Page, Stage, and Beyond: Perspectives on Performance and Theatricality

Boston College is pleased to announce its Second Biennial English Graduate Conference, “Page, Stage, and Beyond: Perspectives on Performance and Theatricality”, to be held on 28 March 2009. Our keynote speaker for the event will be Prof. Martin Puchner of Columbia University. He has published widely on theater, philosophy, and modernism, and his most recent book, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes (Princeton, 2006), was recently awarded the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize. Drawing on Antonin Artaud’s description of theater as something “which is in no thing, but which makes use of everything”, we are looking for original, thought-provoking 15-minute presentations that explore the dynamic nature of performance and theatricality. We invite papers that not only examine performance and theater but also deal with the way performance and theatricality are represented across time, place, and various genres—including traditional staged performance; performance and visual art; live and recorded music; film, television, video, and the Internet; prose and poetry; and rituals, ceremonies, and monuments. We invite surprises and strongly encourage scholars to broadly define the nature of theater and performance. At the same time, we welcome individual submissions that offer a fresh focus on a text(s) through a critical lens provided by canonical theorists such as Joseph Roach, Judith Butler, Laura Mulvey, and Stephen Greenblatt. An ideal submission would explore one or more of the following questions:
• How do the performative and theatrical elements of speech acts function in politics and society? In what ways is acting always “acting out”?
• How does performance implicate its audience? What is the role and responsibility of the spectator?
• What are the possibilities or pitfalls of using theatricality as a metaphor to bridge historical and literary studies?
• How is performance affected by its means of transmission—whether by stage, print, manuscript, video, or cultural phenomenon?
• How are performance and theatricality manifested in everyday life? How do quotidian acts elevate themselves to ritual, ceremony, and rite?

Please send an abstract by 15 January 2009 to colloq@bc.edu.