Language, Culture, and Performance

Language is such a ubiquitous and unavoidable component of our quotidian experience of the world that we are often inclined to take it for granted and to assume that it is just an external objective system of signs apt at enabling the transmission of information. The aim of this course is to encourage students to suspend what Edmund Husserl would call our “natural attitude” toward the way we engage with language in our everyday lives. By “bracketing” this naively taken for granted “natural standpoint,” we will be able to develop a deeper understanding of the multifaceted nature of human interaction and, hence, discover how humans constitute and, at the same time, are constituted by language. Through a series of readings, we will investigate language as a form of social action and discover the key role it plays in mediating emotions, transmitting aesthetic and cultural values, organizing cognition, structuring experience, reproducing social structures, enabling intersubjective recognition, as well as reproducing and challenging power relations. By looking closely at the unfolding of verbal and nonverbal interactions across a number of communities in the world, we will develop an understanding of the poetic and performative aspects of communication and gain critical insights into multiple intersections between language and culture. In addition to providing a discussion of the different theoretical and methodological approaches available for the analysis of the language-culture interface, the selected readings will cover topics such as bilingualism and codeswitching; the relation between language, sound, and images in performance; the creativity of verbal art and verbal duels; the performance of identity; the structure of narrative and storytelling, language hegemony, language ideologies, political communication; and the aesthetics of persuasion.