Myth-making in Greek and Roman comedy

Challenging the common notion that mythological comedies simply burlesque stories found in epic and tragedy, this dissertation shows that comic poets were active participants in creating and transmitting myths and argues that their mythical innovations influenced accounts found in tragedy and prose mythography. Although no complete Greek mythological comedy survives, hundreds of fragments and titles reveal that this type of drama was extremely popular; they were staged in Greece, Sicily, and Southern Italy and make up about one-half of all comedies produced in some periods. These fragments, supplemented by Plautus' Amphitruo (the only nearly complete mythological comedy), vase-paintings, and ancient testimonia, shed light on the vibrant tradition of comic mythology. In chapter one, I argue that ancient scholars' and prose mythographers' citations of comedies invite us to view comedians as authoritative myth-makers. I then survey the development of mythological comedy throughout the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. The plays' titles reveal common mythical topics as well as a number of comic myths that survived independent of the tragic tradition. In chapter two, I argue that Cratinus' Dionysalexandros and Epicharmus' Odysseus the Deserter are wildly innovative comedies that challenge previous accounts for mythological authority. In chapter three, Epicharmus' Pyrrha and Prometheus, Pherecrates' Antmen, and Cratinus' Wealth Gods are studied to show how comedians created new stories by fusing myths together and by combining myth and historical reality. In chapter four, I look at the affairs of Zeus to show the dramatists' different approaches to the same mythical material. While tragedians tend to focus on the suffering of Zeus' victims, comedians feature Zeus' humorously outlandish and usually harmless seductions. In chapter five, on the Amphitruo, I show how Plautus has transformed a myth about the birth of Heracles into a story about Jupiter's long-term affair with a pregnant woman. In chapter six, I enter the debate about comedy's influence on tragedy and argue that mythical variants invented by the comic poet Cratinus have been incorporated into Euripides' Trojan Women and Helen, which demonstrates that, as early as the fifth century, comic poets were seen as mythological authorities.2017-06-30T00:00:00

EDUCATIONAL RESPONSES TO THE CANCER INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX PINK WAR MACHINE: THEORIZING GENDER INSUBORDINATION FROM AUTOBIOGRAPHIES OF BREAST AND GYNECOLOGICAL CANCERS

Premised upon John Dewey’s contention that dualist notions of minds isolated and elevated from bodies are an “evil” perpetuated in education (1916), this study applies Jane Roland Martin’s theories of education as encounter (2011), education as a lifelong series of culture crossings (2006), and education as the transmission of both cultural liabilities and assets (2002) to curriculum theorizing from women’s cancer narratives as educational autobiographies (Couser, 1997; Lorber and Moore, 2002; Frank, 2013; Dewey, 1916; Pinar, 1975; Franzosa, 1992; Martin, 2011; Laird 2017, 2018). Informed also by analyses of modes of body discipline and conditions affecting the well-being of bodies in communities (Foucault 1982; Friedman, 1989; Bartky, 1990; Young, 1994; Butler 2006; Shusterman 2008; Warren 2011), this textual study focuses upon the U.S. “cancer-industrial complex” (Ehrenreich, 2001), the conglomeration of medical and research institutions, government and nonprofit agencies, and commercial corporations that shape patient and public health education for women with breast and gynecological cancers (BGC) as a “pink war machine” that fosters cisgender heteronormativity and gender subordination (GS). Education for GS includes three practices—“pink commerce,” medical authoritarianism, and “pink narratives”—which compel BGC patients’ conformity to gender norms, violate their bodies, suppress their voices, and limit and distort their learning. This textual study theorizes “Gender Insubordination” (GI) from close reading of eight autobiographical narratives (Campion, 1972; Kushner, 1975; Rollin, 1976; Lorde, 1980; Lucas, 2004; Ho, 2006; Steingraber, 2010; Gubar, 2012) that voice women’s critical responses to gender-subordinating, pink war training. This study’s thesis is that GI is a self-educating practice, and collectively, that GI narratives can serve as counter-curriculum for revealing, resisting, and redressing pink-war-machine miseducation. Women’s diverse narratives express GI educational thought of three kinds: emergent, instigative/informer, and restorative/reformer. In all cases, four GI actions respond directly to gender-subordinating patient education: Refusing to comply with gender-normed behaviors, developing practices to listen to and sustain bodies, educating others to recognize pink war miseducation, and claiming voice for self-advocacy. Commending Dewey’s insight that education may enhance or harm health (1916), this study closes with a plea to broaden educational studies to apply its disciplines of interpretive, critical, and normative inquiry to health care as a site of vital teaching and learning

Spanish American, 10-27-1917

https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/sp_am_roy_news/1240/thumbnail.jp

Place and Displacement: The Unsettling Connection of Women, Property, and the Law in British Novels of the Long Nineteenth Century

This study examines how British novels produced during the long nineteenth century, the period from 1750 to 1919, represent thetenuous connection of women to property and place. A paradox of the era was that while women tended to be relegated to theconfines of the domestic realm as daughters, sisters, wives, or widows, it was also a home that they could not or did not own, and in which their continued residence was dependent upon the largesse of others, making them vulnerable to displacement. Thedichotomy between home and homelessness creates the dynamic tension that drives many plots of the long nineteenth century, precipitating the movements of dispossessed female characters who must maneuver through a complex topology of geography, laws, and social practices in search of new homes, families, or communities. Since the fictional world of the novel is meant to provide a landscape that is recognizable and realistic, this study looks at how laws and related constructs are key mechanisms for achieving mimesis. I suggest that fictions of the long nineteenth century rely on the law to reveal both the dominant ideology as well as its contestation, seamlessly enfolding laws and legal constructs into the fabric of those plots reliant for their development on thedisconnection of women from land, ownership, and occupancy rights. Another goal of this study is to expand both the timeline typically employed when critically assessing narratives predicated on some form of female displacement, as well as broadening the constellation of laws and socio-legal practices that influenced the content of plots predicated on contested interests in land and wealth. Rather than concentrating only on the mid-Victorian period and theconstraints of coverture on married women’s rights of ownership as many studies do, I suggest that a much longer chronology of laws and practices must be considered in understanding the long sweep of evolving laws and practices affecting women’s rights of property regardless of marital status that filtered into the plots of contemporary fictions. I begin in the mid-eighteenth century and expand into the first decades of the twentieth century as the natural termination point for novels of female displacement. In addition to those common law practices generally associated with marriage such as coverture, or inheritance practices that preference themale line such as primogeniture, including the 1753 Marriage Act, the practice of Parliamentary Enclosure, the Inheritance Act of 1833, the several Asylum and Madhouse Acts enacted in this period, and the Reform Act of 1832, among other laws whose influence on the shape of fictions is palpable within plots or sub-plots that mirror the preference for the preservation of landed interests while simultaneously destabilizing women’s rights in property and place. I begin with Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) and its contestation of masculine historicity and its exclusion of women from the national narrative as symbolic of their physical exclusion from rights in the eponymous castle that Edgeworth suggests is not only a function of the uncertain political climate, but of the imposition of English laws and practices. Straddling the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and written on the eve of Anglo-Irish Union, this short novel demonstrates how uncertain temporal and political boundaries offer opportunities that women can use to gain some wealth or property within a transforming Ireland. Eschewing themarriage plot formula, Edgeworth demonstrates how a combination of ancient Irish customs and the manipulation of English laws and practices can provide women with material benefits, even if they cannot own or remain at the titular property. Chapter three examines Jane Austen’s Juvenilia and its bold assault on the inheritance practices that favored men and the mercenary marriages facilitated by Hardwicke’s Act of 1753. Often discounted in Austen’s canon as merely preliminary to her development as a writer, I suggest that because the juvenilia was not intended for publication, it provides uncensored access to one of Austen’s chief concerns, the displacement and disinheritance of women, including women’s omission from masculine historicity. The significance of these early works is that Austen both returns to them for characters, plots and language in her mature novels, but also that the concerns she first articulates in her juvenile writings about women’s legal place in English society remained constant and continued to inform her mature novels. Chapter four focuses on Austen’s mature novels, and suggests that the marriage plot paradigm is merely the cover story Austen uses to question marriage and inheritance practices that displaced women, achieved by structuring her plots like modern exile narratives using spatial tropes that subvert the laws and practices that precipitate women’s displacement. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.

The Concert Of Nations: Music, Political Thought And Diplomacy In Europe, 1600S-1800S

Musical category, political concept, and political myth, the Concert of nations emerged within 16th- and 17th-century court culture. While the phrase may not have entered the political vocabulary before the end of the 18th century, the representation of nations in sonorous and visual ensembles is contemporary to the institution of the modern state and the first developments of the international system. As a musical category, the Concert of nations encompasses various genres- ballet, dance suite, opera, and symphony. It engages musicians in making commonplaces, converting ad hoc representations into shared realities, and uses multivalent forms that imply, rather than articulate political meaning. The Nutcracker, the ballet by Tchaikovsky, Vsevolozhsky, Petipa and Ivanov, illustrates the playful recomposition of semiotic systems and political thought within a work; the music of the battle scene (Act I) sets into question the equating of harmony with peace, even while the ballet des nations (Act II) culminates in a conventional choreography of international concord (Chapter I). Chapter II similarly demonstrates how composers and librettists directly contributed to the conceptual elaboration of the Concert of nations. Two works, composed near the close of the War of Polish Succession (1733-38), illustrate opposite constructions of national character and conflict resolution: Schleicht, spielende Wellen, und murmelt gelinde (BWV 206) by Johann Sebastian Bach (librettist unknown), and Les Sauvages by Jean-Philippe Rameau and Louis Fuzelier. These construct competing definitions of the political concept vis-à-vis hegemony, morality, and reality The Concert of nations has hence long constituted a symbolic resource for political action. At the Congress of Vienna (1814-15), music and dance contributed to a high society of pleasures that modeled peaceful difference and competition in international relations. The Austrian court, and in particular its foreign minister, Klemens von Metternich, consistently resorted to the Concert of nations as a vector of soft power. Current uses of music in international relations only partially replicate these practices. As illustrated by the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, musicians can still represent the Concert of nations, but the experience remains limited to professionals, and the values their performances embody do not necessarily offer desirable political models (Chapter III)

Antropofagia and Constructive Universalism: A Diptych

This study proposes a rethinking of the word-image relation through an examination of Joaquin Torres-García’s Constructive Universalism (ca.1934-1949) and the Brazilian Modernist movement of Antropofagia (1928-ca.1934). By placing both in the close relation of a ‘diptych,’ I argue for a new reading of Torres-García’s visual work as well as a different understanding of Antropofagia. In the first part of this work, I argue, through a close reading and viewing of Torres-García’s work, that the constitutive instability between word/image has been overlooked in favour of, on the one hand, an appropriation in terms of a ‘deviation’ from the canon of Geometric Abstraction and on the other hand as a paradigm of Pre-Columbian, Inca abstraction. Both discursive gestures repress the matter of visual aesthesis. Against this strategy of legibility, I propose a counter-reading through the concepts of ‘graphism’ (Leroi-Gourhan), ‘manuscription’ (Sarabia), the ‘sensory field’ (Lyotard) and the hypericon. These concepts allow contingency to find its way back into Torres-García’s oeuvre in opposition to neo-Classicist misappropriations. Throughout my argument, it will become evident that Torres-García’s paintings bespeak an irrepressible mestizaje, an intertwining of the figural with the abstract. It is this tension animating Torres-García’s work that has been neglected by the disciplining of discourse’s ‘logic of illustration.’ In the second part of the study, I take Antropofagia not so much as a historically determinate period in the narrative of Brazilian Modernism, but as a heuristic for the thinking through of the ‘inconstancy’ of the relation between word and image in its New World Baroque vertigo. This vertigo is politically charged, and amounts to a ‘counter-Conquest’ (Lezama Lima) of the clear and distinct distribution of legibility and visibility inherited through coloniality. The metaphoric economy of cannibalism in Oswald de Andrade’s “Manifesto Antropófago” (1928) in conjunction with the visual work of Tarsila do Amaral and the ‘re-discovery’ of Barroco Mineiro by the Brazilian avant-garde deconstructs the narrative of rupture so as to engage in a complex ‘route to roots’ highlighting the artifice of origin. This same artifice marks Torres-García’s oeuvre, and by ‘closing’ the diptych, I show how abstraction folds back into a Baroque superimposition

The influence of myth on the fifth-century audience’s understanding and appreciation of the tragedies of Aeschylus

This thesis seeks to establish how the fifth-century audience’s perception of Aeschylean tragedy was influenced by their prior knowledge of the myths on which the dramas were based. Thus we study references to these myths in earlier epic and lyric sources in an attempt to detect borrowings and deviations from the earlier material on the part of the poet. The earliest surviving tragedy, the Persae, has a historical basis and so mythical knowledge is supplanted by the audience's own first-hand experience of the recent war. We see how foreknowledge of the Greek victory at Salamis will prove a deep influence on the audience s perception of the presentation of the enemy court and how Aeschylus presents the Persians as being utterly devastated by the defeat. Likewise an appreciation of the Seven Against Thebes is greatly enhanced if we remember that from the very beginning of the drama the audience were anticipating the double fratricide from their knowledge of this events in previous versions of the myth. During the Supplices, the audience would have suspected that not only would the Argives accept the supplication of the Danaids but also that these helpless girls would shortly murder their bridegrooms on their wedding-night, and Aeschylus includes many dark hints at this future event during the course of his play. Our study of the myth of Agamemnon will enable us to appreciate the exploitation of audience expectation throughout the Oresteia and their foreknowledge that murder is plotted against Agamemnon on his return and that Orestes will return to exact vengeance proves vital to the tragic effect. In addition we detect certain areas in which Aeschylus may diverge from his inherited material, such as his presentation of Clytemnestra as the sole unaided killer of her husband and his inclusion of a trial of Orestes before the court of the Areopagus. Thus it is hoped that by considering the mythical knowledge shared by both Aeschylus and his audience we are able to gain a fuller appreciation of the effects sought by the poet in the fifth-century theatre