Performing Autobiography

Performing Autobiography
Author: Katrina M. Powell
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2021-06-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030645983

Performing Auto/biography: Narrating a Life as Activism analyzes the rhetorical strategies employed in five authors’ auto/biographical texts, examining their representations of identities and the public implications of writing individual identity. Exploring the ways race, class, culture, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality might affect the form(s) in which writers choose to write (e.g., memoir, fictional autobiography, poetry), questions how autobiographers challenge notions of genre, truth, and representation. This builds on the argument that constructing identity is a Performing Autobiography performance, one that can simultaneously use and subvert traditional notions of rhetoric and genre. By examining the auto/biographical texts of Zora Neale Hurston, Audre Lorde, Dorothy Allison, Joyce Johnson, and Shirley Geok-lin Lim together, the book theorizes self-representation and genres as rhetorical performances, and therefore their texts can be seen as “performative auto/biography”—transgressive archives where readers are asked to consider their own identities and act accordingly. In doing so, this book contributes to growing theories in feminist rhetorics and auto/biography studies, arguing that these performative genres advocate for life narratives as political and social activism.

Performing Autobiography

Performing Autobiography
Author: Jennifer Stephenson
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2013-06-17
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1442660651

In Performing Autobiography, Jenn Stephenson presents an innovative new approach to autobiography studies that links the growing field of research to drama. Stephenson’s analysis engages with performance histories to demonstrate the extent to which the dramatic form, which recasts autobiography as ambiguously fictive, ensures that the experience of the plays remains open to revision, alteration, and interpretation. As such, Performing Autobiography understands this form not to be the impossible documentation of the backward-looking narrative of one’s life, but rather an evolving process of self-creation and transformation. Stephenson explores the autobiographical form by analysing seven works by Canadian playwrights written and performed between 1999 and 2009, including Judith Thompson’s Perfect Pie, Daniel MacIvor’s In On It, and Timothy Findley’s Shadows. Her analysis encourages us to see autobiography as a uniquely political act, one that, where enacted on stage, illustrates the variety of ways that self-reflection and interpretation has an expanding role in contemporary culture.

Performing Autobiography

Performing Autobiography
Author: Jenn Stephenson
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2013-01-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 144264446X

Investigates the use of plays as a form of autobiography, looking at how the line between real-life and fiction can become blurred.

Voices Made Flesh

Voices Made Flesh
Author: Lynn C. Miller
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2003
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780299184247

Fourteen bold, dynamic, and daring women take the stage in this collection of women's lives and stories. Individually and collectively, these writers and performers speak the unspoken and perform the heretofore unperformed. The first section includes scripts and essays about performances of the lives of Gertrude Stein, Georgia O'Keeffe, Mary Church Terrell, Charlotte Cushman, Anaïs Nin, Calamity Jane, and Mary Martin. The essays consider intriguing interpretive issues that arise when a woman performer represents another woman's life. In the second section, seven performers--Tami Spry, Jacqueline Taylor, Linda Park-Fuller, Joni Jones, Terri Galloway, Linda M. Montano, and Laila Farah--tell their own stories. Ranging from narrrative lectures (sometimes aided by slides and props) to theatrical performances, their works wrest comic and dramatic meaning from a world too often chaotic and painful. Their performances engage issues of sexual orientation, ethnicity, race, loss of parent, disability, life and death, and war and peace. The volume as a whole highlights issues of representation, identity, and staging in autobiographical performance. It examines the links among theory and criticism of women's autobiography, feminist performance theory, and performance practice.

Theatre and Autobiography

Theatre and Autobiography
Author: Sherrill Grace
Publisher: Talonbooks
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2006
Genre: Drama
ISBN:

This groundbreaking exploration of a wide range of contemporary theorists and playwrights covers an extraordinary breadth of styles and performances.

Interfaces

Interfaces
Author: Sidonie Smith
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 500
Release: 2002
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780472068142

Charts the ways that woman artists have represented themselves and their life stories

My Way

My Way
Author: Paul Anka
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2013-04-09
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1250035201

A teen idol of the 1950s who virtually invented the singer/songwriter/heartthrob combination that still tops pop music today, Paul Anka rocketed to fame with a slew of hits-from "Diana" to "Put Your Head on my Shoulder"-that earned him a place touring with the major stars of his era, including Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Buddy Holly. He wrote Holly's last hit, and just missed joining the rocker on his final, fatal plane flight. Anka also stepped in front of the camera in the teen beach-party movie era, scoring the movies and romancing their starlets, including Annette Funicello. When the British invasion made his fans swoon for a new style of music-and musician--Anka made sure he wasn't conquered. A rapier-canny businessman and image-builder who took his career into his own hands-just as he had from the very beginning, swiping his mother's car at fourteen to drive himself, underage, to his first gigs in Quebec-Anka toured the world until he could return home in triumph. A charter member of the Rat Pack, he wrote the theme music for The Tonight Show as well as his friend Frank Sinatra's anthem "My Way". By the 1970s, a multi-decade string of pop chart-toppers, including "Puppy Love" and "(You're) Having My Baby", cemented his status as an icon. My Way is bursting with rich, rollicking stories of the business and the people in Anka's life: Elizabeth Taylor, Dodi Fayed, Tom Jones, Michael Jackson, Adnan Khashoggi, Little Richard, Brooke Shields, Johnny Roselli, Sammy Davis, Jr., Brigitte Bardot, Barnum & Bailey Circus acrobats, and many more. Anka is forthcoming, funny and smart as a whip about the business he's been in for almost six decades. My Way moves from New York to Vegas, from the casino stage to backstages all over the world. It's the most entertaining autobiography of the year.

Lives in Play

Lives in Play
Author: Ryan Claycomb
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2012-08-08
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0472118404

Lives in Play explores the centrality of life narratives to women’s drama and performance from the 1970s to the present moment. In the early days of second-wave feminism, the slogan was “The personal is the political.” These autobiographical and biographical “true stories” have the political impact of the real and have also helped a range of feminists tease out the more complicated aspects of gender, sex, and sexuality in a Western culture that now imagines itself as “postfeminist.” The book’s scope is broad, from performance artists like Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, and Bobby Baker to playwrights like Suzan-Lori Parks, Maria Irene Fornes, and Sarah Kane. The book links the narrative tactics and theatrical approaches of biography and autobiography and shows how theater artists use life writing strategies to advance women’s rights and remake women’s representations. Lives in Play will appeal to scholars in performance studies, women’s studies, and literature, including those in the growing field of auto/biography studies. “ A fresh perspective and wide-ranging analysis of changes in feminist theater for the past thirty years . . . a most welcome addition to the literature on theater, in particular scholarship on feminist practices.” —Choice “Helps sustain an important history by reviving works of feminist theater and performance and giving them a new and refreshing context and theorical underpinning . . . considering 1970s performance art alongside more conventional play production.” —Lesley Ferris, The Ohio State University

I Foresee My Life

I Foresee My Life
Author: Suzanne Oakdale
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780803222526

I Foresee My Life is a study of the ritual performances of the Kayabi, a Brazilian indigenous people, during the 1990s. Kayabi rituals are distinct in that they center on the autobiographical narratives of living people. Suzanne Oakdale discusses these autobiographical performances in the context of shamanic cures, mortuary rites, and political oratory. In each ritual, leaders describe how some of the dramatic environmental, economic, and political changes taking place in the Amazon have affected them. For example, the Kayabi have moved from a heavily colonized area to a reservation and as a result have had to address different facets of Indian identity, new forms of commodity consumption, residence patterns, and leadership. As they narrate their lives in these rituals, leaders also give other participants ways to address some of the pressing issues in their own lives. Special emphasis is given to the emotional effects of narrative performances and how these accounts move people to identify with others, compel them to act in appropriate ways, or assuage their grief over a lost loved one. Oakdale analyzes autobiographical performances using insights from studies on ritual, life history, and linguistic anthropology to better understand Kayabi notions of self and person and the role these narrative expressions play in their social life. Richly textured with eyewitness accounts and indigenous voices, I Foresee My Life demonstrates the enduring power of indigenous performances today. Suzanne Oakdale is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of New Mexico-Albuquerque.

Performing Marginality

Performing Marginality
Author: Joanne R. Gilbert
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2004
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780814328033

An academic study of stand-up comedy performed by females. This will aid in the understanding of power structures in our society.