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The story of a new style of art-and a new way of life-in postwar America: confessionalism. What do midcentury \"confessional\" poets have in common with today's reality TV stars? They share an inexplicable urge to make their lives an open book, and also a sense that this book can never be finished. Christopher Grobe argues that, in postwar America, artists like these forged a new way of being in the world. Identity became a kind of work-always ongoing, never complete-to be performed on the public stage. The Art of Confession tells the history of this cultural shift and of the movement it created in American art: confessionalism. Like realism or romanticism, confessionalism began in one art form, but soon pervaded them all: poetry and comedy in the 1950s and '60s, performance art in the '70s, theater in the '80s, television in the '90s, and online video and social media in the 2000s. Everywhere confessionalism went, it stood against autobiography, the art of the closed book. Instead of just publishing, these artists performed-with, around, and against the text of their lives. A blend of cultural history, literary criticism, and performance theory, The Art of Confession explores iconic works of art and draws surprising connections among artists who may seem far apart, but who were influenced directly by one another. Studying extraordinary art alongside ordinary experiences of self-betrayal and -revelation, Christopher Grobe argues that a tradition of \"confessional performance\" unites poets with comedians, performance artists with social media users, reality TV stars with actors-and all of them with us. There is art, this book shows, in our most artless acts.

Later theories of reader-response spoke of \"interpretive communities,\" groups of readers united by their shared practices and assumptions; and yet here we were, a graduate cohort in English-perhaps the tightest interpretive community this side of a fundamentalist congregation-and the sheer variety of our experiences, once we discussed them at all, was astonishing to us.8 Perhaps, we thought, this aspect of our reading had remained untouched, untutored all our lives. [...]questions have obsessed literary critics of late, not because we are witnessing the \"death\" of reading (my apologies to the writers of a thousand think-pieces), but because digital culture affords us new perspectives on it.

This essay offers an early chapter in the conjoined history of poetry and performance art, literary criticism and performance studies. Beginning in the mid-1950s and with increasing fervor through the 1960s, American poetry lived simultaneously in print, on vinyl, and in embodied performance. Amid this environment of multimedia publicity, an oddly private poetry emerged. The essay locates confessional poetry in the performance-rich context of its birth and interrogates not only its textual voice but also its embodied, performed breath. Focusing on early confessional work by Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, this essay conducts side-by-side \"readings\" of printed poems and recorded performances and suggests that confessional refers to an intermedial, printperformance style— a particular logic for capturing personal performances in print form and for breathing performances back out of the printed page.

Hollywood is ruled by conventional wisdom—or, as it's known when it takes off its coat and tie, magical thinking. Certain factors, they say, make for a surefire hit; certain others mean you'll never make a buck. Some of the rules sound silly, but, really, why tempt fate? Listen to director Bill Condon as he slips one of these showbiz credos into a recent interview: “You know, they say for a great performance you need a great telephone scene.” To the uninitiated, this may sound strange—surely an outlying tenet of the faith!—but Hollywood's belief in the “telephone scene” is curiously devout. And unlike other Tinseltown lore, with its murky past and fractured provenance, this tale of the telephone is easy to track to a single event nearly eighty years ago.

In a 2010 performance at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn of his play A Life in Three Acts, British drag legend Bette Bourne showed how subtly mediated the simplest confession can be. The tone of the piece, a memoir of Bourne’s life in gay activism and art, was familiar: reminiscence, spontaneous and tenderly felt. Tales from his youth, stories of his days in a “drag commune,” pearls of wisdom from the founding of Britain’s Gay Liberation Front, and fond memories of the early days in his drag ensemble Bloolips—all blended together in an evening of chat. Charles Isherwood, reviewing

A public is always a notional thing: the result of someone’s rhetorical conjuring. “It exists,” Michael Warner says, “by virtue of being addressed.”² Even so, a public is never the same thing as the people literally being addressed. Instead, it’s always a bit open, indefinite—except perhaps, Warner says, in the theater: A public can also be a second thing: a concrete audience, a crowd witnessing itself in visible space, as with a theatrical public. . . . A performer onstage knows where her public is, how big it is, where its boundaries are, and what the time of its