Abstract

This essay traces the history of the text/performance split against the emergence of literary modernism to reveal how the category of the literary bears within it an "anti-performative" bias. Walker shows how this bias not only informs the metaphor of culture-as-text, so important to twentieth-century thought, but persists in contemporary social and cultural theory. Analyzing the work of Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, she demonstrates how this bias is being provisionally dismantled with the recent turn to the metaphor of performance.

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