Fiction, folklore, and reader competency: The politics of literary performance arenas

This dissertation explores the dynamics and representational politics of literary performance arenas. The performance of folklore in live contexts has kinetic, aural, and sensory aspects that allow the performers and audience members to be co-creators of the communication that emerges from the performance arena. When folklore performances are textualized and recontextualized in fiction, that folklore can still have performative potential, given that the author and the reader have competence and apply the epistemology of the live performance to the literary event.;This exploration of literary performance arenas consists of four main chapters. Following a preface that introduces the scope of the project, Chapter 1 argues that literary performance arenas can be described by examining the conservative role of reader competency and the dynamic role of reader agency. Chapter 2 presents examples of literary performance arenas powered by reader competency. Focusing on Orson Scott Card's use of Mormon historical narratives in his novel Seventh Son, the chapter argues that competent readers find specialized meaning through the textualized folklore, especially as the book is read using the interpretive strategies associated with membership in Mormon folk groups and familiarity with the Mark Hofmann forgery scandal. Chapter 3 explores selections from Louise Erdrich's fiction that are anthologized for use in introduction to literature courses. In this reading situation, the textualized folklore is likely read without the resources of reader competency. The chapter argues that interpretive paradigms of multiculturalism, formalism, and stereotypes often replace performance. Chapter 4 details another impediment to literary performance arenas by examining Caroline Kirkland's A New Home, Who'll Follow?, which recontextualizes personal experience narratives. Designed to be read by Eastern elites who lacked competency to read performatively, Kirkland's recontextualizations also failed to invoke literary performances from competent readers, her neighbors, because of their anger at how she appropriated their folklore. The dissertation concludes with a reflexive examination of the dissertation's arguments in an attempt to evaluate the critic's role in studying literary performance arenas.