Performativity and Performance

by Andrew Parker (Editor), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

From the age of Aristotle to the age of AIDS, writers, thinkers, performers and activists have wresteled with what "performance" is all about. At the same moment, "performativity"--a new concept in language theory--has become a ubiquitous term in literary studies. This volume grapples with the nature of these two key terms whose traces can be found everywhere: in the theatre, in the streets, in philosophy, in questions of race and gender, and in the sentences we speak.

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, Theory

248 pages, Paperback

First published October 24, 1995

About the author

Andrew Parker is a zoologist who has worked on Biomimetics. He worked at the Natural History Museum in London, and from 1990 to 1999 he was a Royal Society University Research Fellow and is a Research Associate of the Australian Museum and University of Sydney and from 1999 until 2005 he worked at the University of Oxford. As of 2018 Parker is a Visiting Research Fellow at Green Templeton College where he is head of a Research Team into photonic structures and eyes.

Reviews

[Amanda Grace · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interacting with performativity as a linguistic concept was new for me—ignorant as I was of the term's etymology—and the collected essays from this seminar tend, for newcomers, toward the inaccessible, mostly due to side-winding arguments (and occasionally due to showmanship in lexicon). However, all the articles included here conveyed ideas I found fruitful to ponder on, regardless of my conviction to agree or disagree with the authors' theses.