Support H-Net | Buy Books Here | Help Support the NBN and NBN en Español on Patreon | Visit New Books Network en Español!
- African Studies
- African American Studies
- American Politics
- American Studies
- American South
- American West
- Asian American Studies
- Australian and New Zealand Studies
- British Studies
- Canadian Studies
- Caribbean Studies
- Central Asian Studies
- Chinese Studies
- East Asian Studies
- Eastern European Studies
- European Politics
- French Studies
- German Studies
- Iberian Studies
- India Studies
- Indian Ocean World
- Iranian Studies
- Irish Studies
- Israel Studies
- Italian Studies
- Japanese Studies
- Korean Studies
- Latino Studies
- Latin American Studies
- Mexican Studies
- Middle Eastern Studies
- Native American Studies
- Pacific Studies
- Polish Studies
- Russian and Eurasian Studies
- Southeast Asian Studies
- South Asian Studies
- Turkish Studies
- Ukrainian Studies
- Western European Studies
- World Affairs
- Animal Studies
- Anthropology
- Archaeology
- Business, Management, and Marketing
- Media
- Critical Theory
- Disability Studies
- Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
- Education
- Economics
- Finance
- Geography
- Gender Studies
- Genocide Studies
- Higher Education
- Human Rights
- Journalism
- Language
- Law
- LGBTQ+ Studies
- National Security
- Philanthropy
- Philosophy
- Policing, Incarceration, and Reform
- Political Science
- Politics & Polemics
- Public Policy
- Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work
- Sociology
- Sound Studies
- Sports
- Urban Studies
- Big Ideas
- Celebration Studies
- Co-Authored
- Cover Story
- Historical Materialism
- History Ex Silo
- Interpretive Political and Social Science
- Invested Investor
- Landscape Architecture
- Late Antiquity
- Mormonism
- NBN Book of the Day
- NBN Seminar
- Postscript: Conversations on Politics and Political Science
- Practical History
- Preparing for Life After Grad School
- Psychology and Climate Change
- Syriac Studies
- The Chair: In The Room at the Fed
- New Books with Miranda Melcher
Feb 16, 2018
The Art of Confession
The Performance of Self from Robert Lowell to Reality TV
Summary
Christopher Grobe's The Art of Confession: The Performance of Self from Robert Lowell to Reality TV (New York University Press, 2017) traces the ways the performance of confession permeated and transformed a wide range of media in postwar America. Grobe explores how confession---from the confessional poets of the 1960s to contemporary reality TV---is both constructed and authentic, artful even in its ostensible artlessness, and always on the move between and across media. The work's archive is expansive, placing in conversation poetry, performance art, comedy, legal confession, film, and reality TV, genres whose conventions transform and whose boundaries blur when confronted with artists impulses to confess, to stage what Grobe calls "breakthroughs" out of both generic and sociocultural containment. Laying bare the ways confessional performances are stylized and mediated to elicit "a satiety of experience which can be taken as reality" while taking seriously artists' attempts to reveal and perform an authentic self, Grobe demonstrates how confession energizes new ways of being, forms of collectivity, and political mobilization.
Christopher Grobe is an Assistant Professor of English at Amherst College where he teaches a wide range of courses on drama, poetics, performance, and performance culture and theory.
Petal Samuel is a postdoctoral fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. She is completing Polluting the Soundscape: Noise Control and Afro-Caribbean Women's Decolonial Soundscapes, a book project that traces the evolution of noise legislation and public discourses decrying noise as technologies of racial control in the Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora, while highlighting the ways Afro-Caribbean women writers have reclaimed noise against the grain of colonial injunctions to remain quiet as a condition of civic inclusion.
Petal Samuel is a postdoctoral fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. She is completing Polluting the Soundscape: Noise Control and Afro-Caribbean Women's Decolonial Soundscapes, a book project that traces the evolution of noise legislation and public discourses decrying noise as technologies of racial control in the Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora, while highlighting the ways Afro-Caribbean women writers have reclaimed noise against the grain of colonial injunctions to remain quiet as a condition of civic inclusion.
