This thesis is an examination of physical pain in ancient tragedy, with the focus on three plays: Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound and Sophocles’ Philoctetes and Trachiniae. The study unfolds the layers ...of several conceptual systems in order get closer to the core—pain and its limits in tragedy. The first chapter aims to show that Aristotle’s model for the analysis of tragedy in his classificatory tract, the Poetics, centered on the ill-defined concept of mimesis, is an attempt to tame pain and clean tragedy of its inherent viscerality. The second chapter looks at the dualist solution advanced by Plato and Descartes, while showing that a discourse rooted in dualism alienates pain from tragedy. The third chapter provides axes of analysis for three tragedies where pain plays a central role by using the idea of pain as an experience of the limit and looking at the different ways in which pain splits the subject. The thesis also advances the idea that, for the most part, conceptual frames act as analgesic systems that obstruct the exposure to the experience of intensity in ancient tragedy.
Reframing Romantic Nature: Towards a Social Ecocriticism is an attempt to offer a new way of thinking about ecological approaches to literature. Rather than separate ecology from the movement of ...history, or support an anthropocentric historicism, my approach aims to merge the interests of both environmental and historical criticism in order to provide a more interdisciplinary view of conceptions of the natural and the social. The process of history owes much more to the non-human than has been generally allowed, especially in the face of contemporary ecocrisis. In the more than two hundred years since the advent of Romanticism in Britain, figures such as William Wordsworth have become icons, their work celebrated as defining intrinsic elements of cultural identity and history. Yet this same period has seen greater environmental destruction than any other in human existence. The poet who announces the renewal of nature does so at the dawn of the anthropocene, and it is no longer possible to treat these phenomena as entirely distinct. Looking back at the Romantics from our own era of ecocrisis evokes an ambivalence towards Romantic constructions of the natural world. This thesis is an attempt to address this complex ambivalence. The thesis advances these concerns through the reading of texts in various genres by five Romantic authors. The first chapter explores a foundational work of Romanticism, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters from Denmark, Norway and Sweden, in terms of how various landscape descriptions are interrupted by both outside forces and internal states, and how these interruptions are emblematic of the irruptive force of capital. This work, though celebrated on its publication for the beauty of its landscape descriptions, is full of a tumultuous and often vexed sense of place. The second chapter addresses the history of deforestation in terms of William Wordsworth’s poem “The Ruined Cottage.” The sense of dearth that poem evokes is, I argue, directly related to the drastic deforestation of England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The next chapter examines the acoustic ecology of John Clare as exemplified in his poem “The Fallen Elm.” How the sounds of the natural world appear as both subjects in his poetry and as influential on the formation of his own patterning of sound is explored, as well as the ideological significance of different types of soundscapes. The focus of the fourth chapter is the urban and suburban landscapes of Thomas De Quincey. Here I examine the appearance of urban sprawl in a variety of works by De Quincey and the way in which the addicted body and the sprawling city become darkly symbolic of each other. The thesis concludes with a reading of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, a novel about the end of humanity written at the end of the Romantic era. Here I consider how changing thought about the relationship of humanity to deity, along with the panic of 1825, which marked an important recognition of the global reach of capitalism, inform a broader revision of earlier Romantic idealism and anticipate later existential thought.
The Performative Corpse: Anatomy Theatres from the Medieval Era to the Virtual Age examines the various ways in which the human corpse has been displayed, dissected, and consumed by and for a public ...audience. To date, performative moments of human dissection have received little scholarly attention beyond work done on the anatomical theatres of the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, in which criminal or unclaimed bodies were dissected for the edification of the academic community and the general public. Traditionally, the events of the anatomical theatre have been framed in Foucaudian terms: developing a hierarchical relationship of power between medico-judicial authority and the dissected body, which is objectified and commoditized. While this dissertation does not take issue with this line of analysis, it aims to open up other dimensions of the anatomy theatre by broadening its scope. It argues that, when placed in a privileged position on a theatrical stage, the dissected body becomes a "performative corpse." In this theatrical space of transubstantiation, confronting death always turns into constructing death; in its dismemberment, the performative corpse reveals the ways in which Western societies, in moments of ontological crisis, have fictionalized death to avoid its dreaded unknowability. This dissertation interrogates several historical moments of public, performative human dissection, including medieval displays of saintly relics and incorruptible bodies (Chapter 1), the sacrificial rites of the early modern anatomical theatres and their relationship to the drama of the period (Chapter 2), a seventeenth century farce condemning the growing lust of the era's anatomists (Chapter 3), nineteenth century monstrous bodies displayed and dissected to validate normal human bodies (Chapter 4), and, finally, twenty-first century exhibitions of plastinated corpses and the public autopsies of Gunther von Hagens (Chapter 5). This dissertation argues that an audience's encounter with the opened corpse always poses a particular threat to the integrity of both psychic and somatic boundaries--an aspect of the anatomical ritual that medico-scientific discourse seeks to repress. In these moments of social crisis, the anatomical theatre plays a critical role in conceptualizing, and immortalizing, the nature of death for a given community.
Subtracting the Spectator: Antitheatricality, the Real of Revolution, and the Political Ontology of Avant-Garde Theater examines the political stakes of avant-garde theater artists' ongoing struggle ...to reinvent the play-text and the art of the mise en scène as paradoxically antitheatrical forms. Beginning with Brecht's Weimar era anti-Aristotelian "learning plays" — works meant for the producers rather than the consumers of art — the antitheatrical imperative gives rise to a wide variety of textual, spatial, and scenic innovations. Taken together, these innovations unequivocally imply the annihilation of the very position of spectatorship on which theater uniquely depends, and thus they point to an unprecedentedly radical redefinition of the theatrical medium as such. My reading of these innovations contests the common notion that theater is directly linked to emancipatory politics, or that it is most effectively political when it engages its spectators as a surrogate community. To this end, I demonstrate that revolution, defined here as the central constitutive form of political modernity, is itself an antitheatrical kind of event — something whose unfolding conventional and experimental theater alike have been categorically unable to dramatize or otherwise stage with aesthetic or political conviction. I draw support for this argument from contemporary philosopher and playwright Alain Badiou's important Rhapsody for the Theater: A Short Philosophical Treatise, in which Badiou argues that although it is structurally isomorphic with politics, the theater is in fact the one artistic medium that does not have access to revolution, "the real" of politics. Understood here in its simplest sense as a mode of address that eclipses its addressee, antitheatricality is strictly speaking not an invention of avant-garde theater, but rather part and parcel of the logic of revolution, as first articulated by the Jacobins and subsequently radicalized by the communists of the Paris Commune onward. When experimental theater artists seek to participate in the ethics of revolutionary politics, therefore, they must do so obliquely, by reenacting not its content, which remains unstageable, but rather the antitheatrical form of its unfolding. Through close readings of works by postdramatic writer-directors Bertolt Brecht, Richard Foreman, and Young Jean Lee, and theater-director-turned-conceptual-artist David Levine, I suggest that the theater's most radical potential lies in the tendency to subvert the basic contract that founds the theatrical medium — not to break the fourth wall, but to actually build it. Working with and against thinkers such as Martin Puchner, Samuel Weber, and Claire Bishop, I argue that avant-garde antitheatricality must finally be read as an aesthetic translation of the violent assault on spectatorship that has defined modern revolutionary thought since Robespierre famously announced to the National Convention, at the height of the Jacobin Terror, "anyone who trembles... is guilty."
This dissertation lays the initial groundwork for theorizing closet film as a literary genre. Though closet drama––poetry written in playscript form––has received attention from a wide variety of ...critics in literary, performance and cultural studies, no such body of work exists for thinking about closet film––fiction written in the form of the screenplay. Aside from the self-published work of independent scholar Quimby Melton––with whom I have collaborated on his ongoing project to form an online bibliography of what he terms the closet screenplay––there exists quite literally no field of study, nor any initial attempt to theorize the limits and potentialities of the genre. This project offers a theorization of closet film informed by the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, especially his focus on potentiality , which I argue helps describe closet film’s tenuous stance toward production––closet film is a genre organized around the potential-not-to produce. Studying closet film also helps us rewrite the boundaries of what is considered possible in terms of literary and visual realism, and the “closet” itself constitutes an excellent new paradigm for understanding the space between film and the novel, opening up discussions of texts that have been largely overlooked or marginalized and enabling us to encounter old ones afresh. This project thus completely revamps our understanding of the novel and its relation to cinema, realism, ontology, and aesthetics.
Cette thèse étudie la notion de « révolution physiologique » dans l'œuvre d'Antonin Artaud dans le but de montrer comment ce dernier a repris et approfondi le projet surréaliste initial. Cette ...révolution est issue de l'expérience de l'asile et du traitement psychiatrique qu'a connu le poète. En particulier, elle reprend et élabore le processus d'art-thérapie auquel il a participé. L'échange et le détournement du discours psychiatrique qui en résultent sont examinés suivant trois aspects. La première partie se consacre à l'étude de la langue inventée que le poète commence à utiliser au moment où il entame l'art-thérapie. Cette langue néologique s'inscrit dans la tradition religieuse des glossolalies et est considérée comme pathologique par la psychiatrie. Elle permet au poète de critiquer le discours psychiatrique par une performance de l'écriture qui réinterprète son expérience des rituels autochtones mexicains et correspond à sa redéfinition de la pratique théâtrale. La seconde partie étudie le travail radiophonique du poète et en particulier la transformation que le poète fait subir à sa voix. Est mis en évidence comment le poète cherche à incarner vocalement son personnage d'Artaud le Mômo, patient schizophrène qui remet en cause la pratique et le discours psychiatrique qu'il tourne en dérision. Ces émissions radiophoniques permettent simultanément au poète de réaliser une condamnation du théâtre traditionnel et une première version de son Théâtre de la Cruauté, recourant à une multiplicité de médias dont elle explore les limites. La dernière partie est consacrée à la définition par le poète d'une conception alternative du corps qui questionne les caractérisations scientifique et médicale de ce dernier. Le poète représente un mouvement de révolution anatomique qui doit aboutir à l'avènement d'un nouveau corps, caractérisé en tant que « corps sans organes » dans sa dernière émission radiophonique. À nouveau, ce corps reprend et détourne les caractérisations du corps-schizophrène par la psychiatrie.
This dissertation considers how theatrical representations of seeing and the imagination function as components of memory in the works of contemporary Spanish playwright Juan Mayorga (Madrid, b. ...1965). Mayorga is currently one of Spain's most widely represented and translated playwrights and winner of Spain's 2007 Premio Nacional de Teatro and the 2013 Premio Nacional de Literatura Dramática, among several Premios Max, and is also a published essayist and scholar. This dissertation explores how, in his theater, Mayorga constructs memory as a non-neutral and conflictive process informed by characters' capacities to see and imagine beyond the visible. The cultural and historical context that grounds the introduction to the chapters is the current debate in Spain having to do with historical memory. The thesis is structured in four chapters, the first two of which serve thematically to inform the third and fourth, which are both grounded more specifically in a historical context characterized by political violence. Chapter 1 establishes a relationship between memory and the imagination's capacity to visualize and experience other worlds as equally or more valid than any visible or objective reality or experience. For this chapter, I examine Mayorga's La lengua en pedazos and three of his works of teatro breve: "Amarillo," "La mano izquierda," and "Una carta de Sarajevo." Chapter 2 examines how the testimonial narrative retelling of memory is both framed and altered by an investigation that seeks to record and archive it, and takes as its examples Mayorga's El arte de la entrevista and La Tortuga de Darwin. Chapter 3 looks at Mayorga's Holocaust-themed plays and specifically at how in plays such as Himmelweg (Camino del cielo) and El cartógrafo. Varsovia 1:400.000, Mayorga constructs the acts of seeing and telling during and after the Holocaust as a critical, ethical imperative. Chapter 4 looks at how Mayorga's Spanish Civil War-themed plays perform the limits and silences of memory. In these works, language is insufficient to capture and communicate the rupture and silences of a traumatic witnessing and remembering that has for decades been silenced and forced to exist hermetically and, thereby, invisibly.
Crave, the play I chose to direct as my thesis final project, constitutes a complex and crude portrait of our time, a moment in history marked by violence and individualism. These themes permeate the ...whole script, with its experimental and poetic style constitutes a challenge at the moment of staging it. This document is intended precisely to register the whole process of staging Crave. The first chapter presents the pre-production research, in which I trace the artistic trajectory of the author, British playwright Sarah Kane, in the context of experimental theater. I also analyze the play, and I present my directorial approach to it. In the second chapter I register the actual process of staging it; the methodologies I used in working with the actors and the designers, as well as the challenges I faced in applying them. Finally, the last chapter is a reflection upon the whole process, with the intention of evaluating my growth as a theater director through this project, which constitutes my final step in these training years at SIUC.
Cannibalism in drama collapses the gap between the performative word and the performance of a text or body. It answers Antonin Artaud's call for a new kind of theatre. He calls this new kind of ...theatre one of Cruelty, i.e., one that shakes the audience out of passive state vis-à-vis bourgeois, Western, narrative-based theatre. Artaud pushes for a recodified theatrical language that does not depend upon language. His desire to circumvent spoken or written language, however, cannot occur, a fact he even acknowledges as a possibility in his The Theatre and Its Double. Cannibalism accounts for this inability by mediating the gap between performance and the performative. It reconstitutes the body and the spoken and/or written word in such a manner that the two are indistinguishable. Through a study of cannibalism in a selection of twentieth-century dramatic texts, this project suggests that a Theatre of Cannibalism might accomplish what Artaud is after, a life before birth, a consciousness before consciousness.
This dissertation examines from the perspective of postmodern theory, the ideological and formal aspects of Jorge Volpi's trilogy of the twentieth century: En busca de Klingsor (In Search of Klingsor ...), El fin de la locura (The End of Madness ), and No será la tierra (Season of Ash). Employing the concept of postmodernism as used by Jean-François Lyotard, I demonstrate how Volpi, through his trilogy, undermines the basis of modernity; that is, the trilogy subverts the metanarratives of science, theory, and progress characteristic of modernity and portrays the previous century as a failed one. As a result of postmodern thought this trilogy also deconstructs the dichotomies culture vs. nature, civilization vs. barbarism, and chaos vs. order. The exploration of the relationship between power and knowledge as examined by Michel Foucault is also a fundamental part of this project. I propose that by criticizing this relationship, Volpi's trilogy proves to be synchronized with the condition of postmodernity in which a multiplicity of voices allows for the fading of a monologic discourse and the disappearance of absolute truths. I also examine the relation between content and form, which leads me to conclude that Volpi's trilogy is more postmodern in ideology than in form. I employ the theories of Linda Hutcheon and Brian McHale on postmodern fiction to illustrate this point.
