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Western University

2015 Undergraduate Awards

Theatre and Performance Studies

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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

The Play The Critics Could Not See: Djuna Barnes’S The Dove, Luke Jennings Jan 2015

The Play The Critics Could Not See: Djuna Barnes’S The Dove, Luke Jennings

2015 Undergraduate Awards

Literary criticism on Djuna Barnes’s The Dove has hitherto been lacking, both in quantity and quality. At least, if an astute observation has been made of the play, it has hidden itself as deftly as has The Dove its meanings from the majority of critics. Partly to blame for this is the fact that few critics have even attempted to analyze it in any depth. But any critic who has read The Dove and dismissed it as a witty but nonsensical exercise in anarchistic sadomasochism, has, to put it kindly, not read it closely enough. While exemplary literary writing is …


Childhood Innocence, Childhood Complicity, And Questions Of The Future In Mother Courage And Far Away, Tamara Spencer Jan 2015

Childhood Innocence, Childhood Complicity, And Questions Of The Future In Mother Courage And Far Away, Tamara Spencer

2015 Undergraduate Awards

Drawing primarily on the theoretical works of Sara Ahmed and Robin Bernstein, this paper explores how children’s complicity and victimhood in the wars within Caryl Churchill’s Far Away and Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children become symbolic of humanity’s demise. The essay uses Far Away and Mother Courage as case studies to examine broader social scripts on childhood. The paper argues that the children in each play are characterized by social expectations that children are meant to be ignorant to the worlds around them, as well as embodiments of the hope that the future will be better than the …