Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Theater in literature'

My dissertation explores how sound informs the representation of cross-cultural interactions within early modern drama and travel writing. "Sounding" implies the process of producing music or noise, but it also suggests the attempt to make meaning of what one hears. "Otherness" in this study refers to a foreign presence outside of the listening body, as well as to an otherness that is already inherent within. Sounding otherness enacts a bi-directional exchange between a culturally different other and an embodied self; this exchange generates what I term the sonic uncanny, whereby the otherness interior to the self vibrates with sounds of otherness exterior to the body. The sonic uncanny describes how sounds that are perceived as foreign become familiar through the vibratory touch of the soundwave that attunes a body to its sonic environment or soundscape. Sounds of foreign Eastern and New World Indian otherness become part of English and European travelers; at the same time, these travelers sound their own otherness in Indian spaces. Sounding otherness occurs in the travel narratives of Jean de Lèry, Thomas Dallam, Thomas Coryate, and John Smith. Cultural otherness is also sounded by the English through their theatrical representations of New World and Oriental otherness in masques including The Masque of Flowers, and plays like Robert Greene's Alphonsus, respectively; Shakespeare's The Tempest combines elements of East and West into a new sound—"something rich and strange." These dramatic entertainments suggest that the theater, as much as a foreign land, can function as a sonic contact zone.

This paper aspires to perform an analysis of Early Modern character by thinking of character as a formative process, spanning playwriting to part-learning to dramatic performance. My analysis, which will focus on Shakespeare's Coriolanus and Julius Caesar, dismisses any notion of the Shakespeare play as holistic or complete text. I draw from Tiffany Stern and Simon Palfrey's Shakespeare in Parts, which establishes a methodology for the analysis of "part" or "cue" scripts, texts that feature a single character's lines amputated from the larger play.

In the Early Modern period, an actor's "part" or "side" would have included his own lines and the cues he needed to know to enter the scene or begin speaking. The part would have been learned in isolation, so the actor would have relied on cues to understand how his role fit into the larger play. I argue that the function of isolated parts and cues, or the last three to five words of any character's lines, is currently underestimated in critical analysis of Shakespeare texts, especially in literary close readings that focus on "character."

The textual space that Palfrey and Stern label the "cue space" continues to be underestimated, I imagine, because critics still view this space as an overly speculative construct. It is true that we cannot speak concretely about what an Early Modern actor would or would not have done, but we can highlight the implications of a potential performance decision. Cues, sites of stability surrounded by malleability, are ripe with potential performance decisions. By drawing from a methodology grounded in an understanding of parts and cues, we may more clearly contextualize the combative collaboration between actor and playwright through which character is formed.

This dissertation is a hybrid project that includes a critical paper and a collection of creative writing, including poems, a nonfiction piece, several drama pieces, and an erasure project. The critical paper is an analysis of the mental ailments and disassociated discourse of Anton Chekhov’s characters in three of his plays—The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, and The Cherry Orchard. Many of Anton Chekhov’s characters display symptoms of depression, including suicide attempts, and formal thought disorder. The creative section’s drama pieces were loosely influenced by Anton Chekhov’s work, but all of the work completed in the creative section is connected through common themes of mental illness and grief. Many of the poems in this section symbolize grief through the loss of a father. Some of the more grief-stricken moments are symbolically represented through animals, such as the mice in “All Summer.” Later, this same type of grief is transformed in “Flatlines,” the titular work of the dissertation, to a young woman’s reimaging and hallucination of childhood characters brought to life to her by her father’s death. The last work presented in this creative section is the erasure project that blends the poetry with the drama–a stage manager’s notes blacked out, silenced, and relit with a different perspective, but still a connection to the theatre’s space, set, and characters.

“The Art of Information Management” explores the ways that information technologies influence thought and take shape in imaginative works of literature at the turn of the seventeenth century in early modern England, from 1580 to 1605. Imaginative literature becomes a space for articulating the challenges presented by discourses perceived to have been unalterably expanded and amplified through technology, as well for experimenting with strategies to respond to those challenges.

Drawing on studies of early modern Materialism, New Historicism, Literary History, Digital Humanities, and Media Archeology, this project seeks to move the understanding of the role information technologies as agents of change forward by relocating debates concerning technology to the spaces imagined in early modern English literature of the fantastic: Thomas Nashe’s multi-modal London and ocean-sanctuary Yarmouth, Edmund Spenser’s Faery Land, William Shakespeare and Robert Armin’s holiday Kingdom of Illyria, and Samuel Daniel’s pastoral Arcadia. In each imagined space, this project looks at the printing press and beyond to attendant technologies in order to develop a better understand of the period’s relationship to our own.

The works considered here expose a moment of feverish innovation with regard to the rhetorical construction of authenticity, political expression, and right behavior. The first two chapters argue that the writings of Thomas Nashe and Edmund Spenser reflect a heightened sensitivity to the speed and timings associated with technologically-mediated discourse. The final two chapters examine the efforts of William Shakespeare, Robert Armin, and Samuel Daniel, as they sort through the solidifying perception of discourse structures outpacing traditional modes of thought and learning.

During the 20th century, book historians, bibliographers, librarians, and archivists laid down the theoretical and empirical framework to understand the printed book as a commodity--a product of a specific market. In the 21st, the predominance of digital technologies and the cyberspace has made more evident than ever that print technologies created a specific market space for cultural exchange: the printspace. We propose authorship as a textual commodity, a cultural object that is shaped by the legal, commercial, and material limitations of the printing press as a platform of media communication.

Under this framework I present four study cases, analyzing different authorships associated with a specific print product, all in the context of the Spanish Golden Age. In the first case, I posit that the material characteristics of the pliego suelto produce a very specific kind of authorship that differs greatly from the authorship for books. Here, the works of Benito Carrasco and Cristóbal Bravo serve as an example and a probe for the market of pliegos. In the second case I contrast Mateo Alemán’s authorial project with how the readers consumed his authorial persona. This juxtaposition shows how an authorship is not the sole creation of the author, but the product of the mechanisms of production, distribution, and consumption of printed text. The third case investigates the interaction between the market of comedias and the market of printed books. The play El Burlador de Sevilla serves to illustrate how this transfer created persistent authorial problems. I demonstrate how the printspace, as a theoretical framework, can provide critical solutions to these authorial problems. The last chapter studies the authorships of Lope de Vega and Juan Pérez de Montalbán as part of the editorial enterprise of the book merchant Alonso Pérez. This case exhibits the marketing strategies used in the construction of both authorships, and showcase the importance of the nascent figure of the editor in the market of books.

Utopias often elicit visions of full-fledged societies that operate more successfully in contrast to a society of the present based on a principle of cognitive estrangement where the daily routines of a new civilization strike readers as strange and advantageous. While William Shakespeare's drama rarely portrays radical societies that speak directly to the fantastic nature of utopia, it does feature moments that draw attention to desires for social change, presenting glimmers of the utopian impulse throughout his work. In this dissertation, I use utopia as critical approach for analyzing Shakespeare's comedies, romances, and tragedies, specifically As You Like It, The Tempest, The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Macbeth. While critics have approached the The Tempest as a utopian play, other works by Shakespeare do not receive much attention from this perspective. This dissertation addresses the lack of attention paid to other plays, illustrating the degree to which the health of the state as a theme featured prominently in his works. I argue that the desires expressed by characters in these plays capture the wishes and despairs of entire social ranks during the Elizabethan and Jacobean, connecting their wishes and fantasies to utopian and dystopian analysis. As You Like It and The Tempest feature utopic settings and address themes of colonialism and egalitarianism. Yet, rather than present locations of harmony, these plays explore the problems and contradictions that spring from the attempts to actualize a utopian climate. Characters in The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, and Romeo and Juliet possess radical aspirations, and they discover opportunities to transform their identities as it relates to their respective societies. However, these characters ultimately fail to rupture the ideologies of their societies. In my final chapter, I argue how dystopian themes arise from the depictions of tyranny and treachery in Hamlet and Macbeth. The transgressions of the Kings in both plays plague their kingdoms. Tackling Shakespeare from a utopian lens illustrates that rather than forming alternative, ideal societies, the concept can be understood as an ambiguous, unfinished dialectical process that strives for social betterment.

This project analyzes a long-neglected dimension of Early Modern Peninsular Studies: court theater. My thesis explores theoretical, political, and scenographic frameworks of court drama written for and produced in the court of Carlos II of Spain. I explore the notions of imagined communities and agency in order to understand how the theater functioned within the Habsburg court, and I juxtapose the role of the king as a spectator to that of the individual consumer of the public theater to confirm it is possible not to identify as part of the mass public during theater consumption. From there, my archival research exposes the political conflicts during the 1670s between Queen Regent Mariana of Austria and her illegitimate step-son, Don Juan José, as their opposing factions vied to dominate the terrain of courtly politics in Madrid. My research investigates how these tensions were reflected in the 1670s works: La estatua de Prometeo and Fieras afemina amor by Pedro Calderón de la Barca. This then led me to consider the political anxieties around the topic of succession in the 1690s as well. I illustrate that Francisco Antonio de Bances Candamo’s political trilogy offered viable options for an heir through his presentation of what I term the nephew-king paradigm. My research illustrates how politics and royal theater production in the 1670s and 1690s were linked due to theater’s status as a facet of the royal Baroque identity. My project concludes by establishing court drama as its own genre through an investigation of court performance, the scenographic advancement, and the musical evolution in Baroque Spanish court drama—a highly original artistic genre in seventeenth-century Spain. I establish staged performance as malleable and trans-dynastic as it outlasts the performance of the monarchs for which the work was staged. Ultimately, this project proves that theater is a part of royal Baroque Spanish identity.