The How of Literature

In a challenging article that starts not from the conventional Western literary canon but from traditional Japanese theatre, Andrew Gerstle (2000:43) has raised the interesting question of whether the concept of “performance literature ” might be illuminating as an analytic and comparative tool when approaching the literatures of Africa and Asia. Further light on this has been shed by the impressive crosscultural range of the articles in this volume of Oral Tradition (20) and the comparative and interdisciplinary workshops that gave rise to them. My article also follows up Gerstle’s question, seeing it as of potential relevance not just for Africa or Asia but also for any literary forms in which performance has a part and thus for theories of “literature ” more generally. 1 It is a question well worth addressing. For despite the now-accepted problematizing of the concepts of “text ” and of “literature, ” conventional approaches to studying literature and literary theory still regularly bypass performance. As pointed out directly or indirectly in several of the articles here (notably those by Peter Middleton [2005] and John Miles Foley [2005]) the implicit starting point still seems to be that the defining heart of “literature ” lies in “texts, ” prototypically texts in writing; and that this is how and where literature exists. Most textbooks and glossaries on literature contain little or nothing about the complex performed aspects of literature in the sense of its realization as a publicly enacted display in the here and now; 1 My paper draws heavily on presentations, discussions, and follow-up interchanges related to the four comparative and interdisciplinary workshops on “Literature and Performance, ” organized by Andrew Gerstle and Rosalind Thoma