UID:
almafu_9959002729502883
Umfang:
1 online resource (238 p.)
ISBN:
1-299-41041-3
,
3-653-00209-5
Inhalt:
In the story of the three baseball umpires, two novice umpires compete in boasting how they respect «truth» and the way things «really» are. One says, «I call them the way I see them»; the other, trying to trump this remark, responds, «I call them the way they are». Then enters the third, most seasoned umpire, saying, «They aren’t, until I call them».〈BR〉 This book deals with two widely argued issues in literature criticism today, performativity and subjectivity. How do people become who they are? What scripts do they follow when they «do» gender, race, and sexuality? Tying into speech act theories and subjectivity theories, as well as gender, race, and sexuality studies, the author explores – through the close reading of several American texts – the many ways words make «things» in literature.
Anmerkung:
Description based upon print version of record.
,
TABLE OF CONTENTS; ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 7; INTRODUCTION 9; CHAPTER ONE: THE STRONG PERFORMATIVE 25; The performative: early history 25; Logos, the originary instance of the strong performative: some Biblical examples 31; A performative genre par excellence: the declaration and the manifesto 38; Word power (Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Norman Mailer, 'The Time of Her Time') 45; Alternative realities as performative creations (Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger; Ambrose Bierce, 'An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge') 50
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The language games of irony and make-believe (Edward Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) 59CHAPTER TWO: EXTENDING THE PERFORMATIVE 71; Performativity in theories of the subject 73; Performance and performative constructions of the subject 85; Performativity of reading and writing 89; Presupposition 92; Presupposition and the (performative) production of meaning 93; CHAPTER THREE: PERFORMING GENDER 97; Recipes for men and women: gender as (hetero)sexualized performance 103; Gender performances and performative genders 106
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Performances of gender compliance (Henry James, Daisy Miller, The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie; Kate Chopin, The Awakening, 'A Pair of Silk Stockings'; Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth) 108; The performance of cultural codes: the Southern woman (William Faulkner, 'A Rose for Emily'; Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire; Flannery O'Connor, 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find') 120; Some misogynist reversals (Jonathan Swift, 'A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed,' T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land) 129
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Performative genders: non-compliance with social norms (Gertrude Stein, Three Lives Willa Cather, My Ántonia; Djuna Barnes, Nightwood; H.D., HERmione; Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe) 131; CHAPTER FOUR: PERFORMING SEXUALITY 151; The new kid on the block of binary thinking: conceptualizing the homosexual 153; The resisting narrative: homosexual subtext beneath the heterosexual text (Henry James, 'The Beast in the Jungle,' 'In the Cage') 156; CHAPTER FIVE: PERFORMING PASSING 167; Gender passing (Mark Twain, Is He Dead?; Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita; David Hwang, M. Butterfly) 168
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The convergence of categories: race and class passing (James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man Nella Larsen, Passing; Philip Roth, The Human Stain) 182; CONCLUSION 201; WORKS CITED 205; INDEX 225
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English
Weitere Ausg.:
ISBN 3-631-58982-4
Sprache:
Englisch
DOI:
10.3726/978-3-653-00209-6
