Abstract:Peirce's "Lesson in Elocution" (written ca. 1892) provides insight into his ideas on continuity and community through his knowledge of performance cultures such as theatre, elocution, rhetoric, and declamation. This unpublished manuscript constitutes the extant part of an application Peirce drafted to the Episcopal Church's General Theological Seminary for the position of elocution instructor. Continuing Henry C. Johnson, Jr.'s account (published in Transactions [2006] vol. 42, no. 4) of the Lesson as evidence of Peirce's religious practices, this article explores the (...) Lesson as demonstration of his performance knowledge and experience. What would Peirce have brought as philosopher and scientist to the teaching of elocution? Conversely, what did his performance knowledge bring to his work on continuity and community? Outlining significant differences between Peirce's semiotic approach and that of the Seminary's then-current instructor, Francis Thayer Russell, the article argues, employing selected performance theory concepts, that performance often operates in semiosis itself, as Peirce defined it. (shrink)

In the 1880s and 1890s, performance played a significant role in the lives of the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) and his second wife, Juliette Peirce (185?–1934). Having moved to Milford, Pennsylvania, in April 1887, Charles and Juliette were still adjusting to country life. Milford, situated on the Delaware River among forests that seemed inexhaustible, had been settled by Hugenot immigrants whose French language and cultural influence were still strong. When the Peirces arrived, the town was already shifting from (...) the lumber industry to tourism, particularly as a summer retreat for the wealthy. Nearby Port Jervis offered relatively easy access by train to the cosmopolitan life in New.. (shrink)

This article introduces the aesthetic theory of François Delsarte and his conception of semiotics. Delsarte created his “applied aesthetics” as a modern scientific method for artists, particularly performers, to investigate the nature of human being. Delsarte’s approach to performance involved the actor in observing human behavior, interpreting it through categories of voice, gesture, and language, and rendering it in an expansive display of types. Delsarte’s applied aesthetics involves the performer’s attention to signs and sign action, a study he called séméiotique. (...) We see Delsarte’s program for inquiry into truth in what I call the actor’s task, which develops his or her human being through observation, analysis, and creation. This was Delsarte’s “orthopedic machine for correcting crippled intellects” – the crippled intellects being those intellectuals and conservatory teachers whose ideas on aesthetics he found to be neither systematic nor attuned to God’s reason. While it is well known in theatre and dance scholarship that Delsarte’s ideas and methods advanced the training of actors, dancers, and orators, particularly in the United States, my paper instead introduces him as a voice in nineteenth-century thinking on signs and semiosis. Delsarte’s aesthetics are firmly based in Thomist assumptions about a triune god whose nature is reflected imperfectly in man. Yet it is striking that Delsarte characterizes the sign relation as mediated in a modern sense, prior to Charles Peirce’s development of his own triadic sign relation, and semiotics as a modern method of scientific inquiry. (shrink)