This dissertation compares representations of women in erotic triangles. I contend that despite the stability implied by the triangular shape, the erotic triangle can be made unstable through women’s language. The first chapter examines medieval and contemporary writing on an essential relationship in the triangle: the friendship between the husband and the lover. Amicitia, chaste friendships between men, had its roots in Greek and Latin philosophy, and recently these relationships have been investigated according to mimetic desire (Girard) or homosocial desire (Sedgwick). In both medieval and modern configurations, these relationships are usually predicated upon the exchange of women. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Gayle Rubin and Luce Irigaray provide anthropological and literary explorations of the economic model where men exchange women to strengthen their homosocial bond. In the three texts, women use linguistic techniques to destabilize the erotic triangle. One is irony: frequently, one character does not understand an ironic statement and is excluded from the relationship between the other two participants. A second is pragmatic implicature, which is also used for exclusionary purposes. Other women adopt economic terminology to negotiate with their husbands or lovers for control of their bodies. Through these linguistic devices women speak exclusively to another member of the triangle, thereby undermining male friendships and denying their bodies be used as objects of exchange. Although their strategies are not always successful and some women remain exchangeable objects, we nevertheless see that erotic triangles can be destabilized. Furthermore, counter to the prevailing anthropological theory, certain women are aware of their position as commodities. From this insight, a new perspective on sexuality is exposed. The formerly strong male relationship, built on classical ideals and predicated on equality, breaks down when one man’s virility is pitted against his rival’s. Sometimes even, the supposedly chaste male relationship reveals erotic undertones. Women’s sexuality is also transformed when certain women prove to be desiring subjects, able to manipulate the system of exchange. In the end, institutionalized notions of chaste male friendships and women as objects of exchange are disrupted, sometimes even undermined, by capable women who determine who should have access to their bodies.

This thesis works towards a theory of creative appropriation as critical praxis. Defining ‘appropriation’ as the re-use of already-authored cultural matter, I investigate how the ubiquity of aesthetically and commercially motivated appropriative practices has impacted concepts of creativity, originality, authorship and ownership. Throughout this thesis, appropriation is understood as bridging the artistic, political, economic, and scientific realms. As such, it strongly affects cultural and socio-political landscapes, and has become an ideal vehicle for effectively criticizing and, perhaps, radically changing dominant aesthetic, legal and ethical discourses regarding the (re)production, ownership and circulation of knowledge, artifacts, skills, resources, and cultural matter in general. Critical appropriation is thus posited as a political strategy that can draw together the different causes motivating appropriative processes across the globe, and organize them for the benefit of a multitude which values concepts of reusing, sharing and collectivity over concepts of the individually authored and the privately owned. My arguments regarding this critical potentiality are based on concrete practices emanating from several media (textual – visual – sonic – digital). The corpus includes Berlin Dadaist collage, ‘found footage’ filmmaking, audio sampling, and digital media art. It is critically contextualized in the fields of philosophy, law, and aesthetics, and paired with relevant examples from extra-aesthetic arenas (economics, industrial production and science). Following a trajectory from the analog to the digital, my thesis traces the emergence and tactical employment of critical appropriative practices in the context of different historical, philosophical, technological and economic circumstances. Focussing on conceptual and practical shifts from the analog to the digital furthermore enables me to draw connections between analytic perspectives founded in dialectic materialism and contemporary theories foregrounding issues of immaterial labor. The important qualitative changes that practices and perceptions of appropriation have undergone are argue to significantly amplify the critical potential of all appropriative practices. Ultimately, my comparative analyses thus establish appropriation as an ideal site for effectively challenging – both in terms of form and content – the ingrained, restrictive notions of original genius and naturalized authorship-qua-ownership on which present cultures and technologies of global capitalism are so heavily based.

When Euripides wrote his final play, Iphigenia at Aulis, depicting the human sacrifice of Agamemnon’s first child that allowed the sailing of the Greek expedition against Troy, he was faced with several significant mythographic choices. Of primary concern was the outcome of the sacrifice: there existed a strong tradition in early sources that mitigated the sacrifice by affecting a divine rescue by Artemis, usually with a deer being left in her place on the altar. The extremely troubled textual history of our script – the play was first performed posthumously, and we do not know in what state Euripides left the text – means that we cannot be certain which tradition Euripides actually chose to follow, sacrifice or rescue. Depicting Iphigenia as a willing victim, however, must have been Euripides’ own innovation. This dissertation explores the ramifications of that self-sacrifice and contextualizes this play within a tradition of mythographic evolution and reception. Chapter 1 surveys the history of criticism of the text, itself a mode of reception, and also examines trends in Euripidean criticism in the modern period, limited until recently by the textual issues. Chapter 2 considers instances of the Iphigenia legend before Euripides’ play. The parodos of Agamemnon, the first source to express the sacrifice in terms of human suffering, receives special attention. Chapter 3 seeks to understand audience reception at the moment of first performance through three different critical lenses: thematic (self-sacrifice was a recurring motif in Euripides’ work), socio-political (by considering the recurring Panhellenic sentiment deployed in the play’s rhetoric), and dramaturgical (by treating the spatial dynamics of the performance as a point of intertextual contact). Chapters 4 and 5 examine reception of the sacrifice story in antiquity (in the Hellenistic and Roman periods), a process which reveals much about the position of Greek tragedy in the popular imagination following the fifth century. The final chapter brings to bear considerations of adaptations of the play into new genres and new media since the advent of the printing press, all of which open up new possibilities for the creators of these adaptations and the story they wish to tell.

In modernity, probably more than ever, “knowledge” has become the object of an intense desire. The tensions underwriting this modern desire for knowledge are inscribed in the very term, curiosity, which is at the centre of this dissertation. A venerable motif, curiosity anchors the specifically modern desire to know within a longstanding philosophical, theological and literary tradition. By the 19th century, “curiosity” is certainly an anachronistic paradigm. Yet, inscribed in curiosity, there are two conflicting dialectics which can be found at the heart of modernity’s unquenchable thirst for knowledge: one the one hand, the dialectic between curiosity as a disenchanting desire to see through into the innermost secrets of things, and curiosity as a “thing”, the product of a fetishist desire arrested on the glittering surface of things. On the other hand, curiosity is beset by the dialectic between the desire for a “totalizing”, meaningful vision and the compulsive drive of an increasingly specialized, meaningless pursuit of knowledge. This dissertation examines a series of Modernist narratives which expose this double dialectic. The protagonists of Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet, Elias Canetti’s Die Blendung and Jorge Luis Borges’ El Aleph are all caricatural, anachronistic, curieux ultimately seeking an “absolute knowledge” that cannot be embodied. The moment it seems to have been attained, it is reified, “objectified” into a fetish, a “curiosity”. Yet, these narratives are not only about curiosity; they are in fact true vortexes of curiosity: that of the protagonists of the narratives as well as that of the authors and the readers themselves. As a result, these narratives also speak to the paradoxical location of literature within culture: literature appears simultaneously as the privileged site of all – ultimately phantasmic – totalizing, meaningful visions of the world, as well as a marginal locus, a monstrous cultural residue.

This dissertation compares representations of women in erotic triangles. I contend that despite the stability implied by the triangular shape, the erotic triangle can be made unstable through women’s language. The first chapter examines medieval and contemporary writing on an essential relationship in the triangle: the friendship between the husband and the lover. Amicitia, chaste friendships between men, had its roots in Greek and Latin philosophy, and recently these relationships have been investigated according to mimetic desire (Girard) or homosocial desire (Sedgwick). In both medieval and modern configurations, these relationships are usually predicated upon the exchange of women. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Gayle Rubin and Luce Irigaray provide anthropological and literary explorations of the economic model where men exchange women to strengthen their homosocial bond. In the three texts, women use linguistic techniques to destabilize the erotic triangle. One is irony: frequently, one character does not understand an ironic statement and is excluded from the relationship between the other two participants. A second is pragmatic implicature, which is also used for exclusionary purposes. Other women adopt economic terminology to negotiate with their husbands or lovers for control of their bodies. Through these linguistic devices women speak exclusively to another member of the triangle, thereby undermining male friendships and denying their bodies be used as objects of exchange. Although their strategies are not always successful and some women remain exchangeable objects, we nevertheless see that erotic triangles can be destabilized. Furthermore, counter to the prevailing anthropological theory, certain women are aware of their position as commodities. From this insight, a new perspective on sexuality is exposed. The formerly strong male relationship, built on classical ideals and predicated on equality, breaks down when one man’s virility is pitted against his rival’s. Sometimes even, the supposedly chaste male relationship reveals erotic undertones. Women’s sexuality is also transformed when certain women prove to be desiring subjects, able to manipulate the system of exchange. In the end, institutionalized notions of chaste male friendships and women as objects of exchange are disrupted, sometimes even undermined, by capable women who determine who should have access to their bodies.

This thesis works towards a theory of creative appropriation as critical praxis. Defining ‘appropriation’ as the re-use of already-authored cultural matter, I investigate how the ubiquity of aesthetically and commercially motivated appropriative practices has impacted concepts of creativity, originality, authorship and ownership. Throughout this thesis, appropriation is understood as bridging the artistic, political, economic, and scientific realms. As such, it strongly affects cultural and socio-political landscapes, and has become an ideal vehicle for effectively criticizing and, perhaps, radically changing dominant aesthetic, legal and ethical discourses regarding the (re)production, ownership and circulation of knowledge, artifacts, skills, resources, and cultural matter in general. Critical appropriation is thus posited as a political strategy that can draw together the different causes motivating appropriative processes across the globe, and organize them for the benefit of a multitude which values concepts of reusing, sharing and collectivity over concepts of the individually authored and the privately owned. My arguments regarding this critical potentiality are based on concrete practices emanating from several media (textual – visual – sonic – digital). The corpus includes Berlin Dadaist collage, ‘found footage’ filmmaking, audio sampling, and digital media art. It is critically contextualized in the fields of philosophy, law, and aesthetics, and paired with relevant examples from extra-aesthetic arenas (economics, industrial production and science). Following a trajectory from the analog to the digital, my thesis traces the emergence and tactical employment of critical appropriative practices in the context of different historical, philosophical, technological and economic circumstances. Focussing on conceptual and practical shifts from the analog to the digital furthermore enables me to draw connections between analytic perspectives founded in dialectic materialism and contemporary theories foregrounding issues of immaterial labor. The important qualitative changes that practices and perceptions of appropriation have undergone are argue to significantly amplify the critical potential of all appropriative practices. Ultimately, my comparative analyses thus establish appropriation as an ideal site for effectively challenging – both in terms of form and content – the ingrained, restrictive notions of original genius and naturalized authorship-qua-ownership on which present cultures and technologies of global capitalism are so heavily based.

When Euripides wrote his final play, Iphigenia at Aulis, depicting the human sacrifice of Agamemnon’s first child that allowed the sailing of the Greek expedition against Troy, he was faced with several significant mythographic choices. Of primary concern was the outcome of the sacrifice: there existed a strong tradition in early sources that mitigated the sacrifice by affecting a divine rescue by Artemis, usually with a deer being left in her place on the altar. The extremely troubled textual history of our script – the play was first performed posthumously, and we do not know in what state Euripides left the text – means that we cannot be certain which tradition Euripides actually chose to follow, sacrifice or rescue. Depicting Iphigenia as a willing victim, however, must have been Euripides’ own innovation. This dissertation explores the ramifications of that self-sacrifice and contextualizes this play within a tradition of mythographic evolution and reception. Chapter 1 surveys the history of criticism of the text, itself a mode of reception, and also examines trends in Euripidean criticism in the modern period, limited until recently by the textual issues. Chapter 2 considers instances of the Iphigenia legend before Euripides’ play. The parodos of Agamemnon, the first source to express the sacrifice in terms of human suffering, receives special attention. Chapter 3 seeks to understand audience reception at the moment of first performance through three different critical lenses: thematic (self-sacrifice was a recurring motif in Euripides’ work), socio-political (by considering the recurring Panhellenic sentiment deployed in the play’s rhetoric), and dramaturgical (by treating the spatial dynamics of the performance as a point of intertextual contact). Chapters 4 and 5 examine reception of the sacrifice story in antiquity (in the Hellenistic and Roman periods), a process which reveals much about the position of Greek tragedy in the popular imagination following the fifth century. The final chapter brings to bear considerations of adaptations of the play into new genres and new media since the advent of the printing press, all of which open up new possibilities for the creators of these adaptations and the story they wish to tell.

In modernity, probably more than ever, “knowledge” has become the object of an intense desire. The tensions underwriting this modern desire for knowledge are inscribed in the very term, curiosity, which is at the centre of this dissertation. A venerable motif, curiosity anchors the specifically modern desire to know within a longstanding philosophical, theological and literary tradition. By the 19th century, “curiosity” is certainly an anachronistic paradigm. Yet, inscribed in curiosity, there are two conflicting dialectics which can be found at the heart of modernity’s unquenchable thirst for knowledge: one the one hand, the dialectic between curiosity as a disenchanting desire to see through into the innermost secrets of things, and curiosity as a “thing”, the product of a fetishist desire arrested on the glittering surface of things. On the other hand, curiosity is beset by the dialectic between the desire for a “totalizing”, meaningful vision and the compulsive drive of an increasingly specialized, meaningless pursuit of knowledge. This dissertation examines a series of Modernist narratives which expose this double dialectic. The protagonists of Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet, Elias Canetti’s Die Blendung and Jorge Luis Borges’ El Aleph are all caricatural, anachronistic, curieux ultimately seeking an “absolute knowledge” that cannot be embodied. The moment it seems to have been attained, it is reified, “objectified” into a fetish, a “curiosity”. Yet, these narratives are not only about curiosity; they are in fact true vortexes of curiosity: that of the protagonists of the narratives as well as that of the authors and the readers themselves. As a result, these narratives also speak to the paradoxical location of literature within culture: literature appears simultaneously as the privileged site of all – ultimately phantasmic – totalizing, meaningful visions of the world, as well as a marginal locus, a monstrous cultural residue.

Across continents and independently of one another, Marianne Moore (1887-1972) and Francis Ponge (1899-1988) both made names for themselves in the twentieth century as poets who gave voice to things. Their entire oeuvres are dominated by poems that attempt to reconstruct an external thing (inanimate object, plant or animal being) through language, while emphasizing the necessary distance that exists between the writing self and the written other. Furthermore, their thing poetry establishes an “essential otherness” to the subject of representation that (ideally) rejects an objectification of that subject, thereby rendering the “thing” a subject-thing with its own being-for-itself. This dissertation argues that the thing poetry of Marianne Moore and Francis Ponge successfully challenged the hierarchy between subject and object in representation by bringing the poet’s self into a dialogue with the encountered thing. The relationship between the writing self and the written other is akin to what Maurice Merleau-Ponty refers to in Le visible et l’invisible when he describes the act of perceiving what is visible as necessitating one’s own visibility to another. The other becomes a mirror of oneself and vice versa, Merleau-Ponty explains, to the extent that together they compose a single image. The type of reflection involving self and others that Moore and Ponge employ in their thing poetry invokes the characteristically modern symbol of the crystal with its kaleidoscopic reflective properties. Self and other are distinct yet indissolubly bound, and rather than a hierarchy between subject and object there are only subjects who exist for-themselves and for-each other, reflecting the kind of reciprocal Pour soi that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology envisioned.

Across continents and independently of one another, Marianne Moore (1887-1972) and Francis Ponge (1899-1988) both made names for themselves in the twentieth century as poets who gave voice to things. Their entire oeuvres are dominated by poems that attempt to reconstruct an external thing (inanimate object, plant or animal being) through language, while emphasizing the necessary distance that exists between the writing self and the written other. Furthermore, their thing poetry establishes an “essential otherness” to the subject of representation that (ideally) rejects an objectification of that subject, thereby rendering the “thing” a subject-thing with its own being-for-itself. This dissertation argues that the thing poetry of Marianne Moore and Francis Ponge successfully challenged the hierarchy between subject and object in representation by bringing the poet’s self into a dialogue with the encountered thing. The relationship between the writing self and the written other is akin to what Maurice Merleau-Ponty refers to in Le visible et l’invisible when he describes the act of perceiving what is visible as necessitating one’s own visibility to another. The other becomes a mirror of oneself and vice versa, Merleau-Ponty explains, to the extent that together they compose a single image. The type of reflection involving self and others that Moore and Ponge employ in their thing poetry invokes the characteristically modern symbol of the crystal with its kaleidoscopic reflective properties. Self and other are distinct yet indissolubly bound, and rather than a hierarchy between subject and object there are only subjects who exist for-themselves and for-each other, reflecting the kind of reciprocal Pour soi that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology envisioned.