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International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy

Book | Chapter

208118

Rhetoric in ruins

performance studies, speech, and the "americanization" of the American university

Shannon Jackson

pp. 71-88

Abstract

The posthumously published The University in Ruins was Bill Readings's attempt to reflect on the university's position as a social institution and occupant of an unstable zone in the increasingly globalized world of higher education. To reflect on the university in this way meant focusing one's attention less on the content and micro-moves within "the culture wars' of the 1990s and more on analyzing the social, cultural, and institutional status of those debates themselves. Readings's book and other works have been helpful to me in my own attempts to come to terms with the institutional place of performance studies in higher education now.1 My charge in this chapter is a little more precise for the purposes of this collection; it is to give both local and abstract accounts of some different kinds of performance studies pedagogy that developed in the United States throughout the twentieth century, practices signified by the gently mocked term "oral interpretation," whose history differs from the histories of PS that are most often told. In coming to terms with oral interpretation — what some call the "Northwestern tradition" of American performance studies education, or what I and others have called the "NCA tradition" — I will be tracking a rhetorical genealogy that simultaneously requires a rhetorical stance on itself. Indeed, it might well be this rhetorical stance — one that emphasizes not only what is valued in a field but how we do our valuing — that is the most vital element of the NCA tradition.

Publication details

Published in:

McKenzie Jon, Roms Heike, Wee CJW-L (2010) Contesting performance: global sites of research. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.

Pages: 71-88

DOI: 10.1057/9780230279421_5

Full citation:

Jackson Shannon (2010) „Rhetoric in ruins: performance studies, speech, and the "americanization" of the American university“, In: J. Mckenzie, H. Roms & Wee (eds.), Contesting performance, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 71–88.