Description

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Performance uses the alphabet as an organizational device to present a series of short pieces that approach performance from multiple perspectives and various compositional strategies. Pelias’s essays, poetry, dialogue, personal narratives, quick speculations, and other literary genres explore the key themes in this field, encapsulating the essence of performance studies for the novice and providing food for thought for the expert. Its brief, evocative, and reflexive pieces introduce performative writing as a method of research for those in performance and many other fields.

About the Author

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Ronald J. Pelias is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Speech Communication at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the author of numerous books on performance studies and performance methodologies, including Performance Studies: The Interpretation of Aesthetic Texts, 2e (Kendall Hunt 2007), Writing Performance: Poeticizing the Researcher's Body (Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), A Methodology of the Heart: Evoking Academic and Daily Life (AltaMira, 2004), and Leaning: A Poetics of Personal Relations (Left Coast 2011). In 2000, he received the Lilla A. Heston Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Interpretation and Performance Studies from the National Communication Association. In addition to numerous published articles and book chapters, he also publishes performance texts and poetry.

Praise For…

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"By means of a deceptively simple alphabetic structure, Pelias invites his readers to contemplate performance from a variety of positions: as performer, critic, student, teacher, and through his own. With the deft hand of a gentle and gracious poet, he captures performance in its myriad forms with acuity and concision in sentences that continually arrest the reader for their insight and profundity."
—Lesa Lockford, Bowling Green State University

"Ron Pelias’ Performance: An Alphabet of Performative Writing literally takes us A through Z into the deep experience and wisdom of one of the great performance and autoethnography methodologists of our time. Ron has created an accessible and lyrical text allowing the reader to go from A to Z or to dip in and out of this rich offering, each chapter a contained letter of praxis based wisdom. Pedagogically and interdisciplinarily invaluable for classroom and scholarly reference alike, Ron’s book adds to our methodological vocabulary with, dare I say, the philosophical and affective power of hisMethodology of the Heart. [This] will be the well-worn book sitting on our desk ready at hand as we write and perform ourselves into being."
—Tami Spry, St. Cloud State University

“Ron Pelias’ new book is at once light and profound, gentle and sharp, languid and pacy. Beautifully written, as always with Pelias, Performance: An Alphabet of Performative Writing provokes and delights in equal measure. I read it quickly, his crafted words drawing me in, prompting, nudging, affecting. This book's greatest gift? I am left wanting to write - and to write differently.”

— Jonathan Wyatt, University of Edinburgh

"The approach is brave. I connect with many of the entries, as a teacher and scholar of performance, but also as a human."

—Tracy Stephenson Shaffer, Text and Performance Quarterly