Papers by Fluffy Singler
We are storytelling beings. Listen to your students before class begins. They are telling stories... more We are storytelling beings. Listen to your students before class begins. They are telling stories about their bosses, their teachers, their friends, their weekends, standing in line at lunch, etc. They tell stories. Then they come to class and listen to lectures about things that are abstract to them, things that (we think) they need to know about, things they have not experienced yet but will, things that likely will not make their way into stories told about class later this evening. Did you ever ask a student, young or old, what they did in class today only to receive a shrug in response? It's because they don't know how to yet make sense of what they learned that day. To a large degree, there is a difference between instruction and storytelling, although theorists have been telling us for years about the way we are socially inculcated and constructed by various stories, the way that stories or narratives are used to keep us in line, discipline our behaviors and our bodies, about the ways that myths are used to construct racial, sexual, and gender boundaries, etc. The internet is full of articles that extol the importance of storytelling in American culture and there are countless books on the use of storytelling with elementary students to read to write, to learn history, etc. But by the time students get to college, unless they are theatre or elementary education majors, storytelling is left behind as something that is no longer needed to understand the world.
This paper compares Shelley Jackson's digital work, My Body: A Wunderkammer with Yoko Ono's class... more This paper compares Shelley Jackson's digital work, My Body: A Wunderkammer with Yoko Ono's classic Cut Piece. It sets the stage for both pieces to be considered a text, under Roland Barthes' contention that anything can be read as a text and performative pieces as well. It then goes on to look at them through a feminist lens toward the dangers of the female body in performance and also through the theory of the gift exchange.
This is a paper I would like to submit for publication. It references the contested history of m... more This is a paper I would like to submit for publication. It references the contested history of melodrama, melodrama, realism and avant-garde performance in the early 20th century and feminist and suffragist performance and places the short plays of Djuna Barnes within all of these types of theatre and performance.
Drafts by Fluffy Singler
This paper traces the history of the avant garde and talks about black artists in America and the... more This paper traces the history of the avant garde and talks about black artists in America and the Caribbean in particular, including Amiri Baraka, Bob Kaufman, Aime Cesaire, and more.
Conference Presentations by Fluffy Singler
Follows, through academic writing, poetic text, and a sometimes manifesto format, what it means n... more Follows, through academic writing, poetic text, and a sometimes manifesto format, what it means not only to be an avant-garde writer, but to be a feminist avant-garde writer and comes to the conclusion, through Cixous and others, that to be a woman artist is to inherently be avant-garde. This is an unpublished paper that will also be presented in April 2017 at the Craft, Culture, Critique Conference in Iowa City/
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Papers by Fluffy Singler
Drafts by Fluffy Singler
Conference Presentations by Fluffy Singler