ABSTRACT
This essay addresses the influence of postmodern theory on performance practice at a time when literary texts were considered sacred. The essay locates several tensions—the unified and the fragmentary self, narrative stability and undecidability, authority and the floating signifier, and academic walls and blurred boundaries—with an eye toward demonstrating how postmodern theory is changing performance practice. The essay also calls for pluralism as a reasonable response to postmodern disruption.
