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Description
The original-practices movement as a whole claims its authority from early modern theatrical conditions. Some practitioners claim Shakespeare in many ways as their co-creator; asserting that they perform the plays as Shakespeare intended. Other companies recognize the impossibility of an authorial text, and for them authority shifts to the Renaissance theatre apparatus as a whole. But the reality is that all of these companies necessarily produce modern theatre influenced by the 400 years since Shakespeare. Likewise, audiences do not come to these productions and forget the intervening centuries. This dissertation questions the new tradition created by using early modern performance practices, asking how original-practices theatre is situated and arguing that though the desire to rediscover the past fueled the movement, the productions actually presented are in negotiation with modernity. The dissertation begins by looking at the rhetoric surrounding the original-practices movement, then at the physical aspects of early modern performance recreated for modern stages and the desire for material authenticity. This project also explores the ways in which race and gender play key roles within Shakespearean texts presented on stage, and argues that while gender occasionally has attention called to it, race is nearly always ignored to the point of whitewashing. I argue that because these companies insist on the universality of Shakespeare, they need to examine and deal with the racism and sexism inherent within the plays. Finally, this project explores the influence original-practices productions exerts upon audiences, including aspects such as attendees' expectations, architectural spaces, and performance, and argues that together, these elements lead to a far more cohesive and responsive audience than that which is found at traditional theatre performances. This interactivity and group mentality can lead to thrilling theatre, but can also pose dangers in the form of positive responses to xenophobic, racist, or misogynist elements within the texts, acting as early-modern audiences did and reifying those negative stereotypes and prejudices. While original-practices theatre includes the danger of being something only of historical interest, it also presents opportunities for exciting, progressive theatre that reaches audiences who do not typically go to see Shakespeare or other performances.
ContributorsSteigerwalt, Jennifer L (Author) / Thompson, Ayanna (Thesis advisor) / Ryner, Brad (Committee member) / Fox, Cora (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
"YouTube Shakespeares" is a study of Shakespeare online videos and the people who create, upload, and view them on YouTube. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, this work is a remix of theories and methodologies from literary, performance, (social) media, fan, and Internet studies that expands the field of Shakespeare studies. This dissertation explores the role of YouTube users and their activities, the expansion of literary research methods onto digital media venues, YouTube as site of Shakespeare performance, and YouTube Shakespeares' fan communities. It analyzes a broad array of Shakespeare visual performances including professional and user-generated mashups, remixes, film clips, auditions, and high school performances. A rich avenue for the study of people's viewing and reception of Shakespeare, YouTube tests the (un)limitations of Shakespeare adaptation. This work explores the ethical implications of researching performances that include human subjects, arguing that their presence frequently complicates common concepts of public and private identities. Although YouTube is a "published" forum for social interactivity and video repository, this work urges digital humanities scholars to recognize and honor the human users entailed in the videos not as text, but as human subjects. Shifting the study focus to human subjects demands a revision of research methods and publications protocols as the researcher repositions herself into the role of virtual ethnographer. "YouTube Shakespeares" develops its own ethics-based, online research method, which includes seeking Institutional Board Review approval and online interviews. The second half of the dissertation shifts from methodology to theorizing YouTube Shakespeares' performance spaces as analogs to the interactive and imaginary areas of Shakespeare's early modern theatre. Additionally, this work argues that YouTube Shakespeares' creators and commentators are fans. "YouTube Shakespeares" is one of the first Shakespeare-centric studies to employ fan studies as a critical lens to explore the cultural significance and etiquette of people's online Shakespeare performance activities. The work ends with a conversation about the issues of ephemerality, obsolescence, and concerns about the instability of digital and online materials, noting the risk of evidentiary loss of research materials is far outweighed by a scholarly critical registration of YouTube in the genealogy of Shakespeare performance.
ContributorsFazel, Valerie Margaret (Author) / Thompson, Ayanna (Thesis advisor) / Ryner, Bradley (Committee member) / Fox, Cora (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This thesis examines Christopher Marlowe's poem Hero and Leander and George Chapman's Continuation thereof through a theoretical lens that includes theories of intimacy, sexuality and touch taken from Lee Edelman, Daniel Gil, James Bromley, Katherine Rowe and others. Hands are seen as the privileged organ of touch as well as synecdoche for human agency. Because it is all too often an unexamined sense, the theory of touch is dealt with in detail. The analysis of hands and touch leads to a discussion of how Marlowe's writing creates a picture of sexual intimacy that goes against traditional institutions and resists the traditional role of the couple in society. Marlowe's poem favors an equal, companionate intimacy that does not engage in traditional structures, while Chapman's Continuation to Marlowe's work serves to reaffirm the transgressive nature of Marlowe's poem by reasserting traditional social institutions surrounding the couple. Viewing the two pieces of literature together further supports the conclusion that Marlowe's work is transgressive because of how conservative Chapman's reaction to Hero and Leander is.
ContributorsHardman, Katherine (Author) / Fox, Cora (Thesis advisor) / Ryner, Bradley (Committee member) / Sturges, Robert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
This paper utilizes insights from emerging monster theory, particularly the idea that monsters are cultural representations, to examine the representation of the Gyant and the figure Talus in Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene. The thesis posits that contrary to most critical readings, the episode concerning the Gyant focuses on a portion of the 16th century English Cultural Body-the peasants, rather than the Irish or another cultural subgroup. The thesis also argues that through the application of monster theory, the complicated political sympathies of the author towards the English lower class emerge, and the English third estate gains a voice.
ContributorsTurney, Brittany (Author) / Fox, Cora (Thesis advisor) / Holbo, Christine (Committee member) / Corse, Taylor (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
The rise of print book culture in sixteenth-century England had profound effects on understandings of identity that are reflected in the prose, poetry, and drama of the age. Drawing on assemblage and actor-network theory, this dissertation argues that models of identity constructed in relation to books in Renaissance England are neither static nor self-contained, arising instead out of a collaborative engagement with books as physical objects that tap into historically specific cultural discourses. Renaissance representations of book usage blur the boundary between human beings and their books, both as textual carriers and as physical artifacts.
The first chapter outlines the relationship between book history and assemblage theory to examine how books contribute to the assembly of the human subject in different ways for readers, owners, and authors and to lay a theoretical and historical foundation for reading cultural assemblages in later chapters. The second chapter studies how authors and sometimes printers attempt as makers of books to construct public identities through them. The chapter focuses on how Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender and Isabella Whitney’s poetry anthologies play with texts and paratexts in order to create the illusion of control over the resulting authorial persona, even while acknowledging that the book itself is a deterritorialized element of their own identities with particular agencies of its own. The third chapter investigates how Renaissance drama represents human beings using books to curate their identity assemblages both publicly and inwardly, particularly as depicted in the work of Thomas Kyd, William Shakespeare, and the author of Arden of Faversham. The successes and failures of these assemblages on the stage reflect anxieties about the book as an agentive object in an assembled identity. The fourth chapter examines the prose work of Philip Sidney, Roger Ascham, and Fulke Greville, considering the obsession with travel books and writing as a reflection of wider notions about the permeability and possible contamination by foreign influences of the self constructed through books and writings related to travel.
The first chapter outlines the relationship between book history and assemblage theory to examine how books contribute to the assembly of the human subject in different ways for readers, owners, and authors and to lay a theoretical and historical foundation for reading cultural assemblages in later chapters. The second chapter studies how authors and sometimes printers attempt as makers of books to construct public identities through them. The chapter focuses on how Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender and Isabella Whitney’s poetry anthologies play with texts and paratexts in order to create the illusion of control over the resulting authorial persona, even while acknowledging that the book itself is a deterritorialized element of their own identities with particular agencies of its own. The third chapter investigates how Renaissance drama represents human beings using books to curate their identity assemblages both publicly and inwardly, particularly as depicted in the work of Thomas Kyd, William Shakespeare, and the author of Arden of Faversham. The successes and failures of these assemblages on the stage reflect anxieties about the book as an agentive object in an assembled identity. The fourth chapter examines the prose work of Philip Sidney, Roger Ascham, and Fulke Greville, considering the obsession with travel books and writing as a reflection of wider notions about the permeability and possible contamination by foreign influences of the self constructed through books and writings related to travel.
ContributorsAdams, John Henry (Author) / Fox, Cora (Thesis advisor) / Moulton, Ian F (Committee member) / Ryner, Bradley D. (Committee member) / Irish, Bradley J. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
The purpose of this project is to analyze Jane Austen's unfinished novel Sanditon (1817) and its inclusion of a character of color. This thesis discusses Austen's mixed-race heiress, Miss Lambe, in the context of two other pieces of fiction that feature mixed-race heroines--the anonymously published The Woman of Colour (1808) and Mary Ann Sullivan's Owen Castle (1816). Scholarship on Austen's awareness of the Abolitionist movement and her sympathy for its politics has previously been published. I advance our conversations on the subject by discussing Austen's Miss Lambe as a mixed-race heiress in the context of gender, race, and ethnicity in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century novels. My thesis considers literary and historical treatments of people of color and provides a trans-Atlantic approach to female characters identified as mixed race.
Juxtaposing Sanditon, The Woman of Colour, and Owen Castle provides insight into how Austen was working within a set of established literary traditions, while creating ways to disrupt some of its problematic elements. This project looks at conventions of the mixed-race female characters in five ways. To begin, I discuss the mixed-race heroine and the compulsion to define her place of origin. Second, I consider the convention of describing mixed-race heiresses' rights to their inheritance. An analysis of the significance of naming mixed-race heiresses follows. I discuss literary conventions of the betrayal of mixed-race females. Lastly, I explore the common use of black maid figures in novels of this era to advance social critique against prejudice. Comparative analysis of Austen with other novels featuring mixed-race heroines in this era allows us to reach new understandings of Sanditon. Austen's unfinished last novel is shown to question the power of fortune, to undermine the orthodoxy of categorizing race and ethnicity, and to unsettle the hierarchy among characters of different races and ethnicities.
Juxtaposing Sanditon, The Woman of Colour, and Owen Castle provides insight into how Austen was working within a set of established literary traditions, while creating ways to disrupt some of its problematic elements. This project looks at conventions of the mixed-race female characters in five ways. To begin, I discuss the mixed-race heroine and the compulsion to define her place of origin. Second, I consider the convention of describing mixed-race heiresses' rights to their inheritance. An analysis of the significance of naming mixed-race heiresses follows. I discuss literary conventions of the betrayal of mixed-race females. Lastly, I explore the common use of black maid figures in novels of this era to advance social critique against prejudice. Comparative analysis of Austen with other novels featuring mixed-race heroines in this era allows us to reach new understandings of Sanditon. Austen's unfinished last novel is shown to question the power of fortune, to undermine the orthodoxy of categorizing race and ethnicity, and to unsettle the hierarchy among characters of different races and ethnicities.
ContributorsBaugh, Victoria (Author) / Looser, Devoney (Thesis advisor) / Justice, George (Committee member) / Wernimont, Jacqueline (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
Medical Humanities is a growing field and much scholarship focuses on the promotion of empathy in professionals. I argue incorporation of literature is crucial as it develops critical thinking skills that guard against the dangers of collective thought. A Foucauldian analysis of three literary works, my own creative non-fiction short story, William Carlos Williams' "The Use of Force," and Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward offer the student perspective, the doctor perspective and the institutional perspective, respectively, and subversive undertones offer an example of the analytical thought developed in humanities education by challenging assumptions and elucidating implicit power relations in the medical institution.
ContributorsBlock, Courtney Samantha (Author) / Lussier, Mark (Thesis director) / Fox, Cora (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
Scientific and Cultural Interpretations of Volcanoes, 1766-1901 analyzes nineteenth-century conceptions of volcanoes through interdisciplinary literature and science studies. The project considers how people in the nineteenth century used science, aesthetics, and other ways of knowing to understand volcanoes and their operations. In the mid-eighteenth century, volcanoes were seen as singular, unique features of the planet that lacked temporal and terrestrial reach. By the end of the nineteenth century, volcanoes were seen as networked, environmental phenomena that stretched through geological time and geographic space. Scientific and Cultural Interpretations of Volcanoes, 1766-1901 offers a new historical understanding of volcanoes and their environmental connections, using literature and science to show how perceptions of volcanic time and space changed over 135 years.
The first chapter, using texts by Sir William Hamilton, Hester Piozzi, and Priscilla Wakefield, argues that in the late eighteenth century important aspects of volcanoes, like their impact upon human life and their existence through time, were beginning to be defined in texts ranging from the scientific to the educational. The second chapter focuses on works by Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Charles Lyell to demonstrate the ways that volcanoes were stripped of metaphysical or symbolic meaning as the nineteenth century progressed. The third chapter contrasts the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa with Constance Gordon-Cumming’s travels to Kīlauea. The chapter shows how even towards the end of the century, trying to connect human minds with the process of volcanic phenomenon was a substantial challenge, but that volcanoes like Kīlauea allowed for new conceptions of volcanic action. The last chapter, through a post-apocalyptic novel by M. P. Shiel, shows how volcanoes were finally beginning to be categorized as a primary agent within the environment, shaping all life including humanity. Ultimately, I argue that the change in thinking about volcanoes parallels today’s shift in thinking about global climate change. My work provides insight into how we imagine ecological catastrophes like volcanic eruptions or climate change in the past and present and what that means for their impact on people.
The first chapter, using texts by Sir William Hamilton, Hester Piozzi, and Priscilla Wakefield, argues that in the late eighteenth century important aspects of volcanoes, like their impact upon human life and their existence through time, were beginning to be defined in texts ranging from the scientific to the educational. The second chapter focuses on works by Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Charles Lyell to demonstrate the ways that volcanoes were stripped of metaphysical or symbolic meaning as the nineteenth century progressed. The third chapter contrasts the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa with Constance Gordon-Cumming’s travels to Kīlauea. The chapter shows how even towards the end of the century, trying to connect human minds with the process of volcanic phenomenon was a substantial challenge, but that volcanoes like Kīlauea allowed for new conceptions of volcanic action. The last chapter, through a post-apocalyptic novel by M. P. Shiel, shows how volcanoes were finally beginning to be categorized as a primary agent within the environment, shaping all life including humanity. Ultimately, I argue that the change in thinking about volcanoes parallels today’s shift in thinking about global climate change. My work provides insight into how we imagine ecological catastrophes like volcanic eruptions or climate change in the past and present and what that means for their impact on people.
ContributorsLinthicum, Kent Robert (Author) / Lussier, Mark (Thesis advisor) / Bivona, Daniel (Committee member) / Looser, Devoney (Committee member) / Tromp, Marlene (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Since their introduction into English in the mid-sixteenth Century, accommodations have registered weighty concepts in religious, economic, and political discourse: they represented the process by which divine principles could be adapted to human understanding, the non-interest property loans that were the bedrock of Christian neighborliness, and a political accord that would satisfy all warring factions. These important ideas, however, give way to misdirection, mutation, and suspicion that can all be traced back to the word accommodation in some way—the word itself suggests ambiguous or shared agency and constitutes a blank form that might be overwritten with questionable values or content. This dissertation examines the semantic range and rhetorical value of the word accommodation, which garnered attention for being a “perfumed term” (Jonson), a “good phrase” (Shakespeare), a stumbling block (Milton), and idolatry (anonymous author). The word itself is acknowledged to have an extra-lingual value, some kind of efficacious appeal or cultural capital that periodically interferes with its meaning. These tendencies align it with different modes of fetishism—idolatry, commodity fetishism, and factishism—which I will explicate and synthesize through an analysis of accommodation’s various careers and explicit commentary evidenced in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts.
ContributorsAckerman, Heather M (Author) / Hawkes, David (Thesis advisor) / Fox, Cora (Committee member) / Ryner, Bradley D. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
The need to draw a more explicit connection between literature and the daily lives of students has become an increasingly pressing issue. Preeminent literary scholars have long argued that the design of many undergraduate classrooms only engages the student with literature to a degree that, long term, does not produce habits of criticism that engage students with wider contexts of conflict. The yield instead primarily takes place in a classroom. Leading scholars tend to draw connections of value between the work they are teaching and the lives of students by focusing on how they negotiate specific power discourses. However, placing an emphasis on having habits of criticism function regarding specific biases in contexts restricts the kinds of conflict students are prepared to negotiate. To encourage a habit of critical thinking in undergraduate students that can be applied to any context of conflict and bias, a vocabulary on language failure should be taught and analyzed through its implications in origin myths that explain and justify division. Language failure, or the failure of symbols to represent subjects in their full capacity, is a concept and theory introduced by Kenneth Burke to examine conflict at a conceivable root. Burke suggests that language failure is the core of misrepresentation and conflict and is inevitably the result of any ‘identification’, or selection of meaning that is assigned to symbols. Identifications are selections of meaning and conceptions of value that organize bodies towards a social purpose, under a limited perspective. The danger of language failure is present when it goes unacknowledged. In identifications, the repercussions of language failure continually complicate, divide and propagate in discourse; assumptions about the validity of identifications encourage more complex ‘blind-spots’ and misrepresentations that exclude populations and have violent potentials. The more complex the layering of association between identifications becomes, the more obscured their foundational failure, their nature of non-innateness, is, faced as truth, affective as justice. The ‘affective’ foundation behind these powerful associations and assumptions is myth. Origin myth, or a narrative that explains the beginning of some worldly phenomena, founds, and adapts to the needs of culture and society. Teaching students to regard risks of language use as being foundational in their cultural thought, their criticism, and their communication, enriches their capability to negotiate and participate ambivalently in conflicts faced during their daily lives.
ContributorsNewcomb, Lily R. (Author) / Jensen, Kyle (Thesis advisor) / Fox, Cora (Committee member) / Free, Melissa (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021