Call For Papers: Collection of Essays on Oratory and Performance in 19th
Century America

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"Performing America: Essays on 19th Century American Oratory"

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I am currently soliciting contributions for a collection of essays on
performance in nineteenth-century American oratorical cultures.
Specifically, I am seeking approaches from a variety of disciplines,
including American Studies, Classics, Communications, English, History,
Performance Studies, Rhetoric, or interdisciplinary approaches to the
relation of performance of performativity to theories, practices, or
individuals involved in nineteenth-century American oratory.

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Among the current, tentative contributors are Steven Mailloux and Sandra
Gustafson.=20

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This project assumes the central importance of public speaking in the
lives of peoples living in the Americas in the nineteenth century.
Attending to the multiply ways that public speaking was a part of the
everyday lives of nineteenth-century Americans, proposed essays in this
volume should address the relations among performance, performativity,
and the art and practice of public speaking. Moreover, it is my hope
that the essays will question the ways that developing notions of
American identity (the ways that Americans themselves conceived of and
imagined their membership in the nation) were intimately related to
public performances of selfhood practiced in public speaking. While
these performative notions of American identity were often hegemonic,
they were also quite frequently subverted, because they were performed.
Thus, I am seeking essays that attend to the many voices and
performances that were not immediately recognized within dominant
notions of American selfhood, within historical studies of American
oratory, or within the hegemonic notions of how an orator should speak
and behave on the speaker's platform, as well as to new approaches to
the figures most traditionally associated with nineteenth century
American oratory. =20

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I invite completed works or chapter proposals on questions addressing or
related to the following topics on nineteenth-century American oratory:

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-the orator as performer of national, raced, gendered, classed
subjectivities

-specific speeches where the speaker's performance, not the text, is the
focus of the analysis

-space/place as a problematic in public speaking

-"Puritan origins" of ideas about oratory

-oratory's troubled relation to theater

-examination of performance in reform movements (Temperance, Suffrage,
Abolition)

-itinerant speakers and performance

-democracy and performance

-the civic ideal and performance

-public speaking as a mode of self-representation

-performance and 19th century teaching of rhetoric

-receptions of orators

-how attention to performance effects the study of public speaking
before 1900

-theorizations of relation of performance to performativity in oratory

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Please send essay proposals (250 - 500 words) or completed works (25
pages) and one-page CV's by July 1, 2004. Completed first drafts of
contributions will be expected by September 1, 2004. Email submissions
preferred in MS Word attachment.

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Address all correspondence and/or questions to:

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Jeffrey Rhyne, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of English

Department of English

Indiana University South Bend

1700 Mishawaka Ave.

South Bend, IN 46634

574-520-4305

jmrhyne_at_iusb.edu=20

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Jeff Rhyne

Assistant Professor

Department of English

Indiana University South Bend

574-237-4305 (office)

574-237-4538 (fax)

<mailto:jmrhyne_at_iusb.edu> =20

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Received on Mon Jun 07 2004 - 00:37:51 EDT