Theatrical some-thing(s): history and performance in George Saunders' Lincoln in The Bardo and Suzan-Lori Parks' The America Play

• Main Author: Teong, Audrey Ke Ying
• Other Authors: Christopher Peter Trigg
• Format: Thesis-Master by Research
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2024
• Subjects: Arts and Humanities; Theatricality; American history; American literature; Contemporary literature; Performance; Theatre; Audience; Intermedia
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/181759
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

In 1993, The English Institute organized the conference, “Performativity and Performance”. A resulting 1995 publication, Performativity and Performance edited by Andrew Parker and Eve Sedgwick, retrospectively defined the conference and the essays presented as: “an attempt, at a moment full of possibilities, to take stock of the uses, implications, reimagined histories, and new affordances of the performativities that are emerging from this conjunction” (2). That “moment full of possibilities” of the 1990s saw a performative turn across the humanities and social sciences — at the turn to the twenty-first century, everything was a performance, including literature. This thesis investigates the “reimagined histories” born out of the performative work of George Saunders’ historical novel Lincoln in the Bardo and Suzan-Lori Parks’ The America Play. Though the differing mediums of novel and play are being compared in this study, the analysis will show a common thread of theatrical methods being employed in order to meditate on, and better apprehend, the processes of signification and meaning-making that already constitute the notions of an ‘American’ history and national identity. Ultimately the thesis argues that Saunders’ and Parks’ innovations make history into an act, and in the reader-audience’s engagement with the act, they will confront their own motivations for study.