Communication Studies

This essay pays homage to Leland Roloff by exploring the influence on Marshall McLuhan of his mother Elsie Hall McLuhan’s career as a platform elocutionist, bridging periods in the history of Performance Studies. Canadian-born Elsie Hall McLuhan (1889-1961) studied elocution and expression and toured her platform recitals in the 1920s and 1930s. Her programs included solo performances of plays, character sketches (some in dialect), and other works of literature ranging from lowbrow to highbrow. Accounts of Elsie McLuhan’s performance career and her correspondence with her son provide evidence of influence on her son’s intellectual development.

William Faulkner's 1930 novel "As I Lay Dying" can be read as a ventriloquistic performance by the character Darl, a performing consciousness who role-plays the other voices in the novel in an effort to resolve his fragmented self into a cohesive whole, an effort which ultimately fails and ends in madness. The essay (1) defines performing consciousness; (2) presents evidence that Darl's is a performing consciousness; and (3) considers the implications of Darl's performance in terms of shamanism or ecstatic role-playing. Darl attempts to fulfill the function and purpose of a shaman and demonstrates shamanic processes of ecstatic performance; his failure to achieve a cohesive self mirrors Faulkner's successful negotiation of his own identity as an artist.

Edith Wharton's fiction was adapted for the stage in her lifetime and beyond in the shifting context of a U.S. theater in transition. This essay is Chapter 14 in "Edith Wharton in Context," edited by Laura Rattray (New York: Cambridge UP, 2012).

On May 15 2008 the California Supreme Court made the unexpected and historical decision to allow same-sex marriages in the state. By using the universal concept of human rights to justify their decision the California Supreme Court moved the issue into more protected and harder ...