Predicated on the assumption that dramatic parody and burlesque cannot be adequately decoded without the intervention of Marxian theory, this project attempts to reintroduce the problems of history, politics, economics, class, and ideology into the study of these two genres. Theodor Adorno's definition of parody as 'the use of forms in the epoch of their impossibility' forms the basis of a historical overview of the ability of dramatic parody and burlesque to expose the ideological impossibilities so often perpetuated in tragic and heroic genres through obsolete forms, commodified language, myths of individuality, and eradication of otherness. Adorno's theory of negative dialectics provides access to early modern dramas by Mr. WM., Francis Beaumont, Henry Fielding, John Brougham, and George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, while Adorno's theories on the culture industry provide insight into the plays of David Rabe and Christopher Durang. Finally, contemporary theories of parody by Linda Hutcheon and Fredric Jameson are examined in conjunction with the theories of Adorno, and plays by Charles Busch, George C. Wolfe, and Tony Kushner are offered as evidence that dramatic parody and burlesque are still vital, ideologically powerful genres / acase@tulane.edu

The purpose of this study is to examine the deconstructive themes and methods which inform T. S. Eliot's prose and poetry, and to demonstrate that, long before Jacques Derrida intervened in the area of literary analysis, Eliot had already developed the principles now 'enshrined' as deconstruction For more than a decade western literary criticism has been the site of philosophical and methodological crisis: on one side of the conflict, the 'traditionalists' and/or New Critics who cling to critical methods and assumptions rooted in orderly metaphysical systems; on the other side, the 'renegade' deconstructionists whose claims for the irrational structure of language mirror what quantum physicists have discovered about the physical world, i.e., that the order of the universe breaks down at the sub-atomic level Without exception, New Critics and their near relations have assumed T. S. Eliot as one of their own. Recent analyses of Eliot's prose and poetry, however, suggest that such confidence may be misplaced. A new generation of analysts, loosely formed under the rubric, 'post-structuralism,' has applied Derrida's critical methods to Eliot's work with varying degrees of efficiency, co-opting the twentieth century's most celebrated poet for their own cause This study seeks to remedy what up to now has been largely a partial and fragmentary approach to deconstructing Eliot's prose and poetry. After a brief introduction, the initial chapter is devoted to an in depth analysis of Derrida's major texts. Once this groundwork is laid, chapter two begins the analysis of Eliot by revisiting his dissertation on F. H. Bradley with particular attention to those theoretical pronouncements that anticipate the direction of Derrida's thought. Chapter three then forges a link between Derrida, the dissertation, and Eliot's essays on literature and culture. Chapters four and five extend the analysis into the troubled landscape of Eliot's most celebrated poems: 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,' 'Gerontion,' The Waste Land, 'Ash Wednesday,' and Four Quartets. The study 'concludes' with several comments on Eliot's two best plays, Murder in the Cathedral and The Family Reunion, and with a brief assessment of deconstruction's present and future In sum, The Fire and the Rose suggests that Eliot's ambivalent quest for the absolute culminates not in any metaphysical assertion, but in his acceptance of the indeterminate world. It further suggests that the 'father' of deconstruction, Derrida, is simultaneously the 'son' born of Eliot's struggle. In a typically Derridaean conflation of identities, and like Tereus of The Waste Land, the father devours the son / acase@tulane.edu

This dissertation is structured around three philosophical issues of particular interest to nineteenth century thinkers and writers---identity formation; language and truth; and unity. These three ideas prove to be central to two distinct bodies of thought developed in the early to middle nineteenth century: the widely disseminated theology of the Harvard Unitarians and the much less influential philosophical/religious beliefs of Henry James, Sr. As dissimilar as the two systems may be in some respects, both are animated by an intense engagement with these three areas of thought. It is in this regard that both become important to the fiction of Henry James, Jr., whose own engagement with these issues, although not systematic, nevertheless evinces a level of scrutiny and nuance often lacking in the other two systems. The purpose of this study, therefore, is threefold: to examine the positions of Unitarianism and Henry James, Sr. on the three philosophical issues; to explore the presence of these ideas in various Jamesian tales written between 1864 and 1884; and to look closely at their presence in the 1881 version of The Portrait of a Lady, a novel that has been regarded as difficult, contradictory, and even incoherent in certain aspects. Reading The Portrait in light of these two influences---Unitarianism and the senior James's philosophical system---places those contradictions in a larger sphere, alongside the enduring questions addressed by theology and philosophy, and in so doing, sheds new light on the novel and its much discussed heroine, Isabel Archer / acase@tulane.edu

The Faerie Queene is not a dream-poem (Introduction, Section 1). Yet dream-theory (oneirocriticism) can be applied to all texts (oneiropoetic), provided that the subordination of literature to psychology (or vice-versa) is avoided (Section 2). The purpose of this essay (Section 3) is to correlate Freudian dream-structures with literary structures, exemplify the correlations with Spenserian passages, and to build a total model for the interpretation of rhetoric in terms of dream-theory. The result, christened 'oneiropoetic,' employs classical rhetoric and poetics, as known in the Renaissance and earlier, and also uses later formulations by Tynianov, Bakhtin, Todorov, Genette, Derrida and others. Section 4 summarizes Freud's dream-theory in relation to his later ego-psychology. The essay is divided into fifty-two dream:literature isomorphs, disposed in four parts of three chapters each. Freudian theory is updated with the help of the language-centered formulations of Roman Jakobson and Jacques Lacan, among others Part I, 'The Censor: Viewpoint,' discusses 'aesthetic distance' versus dream-depersonalization; nightmares and punishment dreams; day-residues; and the 'Aristotelian' fancy in Spenser (Chapter 1). Chapter 2 discusses parody and paramnesia; irony; and absurdity. Chapter 3 examines genre theory as exclusions of The Censor, and equates literary fragmentation of time with dream-time. Part II, 'Condensation: Symbol,' discusses visual images or 'filming' in terms of literary pictorialism (Chapter 4). 'Escape' literature, including romance narrative in some of its aspects, is isomorphized to Freud's 'family romance,' and certain blazons to hysterical symptoms (Chapter 5). Chapter 6 analyzes such Condensations as algebraic names, the dragon-hermaphrodite, and Faeryland itself. Part III, 'Displacement: Allegory,' relates Freudian associationism to Renaissance hidden meaning (Chapter 7). Spenserian entrelaced allegory is compared to the homologous series of dreams of a single night (Chapter 8). Chapter 9 finds in Spenserian characterization a Galenesque imagery of humours isomorphic to Freudian libidinal 'zones.' The last Part, 'Secondary Revision: The Audience,' discusses the 'finish' of the text-surface, and also persona layers (Chapter 10). Chapters 11 and 12 correlate Transference in Freud with mediation in Spenser / acase@tulane.edu

My dissertation shows that nineteenth-century philosophical and scientific inquiries into the relationship between vision and knowledge exerted a formative influence on the epistemology and ideology of Victorian ghost and detective fiction. In contrast to the popular assumption that it is possible to isolate a single dominant model or regime of vision in this period, I maintain that nineteenth-century visual culture was defined by the continuous negotiation and tension between different conceptual models, epistemologies, and ideologies. Chapter One argues that the Victorian ghost story registers the shift in the early nineteenth century from spiritual to physiological models of vision and the growing demand for empirical verification of notions that had traditionally been accepted as articles of faith, while at the same time opening a discursive space for expressions of dissent to the rule of rationalism and materialism by underscoring the unreliability of the bodily senses and nostalgically invoking a spiritual model of spectatorship. The second chapter argues that Victorian detective fiction puts back into circulation Bishop Berkeley's theory of a universal visual language, transforming it into a new kind of ocularcentric epistemological fantasy about the instantaneous discovery of 'plain meaning,' while simultaneously subscribing to the empiricist theory that observation is a compound of sensations and inferences, and as such is inevitably fraught with interpretive difficulties and epistemological uncertainties. Chapter Three examines how certain late-nineteenth century developments in physics and mathematics, most importantly non-Euclidean geometry and speculations about n-dimensional space, occasioned an increasing fascination in late-Victorian science in the invisible and the unseen, reorienting scientific discourse toward non-positivist, idealist conceptions of seeing and knowing, preeminently intuition. In the genre of psychic detection, a hybrid of ghost and detective fiction, this fascination manifests itself quite differently: as the paranoid anxiety of always being watched by unseen spectral watchers. The final chapter examines nineteenth-century spirit photographs and composite mug shots in terms of their mutual correspondences. In both photographic genres, I argue, the ostensible evidential value of the image ultimately depends on a mutually non-exclusive commitment to seemingly incompatible impulses and beliefs: ocularcentrism and antiocularcentrism, positivism and idealism, empiricism and metaphysics / acase@tulane.edu

This dissertation explores the Holocaust's relationship to modernity and postmodernity and the historic event's effects on a post-Holocaust world, culturally, socially as well as artistically. Showing the Holocaust's widespread influence on our postmodern unconscious, this study examines a variety of literary texts that demonstrate the haunting effects of the Holocaust on the present After a brief reading of Bernhard Schlink's The Reader that situates the concerns and parameters of this study, Chapter One looks at the theoretical relationship between the Holocaust and postmodernity. For the most part mutually exclusive, cautiously ignoring or, at best, dismissing one another, these fields ought not to be seen as antagonistic but can, instead, greatly contribute to our engagement with the past. Postmodern theory with its denial of universalism, its celebration of the imagination, and its emphasis on representation and representability is highly dangerous to Holocaust Studies. Likewise, postmodernism often shies away from addressing the Holocaust since the historic event comprises possibly its most serious challenge as this historic event questions the easy dismissal of absolute truths and values as well as the ludic treatment of history itself. Nevertheless, the two fields are intricately entwined and a postmodern approach to the Holocaust reveals new insight into both postmodernism and our study of the Holocaust Accordingly, Chapters Two through Four look at the cultural, linguistic, and psychological effects of the Holocaust on post-War life in close readings of E. L. Doctorow's and Walter Abish's postmodern historical novels, Raymond Federman's highly experimental texts and his readings of Samuel Beckett's work, and D. M. Thomas's controversial fictions. While these authors by no means present a comprehensive account of Holocaust literature, they offer a wide variety of reactions to the Holocaust, not only showing its exemplary role for postmodernism but also exhibiting a variety of ways in which postmodernism can offer new insights into our understanding of the Holocaust and its role in contemporary life. The dissertation concludes with an examination of identity politics within Holocaust, exemplified by the case of Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments and the scandal surrounding its reception / acase@tulane.edu

Funeral ritual was a form of cultural performance that Victorian society modified both to reflect and to reinforce the ideological assumptions upon which nineteenth-century industrialism and commercialism were based. As a socially significant act, the funeral afforded participants a symbolic resolution to the contradictions inherent in industrial culture. In the Victorian funeral material goods ironically signified spiritual values. Charles Dickens presided over a similar evolution in fiction. His revival of the serial format and the innovative marketing of his work displaced more traditional notions of artistic creation by placing 'art' clearly in the 'marketplace' of ideas Despite their reliance on commercialism, both the funeral and the novel effaced their participation in the material exchanges of Victorian culture. Each form evoked a sense of the spiritual to counter the materialism of commodification--the funeral claimed an inherently religious nature that celebrated transcendence over material concerns, while the novel claimed an essentially aesthetic role as art, the deliberate celebration of the imaginative. This prevailing tension between the material impulse of commercialism and the spiritual desire for transcendence over the vicissitudes of industrialization and commercialization defines Victorian culture. In the juncture of the funeral represented in the novel, moreover, the contradictions that each form symbolically resolves tend to stand out in relief This study focuses primarily on represented funerals in three of Charles Dickens's novels--The Old Curiosity Shop, Martin Chuzzlewit, and David Copperfield--funeral scenes that have been read generally as either satirical pictures painted by a social reformer or as reflections of a romantic preoccupation with death. Both of these views tend, however, to oversimplify the role Dickens's fictional funerals play as sites at which cultural values are negotiated. Those ideological concerns reflect not just society's changing values and assumptions about wealth, class, and social mobility but Dickens's own concerns and anxieties for both himself as an artist and for the serial novel as a form of art. In each of these novels Dickens replicates the same spiritual/material tension he calls into question in the funeral scenes and reveals the extent of his own investment in the ideological forms of his culture / acase@tulane.edu

Several Elizabethan plays on Henry V share with Fielding a marked tendency toward ambiguity and contradiction in representing crimes against property. The Henry plays, including the early anonymous Famous Victories of Henry V, the Henslow play, Sir John Oldcastle: Part I, by Munday, Drayton, et al., and Shakespeare's I & II Henry IV and Henry V alternately eulogize and proscribe theft. They consistently exploit Hal's popular characterization as a thief, while other thieves, or theft in general at times, is disallowed Fielding condemns theft in his prose tract, An Enquiry into the Late Increase of Robbers, and calls for renewed enforcement of laws protecting property. In Amelia, however, Fielding indulges Booth, a debtor, at the expense of property laws Both sets of texts valorize or excuse crimes against property; they also condemn illicit or illegal forms of exchange. My study traces these problematics, and also explores various textual mechanisms that work to efface contradictions in the texts' construction of property and their representation of exchange Certain elements in the dramas, for instance, work to contain illicit forms of exchange. In Oldcastle, certain thefts create what I call 'gift-effects.' Theft is valorized when it brings about the circulation of property as gift. Gift-effects neutralize, sanitize, or redeem illicit forms of exchange; thus, they soften, or even efface, the contradictions produced by a text that valorizes the illicit or illegal. In Amelia, a certain ethics--or a certain nostalgia associated with the gift and with patronage exchange--works to legitimize Fielding's resistance to the criminalization of debt, despite his austere legal reformism in the case of theft. Fielding may be seen both to defend and repudiate the newly emergent market culture that increasingly criminalizes debt / acase@tulane.edu

This edition collates the three extant copies of the original 1587/88 edition of a play entitled The Misfortunes of Arthur, which are separately housed in the British, Huntington, and Houghton libraries. These three original copies are collated with the three modern editions, John Payne Collier's 1883 edition, Harvey Carson Grumbine's 1900 edition, and J. W. Cunliffe's 1912 edition. Collier's is a modern-spelling edition; Grumbine's, a diplomatic edition with textual and glossarial notation; Cunliffe's, an old-spelling edition, which also carries critical apparatus. The British Library's copy is the copy text The Introduction places the play in its literary and historical setting. It discusses the Arthurian legend, examining both the chronical and romance traditions informing the play. The Introduction also demonstrates the critical importance of the play as a bridge, or watershed, between the traditions of the academic and public theatre. Thematic and linguistic echoes between this play and the plays of later dramatists, especially Shakespeare, are also examined. The authors, who include Francis Bacon and Christopher Yelverton, are given brief biographical treatment, and the correspondence between Renaissance law and Renaissance drama is suggested. The political importance of the play and its relationship to the execution of Mary, Queen of Scotland, is also discussed This edition is an attempt to bring into print for the first time the text as it was presented before Elizabeth I at Greenwich Palace on 28 February 1587/88. The original volume privileged the text of the play's main author, Thomas Hughes, by printing his I.i and V.ii in their proper place in the play. William Fulbecke's I.i and V.ii, which were actually spoken in the court presentation, were relegated to an appendix. This edition privileges the Fulbecke text in the body of the play. Appendix A contains the text of Hughes' I.i and V.ii; Appendix B, a discussion of a poem found in 1983 among the papers of Anthony Bacon, which is relevant to the play; and Appendix C, a list of all known translations of Seneca, Lucan, and Vergil found in The Misfortunes of Arthur / acase@tulane.edu

This dissertation considers Shakespeare's representation of the dominant female in his first tetralogy of history plays in relationship to the ideological contradictions generated in Elizabethan England by the presence of a woman on the throne of a traditionally patriarchal state. Like the dangerous queens described by opponents to female rule in the sixteenth century, the independent women of Shakespeare's first tetralogy aggressively try to usurp a man's place and so threaten to subvert the stability of the nation itself. That Shakespeare in his earliest history plays chooses to foreground the figure of the woman-on-top raises questions, then, about the relationship between the women of these plays and the culture in which they were produced. This dissertation offers a way of reading these plays within a cultural framework and suggests the importance of Shakespeare's histories for feminist critics of Shakespeare The first chapter defines the ideological contradictions of Elizabeth I's reign and the strategies available for managing them, considering representations of the ruling female produced by the debate over female rule, by the Elizabethan court and the queen herself, and by travellers' reports from the New World. The three central chapters take up the individual plays of the tetralogy, beginning with 1 Henry VI and concluding with Richard III. Shakespeare's representations of women throughout the tetralogy work to reinforce traditional anxieties about women in power. But while he follows the patriarchal model in defining the woman-on-top, Shakespeare offers no comparable model for managing her. Destabilizing the reassuring resolutions of his chronicle sources, he suggests that traditional paradigms for handling the unruly woman had become problematic in Elizabethan England. Rather than mediating the ideological contradiction of female rule, then, Shakespeare in the first tetralogy exposes the conflict, emphasizing the dangers posed by the woman who wields power and, at the same time, dramatizing the failure of the heroic male to control her unruliness. In a nation ruled by a woman, these plays suggest, patriarchal models of power have lost their efficacy / acase@tulane.edu