The Pitchman in Print: Oral Performance Art in Text and Context

Oral performance art, patterned performative speech for an audience, is perhaps the oldest and most ubiquitous human art form. Specific instances of this art include the performances of griots and guslars, troubadors and shamans, as well as rappers and riddlers, preachers and politicians. While this art form is by definition oral, it is also the case that, frequently, literary art has represented oral performance art. There is written art which depicts oral art, which describes it, appropriates it, criticizes and co‑opts it. In this dissertation, I define oral performance art as constituting a separate and unique artistic genre, one which has generic qualities. Oral performance art always, in all its specific instances and contexts, includes three main characteristics‑( 1) a contested control of the performance and its reception, (2) a display of verbal virtuosity, and (3) a familiarity of form which links it to an established tradition. I also define written representations of oral performance art as constituting a separate and unique literary genre, with its own generic qualities. This dissertation is founded on the conclusions of seven years of fieldwork with pitchmen and their audiences at contemporary American county fairs and carnivals. After detailing these conclusions, and examining the work of other theorists and critics of oral performance art, I present an analysis of the work of five literary artists‑Geoffrey Chaucer\u27s Parliament of Fowls, Charles Dickens\u27 Bleak House, Joseph Conrad\u27s Heart of Darkness, Mark Twain\u27s Huckleberry Finn, and Simon Ortiz\u27 poetry and short fiction. Each of these literary artists, I argue, translates oral performance art, and therefore each of them is uniquely able to share and co‑opt some of the effects of the distinctive features of oral performance art. In addition, in these translations, there is an inherent emphasis on the differences between oral performance art and literary art. This emphasis allows these authors to uniquely engage audiences in their literary portrayals of other hierarchical differences which are associated with the oral and the literary, such as the difference between high and low culture, the elite and the popular, the modem and the primitive, truth and fiction

Captions, Characters, Self-Portraits: Compositional Approaches to the Disembodied Speaking Voice and the Voice-Text-Music Relationship

In this thesis and accompanying portfolio, I show how my compositional practice proposes the disembodied speaking voice as musical material that yields new compositional avenues. Unlike the singing voice, the speaking voice has an ambiguous connection to music. Does it suggest, even demand new musical material and forms, which deviate from dialectical and teleological musical structures? When this voice is no longer physical, but rather disembodied, does this compound the ambiguity? I explore three divergent approaches to selecting, generating, and structuring text for disembodied speaking voices, which unmoor the voice from the musical paradigms of literary, lyrical, and poetic texts; and from the linear narratives typically associated with music. My practice eschews these, investigating found text and lists; verbatim and paraphrased documentary material; and stream-of-consciousness free-writing; all of which might break with narrative or semantic meaning. The deployment of these texts calls into question the function of the disembodied voice. I thus trace an evolving view of the perception of the voice as a cinematic narrator, a radiophonic character, an apparently supernatural presence, an audio caption for the accompanying music, a material sonic object, or as the reflexive presence of the composer themselves. This leads towards a notion of sonic self-portrait in my most recent work, brought about through specific kinds of uses of recordings of my own voice. These approaches are preceded and contextualised by a framework in which I consider extra-musical models and theories from cinema and artists’ film, radiophonic work and the everyday sphere of vox ex machina automated voices, with reference to a wide range of analogous and contrasting approaches in works by other composers and sound artists. A second layer of contextualisation is provided by my proposal of a categorisation of types of macro- and micro-structural relationships between speaking voices and music. These range from an entirely separate, discrete presentation of voice and musical material to scenarios in which the voice alone is presented as musical material

Mouthwork - public address and laboured expression: conditions of gesture, voice, and senses of time as practice-led research

The Western conventions of public speaking owe their development to ancient Graeco-Roman traditions. The practiced delivery of the voice and gestures was part of a daily routine which trained boys to grow into eloquent men. For the well born elite, public speaking was taught in exclusive, all-male spaces. These spaces fostered learning environments which supported ‘masculinity’ and the presentation of confidence as a gendered method of anti-theatrical performance. The context of learning, and the jeopardy created in the live address of public speaking, dictated how a man should speak and what sort of voice he should have. The idealised man of public address was to have no sign of weakness, associated with ‘effeminate’ gestures and voice pitch. Furthermore, the delivery of his voice and gestures was to appear paradoxically untrained, creating a relationship between public speaking and performance as a sort of naturalistic acting style. I propose what I have termed the ‘Flop’ and the ‘Camp Rant’ as original methodologies which use writing and performance as practice-led research. Drawing on AD 2 Graeco-Roman methods for teaching, writing and speaking, as well as readings of queer and feminist theorists including Judith Butler, Jack Halberstam, Paul B. Preciado, Patricia MacCormack, Dina Al-Kassim and Donna Haraway, I explore the delivery of voice and gestures in the practices of three feminist performance artists. The methods of Diane Torr, Karen Finley and Andrea Fraser are applied to splinter Western conventions of the live voice and received notions of embodied presence. In this process-led exploration into durationality and recitation, I will activate past and present alignments to ‘masculinity’ that create alternative and affirmative sensations via registers of language. The components of public speech, as a gendered construct, are bound (and can be unleashed) by conditions of voice, body and senses of time. To underscore the importance of practice in the embodied exercise of theory, this project is presented as a two-part delivery of A Good Man Speaking Well (2020), a prose text I have written and will perform live on the day of the PhD viva

Writings, Readings and Not Writing: poems, prose fiction and essays

This submission of published work consists of a number of different modes of writing that interrelate as the concerns of a poet, essayist and teacher. There are twenty-seven separate publications, presented under six categories headings: (A) poems, including prose-poems, written for the page; (B) prose-fiction, represented through a single work; (C) visual poems; (D) enquiries into aspects of a general poetics, including questions about 'situatedness' or 'implicatedness', genres of discourse and their related modalities, poetics and grammar, and a poetics of reading; (E) critical and celebratory readings, mostly of contemporary poets and poems; (F) meditations on institutionalised divisions and modalities of knowledge and practice and their implications for arts pedagogy. These six categories are intended to open out on to each other, to constitute an exploration of writing and reading that is always more than the sum of its parts. With the exception of one article published in 1992 all work was published- or will have been - between 1996 and 2005, a period that coincides with the consolidation and development of a field of study and practice at Dartington College of Arts named Performance Writing. The poems and prose fiction exemplify specific practices within this field and the articles are attempts to develop theoretical and critical instruments within it, especially as they apply to poetry. The articles move between close readings of poetic texts and broad enquiries into reading, writing and the operation of texts within their social, spatial and temporal contexts, such as domestic settings or bereavements. Three articles address 'grammar for performance writers'; three others focus on reading and its relation to knowledge, form and setting; another three, including a review, are enquiries into discipline and interdisciplinarity

Haunted houses: influence and the creative process in Virginia Woolf's novels

This thesis argues that rather than being an innovative, modernist writer, Virginia Woolfs methods, themes, and aspirations were conservative in certain central ways, for her novels were influenced profoundly by the work of writers from earlier eras. This argument is developed both by demonstrating that Woolf was influenced by other writers, and also by exploring the dynamics of how this process of influence took place. The thesis contends that this process included identification with past writers and a longing for the literary past, which complicated Woolfs attempts to negotiate the past and its values. After a chapter examining theoretical approaches to the concept of literary influence, the thesis makes a detailed study of Woolf's engagement with her influences in eight of her novels. Woolf s responses to influence are divided into three phases. In the first phase, up to the mid- 1920s, she wrestled with existing perceptions of the woman writer as she looked to female precursors as role models and struggled with their legacies. At the same time, she sought refuge from such a problematic inheritance by turning to her male precursors to try and gain covert access to the literary traditions which were thought to be the birthright of the men of her generation. In the second phase of her career, in the late 1920s, Woolf continued to deal with the absence of a ready-made tradition by elegizing writers she had known and the literary traditions they represented. In the process of mourning other writers, it is suggested, Woolf remade them in her imagination to be like herself. This process of identification continued in the third phase, in The Naves and Between the Acts, when Woolf drew on the work of Wordsworth and Coleridge, respectively, to explore and develop her mature identity as a writer

Utilizing A Quality Circle Team Approach To Design A Curriculum Resource Guide For The TK-1 Teacher

The author designed a Curriculum Resource Guide for the TK-1 teacher using a Quality Circle Team approach. The intent of this practicum was to provide the TI-1 teachers with a Resource Guide to aid in curriculum planning for the TK-1 developmental placement class. After reviewing results of surveys given to TK-1 teachers in Kent County, a guide was designed based on the results and research of specialists in the field of developmental placement. At the conclusion of the project each member of the Quality Circle Team was asked to rate the final product using a criterion referenced evaluation form which addressed each of the ten components. Criteria for each section was (a) Is the message clear? (b) Is it educationally sound? (c) Does it fit the TK-1 grade level? Participants could respond yes, no, or unclear. Every item showed a unanimous yes response for each component. The achievement of leadership effectiveness was rated high. Recommendations were made to the PREP Office that the Curriculum Resource Guide should be considered for county adoption to be used by all TK-1 teachers and as a reference for other educators and parents. Appendices include surveys, evaluations, and the Curriculum Resource Guide for the TK-1 Teacher

You Are So Mine

Creative Writin

You Are So Mine

Creative Writin

The rhetoric of feeling: S.T. Coleridge's lectures on Shakespeare and the discourse of 'philosophical criticism'

My thesis explores what kind of work is performed by affective terms such as 'passion', 'excitement', or 'poetic feeling' in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's lectures on Shakespeare. While Coleridge might be regarded as a fore-runner of twentieth-century critical trends such as formalism and reader-response criticism, his interest in different forms of emotion in connection with poetry links his thought to theoretical concerns of his own and of the immediately preceding age. I situate Coleridge in the context of British 'philosophical criticism' in the second half of the eighteenth century, a critical discourse that had paid particular attention to problems related to the role of feeling in literary language. I argue that Coleridge's interpretations of Shakespeare and the critical stance they articulated both continued and challenged important aspects of this critical tradition. The Introduction offers an overview of the problem of feeling and (poetic) language in Coleridge's thought, followed by a definition of 'philosophical criticism', its reliance on Shakespeare and the productive tensions between 'feeling' and 'philosophy' that characterise it. The Introduction ends with a survey of recent scholarship. I proceed in the first chapter with an analysis of Coleridge's lectures as 'performances', that is, as events grounded in the lecturer's performance of immediate thought and feeling in front of his audience, generated by his encounters with the Shakespearean text. The second chapter deals with Coleridge's theory of Shakespearean poetry as expounded in the lectures, focussing especially on 'passionate' aspects of language and on the connections Coleridge establishes between these and bodily movement, gesture, tone, and rhythm, as well as 'embodied' or 'performative' uses of rhetoric. In the third chapter I continue to explore the ways in which Coleridge extends the scope of the New Rhetorical concept of passionate language by pushing back its pre-established limits. The fourth chapter compares Coleridge's often dismissed character criticism with the 'philosophical analysis' of character developed by William Richardson, a Scottish philosophical critic whose latest publications appeared at the time of Coleridge's lectures on Shakespeare. Here I aim to point out some of the philosophical and moral underpinnings of Richardson's and Coleridge's concept of 'character', and their respective stances towards passion and analysis. In my discussion, I will sometimes refer to Coleridge's play Remorse, staged in 1813, that is, in the middle of his lecturing career. Coleridge's interest in theatre can be recognised throughout his lectures in several of his statements on Shakespeare and passionate language, especially since he often thinks about the expression of feeling as inherently theatrical. In the last chapter I turn to Remorse in order to show how some major concerns of Coleridge's lectures - with the rhetoric of passion or the analysis of character - appear in his own play, and how his play casts a new light on those concerns. With Remorse, Coleridge crosses the divide between philosophical reading and poetical creation; however, the play also reveals the persistence of philosophy in Coleridge's work, not only in the form of his grounding assumptions, but also as a problem to be 'staged' in drama. By reconstructing Coleridge's exchanges with earlier philosophical critics - most importantly, with Kames, William Richardson, Alexander Gerard, and Joseph Priestley -1 intend to highlight aspects of his critical practice that have rarely received sustained attention. In doing so, I also offer an interpretation of the complicated and often ambivalent role of feeling in Coleridge's criticism. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.)