http://www.cgrobe.com/invited daily 0.75 2018-04-26 http://www.cgrobe.com/invited/2015/6/11/why-its-easier-to-act-with-a-telephone-than-a-man monthly 0.5 2015-06-11 http://www.cgrobe.com/invited/2015/2/25/on-book-the-performance-of-reading monthly 0.5 2015-06-11 http://www.cgrobe.com/invited/2015/10/13/why-its-easier-to-act-with-a-telephone-than-a-man monthly 0.5 2015-10-19 http://www.cgrobe.com/invited/2015/10/16/of-tv-actors-and-technodollies monthly 0.5 2015-10-16 http://www.cgrobe.com/invited/2015/10/16/performance-and-media monthly 0.5 2015-10-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1445275873886-G2JA0C8P1WJ4QM3LEC7A/image-asset.jpeg Invited - Performance and Media http://www.cgrobe.com/invited/2017/4/11/confession-in-the-age-of-aggregation-art-politics-and-the-self-of-social-media monthly 0.5 2017-08-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1502668189492-W0TKF9Z0EL3VFP97HITD/image-asset.jpeg Invited - Confession in the Age of Aggregation: Art, Politics, and the Self of Social Media http://www.cgrobe.com/invited/2018/5/7/first-fridays-the-art-of-confession monthly 0.5 2018-04-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1524754186207-JF6U9ES4488R887G26LB/Bookchin_MyMeds.jpg Invited - First Fridays: The Art of Confession http://www.cgrobe.com/invited/2018/5/14/the-art-of-the-ordeal-trump-abramovi-and-the-politics-of-performance monthly 0.5 2018-05-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1524754670010-ICLM94Y6B279VSUYDUXW/TrumpKaufmanGIF+2.gif Invited - The Artist Is President: 'Performance Art' and Other Keywords in the Age of Donald Trump http://www.cgrobe.com/invited/2018/5/15/public-conversation-the-art-of-confession monthly 0.5 2018-04-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1524755050883-J3UE1XGR79JBWRUCB8W5/grobe+comp+final+hi.jpg Invited - Public Conversation: "The Art of Confession" http://www.cgrobe.com/bookart daily 0.75 2015-10-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1433990266243-EHIVFNI2GD9R8HVZYY7H/DSCF6356.JPG The Lost Vowels of Sarah Siddons https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1433990266243-EHIVFNI2GD9R8HVZYY7H/DSCF6356.JPG The Lost Vowels of Sarah Siddons https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1433990318554-8CNGLKCBXLLJPTADVDK1/DSCF6360.JPG The Lost Vowels of Sarah Siddons https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1433990490338-XEI5VB265O0C3K4NWOL8/DSCF6382.JPG The Lost Vowels of Sarah Siddons https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1445022736302-QYDWZ37P0BTXT4Q0TJKW/image-asset.jpeg The Lost Vowels of Sarah Siddons - Documentation http://www.cgrobe.com/new-gallery daily 0.75 2023-10-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1675210656236-7FI4QD6D9YCHBW70AVAW/ELIZA_conversation.png Articles - The Programming Era: The Art of Conversation Design, from ELIZA to Alexa (in Post45) From the start, the problems posed by conversational AI were understood as both technical and artistic. Today, artists are being hired to build conversational interfaces and to shape the personalities of virtual agents. This essay analyzes the work that “conversation designers” do and re-reads ELIZA, the world’s first chatbot, through the eyes of the artists among them. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1675210656236-7FI4QD6D9YCHBW70AVAW/ELIZA_conversation.png Articles - The Programming Era: The Art of Conversation Design, from ELIZA to Alexa (in Post45) From the start, the problems posed by conversational AI were understood as both technical and artistic. Today, artists are being hired to build conversational interfaces and to shape the personalities of virtual agents. This essay analyzes the work that “conversation designers” do and re-reads ELIZA, the world’s first chatbot, through the eyes of the artists among them. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1675211253784-S9T25ZWO57COMDJ2VWH3/1891-hg-burning-lovborg-manuscript-fales.jpg Articles - “A Terrible Art of Sharpshooting at the Audience”: Teaching the Shock of Modernist Drama via the Play of Ideas (in Modern Drama) One of the hardest things to convey to present-day readers of modernist drama is the power it had to shock turn-of-the-century audiences. And yet we cannot simply cast ourselves as the world-weary counterparts to the naïfs and prudes of fin-de-siècle Europe, because historical time is more syncopated than that. In this essay, I share some strategies for sharpening the sting of modernist drama—but also for highlighting its internal complexity. I then advocate for putting this “terrible art” in its place, as just one strategy theatermakers have used to challenge our thinking about the world. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1470190562115-JDDWX2PZHRVRJ4OHKB32/jp-gatz-popup.jpg Articles - On Book: The Performance of Reading (forthcoming, NLH) Reading, observes Leah Price, is an “activity against which the social defines itself.” How odd, then, that during the last half-century public reading has proliferated so wildly. These "bookish performances" (literary readings, readers theater, and found-text performance of every variety) share one goal: not to dramatize literature, but to theatricalize the (inward) experience of reading. As such, they offer an archive of our reading: its phenomenology, its ideology, and its sheer, idiosyncratic variety. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1675209581688-85CEQJP50AGJLUDJ0YXR/image.jpg Articles - The Deep, Dark Play of the US Capitol Riots (in Performance Research) The weird co-existence of violence and silliness in the Capitol Riots led commentators to declare them “surreal,” or else to posit the simple theory that the rioters’ playfulness was “camouflage” or “cover” for their true intentions: to commit acts of white supremacist violence. A close performance-minded reading of video footage from the riots tells a different, more complicated story. To lay the foundations for telling such a story, this article re-reads canonical play theories (Geertz’s “deep play,” Schechner’s “dark play”) and builds new theories of political play on the ideas and practices of the contemporary Trumpist right. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1550003688401-7W2716PGQNCK3SAN6O35/TrumpKaufmanJPEG.jpg Articles - The Artist Is President: "Performance Art" and Other Keywords in the Age of Donald Trump (in Critical Inquiry) Throughout the 2016 US presidential election, pundits repeatedly described Donald Trump as a performance artist and his campaign as performance art. Meanwhile, his alt-right supporters were mounting performance art shows, debating the meaning of Marina Abramović’s work, and developing their own theories of political performance. For experts in performance theory, such punditry and provocation is like the image in a funhouse mirror. It’s hard to make sense of such bizarre, distorted images—let alone to recognize ourselves in them. This article insists that, nonetheless, we should try. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1470236805558-7OGW9ORA2PFM4QOVYFP0/jp-gatz-popup.jpg Articles - On Book: The Performance of Reading (in New Literary History, December 2016) Reading, observes Leah Price, is an “activity against which the social defines itself.” How odd, then, that during the last half-century public reading has proliferated so wildly. These "bookish performances" (literary readings, readers theater, and found-text performance of every variety) share one goal: not to dramatize literature, but to theatricalize the (inward) experience of reading. As such, they offer an archive of our reading: its phenomenology, its ideology, and its sheer, idiosyncratic variety. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1477421698945-K3TE7X3YWD46LROBV39D/365115251_b0e38afd10_b.jpg Articles - A Constellation of Imagined Theatres: Technology and Performance (contributor to a multi-authored article, edited by Daniel Sack) (in Theatre Journal, September 2016) "The interiority of actors has always been produced this way: as a collaboration among performers, audiences, and things, by a collusion of techniques and technologies." https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1470191925225-MFYOMB0A3ST7NUAVTKZB/TorrenceSquare.jpg Articles - Why It's 'Easier to Act with a Telephone than a Man' (in Theatre Survey, May 2016) Film and theater critics of the early 20th century came to rather strange consensus. As George Jean Nathan put it in 1928, there wasn't an actor alive "who didn't seem completely convincing in a telephone scene." But why? This essay explores the history of the stage telephone in order to explain how the "telephone scene" became a trial (and a showcase) for quality realist acting. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1470197908299-5856GUW5OXHUV64W918U/1193redited.jpg Articles - Every Nerve Keyed Up: 'Telegraph Plays' and Networked Performance, 1850-1900 (in Theater, Spring 2016) This essay tells the stage history of the telegraph machine. Structured around a deep analysis of William Gillette's Secret Service, it also surveys a wide range of American, British and French telegraph plays. Telegraphy, I argue, transformed 19th-century dramaturgy and acting, turning them realist and proleptically modern. At the same time, these plays (alongside extra-theatrical telegraph "performances" like technical demonstrations and early baseball broadcasts) reveal a new, emerging sense of the human, the global, and the live. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1470192135368-QKRP4KY6LPVPN9PBYFLX/LowellLP.jpg Articles - The Breath of the Poem: Confessional Print/Performance circa 1959 (in PMLA, March 2012) Starting in the mid-1950s, American poetry lived not only in print, but also (and equally) on vinyl and in live performance. Amid this unprecedented publicity, an oddly private genre emerged: confessional poetry. This was no coincidence. Confessional poetry, I argue, was from the start a performance genre, infused with the breath of embodied orality. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1470192735023-Y2DVSUEPP2YPU2586P3K/portauthoritySquare.jpg Articles - Love and Loneliness: Secular Morality in the Plays of Conor McPherson (excerpted in Norton's Modern and Contemporary Irish Drama) Some early critics were aghast at Conor McPherson's plays, which they took to be amoral explorations (even immoral celebrations) of Irish "lad culture." In this essay, I explore McPherson's oeuvre and reveal that, in fact, these plays are obsessed with forging a new morality: something separate from the political and religious creeds that had hitherto guided Irish life. http://www.cgrobe.com/chapters daily 0.75 2020-08-25 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1516754603289-7IBSB63NHJ4NHFEBHVTV/phonlgy3.gif Chapters - Sound: An Essay on 'O' in Further Reading (Oxford UP, 2020) People talk of printed literature as having a sound, but I confess I’m unsure what they mean. It’s pretty clear they’re not thinking of the sounds of silent reading: how pages rustle, pencils scratch, and books thud shut. Nor are they thinking, in most cases, of the sounds that people make when speaking literary texts out loud. These, they protest, are the sounds not of literature but of performance—not of words but of lungs and vocal cords. No, in truth, they have in mind something weirder: the sound that literature would make, might make, were it able to sound itself out. They are thinking, in other words, of a potential for sound that lies buried in the silent page. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1516754603289-7IBSB63NHJ4NHFEBHVTV/phonlgy3.gif Chapters - Sound: An Essay on 'O' in Further Reading (Oxford UP, 2020) People talk of printed literature as having a sound, but I confess I’m unsure what they mean. It’s pretty clear they’re not thinking of the sounds of silent reading: how pages rustle, pencils scratch, and books thud shut. Nor are they thinking, in most cases, of the sounds that people make when speaking literary texts out loud. These, they protest, are the sounds not of literature but of performance—not of words but of lungs and vocal cords. No, in truth, they have in mind something weirder: the sound that literature would make, might make, were it able to sound itself out. They are thinking, in other words, of a potential for sound that lies buried in the silent page. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1498766085840-O56WKBHPVYTQC81OHS2D/IMG_0005.JPG Chapters - Playing with TechnoDollies: The TV Actress and Other Technologies in Orphan Black: Gender, Performance, Biopolitics (forthcoming, Intellect Books) Orphan Black is a show about women and clones. It is also a show about acting and labor. These facts are connected, and in this essay I explore and explain a few of these connections. As you read, keep this endpoint in mind: the actor, the woman, the laborer and the clone are all alike. They are cyborgs. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1470236706879-SML6PMO9M8I4DNH33SQN/KoolAd.jpg Chapters - Advertisements for Themselves: Poetry, Confession, and the Arts of Publicity in American Literature in Transition, 1950-1960 (Cambridge UP, 2017) Was the proverbial "man in the gray flannel suit" an assassin of poets or a poet manqué? This essay explores midcentury writers' denunciations of the ad-biz, while also arguing that midcentury poetry (especially confessional poetry) was essentially a mode of "public relations"—that new, pervasive sort of advertising that promoted not things, but people, ideas, and lifestyles. Taking themselves as their subject, poets chose personality as their medium—above or alongside language. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1470198356305-E8QG7N02TZ3R3K2CD83D/ReadingPoemsSquare.jpg Chapters - From the Podium to the Second Row: The Vanishing Feel of An Anne Sexton Reading in This Business of Words (UP of Florida, 2016) Excerpted on the Florida Bookshelf blog (read here) This chapter comes in two parts. The first is a performance history of Anne Sexton's career on the poetry reading circuit—as well as a meditation on how to write the history of such an elusive performance mode. The second is an edited collection of what I call "reading poems"—poems fans wrote (then sent to Sexton) about the experience of seeing her read. What unites them is my search for a new way to study American poetry in the age of the reading. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1470204579632-X2HSWUAQOFB9DR076NOU/KoolAd.jpg Chapters - Advertisements for Themselves: Poetry, Confession, and the Arts of Publicity (in American Literature in Transition, 1950-1960; forthcoming Cambridge UP) Was the proverbial "man in the gray flannel suit" an assassin of poets or a poet manqué? This essay explores midcentury writers' denunciations of the ad-biz, while also arguing that midcentury poetry (especially confessional poetry) was essentially a mode of "public relations"—that new, pervasive sort of advertising that promoted not things, but people, ideas, and lifestyles. Taking themselves as their subject, poets chose personality as their medium—above or alongside language. http://www.cgrobe.com/editorial daily 0.75 2016-08-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1470197479410-BTRTYMWVRGL3M5QGRBIM/Screen+Shot+2016-08-03+at+12.09.38+AM.jpg Editorial https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1470197479410-BTRTYMWVRGL3M5QGRBIM/Screen+Shot+2016-08-03+at+12.09.38+AM.jpg Editorial https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1470197041392-3WMSL8CSBXTTYSG72BJD/ReadingPoemsSquare.jpg Editorial http://www.cgrobe.com/shortform daily 0.75 2023-10-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1697687688022-WHEBRK3LDI5CZIDA9R29/1200px-Racknitz_-_The_Turk_3.jpg Short-Form (for Chronicle of Higher Education) The recent release of ChatGPT, a language-generating tool from OpenAI, has inspired dark fantasies in the minds of some humanities teachers. But if we treat learning (not distinction) as the goal of education, then generative AI looks more like an opportunity than a threat. As software that can simulate human thinking, it may indeed create some thoughtless students who rely on it too heavily. But it might also create students who are ready to think twice, to push beyond statistically likely ways of thinking. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1697687688022-WHEBRK3LDI5CZIDA9R29/1200px-Racknitz_-_The_Turk_3.jpg Short-Form (for Chronicle of Higher Education) The recent release of ChatGPT, a language-generating tool from OpenAI, has inspired dark fantasies in the minds of some humanities teachers. But if we treat learning (not distinction) as the goal of education, then generative AI looks more like an opportunity than a threat. As software that can simulate human thinking, it may indeed create some thoughtless students who rely on it too heavily. But it might also create students who are ready to think twice, to push beyond statistically likely ways of thinking. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1598375866254-8WYIBURIYYLY3145USZZ/d06c31efa67fe140f1517f35d4a8c644c2-rhode-island-calamari-man.2x.rsquare.w330.png Short-Form - The Case for an Awkward Convention (for The Washington Post) “Awkwardness is good for more than giggles. It helps to resolve a paradox faced by every party convention. As a demonstration of party competence, the convention must go smoothly. But as a stage for political expression, it must feel real — and, whether party leaders like it or not, this means free to go really wrong. It’s a tricky balancing act. Stage-manage the action too tightly, and no one will believe a word you say; cut things too loose, and your party will never live it down.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1598376342662-TUV2DLLON9RYPGGW42E2/24476355997_633d049a29_b.jpg Short-Form - Offending the Audience (for the Lights Camera Action Committee) “Since the earliest days of his campaign, people have compared the U.S. president’s frequent rallies to the button-pushing act of an insult comic. He mocks people, imitates them, and calls them nasty names. But unlike an insult comic—he doesn’t aim this mockery at people in the room, or even at people who exist. Instead, he invokes absent people (“Some people say…,” his comments often begin) or even creates them out of whole cloth, tailor-made to be mocked! “Trump may take it extremes, but this tactic is typical: the drama of giving offense has always been founded on a fiction. The offended party may exist, but in the moment of performance—during a Trump rally, or at a performance of Handke’s play—the literal existence of this offended person is immaterial.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1526919772272-XY75ZKUHCHB8RWW7ZI9W/Dombeck_1024x1024.jpg Short-Form - The Art of Confession: A Selected Bibliography The Seminar Co-Op blog (read here) “Confessional artists are often tarred as narcissists: people so self-involved, they can’t even see an inch beyond themselves.” An essay about American intellectual discourse on narcissism, from Lionel Trilling’s Sincerity & Authenticity (1972) and Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (1979) to Kristin Dombek’s The Selfishness of Others (2016). https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1470234753250-P8E35D75YLXCTY4JY938/SFSFF+-+William+Gillette+play+poster.jpg Short-Form https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1470234989569-624MN8PQ8K0D2AMMLCEU/SFSFF+-+William+Gillette+play+poster.jpg Short-Form - The Case of the Missing Detective (for the Los Angeles Review of Books) "WHEN AN ACTOR plays Hamlet, who directs him to strike The Pose? (You know: elbow bent, face in profile, eye to eye-socket with a skull.) ... And who reminds the latest Sherlock Holmes to wear a deerstalker cap, to smoke a curved pipe, and to crow, 'Elementary, my dear fellow'?" Answer: Edmund Kean, the Romantic era's favorite Hamlet; and William Gillette, who originated the role of Holmes. Long thought lost to history, Gillette's influential performance is back in a recently rediscovered silent film. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1470235548794-U9ERXU5V15ROMHQTBXJM/Sally%2BHawkins%2Bin%2BOscar%2BWinning%2B-The%2Bphone%2BCall-.jpeg Short-Form - Hollywood Calling (for the Los Angeles Review of Books) "[Luise Rainer] never outran one minor achievement from 1936: a four-minute scene in a three-hour film that you’ve probably never watched. ... Legend has it that this scene single-handedly won Rainer an Oscar. ... And like that, Hollywood had discovered another law of nature: as night follows day, so Oscars follow telephone scenes." Now, the Oscar-bait telephone scene is back in a big way: two films up for consideration this year consist entirely of telephone calls: Locke (2013, dir. Steven Knight) and The Phone Call (2013, dir. Mat Kirby). https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1470236092059-RT8O07AF6MV61Z0EII27/30+Let+Me+Clear+My+Throat.jpg Short-Form - Lending an Ear (for Public Books) "As soon as you begin to refashion your own hearing this way, you’ll understand how elusive sound can be. You might begin to worry, as Roland Barthes does in his most famous essay on voice, 'am I alone in perceiving it? am I hearing voices within the voice?' Hopefully you’ll conclude, as Barthes does, by asking, 'isn’t the truth of the voice to be hallucinated?'" https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1470236410519-BZ9SDIT46FK8JI4TWW8Q/StrayedWild.jpg Short-Form - Memoir 2.0; or, Confession Gone Wild (for Public Books) "Wild is Cheryl Strayed’s first confessional memoir—unless, of course, you count her name. As Strayed recalls about a third of the way through Wild, she authored that briefest of autobiographies on a set of no-fault divorce papers in 1994. Obsessed by the blank line where she was to write her new name, she toyed with outlandish possibilities—“names of movie stars and cartoon characters and strange combinations of words that weren’t rightly names at all”—before finally deciding on this two-word mea culpa." https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1470236990239-XJYGFYJDFPQDTC1KOZAA/RobotTheaterHirata.jpg Short-Form - Refined Mechanicals; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Share the Stage (in Theater, Spring 2012) "The last five years have brought an outpouring of such compendious books on performance and the digital. This flood is a delayed effect, no doubt, of the commercial Internet’s landfall fifteen years ago, but few scholars (Causey and Salter included) have limited themselves to a narrow consideration of 'networked performance.' Instead, the ubiquity of digital and networked technology in our lives has prompted many scholars to examine the wider influence on performance of recent changes in science, media, and technology more generally." https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1470237463692-I0MVJW8IHU4BDFYYYKRM/IshmaelJonesThem.jpg Short-Form - Canonical Improvisations: The Case of Them (in Theater, Spring 2011) "The recent revival of Ishmael Houston-Jones’s Them, a multidisciplinary dance event from the mideighties, joins a host of similar attempts (across all the temporal arts) to resurrect experiments from decades past. In doing so, it faces particular challenges. Postmodern dance has seldom spoken in the past tense. Determined to discard inherited styles—and even to avoid the self-continuity that sustains style as such—its choreographers have preferred to grace their moments lightly." https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1470237790023-CLP8IRPH7DSMNOR427VC/Abramovic_ArtistIsPresent.jpg Short-Form - Twice Real: Marina Abramovic and the Performance Archive (in Theater, Winter 2011) "I was there on a preview day and had received bogus information that she would not yet be performing, but there (suddenly) she was—sitting as she would for every second the museum was open over the coming months— anchoring the vast space of the second-floor atrium to its center. Across a plain wooden table from her, an empty chair awaited any visitor who wanted to sit with her for a spell. With her eyes set in a thousand-yard stare and her face clammy, waxen with another day of perfect stillness, she looked to me like a corpse—or else a premature effigy of herself." http://www.cgrobe.com/reviews-1 daily 0.75 2023-10-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1697688057164-8CUBBQOXFOAWZC6JXE5Z/978-1-5179-0976-5-frontcover.jpg Reviews - Can the Computer Speak? Review essay for American Literature https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1697688057164-8CUBBQOXFOAWZC6JXE5Z/978-1-5179-0976-5-frontcover.jpg Reviews - Can the Computer Speak? Review essay for American Literature https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1697687987924-UNT034655WB1LIARN1JP/interchangeable-parts-1.jpg Reviews - Victor Holtcamp, Interchangeable Parts Review for Theatre Journal https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1470238351757-ITHQPA63P9JZEK984I6F/Allison_BodiesOnTheLine.jpg Reviews https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1697687937028-UOCZRNEZ091LGOSXNFS2/978-1-4780-0884-2-frontcover.jpg Reviews - How to Resist When Resistance Feels Impossible Review for Performance Research https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1502667256017-SF7YLHVJ4Q4ZEU23YOFT/9781783205899.jpg Reviews - Heddon & Johnson (eds.). It's All Allowed. reviewed for TDR https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1470238369969-0KRK45JP6OD89WINA7O3/Allison_BodiesOnTheLine.jpg Reviews - Allison, Raphael. Bodies on the Line. reviewed for New England Quarterly. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1470238487851-HSJJMKR3ZYTI7FXAWKVT/Hoffman_AmericanPoetryPerf.jpg Reviews - Hoffman, Tyler. American Poetry in Performance. reviewed for Modern Drama http://www.cgrobe.com/flat-protagonists daily 0.75 2018-11-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1472748194426-R23ZN6P5X62GVRVOQK9Q/Figlerowicz_Protagonists+revised.jpg Flat Protagonist https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1472748194426-R23ZN6P5X62GVRVOQK9Q/Figlerowicz_Protagonists+revised.jpg Flat Protagonist https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1470251390974-OFBC1L7F3D4UKNWMMRDJ/DSCF7915.JPG Flat Protagonist https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1470251405082-SC1ID7IQC1SGQ9KCROV0/DSCF7908.JPG Flat Protagonist https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1470251460345-UVRVDU5XD217QSFA1V29/DSCF7912.JPG Flat Protagonist http://www.cgrobe.com/sleep-research daily 0.75 2016-08-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1470596921669-G9EMDS7RVFXOY4VCIXG3/DSCF8585.JPG Sleep Research https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1470596921669-G9EMDS7RVFXOY4VCIXG3/DSCF8585.JPG Sleep Research https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1470596888604-OUU9Y9ZH0FIGI657UP82/DSCF8585.JPG Sleep Research https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1470596989560-73ODRZMS4ONXIYSECYRB/DSCF8586.JPG Sleep Research https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1470597048693-ZTSA2G3OTMNVLKFTW78X/DSCF8591.JPG Sleep Research https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1470597035708-0ROAJDAX72GZHUBRUSUG/DSCF8588.JPG Sleep Research https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1470597025591-3T0X9ZWZ7M0AMWPTG5VI/DSCF8589.JPG Sleep Research http://www.cgrobe.com/books-gallery daily 0.75 2017-08-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1502658312206-9DYR9C10FZRGAY0HHAFV/Art+of+Confession.jpg Books - The Art of Confession: The Performance of Self from Robert Lowell to Reality TV Find it on NYU Press, Google Books, and Amazon What do midcentury “confessional” poets have in common with today’s reality TV stars? They share an inexplicable urge to make their lives an open book, and also a sense that this book can never be finished. Christopher Grobe argues that, in postwar America, artists like these forged a new way of being in the world. Identity became a kind of work—always ongoing, never complete—to be performed on the public stage. The Art of Confession tells the history of this cultural shift and of the movement it created in American art: confessionalism. Like realism or romanticism, confessionalism began in one art form, but soon pervaded them all: poetry and comedy in the 1950s and ’60s, performance art in the ’70s, theater in the ’80s, television in the ’90s, and online video and social media in the 2000s. Everywhere confessionalism went, it stood against autobiography, the art of the closed book. Instead of just publishing, these artists performed—with, around, and against the text of their lives. A blend of cultural history, literary criticism, and performance theory, The Art of Confession explores iconic works of art and draws surprising connections among artists who may seem far apart, but who were influenced directly by one another. Studying extraordinary art alongside ordinary experiences of self-betrayal and -revelation, Christopher Grobe argues that a tradition of “confessional performance” unites poets with comedians, performance artists with social media users, reality TV stars with actors—and all of them with us. There is art, this book shows, in our most artless acts. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1502658312206-9DYR9C10FZRGAY0HHAFV/Art+of+Confession.jpg Books - The Art of Confession: The Performance of Self from Robert Lowell to Reality TV Find it on NYU Press, Google Books, and Amazon What do midcentury “confessional” poets have in common with today’s reality TV stars? They share an inexplicable urge to make their lives an open book, and also a sense that this book can never be finished. Christopher Grobe argues that, in postwar America, artists like these forged a new way of being in the world. Identity became a kind of work—always ongoing, never complete—to be performed on the public stage. The Art of Confession tells the history of this cultural shift and of the movement it created in American art: confessionalism. Like realism or romanticism, confessionalism began in one art form, but soon pervaded them all: poetry and comedy in the 1950s and ’60s, performance art in the ’70s, theater in the ’80s, television in the ’90s, and online video and social media in the 2000s. Everywhere confessionalism went, it stood against autobiography, the art of the closed book. Instead of just publishing, these artists performed—with, around, and against the text of their lives. A blend of cultural history, literary criticism, and performance theory, The Art of Confession explores iconic works of art and draws surprising connections among artists who may seem far apart, but who were influenced directly by one another. Studying extraordinary art alongside ordinary experiences of self-betrayal and -revelation, Christopher Grobe argues that a tradition of “confessional performance” unites poets with comedians, performance artists with social media users, reality TV stars with actors—and all of them with us. There is art, this book shows, in our most artless acts. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1502658291267-65U6B7LKHSKGAGYBTUM6/Art+of+Confession.jpg Books http://www.cgrobe.com/conferences daily 0.75 2018-09-15 http://www.cgrobe.com/conferences/2018/1/4/the-art-of-the-ordeal-or-what-does-and-should-performance-art-mean-today monthly 0.5 2017-08-13 http://www.cgrobe.com/conferences/2017/7/7/mechanical-or-electric-a-roboticists-guide-to-acting monthly 0.5 2017-08-13 http://www.cgrobe.com/conferences/2016/1/8/being-onstage-subconsciously-the-telephone-and-realist-acting monthly 0.5 2017-08-13 http://www.cgrobe.com/conferences/2013/11/9/every-nerve-keyed-up-telegraph-plays-and-the-networked-theater-of-the-19th-century monthly 0.5 2017-08-13 http://www.cgrobe.com/conferences/2014/3/21/centering-the-margins-the-poetry-performances-of-anne-sexton-and-her-fans monthly 0.5 2017-08-13 http://www.cgrobe.com/conferences/2017/8/13/the-realist-actor-is-transmedial monthly 0.5 2017-08-13 http://www.cgrobe.com/conferences/2017/8/13/forms-of-feminist-talk-performance-art-and-cr monthly 0.5 2017-08-13 http://www.cgrobe.com/conferences/2016/1/10/india-after-how-to-publish-an-improvisation monthly 0.5 2017-08-13 http://www.cgrobe.com/conferences/2014/11/7/earl-warren-performance-theorist-autobiography-after-miranda monthly 0.5 2017-08-13 http://www.cgrobe.com/conferences/2018/1/4/the-art-of-the-ordeal-or-what-does-and-should-performance-art-mean-today-ecsth monthly 0.5 2017-08-13 http://www.cgrobe.com/conferences/2017/8/13/playing-with-technodollies-in-orphan-black monthly 0.5 2017-08-13 http://www.cgrobe.com/conferences/2014/11/21/irony-machines-and-telephone-scenes monthly 0.5 2017-08-13 http://www.cgrobe.com/conferences/2018/9/15/roundtable-on-peggy-phelans-unmarked-at-25 monthly 0.5 2018-09-15 http://www.cgrobe.com/conferences/2018/9/15/motion-capture-face-replacement-and-realist-acting monthly 0.5 2018-09-15 http://www.cgrobe.com/conferences/2019/1/3/inventing-humanity-the-realist-in-botface monthly 0.5 2018-09-15 http://www.cgrobe.com/conferences/2018/9/15/working-session-on-impotent-performance monthly 0.5 2018-09-15 http://www.cgrobe.com/info-aviator daily 1.0 2013-01-30 http://www.cgrobe.com/bio daily 0.75 2023-10-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/2f532e49-103d-4d58-ae18-ccbe76450ba6/Grobe_headshot2023_square_colorcorrected.jpeg Bio http://www.cgrobe.com/teaching daily 0.75 2018-05-23 http://www.cgrobe.com/articles daily 0.75 2019-02-12 http://www.cgrobe.com/reviews daily 0.75 2018-09-15 http://www.cgrobe.com/making daily 0.75 2016-08-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1470251267157-BKVY155UU3G9WI8R3G1T/DSCF7915.JPG Making https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1470605083280-FDR0UTAZ8CESTWX0XR5D/DSCF8589.JPG Making https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1470251843666-K9BSDCZSLMLMY72YFS4K/DSCF6360.JPG Making http://www.cgrobe.com/books daily 0.75 2023-10-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1502660571887-993DNJZKZIBPRXA83UMD/Art+of+Confession.jpg Books https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5578ea06e4b0bc473a01cf0e/1502661179765-ZE2T7W2FZEZBDOMZGBIZ/Grobe+Figure+6.JPG Books http://www.cgrobe.com/aalac daily 0.75 2018-04-12