Performance in Three Cultures: Literary, Popular and Folk
Session Coordinator: John Schleppenbach
Quincy University
Quincy IL 62301
jschlepp@quincy.edu

Masks and Identity in Modern Literature (Conrad, Yeats, Pound, Eliot)

“The intellect of man is forced to choose/Perfection of the life, or of the work.” Yeats stated that antinomy in 1931 (“The Choice”), but it is evident that the poet perfected—indeed created—his life through his art. His theory of masks explores an intriguing concept of performance as an actualizing force in the development of identity, and in this way his work served as a mask to his understanding of himself as private individual. Fellow modernists Conrad and Eliot also developed new identities for themselves by performing desirable roles; authorship assisted in the realization of these identities. In this discussion, I will demonstrate that authorship may fruitfully be considered as performance and that authorship is performance in very meaningful terms for these writers. Regarding performance as play and as ritual allows us to consider the different ways in which concepts of performance can illuminate the theory and practice of modernism.

Barbara Schleppenbach
Quincy University
bschlepp@quincy.edu

The Aesthetics of Performance in Modern Literature

The beauty of much "high modernist" literature, e.g., works by Joyce, Pound, Eliot, et al., lies in "arrangement," the disposition of materials in a putatively neutral way on the analogy of design in the visual arts. The "performer," then, is the "arranger," the manipulator of words, voices, images, episodes or feelings where none of these elements are to be construed as either rhetorical or self-expressive. The poet-as-catalyst figure in T. S. Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" is perhaps the most extreme expression of this view of the writer, but Stephen Dedalus's notion of the artist as the God of creation (in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), above or behind or beyond the work, gets at the same sort of thing. This aspect of the modernist aesthetic is, to say the least, problematic. In this essay I will explore various ways in which it is supposed to work, and whether or not it does.

Terrence J. Riddell
Quincy University
riddete@quincy.edu

Narrative Focus in Film and Literature

An understanding of narrative focus in modern film and literature requires an examination of many aspects of narrative performance. This essay examines the "performance" of gender roles in several recent films. Women become men, men become women, or women and men exaggerate cultural gender definitions to emphasize their "femininity" or "masculinity."   Films like Boys Don't Cry, All About My Mother, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Mrs. Doubtfire, and even Some Like it Hot, offer an examination of gender performance.

Sharon Buzzard
Quincy University
buzzash@quincy.edu

Realism in Mark Twain’s Use of Fiction, Syndication and Folklore

Mark Twain’s sense of realism included Aristotelian mimesis, but it also included the representation of experience in several kinds of performance: literary fiction, newspaper syndication, the Lyceum circuit and folk narrative. Twain understood and was able to adjust his presentations to different audiences; he was aware of the importance of context, function and form in these venues. I will review the way Twain used folk elements in his work by comparing motifs in selected examples with a regional collection of folklore, Folklore of Adams County Illinois. I will also review some of the Hannibal and Quincy newspaper articles regarding his performances there while on tour with George Washington Cable. In addition, I will present some discussion of narrative performance by Mississippi rivermen based on articles I have previously published.

John Schleppenbach
Quincy University
jschlepp@quincy.edu