Intrecci ricreativi tra testo e performance

Whether ubiquitously invoked as “travelling concepts” in the fluid “post-age” scenario of global and digital interactions or denigrated as inflationary and all-too-fashionable labels, performance and performativity have increasingly, even perhaps equivocally, contributing to a radical reconfiguration of identity and culture in terms of living, embodied practices and contingent, situated events, thus calling for a renewed interest in the ways in which texts “do things with words”. Starting from this fluid and contested framework, this paper draws on what Dwight Conquergood calls the “heuristic potential” of performance in order to discuss both his meta-disciplinary reflections and his specific analysis of the elocutionary dimension of literary and cultural communication. His sustained focus on the tense intersections between narrative and “vocal embodiment” and his own formation in the field of “oral interpretation” may prove fruitful to reflect on how deeply both literary production and reception are inextricably embedded in the performativity of the human voice, thus urging to discard the hegemony of abstract text-centric paradigms but without ignoring the cultural and historical density of such ephemeral elocutionary, re-citational practices. The final part of the paper briefly points to the crucial question of agency and affect implicated in the performativity of any language as artfully staged in Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize Speech and Lecture.