Poetics, Performativity, and the Personal Narrative

This introduction explains the relationship between personal narrative, poetics, and performativity as they pertain to performative writing as an aesthetic discursive practice and a discursive aesthetics. After a brief overview of how the personal, the poetic, and the performative intersect, Howard introduces place and space as the starting point for the aesthetic impulses in this volume. She previews the subsequent chapters that illustrate how performative writing can take many forms, evoke many responses, and establish collaborations between the audience/reader and the performer/writer.