Theatres of Reality, Fiction, and Temporality: Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller’s \u3cem\u3eIbsen-Saga\u3c/em\u3e (2006 - 2015)

This dissertation examines the influence of modernist aesthetics and ideologies on contemporary, European and U.S. experimental theatre. I argue that modernist and contemporary experimental theatres offer competing notions of reality, fiction, and temporality, which I interrogate through Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller’s Ibsen-Saga. I illuminate this tension by reading current modes of performance against the Saga’s productions and work practices, as well as their aesthetic and ideological foundation in three modernist sources: the artificiality of Ibsen’s realism, the utopianism and totality of Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, and the temporal provocations of the historical avant-gardes. I contend that the Saga reanimates Ibsen, Wagner, and the avant-gardes’ modernist forms and ideas to reject the conventions of twenty-first century practice

Comparison of the vocabularies of the Gregg shorthand dictionary and Horn-Peterson's basic vocabulary of business letters

This study is a comparative analysis of the vocabularies of Horn and Peterson's The Basic Vocabulary of Business Letters1 and the Gregg Shorthand Dictionary.2 Both books purport to present a list of words most frequently encountered by stenographers and students of shorthand. The, Basic Vocabulary of Business Letters, published "in answer to repeated requests for data on the words appearing most frequently in business letters,"3 is a frequency list specific to business writing. Although the book carries the copyright date of 1943, the vocabulary was compiled much earlier. The listings constitute a part of the data used in the preparation of the 10,000 words making up the ranked frequency list compiled by Ernest Horn and staff and published in 1926 under the title of A Basic Writing Vocabulary: 10,000 Words Lost Commonly Used in Writing. The introduction to that publication gives credit to Miss Cora Crowder for the contribution of her Master's study at the University of Minnesota concerning words found in business writing. With additional data from supplementary sources, the complete listing represents twenty-six classes of business, as follows 1. Miscellaneous 2. Florists 3. Automobile manufacturers and sales companie

Beyond The Words: Paratextual And Bibliographic Traces Of The Other Reader In British Literature, 1760-1897

Over the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, compounding technological improvements and expanding education result in unprecedented growth of the reading audience in Britain. This expansion creates a new relationship with the author, opening the horizon of the authorial imagination beyond the discourse community from which the author and the text originate. The relational gap between the author and this new audience manifests as the Other Reader, an anxiety formation that the author reacts to and attempts to preempt. This dissertation tracks these reactions via several authorial strategies that address the alienation of the Other Reader, including the use of prefaces, footnotes, margin notes, asterisks, and poioumena. The deployment of such paratextual and bibliographic tools allow the author to manage the fear of the Other Reader while still addressing their text primarily to their own discourse community

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 Idea of Infancy in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry

This book radically refigures the conceptual and formal significance of childhood in nineteenth-century English poetry. By theorizing infancy as a poetics as well as a space of continual beginning, Ruderman shows how it allowed poets access to inchoate, uncanny, and mutable forms of subjectivity and art. While recent historicist studies have documented the "freshness of experience" childhood confers on 19th-century poetry and culture, this book draws on new formalist and psychoanalytic perspectives to rethink familiar concepts such as immortality, the sublime, and the death drive as well as forms and genres such as the pastoral, the ode, and the ballad. Ruderman establishes that infancy emerges as a unique structure of feeling simultaneously with new theories of lyric poetry at the end of the eighteenth century. He then explores the intertwining of poetic experimentation and infancy in Wordsworth, Anna Barbauld, Blake, Coleridge, Erasmus Darwin, Sara Coleridge, Shelley, Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, and Augusta Webster. Each chapter addresses andanalyzes a specific moment in a writers’ work, moments of tenderness or mourning, birth or death, physical or mental illness, when infancy is analogized, eulogized, or theorized. Moving between canonical and archival materials, and combining textual and inter-textual reading, metrical and prosodic analysis, and post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory, the book shows how poetic engagements with infancy anticipate psychoanalytic and phenomenological (i.e. modern) ways of being in the world. Ultimately, Rudermansuggests that it is not so much that we return to infancy as that infancy returns (obsessively, compulsively) in us. This book shows how by tracking changing attitudes towards the idea of infancy, one might also map the emotional, political, and aesthetic terrain of nineteenth-century culture. It will be of interest to scholars in the areas of British romanticism and Victorianism, as well as 19th-century American literature and culture, histories of childhood, and representations of the child from art historical, cultural studies, and literary perspectives. "D. B. Ruderman’s The Idea of Infancy in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry: Romanticism, Subjectivity, Form is an interesting contribution to this field, and it manages to bring a new perspective to our understanding of Romantic-era and Victorian representations of infancy and childhood. …a supremely exciting book that will be a key work for generations of readers of nineteenth-century poetry." Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck, University of London Victorian Studies (59.4

Memory, Interpellation, and Assemblage: Multivalent Subjectivity in the Novels of Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, and Evelyn Waugh

This project assesses assemblage theory and attempts to optimize it for the study of modernist literature. The first stage of this process examines contemporary assemblage theory to determine the extent to which it is able to account for the various inter-relationships between individuals, the groups they form, and the power structures that emerge from but act as constraints upon interpersonal relationships, especially as they appear in modernist texts; the second stage uses this modified version of assemblage theory to respond to the critical discourses surrounding the writing of Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, and Evelyn Waugh. Ultimately, this project argues that assemblage theory needs to be modified in four ways to account for the depictions of subjects navigating multiple assemblages that Woolf, Orwell, and Waugh provide. First, assemblage theory requires a more robust model of interpellation than is implied by the term “territorialization” – one that accounts for the semiotic element of interpellation, wherein the individual interprets his or her social setting to decide what type of action is most appropriate. Second, this semiotic element suggests the need to disregard Manuel DeLanda’s insistence that only “valid historical actors” should be treated with assemblage theory, as Woolf, Orwell, and Waugh all show individuals acting on behalf of assemblages that do not exist as ontologically valid entities according to DeLanda’s standards. Third, the three modernist authors show the value of treating Nietzsche’s account of the Apollonian and Dionysian as a model of assemblage by enabling a discussion of the motivations behind several of the most powerful forms of interpellation. Finally, these modernist texts suggest it is important for assemblage theory to distinguish between different scales of personal and collective memory to be able to account for the different registers of individual and collective experience that motivate group activity and signal assemblages’ temporal parameters

The Idea of Infancy in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry

This book radically refigures the conceptual and formal significance of childhood in nineteenth-century English poetry. By theorizing infancy as a poetics as well as a space of continual beginning, Ruderman shows how it allowed poets access to inchoate, uncanny, and mutable forms of subjectivity and art. While recent historicist studies have documented the "freshness of experience" childhood confers on 19th-century poetry and culture, this book draws on new formalist and psychoanalytic perspectives to rethink familiar concepts such as immortality, the sublime, and the death drive as well as forms and genres such as the pastoral, the ode, and the ballad. Ruderman establishes that infancy emerges as a unique structure of feeling simultaneously with new theories of lyric poetry at the end of the eighteenth century. He then explores the intertwining of poetic experimentation and infancy in Wordsworth, Anna Barbauld, Blake, Coleridge, Erasmus Darwin, Sara Coleridge, Shelley, Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, and Augusta Webster. Each chapter addresses andanalyzes a specific moment in a writers’ work, moments of tenderness or mourning, birth or death, physical or mental illness, when infancy is analogized, eulogized, or theorized. Moving between canonical and archival materials, and combining textual and inter-textual reading, metrical and prosodic analysis, and post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory, the book shows how poetic engagements with infancy anticipate psychoanalytic and phenomenological (i.e. modern) ways of being in the world. Ultimately, Rudermansuggests that it is not so much that we return to infancy as that infancy returns (obsessively, compulsively) in us. This book shows how by tracking changing attitudes towards the idea of infancy, one might also map the emotional, political, and aesthetic terrain of nineteenth-century culture. It will be of interest to scholars in the areas of British romanticism and Victorianism, as well as 19th-century American literature and culture, histories of childhood, and representations of the child from art historical, cultural studies, and literary perspectives. "D. B. Ruderman’s The Idea of Infancy in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry: Romanticism, Subjectivity, Form is an interesting contribution to this field, and it manages to bring a new perspective to our understanding of Romantic-era and Victorian representations of infancy and childhood. …a supremely exciting book that will be a key work for generations of readers of nineteenth-century poetry." Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck, University of London Victorian Studies (59.4