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Full-Text Articles in Cultural History
Literary Theories Of Circumcision, A. W. Strouse
Literary Theories Of Circumcision, A. W. Strouse
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
“Literary Theories of Circumcision” investigates a school of thought in which the prepuce, as a conceptual metaphor, organizes literary experience. In every period of English literature, major authors have employed the penis’s hood as a figure for thinking about reading and writing. These authors belong to a tradition that defines textuality as a foreskin and interpretation as circumcision. In “Literary Theories of Circumcision,” I investigate the origins of this literary-theoretical formulation in the writings of Saint Paul, and then I trace this formulation’s formal applications among medieval, early modern, and modernist writers. My study lays the groundwork for an ambitious …
Ludic Conceptualism: Art And Play In The Netherlands, 1959 To 1975, Janna Therese Schoenberger
Ludic Conceptualism: Art And Play In The Netherlands, 1959 To 1975, Janna Therese Schoenberger
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation, the first extended study on art in the Netherlands in the 1960s and ‘70s, investigates the phenomenon of ludic art, taking its lead from Johan Huizinga’s definition of ‘ludic’ in his seminal Homo Ludens (1938). According to Huizinga, the ludic is characterized by masquerade, freedom, and purposelessness, to which I add my own theoretical contribution—absurdity. I argue that the key instantiation of Huizinga’s ideas is found in the utopian project New Babylon (1959–74) by Constant Nieuwenhuys. In the 1960s, ludic art was deployed as a strategy of social critique that attacked from an oblique angle, sometimes effectively, but …