"Talking Across Disciplines: A Roundtable Discussion on 19th-century
American Oratorical Performance"
Proposed Roundtable for the Annual Meeting of the American Studies
Association, “The Local and the Global,” November 14-17, 2002, Houston,
Texas
Deadline: 1/8/02
Historians, literary scholars, and rhetoricians have been separately
engaged with the study of nineteenth-century American oratory. Jay
Fliegelman, Nancy Ruttenberg, Sandra Gustafson, Nan Johnson, and Carla
Peterson have each contributed important multidisciplinary studies on
the significance of oratory to early American identity. They suggest
that American identity may be founded, in Fliegelman’s words, on a
“performative understanding of selfhood.” I propose a
transdisciplinary discussion on oratorical performance qua performance.
I am looking for scholars who have been researching the field of early
American oratory from diverse disciplines, including Classics, English,
History, Philosophy, Rhetoric and Composition, and Theatre/Performance
Studies.
Questions for the roundtable to address include (but are not limited
to): How does one “read” oratorical performance? What is the relation
between the body and the voice in oratorical performance? In what
“local and global” forums might we look to study the multiple forms that
public speech took during the 19th century in order to contest the
hegemonizing study of the “Great (White Male) Orators”? What values are
embedded in both dominant cultural and resistive cultural practices of
public speaking? How do these diverse ideologies of performance relate
to the ideologies of U.S. expansionism, of U.S. slavery, of racial and
identity formation in the United States, and of American literary
practices and aesthetics?
Answering ASA’s challenge to broaden presentation modes, I envision a
combination between the “On-line format” and the “Dialogue format.” I
will request short papers one month before the conference to be posted
on the Internet. Discussion at the session will build from those
papers.
Please send a one-page vita and a one-page proposal by January 8, 2002,
to:
Jeffrey Rhyne
Dept. of English
University of California, Riverside
Riverside, CA 92521
Email submissions preferred to: jmrhyne@citrus.ucr.edu
===============================================
From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List
CFP@english.upenn.edu
Full Information at
http://www.english.upenn.edu/CFP/
or write Erika Lin: elin@english.upenn.edu
===============================================
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Nov 25 2001 - 21:20:07 EST