W. G. Sebald and Patrick Modiano are two contemporary authors who share similar themes and literary practices. They are both fastidiously or even obsessively historical in their narrative development. And they seem preoccupied with the sins of World War II. Critics have divided feelings about...
“Can you hear me?” asks Stephen Hawking towards the end of The Theory of Everything. Slumping in a motorized wheelchair, theoretical physicist Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) poses the question in a monotonic, computer-generated voice with staccato quality to an eager audience through his speech...
This chapter theorizes global Shakespeare through two interrelated concepts: performance as an act of citation and the ethics of citation. Bringing the concept of performance as citation and the ethics of citation together, this chapter argues that acts of appropriation carry with them strong...
As a work that survives and appears in more than one form, King Lear has a vexing problem of interpretation and a rich opportunity for the study of textual and cultural variants. The play begins with an aging monarch staging a fantastical, paradoxical final act as a king. It lures us toward a...
Ophelia, an iconic figure of a madness-afflicted woman, has been commonly regarded as a signifier bearing cultural and social significance within changes of cultural context over the duration of the play’s performance history. Building upon David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s “narrative...
This project aims to delve into the layered, complex, and problematic relationship between white supremacy and the Middle Ages through the context of the Ku Klux Klan’s obsession with chivalry and the defense of white womanhood during the Jim Crow era in the American South. In order to do so,...
Asian directors leverage Shakespeare’s own propensity to undermine dominant ideologies of gender—notably through the Ophelia figure—in their effort to renew Asian performance traditions. How do Shakespeare and modern directors talk to each other across cultural and historical divides? How does...
This work explores the affect of combat trauma on the military-civilian divide through the lens of predominantly British and American, English language texts from the 1840s through the early 2000s. The focus is on the effects of trauma on narratives with the combat trauma and war memoirs of...
This project aims to increase interest and awareness of Asian American humor in literature and media, a subject that has so far been neglected by critics and the general public. "Asian American Humor" expands upon the work of established Asian American literary scholars and their efforts to...
This thesis uses George Eliot’s Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss as its two primary texts in its examination of the community destabilizing and community imperiling desire, as it develops in the “knowable communities” of Hayslope and St Ogg’s, respectively (Williams 165). “Mapping the Movement...
The widely accepted assessment of Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time is that the text’s fragmentary form belies a complex but cohesive narrative wholeness. Missing from the critical record, however, is an adequate account of In Our Time’s use of what T.S. Eliot termed “the mythical method.” Using a...
This dissertation argues for a greater recognition of the impact “the animal turn” has had on literary studies. The study analyzes a group of influential North American writers critically engaged with fascist formulations of bodily expendability and the entanglement of violence that crosses...
Much critical scholarship has considered the ways in which gender and gender expression contribute to Willa Cather’s novels. Much work has also considered Cather’s regionalism and its relationship to national literature and the values of the American middle west. My work in this paper brings...
Ecocentrism is the amalgamation of demonstrated attitudes and actions toward environmental sustainability, as well as toward equitable interspecies relationships between humans and other living things. Ecocentrism is a subjective and optional ideology which a society may adopt, as is religion,...
'Cripping Broadway' is a body-oriented history of performance practices in five chapters. Chapter one, “Cripping Broadway,” historicizes the emergence of the triple-threat performer and surveys conventional uses of disability in the American musical. The triple-threat is a useful heuristic for...
In contemporary American culture, race, has multiple and contradictory meanings. In current American cultural discourses, race often brings to mind people who are not white, while whiteness remains unmarked and serves as a benchmark category—as if white is not a race. The second feature in...
Integrating queer theory and ecocriticism, this essay reassesses the
historical manuscript contexts of Geoffrey Chaucer’s shortest poem,
commonly known as ‘Adam Scriveyn,’ while also reconsidering the text’s
varied afterlives in contemporary scholarship, including its manifestations
in...
The STC Macbeth’s setting and predominantly
multiethnic cast brought to mind Orson Welles’s landmark 1936 Macbeth which
was set in Haiti and featured an all-black cast. In both cases, the ethnicity
and race of the cast matched that of the characters and cultures in the
adaptation’s respective...
This collection of scholarly essays offers a new
understanding of local and global myths that have been constructed around
Shakespeare in theatre, cinema, and television from the nineteenth century to
the present. Drawing on a definition of myth as a powerful ideological
narrative, Local and...