PUBLICATIONS & CURRICULUM
A SAMPLING OF DAUN'S WORK
| Kendig, Daun. Framing in Eudora Welty's "The Golden Apples" Doctoral Committee Chair: Maclay, Joanna H. Department/Discipline: Speech Communication Degree Granting Institution: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Degree: Ph.D. |
ABSTRACT:
This dissertation argues that the analytical and critical vocabulary currently available to scholars in the field of oral interpretation significantly limits what they can see in a literary text and consequently what they can transform into performance. In an effort to expand this vocabulary, the dissertation explores frame analysis as a potential methodology.
Initially developed by sociologist Erving Goffman, frame analysis studies the assumptions underlying the organization of human experience to discover how individuals recognize what is going on in a given situation so they can behave appropriately. While Goffman's detailed vocabulary provides a valuable foundation, his interest in social interaction limits the method's applicability to literature and performance. At the same time, similar studies in how expectation influences understanding have gone on in a variety of fields. The work of performance approach folklorists such as Richard Bauman and Roger Abrahams as well as of literary theorists such as Barbara Herrnstein Smith suggest valuable extensions of framing principles for the study of aesthetic forms of discourse such as literature and performance. This dissertation applies framing principles to Eudora Welty's cycle of short stories, The Golden Apples. It looks first at immediate frame disclosure in the individual stories to determine what literary features tend to anchor, layer and threaten the stories' frameworks. Then, it examines gradual frame disclosure to discover how Welty teaches readers, through patterns of expectation, to discern an additional mythic-symbolic reality that underlies the entire cycle. Finally, it considers how these discoveries can be transformed into performance. The analytical and critical vocabulary of framing focuses the ways that readers perceive and understand various realities at work in a given text. In so doing, it also focuses the need for analogous structures in performance. The method's applicability to both the printed text and to performance makes it particularly useful to the field of oral interpretation since it underscores the relationship between the two forms that the field rests upon. |
| Kendig, Daun. Transforming gender scripts: Life after you just don't understand | ABSTRACT: This paper examines how working collaboratively through improvisational performance offers a means of exploring the dominant culture's gender scripts and transforming them into scripts of possibility. Deborah Tannen's You Just Don't Understand offers useful examples of the dominant script, hut students need to realize they are not confined to these options. Augusto Boal's forum theatre provides a framework for disrupting dominant scripts and generating alternatives. Improvisation taps the reflexive power of performance to analyze and at times transform scripts from everyday life. The collaborative nature of this process both supports students in their attempts to try out other scripts and augments what any individual can understand or experience with the group's insight. The playful nature of the process allows students to “desacralize” the status quo, demonstrate the contingency of identity, discover and recreate themselves while transforming script possibilities. |
| Kendig, Daun. "Realities in 'Sir Rabbit': A Frame Analysis." | Eudora Welty: Eye of the Storyteller, edited by Dawn Trouard. Kent State UP, 1989, pp. 119-32. |
| Kendig, Daun. Acting on Conviction: Reclaiming the World and the Self through Performance
Published 1 October 1993 Political Science Anthropological Quarterly |
ABSTRACT: Based on a performance workshop conducted at a medium security men's prison, this article considers how the incarceration process functions as a rite of passage deconstructing the inmate's image of himself and the world, and how the performance process can work as a complementary rite helping him to reclaim and transform those representations. This transformation is possible because performance functions as a way of learning and knowing about social life, a way of reflecting upon and discovering meaning in experience, and a way of acting upon and transforming the world and self. [performance, prison, rites of passage, representation, transformation] |