Oral Fixation or Oral Corrective? A Response to Larry Hurtado

2016 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelly R. Iverson

Over the last several decades, performance criticism has made significant headway as an interpretive method. However, in a recent issue of this journal, Larry Hurtado argues that the key assumptions of the movement ignore various historical realities regarding the use of texts in the ancient world. The following discussion offers a brief response to what Hurtado suggests are several ‘oversimplifications’. The essay argues that rather than being a ‘fixation’ as Hurtado maintains, the renewed focus on orality and performance is a corrective that helps to provide a broader understanding of how biblical texts were typically experienced in the ancient world.

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (6) ◽  
pp. 683-704
Author(s):  
Michelle Hayes ◽  
Kevin Filo ◽  
Caroline Riot ◽  
Andrea N. Geurin

Sport organizations regulate athletes' use of social media for many reasons including the protection of the organization's reputation. Several strategies have been introduced to minimize issues related to the negative consequences athlete social media use may present, yet whether these strategies also work to address social media distractions experienced by athletes during major sport events is not well known. Utilizing communication privacy management (CPM) theory, the purpose of the current research was to examine the aspects of social media that sport administrators perceive to be distracting to athletes and what support and management mechanisms are utilized to address such concerns during major sport events. Semistructured interviews ( N = 7) with Australian national sport organization (NSO) administrators were conducted. Sport administrators reported several aspects of social media that are perceived to distract athletes including personal and performance criticism and a fixation with social media profiles. Social media could also be used to manage athlete temperament. As a result, organizations highlighted both proactive and reactive communication boundaries and mechanisms that could be used to address concerns including content restrictions, best practice case studies, engaging in conversations, and monitoring. Opportunities for sport practitioners are described including conducting consultation sessions with athletes to better understand their needs regarding their social media use.


2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 350-393
Author(s):  
Pieter J.J. Botha

Abstract Orality/aurality is recognised by a growing number of scholars as a significant aspect of the context of New Testament texts. As part of the exploration of the oral features of New Testament texts some are turning to Greco-Roman storytelling and oratory, informed by performance studies. A selection of these explorations are discussed to introduce scholarship that attempts to identify various elements of performance events in the early church as a basis for re-thinking our ways of studying and our interpretations of the New Testament writings in their original context. The obstacles to such efforts are considerable, but some significant gains have been made. Focusing on research on the Gospel of Mark, this discussion shows how performance critical studies allow new insights into the origins of the Gospels, leading to interesting new and meaningful perspectives on the history of the early Jesus movement with specific attention to the role telling and presenting the Markan story played.


Shakespearean performance criticism has undergone a sea change in recent years, and strong tides of discovery are continuing to shift the contours of the discipline. The essays in this volume, written by scholars from around the world, reveal how these critical cross-currents are influencing the ways we now view Shakespeare in performance. Essays are divided into four groups. The first group interrogates how Shakespeare continues to achieve contemporaneity for Western audiences by exploring modes of performance, acting styles, and aesthetic choices that are regarded as experimental. The second group tackles the burgeoning field of reception: how and why audiences respond to performances, or actors to the conditions in which they perform; how immersive productions turn spectators into actors; how memory and cognition shape and reshape the performances we think we saw. The third group addresses the ways in which technology has altered our views of Shakespeare, both through the mediums of film and sound recording, and through digitalizing processes which have caused a profound reconsideration of what performance is and how it is accessed. The final group grapples with intercultural Shakespeare, considering not only matters of cultural hegemony and appropriation in a ‘global’ importation of non-Western productions to Europe and North America, but also how Shakespeare has been made ‘local’ in performances staged or filmed in African, Asian, and Latin American countries. Together, these groundbreaking essays attest to the richness and diversity of Shakespearean performance criticism as practised today, and point the way to critical continents not yet explored.


2002 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 313-324 ◽  
Author(s):  
Drew Milne

In this essay, Drew Milne suggests affinities between the dramatization of history in the work of John McGrath and Karl Marx. He shows how both Marx and McGrath refused to mourn the histories of Germany and Scotland as tragedies, but that differences emerge in the politics of McGrath's radical populism – differences apparent in McGrath's use of music, historical quotation, and direct address. McGrath's layered theatricality engages audience sympathies in ways that emphasize awkward parallels between modern and pre-modern Scotland, and this can lead to unreconciled tensions between nationalism and socialism which are constitutive of McGrath's plays. Drew Milne is the Judith E. Wilson Lecturer in Drama and Poetry, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Trinity Hall. He has published various articles on drama and performance, including essays on the work of August Boal, Samuel Beckett, and Harold Pinter, and is currently completing a book entitled Performance Criticism.


2013 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-22
Author(s):  
Lénart J. de Regt

In the last decade or so, the United Bible Societies have paid increasing attention to orality, features of orality in biblical texts, and what impact these should have on Bible translation. Articles appeared in The Bible Translator, an Orality Working Group was convened in 2008, a Source Text and Orality Workshop for Europe-Middle East translation consultants took place in January 2011, and an Intersemiotic Translation workshop was held in March 2011. Some of these findings have led the author to reflect on performance criticism in this contribution.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-41
Author(s):  
Diana Damian Martin

In his work titled ‘Dance Curves: On the Dances of Palucca’ (1926), Wassily Kandisky translates two postures of the German Expressionist choreographer Gret Palucca from photographs into line drawings. The drawings are a study, but they are neither pictorial, nor straightforwardly representational. Staging an encounter between Dance Curves and Hannah Arendt’s investigation into thinking as both an interrupted and interruptive activity, this essay argues for a poetics of appearance as it is constituted by nonconforming acts of critique.Negotiating conflicts that shape a politics of recognition for criticism which deliberately or implicitly refutes utility, I articulate a process of appearance of meaning with differential relation to modernist concerns for interpretation, dissenting from rationalist and objectivist traditions that have dominated theatre and performance criticism since the Enlightenment.  What happens when I disavow the drawings from the images, remove them from the source? Perhaps in such a place, we might find critique as a process of deliberately mishandled translation, as an occupation of an idea shifted elsewhere, as a displacement of meaning. Appearance shapes itself around slippages of attention that depart from the work of performance.In this essay, I turn to how these slippages fold outwards from the encounter, to the political nexus between performance and its world. In Arendt, I locate a means through which forms of thinking rendered as criticism constitute a resistant poetics to normative modes of paying attention, operating beyond what Bojana Kunst calls ‘the ready-made possibilities of discourse’ (2015, 13) under neoliberalism, that is, the ‘pre-established models of criticality and reflexivity’ to which art and artistic subjectivity often partake (ibid.) 


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