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Performative Criticism is a specialized method of critical analysis that aligns key elements of a literary text with the mode of argumentation to produce a critical reading that performs or enacts its critical insights. It is a critical approach that reminds us that critical, textually engaged work can be personal, creative, self-reflexive, transgressive, playful, interested, and intimate. And, in this manner, enacted/performative criticism can be particularly useful when producing readings of “marginal” and “experimental” literatures (i.e., innovative women’s writing).

If you’ve had the experience of summarizing a non-linear, fragmented, in-your-face women-oriented narrative and found that the conventions of critical summary so reorganized, or, for lack of a better word, reconventionalized the story so much that your analysis lost the texture and power of the work itself—performative criticism offers an alternative and aligned approach to conventional (essay format) literary interpretation. 

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See the "Critical Play," the introduction to Reading & Writing Experimental Texts: Critical Innovations, a collection of innovative criticism edited by me and Dr. Robin Silbergleid of Michigan State University.