Sharing Stories: A transtextual investigation of family history as performance hypertext

This study researches through practice how family history texts, including objects that have been passed through the generations, photographs, historical data, and family stories, can be brought into play to create performance hypertexts. In order to analyse different textual relationships within these hypertexts, I am adapting Gérard Genette’s theory of transtextuality as a framework. For Genette, transtextuality meant all the relations between a written text and the textual elements from which it is composed. These textual elements might be source materials, genre or the paraphernalia of publication and the transtextual may be explicit or implicit; it may be intentional or accidental. Adapting this theoretical framework to discuss performance brings additional textual elements into play, such as location, objects and performers. By defining performance as a form of hypertext - a site where textual elements intersect - it is possible to investigate the impact that these textual relations have on one another. Transtextuality indicates texts that are in a state of play and which reach beyond the physical confines of words on paper through their relations to other texts. Thus, I argue for the efficacy of using transtextuality to discuss family history performances, which are constructed through their relationships to other textual forms. Following the methodology, each chapter concentrates a separate practice experiment that investigates issues that arise from the study and sharing of family history. The first experiment considers the use of material culture, the second reflects on the use of personal, private writing, then, thirdly, the influence of memory is examined and, finally, I explore participatory family history storytelling. This practice-research thesis breaks new ground by drawing together scholarship from historical research and performance studies using the theory of transtextuality.