Tom Lavazzi

Off the Page: Literary and Cultural Criticism as Multimedia Performance

Off the Page blends lyric, theoretic/philosophic, autobiographical and documentary forms of writing, and then plays on these forms in the arrangement, structure, and visual appearance of the text while also extending this textual performance “off the page” into multimedia mise en scene. The book’s approach to literary and cultural criticism is based on a synthesis of tendencies in postmodern critical and creative writing. Since the 1960s and 1970s, inspired partly by early experiments with intermedia art (especially performances by the international alliance of composers and visual artists, Fluxus) and the advent in America of “ethnopoetics” (investigations into the artistic and/or ritual practices of non-mainstream ethnic cultures – especially Native American – within Western culture), an emphasis on text as performance has emerged. However, while the avant-garde of American poetics in the post WWII era has been concerned with performing texts, many postmodern American and European literary, cultural, and performance critics and theorists have concentrated on experimentation with textual performance–performative writing.

Challenging, elusive, and brilliant as such creative approaches to critical writing are, the majority of them are textual interventions that stage themselves on the printed page – the ampitheatre of performative criticism, rather than semiotically hybrid, multimedia enactments. As defined by this collection, performative criticism operates in a somewhat broader formal arena to realize the full potential of mise en scene, or multimedia critical “happenings” (interpretive audio-visual environments integrating image, gesture, sound, music, lighting, voice and objects as well as the spoken and written word), as a strategy for literary and cultural hermeneutics.

Tom Lavazzi is a Professor of English at CUNY-Kingsborough and directs the critical performance group TEZ: http://www.tezperformance.org. His poetry and criticism appear in such journals as American Poetry Review, Postmodern Culture, and Women in Performance, among others.

Published by Parlor Press

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