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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
Agency From A Stone: Shelley’S Posthumanist Experiments In "Mont Blanc", Betsy Bolton
Agency From A Stone: Shelley’S Posthumanist Experiments In "Mont Blanc", Betsy Bolton
English Literature Faculty Works
This article reads Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’ as an extended exploration into possible modes of relationship linking the human mind to the material world. The modes of relationship considered by Shelley anticipate many of the structures and strategies developed by posthumanist theory, including structural coupling, strategic anthropomorphism, imagistic translation, and human-nonhuman assemblages. After summarizing Kantian and post-Kantian readings of ‘Mont Blanc,’ the essay works through an extended close reading of the poem to elucidate its proto-posthumanist elements.
Theorizing Audience And Spectatorial Agency, Betsy Bolton
Theorizing Audience And Spectatorial Agency, Betsy Bolton
English Literature Faculty Works
This chapter analyses Georgian audiences and spectatorial agency through several lenses: psychoanalytic film theory, theories of the public sphere and of mass publicity, and media studies of cultural convergence. The first section reads Georgian theatre’s heterogeneous playbills as a syntactical rendering of the audience, the imaginary community of the nation in process of negotiation. The second section shows theatrical paratexts blurring the boundary between theatre and coffee house, creating a theatrical public sphere in which the audience exercises daily public agency in saving or damning the play. The third section highlights the mingling of vulnerability and charisma in the celebrity …