The Body and the Text. Performance in Cultural and Literary Studies

• Autores: Lucia Esposito
• Localización: Alicante Journal of English Studies / Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses: RAEI, ISSN-e 2171-861X, ISSN 0214-4808, Nº. 26, 2013 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Identity, Culture and Performance Studies / coord. por Silvia Caporale Bizzini, Lucia Esposito, Alejandra Ruggiero), págs. 27-43
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The essay explores the incidence and fertility of ‘performance’ as a means to examine and critique culture also in the field of cultural and literary studies, on whose ground it has landed, together with performativity, as a ‘travelling concept’. Continuously traversing the porous borders of performance studies, both concepts are in fact aiding an understanding of identity and culture not only as discoursively and normatively ‘constructed’ but also as ‘performed’ through embodied practices whose ‘efficacy’ (transgression, resistance, agency) against those very terms of discoursive constructedness and normativity may be tested. Post-subcultural studies, for example, focusing on contemporary youth subcultures’ creative life-style, body language and spectacular appropriation of the city spaces, analyse their tactics of resistance to the organizational ‘efficiency’ and technological ‘effectiveness’ that dominate today’s cultural scenario. The texts of literature are likewise increasingly approached as ‘events’ or performances, on whose contested terrain the embodied practices of writers and readers have become crucial while, especially in the so-called ‘performative writing’, the split speech/writing is being pushed to the background.