Performance

This volume presents a selection of papers given at the International Conference on Performance at the University of Lausanne in May 1997. Performance is, of course, a term native to the world of theatre, and in this traditional sense it is as alive as ever, as several of the contributions by theatre specialists demonstrate. But this collection of essays also shows that in recent years the term has been fruitfully applied to a wide range of additional subjects. It presents in a genuinely interdisciplinary fashion an excellent survey of this new development. Performance is applied to literature (with essays on canonical writers ranging from Margery Kempe to Joyce and Wallace Stevens) as well as to linguistics (with contributions covering such diverse fields as dialectology, advertising and computational linguistics). In several essays, the notion of performance throws new light on texts which combine orality with literacy, such as in Native American literature or Salman Rushdie`s novels. Other contributors argue for (or test the limits of) performance concepts to redefine the basic modalities of literature and science, which have been described by performance theorists as an arena in which writers perform with language and scientists stage their scientific theories.