Ökumenische Performance

This paper aims to explore both the textual performance and the cultural transfer of the Word of God from a Protestant (Christian Hild) and Catholic perspective (Juan Rego). Building on Pope Benedict XVI’s post-synodal apostolical exhortation Verbum Domini (§ 53), the variety of ritual performances of the Word will be analysed in terms of an “ecumenical performance” in order to explore the common theological foundation of both confessions

Biomitografia zakwestionowana. Sendlerowa. W ukryciu Anny Bikont jako performans tekstualny

The article is a performative interpretation of Sendlerowa. W ukryciu, a biography of Irena Sendlerowa by Anna Bikont. The author of the article presents the biography as a textual performance, whose aim is to contest the well-known image of Irena Sendlerowa (described within the category of biomythography introduced by Michael Benton). The author analyses how Anna Bikont distances herself from the biomythography and reintroduces the parts of Sendlerowa’s biography that had been omitted for years through being incompatible with the role of a national hero. She also evaluates the extent to which biography can serve as a critical tool with respect to Polish historical policy.

Introduction

The introduction explores how Bonnefoy rejects the conception of poetry as an act of representation or a subversion of linguistic codes in his early work but nonetheless struggles to find the right performative medium. Analysing a change that occurs in his poetry with the publication of Dans le leurre du seuil in 1975, it examines how he comes to perceive of writing as an inherently scenic exploration of the interactions that occur between linguistic, corporeal, and material forces in any gesture of communication. It also investigates how the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy develops a similar conception of textual performance when he conceives of the act of writing in ontological terms, as a way of actively experimenting with the dynamics of relation that bring existence into being.

In a World of Material Presence, Début et fin de la neige

This chapter investigates how Bonnefoy experiments with spacious ways of entering into contact with the material world in the snow poems of Début et fin de la neige, published in 1991. It compares how both Bonnefoy and Nancy use the biblical scene of Noli me tangere to reflect on the human desire to grasp a metaphysical essence and on the exhaustion of this desire by the endlessly shifting forms of material existence. Exploring how the loss of an absolute principle inspires a newly spacious conception of touch, the chapter analyses how both Bonnefoy and Nancy foreground the loose and airy interactions that occur between language, sense, and matter in the scene of writing. It explores how they present a spacious form of textual performance as an immersive way of exploring the world’s dynamics of exposition ‘de l’intérieur’.

Conclusion

This conclusion will explore how the late poem ‘L’Heure présente’ (2012) rearticulates the conception of ontological performance that Bonnefoy first develops in ‘La Terre’ (1975). It will analyse how Bonnefoy argues that poetry becomes an ontological performance when, having experienced the loss of any form of metaphysical absolute, and having been intimately exposed to the negativity of finite existence, we perceive value and sense in dynamic terms as the very praxis by which existence endlessly dissolves and opens itself up anew. Examining how Bonnefoy and Nancy both embrace this dynamic of opening and seek to make it felt within their writings, this conclusion will explore how the inherently ecstatic conception of textual performance that they develop resists the anthropocentrism of Heideggerian phenomenology and anticipates the turn towards the body and the material real that has occurred in recent French and Francophone poetry and philosophy.

Letters

Epistolary writing finds expression everywhere in Charles Brockden Brown’s career. We see it in his praxis, as he writes epistolary novels, periodical essays, and letters. We also see Brown articulate a theoretical explanation for his devotion to the form in his actual correspondence and his fiction. A letter writer, unlike a narrator, self-consciously constructs identity as a textual performance. And letters, unlike prose narratives, draw conspicuous attention to communicative exchange and to the ways that communication links (and fails to link) individuals and groups across time and space. This chapter focuses on two longer sequences in Brown’s correspondence and the epistolary fragment the “Henrietta Letters” as source material for Brown’s epistolary praxis and theory.

The Experiment of Experience: Ronald Sukenick and Mark Amerika's Performative Theory of Writing

The paper analyses some texts by the American author Ronald Sukenick (particularly the 1969 short story ‘The Death of the Novel’, included in a collection by the same name) and links them to some recent works by Mark Amerika in order to show the way experimental writing can be conveniently used as a means to investigate the nature and role of literature in critical transition periods. Sukenick started to write in the sixties, at a time in which a prevailing feeling of the novel's exhaustion dominated, and experimented a new kind of non-mimetic, experiential writing – literature performed as an extemporaneous event and an embodied experience – that Amerika was to foreground later, in the period in which literature was being ferried to the digital world. The two authors (and both professors), who also collaborated on some projects, seem to share the same penchant for an acrobatic (con)fusion of storytelling and theoretical and critical analysis, and the result is a textual performance that situates the metacommentary as literary production.

@IKnowTheseWords: A Twitterbot Textual Performance

Twitterbots automate the process of tweeting. They proliferate the social network with messages crafted for hash tags, themes, or replies. @IKnowTheseWords is a bot that I created to assist me in automatically archiving my wordhord from the “OED Word of the Day” database as an online Twitter performance. As such, the bot is a helper-agent that serves words to my Twitter timeline, one day at a time. Consequently, it is essential that I talk back to the bot, letting it know (and anyone else who views these tweets and replies) which words should be included in my personal archive. This process will take years as the bot and I perform the tasks: Tweeting a word from the OED, sorting each word, and capturing those words that are part of my current vocabulary using a Twitter archiving Google spreadsheet. With two “I”s involved in the process of knowing—or not—these words, @IKnowTheseWords speaks predictably and intelligently as a bot and randomly, with culturally specific musings as the “I” who replies to each tweet. In this case study I arrive at a philosophical understanding of how the project made a theoretical pivot as a result of its current processing and performance with emerging media tools.