Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal. / Pour respecter les droits d'auteur, la version électronique de cette thèse ou ce mémoire a été dépouillée, le cas échéant, de ses documents visuels et audio-visuels. La version intégrale de la thèse ou du mémoire a été déposée au Service de la gestion des documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

Revision of the author's Thesis (doctoral)--Humboldt-Universität, Berlin, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [231]-248) and index.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal / Pour respecter les droits d'auteur, la version électronique de cette thèse ou ce mémoire a été dépouillée, le cas échéant, de ses documents visuels et audio-visuels. La version intégrale de la thèse ou du mémoire a été déposée au Service de la gestion des documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

Thèse--Lettres--Paris IV, 1975. / Bibliogr. p. XVII-XXIX. Index.

Thesis (doctoral)--Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, 1975. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 154-166).

Inaug.-Diss.--Münster.

Between 1880 and 1930, European and American modernists connected to the theater became fascinated with the subject of the baroque. Among the first, Friedrich Nietzsche argued that the baroque style recurs throughout western history, tending in every artistic medium toward the theatricality of strong emotions and exciting gestures. His writings reflect a larger trend during this period, imagining the baroque as a spectral presence of sorts, a force both haunted by theater and haunting western history repeatedly. “Traditions of the Baroque” takes up these various hauntings, pursuing two simultaneous claims. It argues that the memory of the baroque stages of seventeenth-century Europe helped produce new forms of theater, space, and experience around the turn of the twentieth century. At the same time, it also argues that modern theater has played a key role in the baroque’s development into a modern philosophical concept, both for the analysis of art, and for a self-reflexive inquiry into the nature of philosophical discourse itself. These two reciprocal developments amount to a “modernist baroque” paradigm in theory and theater alike: a pattern of having to look back to the past in order to pursue the new. Tracing this pattern, “Traditions of the Baroque” focuses on avant-gardists whose thought and writing takes place between theory and performance: philosophical theater-makers and theatrical philosophers from Nietzsche and Stéphane Mallarmé to Walter Benjamin and Gertrude Stein. Moving between the page and the stage, it tracks citations of seventeenth-century theater through modernist aesthetic theory across an array of otherwise disparate materials: Nietzsche’s writings on Wagnerian opera; Mallarmé’s hermetic and unstageable theatricals; Benjamin’s analyses of Expressionism and Epic Theater; and Stein’s saintly miracle plays. At each step, it uncovers a notion of historical unfolding based not on narrative progress, but on the citability and iterability of the past, making clear that the idea of the baroque spurred modernist thinkers to reimagine both western history and modernity altogether. Far from perpetuating age-old anti-theatrical prejudices based in transcendental metaphysics, Nietzsche, Mallarmé, Benjamin, and Stein all adopt baroque forms of theatricality precisely to subvert the ideological regimes of the past. The baroque becomes, for these authors, a means to disrupt norms of representation across a wide array of registers: aesthetic, economic, sexual, historiographic, and metaphysical. These modernists take up the baroque vision of the world as a grand theater organized around a divine center, and radically transform it to suit a modern awareness of performance’s pervasiveness in everyday life. Their modernist baroque functions not as an official style of hegemonic power— such as the absolutist state or counterreformation church—but as a deconstructive force, one that extends the baroque’s afterlife into the contemporary theater and theory of our present time.

Texte remanié de: Diss.--Saarbrücken, 1992. / Bibliogr. p. 263-275. Index.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1978. / "Thesis no. T26988"--first page. Includes bibliographical references (p. 329-337).

This dissertation reveals significant aspects of the use and understanding of prints in seventeenth-century Sicily by exploring their function in the realm of sacred images. It centers on three of the most substantial printmaking ventures carried out in Palermo and Messina: Ottavio Gaetani's Icons of Mary (Palermo, 1663), Placido Samperi's Iconology of the Virgin (Messina, 1644), and Giordano Cascini's St. Rosalia (Palermo, 1651). All three books treat religious subjects and feature intaglio prints claiming to reproduce the sacred images – paintings, sculptures, and mosaics – that constitute a crucial element of each narrative. The project examines the production of these works and the subsequent textual and visual responses made on the island and at farther distances. The three chapters treat each book both as a collection of prints and as an exchange between text and image that renders those prints as evidence for the value and flexibility of images. The first chapter focuses on Gaetani’s collection of icons of the Virgin from through the island and the utilization of prints as effective surrogates for those miraculous images. In the second chapter, the lines between devotional and art historical value are questioned in Samperi’s illustrated collection of paintings and sculptures depicting the Virgin. The third chapter unfolds the strategies by which prints were presented as evidence of a cult’s material history and continued to inform St. Rosalia’s legitimacy. In doing so, the chapters reveal a range of possible understandings of the relationship between prints and their sources, as well as active manipulations of that relationship to a range of ends. The dissertation identifies a Sicilian approach to generating historical, political, and sacred narratives that was inventive in both depending on and incorporating the reproduction of images in print.