87 research outputs found
Boy Scout Troop 14 with scoutmaster James Washington, Jr., Seattle, ca. 1946
No full textFront row: unidentified, Nicky Washington, Clarence Neal, Leonard Clark, Walter Jones, Chester Johnson. Back row: Andrew Ratcliff, Karl York, James Washington, Jr., Bobby Brown, Billy Johnson, unidentified, Charles Johnson.Handwritten on verso: Karl York
Satire and sympathy : some consequences of intrusive narration in Tom Jones and other comic novels
No full textThis thesis aims to reinterpret Tom Jones by putting it into
some previously untried comparative contexts. As well as using
the traditional points of reference such as Lucian, Swift and
Sterne, I compare Fielding's satire with Flaubert's; his narrative
poetics with Dickens's and Beckett's; his strategy of intrusion
with George Eliot's; and his literary politics with Brecht's.
I start by assuming the ambivalence of Tom Jones, but rather
than seeing this as a conscious ironic duality, I argue that it
derives from literary, moral and political uncertainty. The
intrusive narrator is seen as an index of vacillation between
first- and third-person narration, while conservative satiric
influences are shown to complicate rather than strengthen the
book's moral decisiveness. Its form, moreover, is shown to be
dialogic, and unable to keep at bay either the reader's
subjectivity or the flux of historical reality. But Fielding's
achievement, I finally suggest, is to have put these factors
into the service of his awareness of the always judgmental
nature of literature.
The thesis therefore takes on several previously uncovered areas:
it is very specific about the nature and extent of the narrator's
presence in Tom Jones; it draws new analogies between social and
literary forms (in the sections on conversation) and political
and literary structures (in the section on Fielding's plays).
It thereby reveals new areas of Fielding's writings which can be
treated as literary theory; finds detailed affinities between
Fielding and writers not normally associated with him; and
eventually constitutes a reading of Tom Jones as an inconclusive
and open-ended text which implies not a denial but a redefinition
of its historical importance
Reading acts of narrative appropriation: four instances of fraudulent memoir
No full textPhDThis thesis examines acts of narrative appropriation, the telling of purportedly‘authentic’ life stories by those for whom the stories are not theirs to tell. This
misuse or subversion of genre - the discipline of historical writing and the category
of autobiography - becomes a means for cultural, social and political dissimulation,
and the analysis focuses both on the act: the event, trespass, or ‘theft’ of another’s
life story, and on the cultural meaning that this event reveals. These narrative acts
are approached theoretically through discussions of what it means to be an author, a
reader, and through the consideration of literary and social genre, category and form.
In exploring identities at particular risk of appropriation, this thesis shows how
fraudulent appropriated narratives affect our reading of the world, and in turn
influence our perception of already marginalized social groups. My primary
examples include prostitution ‘narratives’, Native North American ‘memoir,’ and
fraudulent Holocaust survivor ‘testimony,’ with each text providing decoded
evidence of ‘genre-bending’ exhibiting a social and political intent. These works
seek to be read as authentic personal narratives, as autobiography, and that is how
they have been presented to the reader. However, they are imposters – fictional tales
desiring the elevated status of historical authenticity and willing to bend the rules
and contracts of genre to achieve their end. Here the appearance of authenticity is
achieved through the use of cultural and social ‘myth,’ or perceptions of cultural
identity, and as such its fraudulent construction is first and foremost a social act,
with a social and economic motivation. As this thesis concludes, these texts are
most successful when their own political and social ideologies echo and confirm that
of the readership; when their subjects, the fraudulent ‘I’ at the center of the text is
also a performative elaboration of cultural belief
'A secret pleasure in being mastered': Play, Power and the Morality of Art in J. M. Barrie's Sentimental Tommy and Tommy and Grizel.
No full textThis dissertation analyses J.M. Barrie's novels Sentimental Tommy (1896) and Tommy and Grizel (1900) in terms of their narrative explorations of the moral implications of art. In particular, it finds the novels preoccupied with the power relations between reader and text, and with the question of whether the playful pleasures of art can ever justify the moral problems created when its power relations are reproduced in social relationships.
The introduction identifies these concerns in the style of the novels through close reading. Chapter one establishes the thesis that, within these novels, art is defined as excess and inconsistency, producing some surprising correspondences to late Nineteenth-Century art theory. This ‘art’ is personified by the protagonist, Tommy, who is shown to have both learned and inherited his artistic disposition. Chapter two identifies a complementary personification, of social morality, in the character of Grizel, which enables their relationship symbolically to play out tensions between art and society. This chapter also finds that these tensions are conceived in the novels as a debate on the gendering of power within heterosexual erotic relationships, wherein the intruding power dynamics of art disturb normative gender roles.
Chapter three, conversely, examines a selection of Tommy's non-romantic relationships and finds them to reveal a model of human selfhood as innately inconsistent, though necessarily modified by social relations. As such, Barrie also, and equally, portrays art as potentially therapeutic, since it allows the expression of individualistic concerns. Finally, the conclusion proposes that this ambivalence towards the morality of art culminates, both in these novels and in Barrie's later work, in a symbolic and paradigmatic mother/eternal boy relationship. Acknowledgement of the complexity of this symbolism, I propose, is of consequence, partly because it is precisely this aspect of Barrie's work that has survived and become significant within Western culture
The Queen's Men on tour: provincial performance in vernacular spaces in early modern England
No full textThe ongoing work lead by the Records of Early English Drama project into evidence for drama in England before the closing of the London theatres in 1642 has by now shown that visits to provincial towns, and performances in the spaces made available there, represented common practice for Elizabethan acting companies. The pivotal study made by Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean, The Queen’s Men and their Plays (1998), demonstrated the potential for tracking the career and plays of one particular company, while the Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men project in Canada showed the merits of exploring the Queen’s Men’s repertory in performance. However, until now such research has been conducted without fully considering the buildings in which such plays were once performed. The specific material, social and political conditions a venue and its occupants imposed on a visiting company had direct consequences for their performances, and it is only by situating performance within extant spaces that we can begin to realise the full potential of McMillin and MacLean’s research. However, until now the methodologies to do so had not been developed. This thesis shows that by combining archaeological and theatre historical research we can better understand the nature of provincial performance, and offers strategies for the exploration of early modern texts in performance in provincial venues
Contemporary Art in Japan and Cuteness in Japanese Popular Culture
No full textThis thesis is an art historical study focussing on contemporary Japan, and in particular the artists Murakami TakashL Mori Mariko, Aida Makoto, and Nara Yoshitomo. These artists represent a generation of artists born in the 1960s who use popular culture to their own ends. From the seminal exhibition 'Tokyo Pop' at Hiratsuka Museum of Art in 1996 which included all four artists, to Murakami's group exhibition 'Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture' which opened in April 2005, central to my research is an exploration of contemporary art's engagement with the pervasiveness of cuteness in Japanese culture.
Including key secondary material, which recognises cuteness as not merely something trivial but involving power play and gender role issues, this thesis undertakes an interdisciplinary analysis of cuteness in contemporary Japanese popular culture, and examines howcontemporary Japanese artists have responded, providing original research through interviews with Aida Makoto, Mori Mariko and Murakami Takashi. Themes examined include the deconstruction of the high and low in contemporary art; sh6jo (girl) culture and cuteness; the relation of cuteness and the erotic; the transformation of cuteness into the grotesque; cuteness and nostalgia; and virtual cuteness in Japanese science fiction animation, and computer games.
Director of Studies: Toshio Watanabe
Supervisors: David Ryan and Omuka Toshihar
The signifier returns to haunt the referent : blackface and the stereotyping of African-Americans in Hollywood early sound film
No full textThis thesis investigates the persistence of blackface in Hollywood's early sound era
1927-1953. It establishes the extensive and complex nature of this persistence against
previous historical accounts of its decline after the introduction of sound. Specifically
this thesis considers the overlooked phenomenon of co-presence where blackface was
juxtaposed with the increased visibility of African-Americans in Hollywood film. It
argues that the primary historical significance of the persistence of blackface lies in its
involvement in, and exposure of, the formal stereotyping of African Americans in
film.
The thesis is founded on research which identified 124 blackface films and on
viewings of 75 of these films. Primarily the argument is advanced on the basis of
close textual analysis. In addition to its theoretical engagement with key positions on
blackface and related areas the thesis also makes use of secondary sources in order to
establish the historical context behind its persistence in film.
Principle areas discussed include the formal practices used to racially mark African Americans
in film, co-presence in the films of Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor, and
blackface and the racial containment of African-American vernacular dance and
music.
This thesis contributes to an understanding of the place of blackface in Hollywood
history by setting down what is, to the best of its author's knowledge, the most
extensive account to date of its persistence in the early sound era. In doing so it
brings new material to the debates on the 'nature' of blackface and argues that current
attempts to revise understandings of its racial bias may be misguided. In conclusion
this thesis finds that the case study of co-presence indicates that one explanation for
the longevity of Hollywood's African-American stereotypes lies in the sheer density
of their textual construction
Filmic machines and animated monsters: retelling Frankenstein in the digital age
No full textFrankensteinian monsters have appeared on our screens since the early days of cinema. Indeed, across the history of film we see Mary Shelley’s “hideous progeny” rewritten as alchemical creations, animated corpses, lumbering fiends, robots, cyborgs, replicants, dinosaurs, artificial intelligences and digital constructions. In particular, Shelley’s text shares its speculative depiction of a posthuman future with fantastic and science-fictional cinema of the digital age. At the same time, posthuman bodies are being created by filmmakers. New possibilities in the digital imaging of human presence – from the replacement of actors with computer-generated imagery to the quest for photorealism in digital animation – themselves evoke the Frankenstein tale and consequently make interesting contributions to the evolving Frankenstein myth.
This thesis investigates the retelling of Frankenstein in popular cinema of the digital age. Through close analysis of a series of chosen texts, I examine the figure of the Frankensteinian monster and his/her/its equivalents in today’s popular culture: posthuman figures who negotiate uneasily with the organic world, boundary creatures who both define and unsettle our understandings of human being. I consider the way the tale, its themes and characters have both endured and evolved over time. I also examine the way these new filmic “machines” and animated “monsters” embody crucial problems associated with the technologies that screen them and the media that contain them.
My concern in this project is twofold. Firstly, I seek to map the (changing) relationship between Frankenstein and film. Since the early 1900s, cinema has provided a fertile ground for the retelling of Shelley’s tale. At the same time, cinema itself has always been a sort of Frankensteinian experiment: a means of breathing life into stillness, of constructing and re-constructing human presence, of stitching together fragmented moments to create a semblance of wholeness. In the digital age, this experiment grows and changes: new modes of production are continually being trialled, allowing us to re-create and re-present human presence in new and often bizarre ways. The figure of the Frankensteinian monster confronts and responds to these concerns, embodying and performing the uncanny, spectacular, mechanical, or organic-mechanical nature of screen presence.
Secondly, this thesis reads the Frankensteinian monster as a mythic figure for the digital age. I move towards the assertion that Frankenstein is a tale about the artificial body and its negotiation with a lost or disrupted origin in the organic world, and that this particular problem reverberates strongly in an age of digital representation. The analyses that constitute this thesis contribute to the argument that each time the Frankenstein tale is retold, re-technologised, and re-imagined using new filmic techniques, the problem of the screen body and its troubled origin stories is revisited and complicated
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Rural life in English poetry of the mid-eighteenth century
No full textThis thesis examines several mid-eighteenth century poems, assessing their portrayal of rural life, its literary and historical significance, and the aesthetic and ideological issues it presents. An introductory essay on developments in rural poetry sets the scene for two extended essays. The first essay is a comparative reading of the subject of rural labour in three poems: James Thomson’s The Seasons (1726-44), Stephen Duck’s The Thresher’s Labour (1730, 1736) and Mary Collier’s The Woman’s Labour (1739). The viewpoints of a professional poet (Thomson), a farm labourer (Duck), and a working woman (Collier) are compared in relation to kinds of work all three address as well as to individual labouring subjects. The responses of the three poets to such related issues as folk traditions, forms of charity and other ‘compensations’, are also compared. Some surprising similarities as well as instructive differences are located; and an interesting picture of idealistic and realistic, male-oriented and female-oriented attitudes to labour and labour-related themes emerges
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