Up Assignment - The purpose of this assignment is to play with language structures. The cut-up software forces the author to construct new forms of language by cutting up their writing with another text. This assignment will force you as a writer to break with your conventional modes of writing. Due Thursday January 14.