English Language and Literature Commons^™

Mediating Machines: Human Mechanisms And The Modern Stage, Kerri Ann Considine

Doctoral Dissertations

Vast changes in technology during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries fundamentally altered the way living bodies related to the machines they increasingly encountered in everyday life. One consequence of this shift was a preoccupation with questions about bodily agency and creative authority that would continue into the modern era. While artists of all kinds engaged with these issues, the theatre proved uniquely suited to addressing the relationship between living bodies and their mechanical environments by not only cultivating a theoretical understanding of the relationship between live bodies and mechanism, but also necessitating the practical enactment of this relationship.

Modern theatre …

Shakespeare In South Africa: An Examination Of Two Performances Of Titus Andronicus In Apartheid And Post-Apartheid South Africa, Erin Elizabeth Whitaker

Masters Theses

The works of William Shakespeare are wide and universal. His work has been and is still consistently performed in numerous countries and venues across the globe. This thesis focuses on two performances of Titus Andronicus, one of Shakespeare’s most controversial plays, in South Africa. One performance, directed by Dieter Reible in 1970, was produced during apartheid. The second, directed by Gregory Doran, was performed in 1995, just after the end of apartheid. These performances of Titus not only show the versatility and universality of Shakespeare’s work, but the complexity of audience reception and directorial intention in different political landscapes. …

“Can The Circle Be Unbroken” : An Ensemble Of Memory And Performance In Selected Novels Of Lee Smith, Jessica Frances Hoover

Masters Theses

This project combines performance studies and memory studies to the analysis of three of Lee Smith’s southern Appalachian novels in order to open the texts to broader understandings of Smith’s use of oral performance forms, such as ballads, music, and storytelling, in her characters’ transmissions of tradition. The approach draws on performance work by Joseph Roach and collective memory theory by Maurice Halbwachs to create a lens through which to add to existing Smith scholarship centering on feminist readings and women’s authorship. This blended approach allows room to analyze the oral performance forms so central to Smith’s work and their …