Writing Performance, Identity, and Everyday Life invites the reader into Ronald J. Pelias world of artistic and everyday performance. Calling upon a broad range of qualitative methods, these selected writings from Pelias submerge themselves in the evocative and embodied, in the material and consequential, often creating moving accounts of their topics.
The book is divided into four sections: Foundational Logics, Performance, Identity, and Everyday Life. Part I addresses the methodological underpinnings of the book, focusing on the touchstones that inform Pelias work: performative, autoethnographic, poetic, and narrative methods. These directions push the researcher toward empathic engagement, a leaning toward others; using the literary to evoke the cognitive and affective aspects of experience; and an ethical sensibility located in social justice. Parts IIIV focus on artistic and everyday life performances, including discussions of the disciplinary shift from the oral interpretation of literature to the field of performance studies; empathy and the actors process; conceptions of performance; the performance of race, gender, and sexuality; and performances in interpersonal relations and academic circles.
By the end, readers will see Pelias demonstrate the power of qualitative methods to engage and to present alternative ways of being. Pelias work shows us how to understand and feel the evocative strength of thinking performatively.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: A Way In
Part I: Foundational Logics
Chapter
1. Performative Inquiry: Embodiment and Its Challenges
Chapter
2. Writing Autoethnography: The Personal, Poetic, and Performative as
Compositional Strategies
Chapter
3. Performative Writing as Scholarship: An Argument, An Anecdote
Chapter
4. Performative Writing: The Ethics of Representation in Form and
Body
Chapter
5. Writing into Position: Strategies for Composition and Evaluation
Chapter
6. Pledging Personal Allegiance to Qualitative Inquiry
Part II: Performance
Chapter
7. A Paradigm for Performance Studies with James Vanoosting
Chapter
8. Empathy: Some Implications of Social Cognition Research for
Interpretation Study
Chapter
9. Performance Studies: Meditations and Mediations
Chapter
10. Performance Is
Chapter
11. Confessions of an Apprehensive Performer
Chapter
12. Toward a Poetic Phenomenology of Performance with Lesa Lockford
Chapter
13. Seductions
Part III: Identity
Chapter
14. The DEF Comedy Jam, bell hooks, and Me
Chapter
15. My Bodys Placement: An Autoethnographic Account of Communicative
Practice
Chapter
16. Making My Masculine Body Behave
Chapter
17. Jarheads, Girly Men, and the Pleasures of Violence
Chapter
18. A Personal History of Lust on Bourbon Street
Part IV: Everyday Life
Chapter
19. Remembering Vietnam
Chapter
20. The Critical Life
Chapter
21. The Academic Tourist: An Autoethnography
Chapter
22. Always Dying: Living Between Da and Fort
Chapter
23. For Father and Son: An Ethnodrama with No Catharsis
Chapter
24. Remains
Chapter
25. The End of an Academic Career: The Desperate Attempt to Hang On
and Let Go
Ronald J. Pelias is currently teaching part-time in the theatre program at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His most recent books exploring qualitative methods are Leaning: A Poetics of Personal Relations (2011), Performance: An Alphabet of Performative Writing (2014), and If the Truth Be Told: Accounts in Literary Forms (2016).
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