The relationship between audience, site and artwork has been explored through this thesis, which analyses the effect of my performances on the audience. These performances, which provide the empirical research, identify ways in which the behaviour of the human mouth appears transgressive and abject when viewed at close proximity. Specifically, this is enacted through a series of considerations concerned with the performer and their presence, and orality. Orality is used here to define the significant role the mouth plays in the categorisation of acceptable and unacceptable human behaviour in this research. The condensed oral experiments that constituted the ritual of this practice, included acts such as spitting, licking and sucking. These situated my performing body as 'woman', as 'transgressor', and as one positioned as 'other' to the audience by her actions. Through an examination of the effect of these performances, this thesis explains and analyses the connections between performer and activity, between performer and audience, between animal and human, and the context of site and social relations. It articulates and accounts for the performance methodology by critically addressing the concerns they are engaged with. The artworks discussed are acts that set up spaces of transgression, interrogation and reflection, aiming, thereby, to subvert the observer's benign neutrality. The thesis concludes by claiming that evaluative observation of the performing self and her effect on her observers is made explicit and understandable as a dynamic part of these performances. It acknowledges the role of the audience, when placed close to it, as integral and implicit to the work. The conclusions drawn develop the debate and understanding of the relationship between audience, site and artwork in live art practice that includes female and animal bodies, and this gives it significance.

No description available.

This thesis questions the phenomenon of human and animal acoustic entanglements in arts and performance practices and proposes that sounding the animal in performance, or ‘becoming-resonant’, secures vital connections to the creatural. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming-animal, Donna Haraway’s definitions of multi-species becoming-with and Mladen Dolar’s ideas of voice-as-object frame this analysis and shape its findings. This thesis begins by tracing coevolutionary chronologies of listening to birdsong in the work of Olivier Messiaen and Celeste Boursier-Mougenot, alongside the development of musical instrumentation, broadcasting, and recording technologies. This trajectory continues in Chapter Two, through my reading of Daniela Cattivelli’s sound works where entanglements of artist, activist, bird-hunter and animal challenge perceptions of birdsong and its meaning in human culture. The acoustics of hunting and its origins in palaeoperformance (Montelle) are connected here through animal voices to Rane Willerslev’s contemporary anthropological investigations of Siberian hunting techniques where deception, concealment, animism and personhood form an acousmatic template. In Chapter Three, the concepts of tactical empathy, perspectivism and neoshamanism (Viveiros de Castro) inform my analysis of Marcus Coates’ live art events where, I argue, he both botches Deleuzeo-Guattarian theories of becoming-animal and complicates the influence of Joseph Beuys’ animal mythologies. Myth also informs animal presences in opera, which in Chapter Four, I claim have been challenged in powerful ways by Raskatov’s A Dog’s Heart and Birtwhistle’s The Minotaur. Raskatov breaks with the traditions of silent dog stereotypes on stage from Shakespeare to contemporary cabaret. Instead violence and ostracism find a voice through these persecuted creatures. Violated bodies and voices are crucial to the primate dramas of Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape and Franz Kafka’s A Report to the Academy where, in Chapter Five, I show how the politics of the tongue, language worship, and anthropocentrism overpower human-primate relationships and distort inter-species communication. Counter to the tyranny of human exceptionalism, the creatural acoustics at work in Kathryn Hunter’s empathic becoming-ape, in bass John Tomlinson’s minotaur, in the radical throat-singing of Christian Zehnder and in castrato histories and legacies, push materialities of lung, larynx and muscle into a new ecology of listening, singing and resonating. By invoking vocalic animal bodies and becoming entangled, creatural acoustics send sonic threads through the labyrinths of culture that sustain resonances across species and beyond the limitations of the human.

The thesis presents a concept and practice of ‘poetic witness’ through in depth case studies of artworks created as part of the practice as research and by other artists that stage subjectivity through framing the relational narrativity of the moment. A poetic witness operates in a space of becoming engaging a plural voice that approaches another through an ongoing othering of self. Particular forms of participatory artwork, performance and contemporary poetics are explored that work to reveal the ways in which a person is conditioned as an individual in society to witness herself and an-other and so exercise agency. This process enlists the knowhow of mortal singularity, the sensuous understanding derived from an emplaced, embodied experience of being. The thesis explores how this affective endurance of the body and the durational experience of dwelling might interpellate the boundaries imposed upon expression-perception by a disembodied linguistic system, and in a process of participatory hearing give space for its unexpressed witness. Examining how artists are staging a communication between the body’s voice, language and dwelling, the thesis explores embodied poetics and the impact of place and time upon a performance of witness, investigating how these processes might challenge a phallogocentric system. The signification and agency of the speaking body is posited in specific ways of framing the performance of utterance sensorily immersed in place that express the witness between hearing and speech; a sonorous voice that potentially discloses the self as other unfixing the autos of memory. It is proposed that a poetic process of witness transposes a context of globalisation and its techno-linguistic, geo-political and economic skew on people, place and time by treating an ongoing digital flow of information as becoming. The sensuous excess of the body’s becoming is ordinarily omitted from a system of exchange imposed by a society, its government and its media, perhaps because the infinity of this embodied, sonorous and poetic knowhow is impossible to regulate. The notion of a ‘situation’ is used as a structuring device in the written thesis to provide a frame within which elements of the practice speak or utter in the form of narrativity or metalepsis, whilst illustrating the voice’s plurality. In this way the written thesis itself applies a process of poetic witness upon the case studies of artworks that perform this witness.

Exploring the intersections between my own embodiment and performance work, this thesis situates negotiations and renegotiations of embodiment as both experiential and as a subjective position that informs my creative practice. The examples of my creative research projects are detailed and discussed in light of the social and cultural critiques that relate to the themes of age (in)visibility, body size and self-study. Throughout, I investigate and advocate the benefits of conducting subjective based inquiry to inform practice-led work, and in exploring paradigms for autoethnographic explorations to be more accessible to those who engage with my practice. Starting from a position of reflection, where my performing body is seen as an archive of personal histories, memories, movements, techniques, as well as social and cultural phenomena, I mobilise the term ‘mesearch’ to disseminate the process of my creative inquiry. The mesearch position is discussed in light of each of the three creative research practice-led works. The benefits of a mesearch approach include the production of creative practice which is relational, ethical, rigorously self-aware and self-critical, innovative and even therapeutic. The implications of my practice, although it is introspective and entirely subjective, provide a platform for further practitioners who engage with self-inquiry to inform their creative outputs.

No description available.

My intention is to establish the usefulness of a practice of reading with reference to questions of sex and gender, to illuminate thereby certain less apparent, relatively unexplored dimensions of the novels, but also to relate those dimensions to certain critical questions which have long claimed attention. Thus the usefulness of my approach would be tested to some extent by its ability to offer insights into problems which are already agreed to exist. The relation of Maggie Tulliver to her environment and the question of solution to the conflict raised in The Mill on the Floss, for example, will be related closely to considerations of the possibilities of female experience which are allowed or disallowed by the text, rather than evaluated in purely moral or aesthetic terms; an investigation of the treatment of male and female spheres established in Middlemarch will offer perspectives on the familiar critical concerns with the novel's use of the web as a structuring device and with the role of the narrator; and, finally, analysis of the treatment of sex and gender in Daniel Deronda will suggest new ways of looking at the long-debated question of the relation between the two "halves" of that novel. [Taken from the thesis Introduction]

This thesis is an attempt to account for autobiography as a highly prevalent form in twentieth century Irish literature, and argues that the formulation of a national identity for Ireland is both determined by and determining of the establishment of individual identities. The first chapter provides an introduction to the concept of nationalism by considering it as both a political force and as an affective structure within which identity is established. The second chapter then considers a variety of issues necessary to a consideration of autobiography as a literary genre particularly concerned with the formation of identity. The issues considered are the generic status of autobiography, the place within it of memory, the nature of the autobiographical protagonist and the function of autobiography. These comments are intended to bear on the full range of modern Irish literary autobiography, and illustrative examples of various points are based on that range. Taken together these chapters establish a framework for the consideration of the part played by social and collective relationships in the formation of individual identity. These introductory chapters are followed by a series of readings of four literary autobiographies produced after Independence. These are works by Patrick Kavanagh, Frank O'Connor, Sean O'Faolain, and Francis Stuart. These works have been chosen to focus on the problems of identity faced by autobiographers in a period when the issue of national identity had been apparently settled by the establishment of the Irish state. These readings are informed by the theoretical and historical considerations of the first two chapters and take as their principal focus the way in which each autobiographer constructs his Identity. The orientation to the nation is also considered in each case as it relates to the formation of Identity and to the form of the text.

This thesis is a study of Dickens's narrative technique and its relation to certain key themes of his fiction, in particular those concerned with the response of his heroes and heroines to one another. It is based upon analysis of his treatment of conventional forms of genre, plot device and characterization and relates these to moral and emotional themes important to both Dickens and the Victorian age as a whole. The methodology adopted is a combination of survey and close analysis, with the intention of providing both a sense of the wider context in which Dickens's writing may be seen and also some detailed insight into the workings within his novels of the topics considered. The argument is arranged in three sections. Part One deals with the model available to Dickens from eighteenth-century picaresque fiction and explores his own variations upon its form and themes in Nicholas Nickleby and Martin Chuzzlewit. In Part Two, four thematic conventions, characteristic of Victorian fiction in general and of central importance to Dickens, are surveyed, with the emphasis mostly upon their workings in a small number of novels selected from different stages of Dickens's career. Part Three concludes the thesis with a study of the contrasting operation of these conventions in David Copperfield and Great Expectations. It is suggested that these two novels, the first less consciously, but the second quite deliberately, re-work many of the techniques and themes Dickens had developed in his early novels and that, with varying degrees of awareness, they offer a critical presentation of certain key nineteenth-century beliefs through their treatment of the conventional assumptions of early-Victorian fiction.

The thesis stems from a programme of research which was carried out at the Centre for Mass Communication Research, Leicester University, after which a number of key problems in the field of 'understanding television' were framed at a colloquium in Copenhagen towards the end of 1976. This study takes up many of the recommendations of that meeting in documenting the entire process of making a major television programme from the formation of an original 'programme idea' through scriptwriting, casting, shooting and editing to transmission. As an exercise in Participant Observation it records in detail the operation of a range of structural constraints and their effects upon the film and its production personnel, as well as recording and comparing a producer's original intentions and their adaption or retention within a process of production. In focussing upon a drama-documentary the thesis also examines the concept of realism and its construction within a film. It posits realian, not as a means of copying reality, but as the result of a culturally constructed symbolic activity in which both the producer and his audience participate. The thesis therefore adopts an holistic approach where 'production' is the sum of all the different moments of production and reception within a communicative process as a whole. It consequently includes a study of a sample audience and individual's reactions to the programme. The study is critical of semiotic analysis in so far as it divorces an examination of a message and its reception from its source, and it concludes that a continuous programme of investigative documentation at ground-level must be necessarily complementary to other studies of television as a medium.