textThis dissertation focuses on two playwrights, at either end of the nineteenth
century, who engage problems of the human body as a site of legitimation and
authentication of identity by staging inversions of the categories of natural and artificial.
Against the backdrop of increasing mechanization and dematerialization of embodiment,
Heinrich von Kleist and Oscar Wilde explore the transgressive possibilities of artificial
bodies as reactions against the erasure of the diversity of actual bodies. I read in their
works similar rejections of the body as a site that narrowly prescribes gender identity and
sexual behavior according to mechanistic views of physiology. In doing so, I argue that
their aesthetic theories and dramas evince a longing for more flexible and complex
models of embodiment that do not prescribe or authenticate gender and sexuality as
functions of a mechanistic physiological nature. This project, then, locates some roots of
posthuman and queer theories of embodiment in the dramas and aesthetic theories of
these two dramatists.
Kleist and Wilde use the dialogue form to explore the paradoxes produced by the
distinction between the natural and the artificial and by the construction of the natural
body as fundamentally mechanical. Kleist’s Penthesilea and Wilde’s Salomé resist the
humanist naturalization of gender and sexuality via the mechanization of the body. As
anti-humanist counter-discourse and performance, the femme-fatales of their dramas are
virtual bodies or bodies yet-to-come. I examine how these virtually queer, posthuman
bodies in the text are performatively actualized on stage to provoke audiences to imagine
modes of embodiment yet-to-come, or to pretend them into existence. I read theatre
theory and practice as part of the complex technical and philosophical tools, for
imagining bodies, as well as defining and performing identities, that precede the concept
of the virtual in the context of computer technology. I conclude by arguing for the
importance of literature, dialogue, drama, and the embodied materialities of performance
to digital media or new media, as an attempt to steer thinking away from the VR model to
the MOO model, from readymade product to participatory, dialogic process.Comparative Literatur