PART III Performance of and Beyond Literature

Madison-09.qxd 10/14/2005 5:55 PM Page 143 PART III Performance of and Beyond Literature PAUL EDWARDS Interpretation is an excellent way of studying literature because it demands that the student perceive. The silent reader, skimming and skipping and scavenging often only for particular ideas or images, frequently does not really assimilate whole pieces of literature. But the interpreter cannot so read. He must bring the whole poem close to himself. The act of oral reading before an audience (though that audience may be a single listener—or, indeed, only the reader himself) is ...a kind of final act of criticism. —Wallace Bacon, The Art of Interpretation (1966, pp. 6, 8–9) When I choose texts, they’re random in a way. I feel I could use any text. That was something that started very early with Spalding [Gray]. I could pick anything in this room. ...I could take three props here: the printing on the back of that picture, this book, and whatever’s in this pile of papers, and make something that would mean as much, no more nor less, than what I’ve constructed in the performance space downstairs. Finally, it’s not about that text. ...I take [some] chance occurrence and say, that is the sine qua non, that is the beginning, that is the text. I cannot stray from that text. As someone else would use the lines of a playwright, I use that action as the baseline. —Elizabeth LeCompte (quoted in Savran, 1988, pp. 50–51) hy “literature”? In the monograph study that began in eighteenth century WUnstoried: Teaching Literature in the England as “elocution,” and flourished in late- Age of Performance Studies (1999) I briefly nineteenth century America (during the heyday trace the rise and fall of “interpretation”: the of oratorical culture) under names as quaint 143 Madison-09.qxd 10/14/2005 5:55 PM Page 144 144 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PERFORMANCE STUDIES sounding as “expression” and “speech arts.”1 raving on hustings, imitating the “action” of Employing a range of examples from parallel eighteenth century stage star David Garrick histories, I wrote Unstoried to suggest to from a pulpit or school podium, or standing at an expanding field of “performance studies” a table in a coffeehouse to read a newspaper scholars, arriving from many disciplines, how out loud—was the laptop-extended or televisu- a number of literature professors once got alized body of its day. involved. Elocutionary training attained its greatest Having begun my academic career in respectability in American colleges and univer- the now-vanished category of “interpretation sities with the founding in 1914 of the National teacher,” I suppose that I suffered “the misfor- Association of Academic Teachers of Public tune of teaching literature,” as Jonathan Brody Speaking—known since 1997 as the National Kramnick (1998) terms it, “in a moment when Communication Association (NCA). Most of its founding rationale has been called into rad- the association’s members, at the time of ical doubt” (p. 244). English elocution came its first convention in 1915, were school into existence alongside “the appearance of the teachers whose platform oratory embraced category of ‘literature’ in the later eighteenth both public speaking and literary recitation. century” (Guillory, 1993, p. 213). The age that Yet as “academically oriented” performers gave us the English-language “classic” gave us (Rarig & Greaves, 1954, p. 499) they were as well a use-value for literature, a form of eager to distance themselves from the “rub- “cultural capital” (Guillory, 1993): the rise of bish” of popular platform entertainment with “literature” helped to shape the public sphere which the label “elocution” had come to be and its protocols of communication. So did the associated during the late-nineteenth century performance of literature, which for two cen- (see Cohen, 1994; Edwards, 1999, pp. 3–4, turies (under various names) capitalized on the 16–43, 63–78, 121; Weaver, 1989). As the trained performing body as a communication association grew and diversified, its Interpreta- medium. From its beginnings, elocution’s tion Division became the national gathering market-driven goals were divided and some- place for teachers and scholars of performance- times self-contradictory. Did elocution belong based literary study who worked outside the in universities or in trade schools? One of its institutional boundaries of “English” and “the- audiences sought enrichment from belles lettres atre.” The interests of these educators were through embodied performance, while another diverse enough to permit continual transfor- (sometimes overlapping) audience sought mations of collective identity. In 1991, the training in the persuasive delivery of any text, group received approval to rename itself a as a tool for activism or professional advance- Performance Studies Division, thereby cultivat- ment. The manuals on elocutionary delivery ing what appears to be the first national asso- that became popular in Georgian England con- ciation of “performance studies” scholars out tained training drills on shaping meaningful of its deep roots in literary study, speech arts, sounds and exhibiting through gesture the and elocutionary training. By contrast, the signs of deep feeling. “Passion for Dummies”: I organization Performance Studies international find it hard to read these books and not com- (PSi), which held its first conference in 1995, pare them to present-day computer manuals, arose from the very different institutional iden- designed to help us with everything from tity of the graduate program in Performance simply turning on the “machine” to making us Studies at New York University (NYU) and appear expressive for the widest possible audi- sought to promote interdisciplinary perfor- ence. The oratorically extended body of the mance scholarship unburdened by association eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—whether with a history of literary study.2 Madison-09.qxd 10/14/2005 5:55 PM Page 145 Performance of and Beyond Literature 145 With the rise of performance studies associa- of literature. It seeks, rather, to identify the tions from contrasting traditions, scholars academic study of interpretation as one of the like Richard Schechner (2002) have begun many streams that flowed unpredictably into to speak of a two-brand model of performance the current of performance studies, as it began studies pedagogy in American universities: with to take shape in the last quarter of the twenti- literature, as exemplified by the academic eth century. Jackson (2001, 2004) has argued department at Northwestern University, and that a deconstruction of institutional blind without, as exemplified by the NYU depart- spots requires a genealogical rather than ment (pp. 16–19; see also Carlson, 1996, narrowly ideological approach: a patient will- pp. 19–25; Jackson, 2004, pp. 8–11; Jacobson, ingness to trace the often playful, all-too- 1994, p. 20; Phelan, 1998, pp. 3–7). Such human reaccentuations of ideas that eventually myths of institutional origin are unlikely to harden into the discourses of academic disci- have any long-term influence on whether per- plines (2001, p. 85). This was my argument in formance studies curricula, during the first Unstoried: a genealogical approach incalcula- decades of the twenty-first century, will succeed bly enriches the reading of archival materials in inscribing their borders on the departmental when we try to make sense of unlikely parallel terrain of colleges and universities. While com- lives (elocutionists Thomas Sheridan and James mentators on the late-twentieth century scene of Burgh in eighteenth century London), emulous performance studies have had fun with the two- candidacies for leadership (Genevieve Stebbins brand or two-school model (see, for example, and S. S. Curry in American “expression” train- McKenzie, 2001, pp. 46–47), Shannon Jackson ing), or negotiations of disciplinary direction in (2004) helpfully reminds us that the “two insti- twentieth century “speech” education. tutional narratives” do not arise fancifully: each A question that remains is this. As interpre- suggests a complicated genealogy. The spread tation vanished from American academic life, of interpretation and later performance studies why did so many of its practitioners adopt through the member institutions of the NCA performance studies (rather than a better- (including Northwestern University) produces a established discipline like theatre or English) as very different “origin” story than the one asso- the appropriate setting to reinvent the pedagog- ciated with the founding of the Performance ical practices that first had drawn them to Studies Department at NYU, yet each story literary study? Within the present-day Perfor- “obscures central figures and deliberative mance Studies Division of the NCA (a unit of societies in other parts of the United States” about 350 members within an association of than New York and Illinois (p. 10). My own over 7,000) are rich examples of “the historical sense of institutional histories filled with unsto- entanglements of the already-was and thus still- ried figures has grounded my research into the kind-of-is” (Jackson, 2001, p. 92; see Jackson, exclusionary, as well as selectively inclusionary, 2004, p. 78). practices that drive the formation and self-defi- What happened, then, to transform the nition of academic disciplines and scholarly study of interpretation into an “already-was” associations. and “still-kind-of-is” phenomenon? Across “Institutional history,” Jackson (2001) the twentieth

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