Performance and Performativity Syllabus Winter 2016

Professor Peggy Phelan:

145 Mem Aud: office hours: Wednesdays from 2-4

Graduate assistant:Gigi Otalvaro, please contact her for any issues with Coursework or minor tech needs:

This course considers the history of the field of Performance Studies, focusing in particular on the epistemological possibilities and limits of two different but related terms: performance and performativity. While our primary focus will be on live art, we will also consider aspects of visual art and broader cultural understandings of performance. The concept of performativity will be explored through an analysis of J.L. Austin’s performative speech act and its legacy.

All seminar participants will write a final paper of about 20-25 pages. (First year students can write about 20 pages; more advanced students can write somewhat longer papers. No papers should have ‘filler.’ I would rather read a well-argued concise paper than a fluffy meandering essay). The final paper will constitute about 65% of your grade. I do not offer Incompletes and think that graduate students should avoid them. I recognize that emergencies sometimes occur and if such a situation develops we will work something out. (The routine pressure of “limited time” is not an emergency). ALL PAPERS ARE DUE IN MY BOX by or before 16 March 2016 at 5pm. E-papers accepted if there is an emergency and if you have made arrangements with me for this before 9 March.

Additionally, all students will prepare something substantive to share with the class on two occasions. TAPS students must use both performance/artistic skills on one of the two days. (This is optional for non-TAPS students). Critical exposition may be a report on assigned readings/viewings, while the performance skill must be a creative project that responds to a particular concern of this seminar. Collaborations are encouraged.I think it is a good idea to set these up early, but I also understand that the seminar itself will create new opportunities and so I will try to remain flexible. I also expect intelligent participation in class discussion each week. Absences are unwise. But if you are ill please alert me and/or Gigi in advance of the seminar meeting. Finally, all students are required to post at least three questions or comments on the Coursework site. At least one must be submitted by 27 January. Please feel free to post more than three times. I especially welcome comments asking for clarifications of any readings or responses to previous classes. Please feel free to ask each other questions, or extend remarks we were unable to complete during the class meeting. The presentations will count for about 25% of your overall grade and the other tasks will count for about 10%.

This course, like all Stanford courses, observes all aspects of the Stanford Honors Code.

Students with Documented Disabilities
Students who may need an academic accommodation based on the impact of a disability must initiate the request with the Office of AccessibleEducation (OAE). Professional staff will evaluate the request with required documentation, recommend reasonable accommodations, andprepare an Accommodation Letter for faculty dated in the current quarter in which the request is being made. Students should contact the OAE assoon as possible since timely notice is needed to coordinate accommodations. The OAE is located at 563 Salvatierra Walk (phone: 723-1066,URL:

Books to Purchase (available in the Bookstore):

J.L. Austin, How to do things with Words?
Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim
Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc.

Class Schedule

6 January 2016: Introduction to class, brief lecture, introduction of seminar members: Please come to class prepared to discuss these two readings, both available on coursework:

Readings:

Jon McKenzie: "The Efficacy of Cultural Performance." Perform –or Else!
Shannon Jackson, “Professing Performance: Disciplinary Genealogies.” TDR: Spring, 2001: p. 84-95.

13 January 2016: The Claims of Performance: An Overview of Some Disciplinary Events

Readings:

Victor Turner, "Liminality and the Performative Genres," in John MacLoon, ed, Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle.
Richard Schechner, Between Theatre and Anthroloplogy, “Points of Contact.”
View: Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena, The Couple in The Cage. available at Stanford library.
Optional: Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.”in The Interpretation of Culture (on coursework)

For those interested in these general issues I also recommend the work of Barbara Browning on Samba; Sally Ness (on gesture, particularly in Bali and the Philipines) and Heike Roms (What’s Welsh for Performance?)

-Browning can be accessed here: (once logged in to Stanford Library account)

-Sally Ness’s Migration of Gesture can be accessed through ebrary by logging into your Stanford Library Account

20 January 2014: Linguistics and Philosophy

Readings:

J.L. Austin, How to do things with Words?
Shoshana Felman. The Scandal of the Speaking Body : Don Juan with J.l. Austin, Or Seduction In Two Languages.

Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003. PAGES: 3-11, 23-26, 41-46. Excerpts on Coursework

*If you are already familiar with these text, please read ahead as the reading for the following week is heavy.

27 January 2016 - **make sure you have posted on Coursework at least once

Derrida’s Response to Austin and Searle’s Response to Derrida and…

Readings: PLEASE READ IN THIS ORDER

Jacques Derrida:“Signature, Event, Context,” in Limited Inc. Northwestern University Press; 1st edition (January 1, 1988).
Jerry Graff: summary of Searle in Limited Inc. (pages 25-27).
John Searle, Reiterating the Difference: A Reply to Derrida.” Glyph 2, 1977.
Derrida: “Limited Inc, a, b, c…” and the afterword.

Optional: Mark Alfino, “Another Look at the Derrida-Searle Debate.’ Philosophy & Rhetoric, vol 24, 2 (1991): 143-52.

Good summary of issues in clearer prose than other texts.

3 February 2016: Where the performative goes: some important examples

**View Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A before class (Online:

Readings:

Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s, chapter 3, “Mediating Trio A,”
Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution.” 1992, reprinted in The Twentieth Century Performance Reader
Parker/Segwick, eds: Performance and Perfomativity: Intro and essays by: CathyCaruth and Elin Diamond. .

10 February 2016: Performance and Visual Art

Readings:

Harold Rosenberg "American Action Painters," 1952 "Artnews", reprinted in his collection, "Tradition and the New."
Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: “The Ontology of Performance.”
Peggy Phelan, “Lessons in Blindness from Samuel Beckett.’ PMLA, 119, 5 October 2004: 1279-88.
Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.” October, 110, 2004” 52-79.
Andrew Russeth: “The Fall of Relational Aesthetics”

17 February 2016 : Performance and Photography

*Paper Proposals Due: two page position paper defining topic and general summary of material you will be considering. Proposal can be somewhat speculative but needs to define clearly what the project aims to do and why you want to do it.

Readings:

Amelia Jones, “Presence in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation.” Art Journal, vol 56, 4 (Winter 1997).
Philip Auslander, “The Performativity of Performance Documentation.” PAJ 84 2006: 1-10.
Peggy Phelan, ed:“Violence and Rupture” in Live art in LA: Performance in Southern California, 1970 – 1983. Routledge: 2012.

Optional: Shannon Jackson: Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity. Cambridge University Press: 2004. Karen Shimakawa: “Whose History Is This, Anyway?’: Changing Geographies in Ping Chong’s East-West Quartet” from National Abjection

24 February 2016: The Performance of Death

Readings:

Sophocles: Antigone:
Butler: Antigone’s Claim
Lacan: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, seminar II, “A Commentary on Sophocles’s Antigone” 243-290

Optional: Bonnie Honig: “Ismene’s Forced Choice: Sacrifice and Sorority in Sophocles’ Antigone” in Arethusa 44. John Hopkins University Press: 2011 pp 29-68. Sharon Patricia Holland, “I’m in the Zone’ : Bill T. Jones, Tupac Shakur, and the (Queer) Art of Death” in Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black Subjectivity. Durham: Duke Univeristy Press, 2000.

2 March 2016 : The Complexities of Race and Sexuality

Readings

Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: “Scriptive Things” and “The Scripts of Black Dolls.”
Shoshana Felman. The Scandal of the Speaking Body : Don Juan with J.l. Austin, Or Seduction In Two Languages. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003. PAGES: 48-58. Excerpts on Coursework

Jose Munoz, “Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect in Ricardo Bracho’s The Sweetest Hangover (and other STDs).” Theatre Journal, 52, 1 March 2000: 67-79.

Jabukiak, “Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun in Poland.” Theatre Journal December 2011.
Optional: Lanser and Warhol: Intro to Theory Unbound: Feminist and Queer Narratology.

9 March 2016: New Directions

Readings:

Una Chaudhuri, “(De)facing the Animals: Zooesis and Performance.” TDR: a journal of performance studies. Vol. 51 2007
Jisha Menonand Patrick Anderson, Intro to Violence Performed.
MeiLing Cheng, Beijing Xingwei: Contemporary Chinese Time-Based Art excerpts: p. 106-125 and pages: 424-430.