The Imagined Histories and Futures of the Past: WWI and the Cultural Imagination

In this paper, I look at various modes of imagining the futures incarnated by the First World War, beginning with artists and writers, like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Erich Maria Remarque, who experienced and depicted the war from a firsthand point of view. From here, I expand that framework to include J.R.R. Tolkien, whose masterpiece Lord of the Rings may owe no small debt to his wartime experiences. I consider the Doctor Who episodes, “Human Nature” and “Family of Blood,” as contemporary attempts to reinsert WWI into the cultural consciousness. Finally, I look at the two versions of War Horse and consider how their change in narrative style and structure impacts audiences’ understanding of the significance of the presented events. I argue that WWI, while often overlooked in popular culture production, actually offers a fascinating lens to making sense of how we became modern and thus how we understand ourselves as human. Therefore, retelling stories of the Great War provides an opportunity to consider the reflexivity of that understanding of our humanity: how we capture and represent who we were can tell us a great deal about who we actually are

Ridiculous Geographies: Mapping the Theatre of the Ridiculous as Radical Aesthetic

This dissertation is a comprehensive study of the artists associated with the Theatre of the Ridiculous. The discussion begins with Charles Ludlam, the most famous practitioner of the form and then extends to artists with whom he collaborated, including Jack Smith, the Play-House of the Ridiculous, Ethyl Eichelberger, and Charles Busch. The argument traces the overlapping aesthetic qualities of all of these theatre practitioners; they all shared a reverence for popular culture of the twentieth century; they all blended references from high and low culture in their dramaturgy; and they all created performances that took a unique approach to cross-dressed performance. The objective of this project is to map the Theatre of the Ridiculous in order to display that it was a coherent and cohesive theatrical movement that contained a radical, queer quality. To do this, this dissertation engages Ludlam as a kind of apotheosis of Ridiculous play making, displaying how his works exemplified all three of these key aesthetic elements. Then, the discussion turns to Ludlam\u27s inspiration, experimental artist Jack Smith, who was preoccupied to the point of obsession with twentieth-century cinema. I then look at the Play-House of the Ridiculous, headed by director John Vaccaro and playwrights Ronald Tavel and Kenneth Bernard, as the site for the genesis of Ridiculous Theatre. Here, I highlight a preoccupation with textual collaging, or remixing, in playwriting, especially insofar as it valued popular references alongside of or even over highbrow ones. I then study gender performance in the Ridiculous, looking at the mashed up performances of Ethyl Eichelberger, which create identities that defy gender categorization. Finally, I consider the legacy of the Ridiculous, tracing both direct inheritors of the form as well as those whose more contemporary work appears to be influenced by it