The Afterlife of Performance

In our case, we want to consider how a network of particular people using particular hardware to capture a performance in a particular space on particular kinds of storage media combines with specific techniques such as mastering, editing, filing, labeling, holding (that is, long periods of neglecting), digitizing, remastering, and circulating in order to produce our sense of the relative worth of a recording of another group of particular people chanting, talking, and reading. [...]the transcript of the recording continually gestures elsewhere for its sense of meaning. Here are some of the questions that arise when conducting such a metahistory of the event: * What does the specific materiality and circulatory history of these tapes tell us about changing scholarly priorities? * What kinds of institutional actors leave a trace on the object, and what can we glean about their priorities from their interventions? * What kinds of operations do English literary scholars habitually perform? What kinds of techniques are they expected to know, and are they at all useful when confronting an object like a reel-to-reel poetry recording? * What counts as a literary object, and how is it studied? * What counts as an archival artifact, and how is it processed? * What does the study of such artifacts say about changing scholarly priorities in terms of critical paradigms and pedagogical methods? * What new kinds of operations and techniques, ones that are not habitual or familiar to English literary scholars, must such scholars learn in order for them to perform research with such artifacts?