This project transposes the events chronicled in Argentinian short fiction writer Samanta Schweblin's stories to the medium of live performance in order to show that the violence incurred in the culling of the \"abnormal\" occupies real space in the physical world. One way to disprove the irreality of the abnormal is to play it out before one's very eyes. To test this, I have chosen to adapt three of Schweblin's stories \"Pájaros en la boca,\" \"Mujeres desesperadas,\" and \"La pesada valija de Benavides\" into a play and to stage it site-specifically in the historic Russell House. The stories that comprise the adaptive portion of this project document the violence that goes unnoticed or ignored for the sake of order and assimilation. In a place which so evidently represents the luxury of high society and the industry of academia, even described as a \"retreat of any lover of the good, the true, and the beautiful,\" it is incumbent upon us to acknowledge the violence incurred by such institutions and to disrupt the assimilative linguistic practice of \"English-only\" performance. By staging these stories in live performance in the Russell House, I hope to amplify Schweblin's assertion that these instances of perceived abnormality are, in fact, real, and can take place not only in the imagined world of the reader but in the physical world before them. As such, my ensemble and I explore a world in which strangeness is not removed from reality but distressingly intertwined with it. In my paper, I begin by contextualizing Schweblin's location in the post-McOndo generation of the Latin American literary canon by identifying common thematic and aesthetic threads. I then examine each of the three stories as the basis for the adaptation and why their linguistic and spatial dimensions create such fertile ground for performance given Schweblin's \"deftly ironic\" language in both dialogue and description. The latter half of the paper is dedicated to unpacking the reasons for which methods of collective interpretation are essential to the de-hierarchizing of artistic production, with Roland Barthes' \"Death of the Author\" essay serving as the philosophical launching pad. I consider the linguistic retention of the Spanish language in the cross-medium adaptation essential to the practice of centralizing marginality given the historic relegation of Spanish-speakers to a second-class position. I conclude by reflecting on the necessary adaptive changes to each of the stories in order to justify the shift to performance as laying the groundwork for the solidarity and change for which Schweblin calls in her stories upon reconsideration of the \"abnormal.\"
"},{"label":"Degree","value":["Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors"]},{"label":"Administrative Note","value":"Drupal Node ID: 24077