Beyond Spalding Grays iconic position as a confessional performer, he serves as a representative character for a culture increasingly consumed with both self-reflection and self- disclosure, where confessional speech is understood as somehow more authentic or pure than other forms of discourse. I argue that confession is a performative, not a constative utterance (a doing not a saying) and that it is a productive not a libratory act; it does not free an already existing self, but produces a new self in the act of performance. Consequently, though the confessional performance style typified by Gray can be aesthetically compelling for audiences and politically constructive for performers, the power dynamics between performer and audience in confessional performance are far from benign. Care must be taken to ensure that the act of confession is ethically sound and artistically/intellectually productive.
I begin by placing Grays work into a historical context. In Chapter 2, I trace some problematics of the confessional voice in academic, literary, religious, legal and psychoanalytic contexts. Chapter 3 examines some of the contentious issues of the confessional voice in Spalding Grays work, offering a reading of Its a Slippery Slope from a Foucaultian post-structuralist perspective. Finally I offer a reading of my own confessional performance work (inspired by and in response to Grays) which has been created using the emerging analytical idiom of haunting, and which I believe to be capable of resolving some of the generic problems of confessional discourse outlined in my study.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LSU/oai:etd.lsu.edu:etd-04052005-105607 |
| Date | 05 April 2005 |
| Creators | Terry, David Price |
| Contributors | Joshua Gunn, Tracy Stephenson-Shaffer, Michael Bowman |
| Publisher | LSU |
| Source Sets | Louisiana State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-04052005-105607/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached herein a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to LSU or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below and in appropriate University policies, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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