Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2004. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 163-172). Also available on the Internet.

The period from the end of World War I through the 1950s has been called “the Golden Age of Drama on Broadway.” Subsumed within this period is another sort of golden age, of music in the American spoken theater, Broadway and beyond, c. 1935-60. Unlike more familiar, and better-studied, genres of dramatic music such as opera, ballet, and the Broadway-style musical, music composed for spoken dramas is neither a definitive part of the dramatic form nor integral to the work’s original conception. Rather, it is added in production, like sets, costumes, and lighting. This study traces the roots of this rich period of spoken-dramatic music to the collaboration of producer John Houseman, director Orson Welles, and composer Virgil Thomson on the Federal Theatre Project, beginning in 1936. The musical ramifications of that collaboration eventually extended to include composers Paul Bowles and Marc Blitzstein, influential theater companies such as the Theatre Guild and Group Theatre, innovative directors such as Elia Kazan and Margo Jones, and major playwrights such as Lillian Hellman and Tennessee Williams. Following a consideration of the forces that gave rise to this musically rich nexus and the people, materials, and practices involved, three high-profile theatrical collaborations are examined, along with three scores that resulted from them: Thomson’s score for Houseman’s 1957 “Wild West” Much Ado About Nothing; Blitzstein’s score for Welles and the Mercury Theatre’s 1937-38 “anti-Fascist” Julius Caesar; and Bowles’s score for the original production of Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1944-45). Each score is located within the musico-dramatic history that produced it, and analyzed within the context of the production for which it was written. This work aims to begin to recover a vast body of forgotten American dramatic music, to limn the role of the spoken theater in the careers of these three noteworthy American musical artists, to probe a busy intersection of high and commercial art forms, and to suggest music’s important role in the development of the American spoken theater.

This thesis looks to explore the musical Cabaret through a critical, historical and political lens, with particular focus on Sally Bowles, questioning the creation and agency of this character in contrast with the political and societal values of various productions. Using a socio-political analysis, this thesis discusses the important relationship between politics and theater, using the pro-choice abortion movements of the 1960's as a way to understand Sally Bowles as a complex device for political and social commentary.

In my thesis, I argue that Barbara Adair's In Tangier We Killed the Blue Parrot can be viewed as a palimpsest. In this sense her re-inscription of the lives and fictions of lane and Paul Bowles in the International Zone of Tangier, Morocco, in the 1940s reflects on and is implicated in the contemporary South African Zeitgeist. Through illuminating the spatial and temporal connections between the literary text and the social text, I suggest that Adair's novel creates a space for the expression of new patterns of intimacy. The Bowleses' open marriage and their same-sex relationships with local Moroccans are complicated by hegemonies of race, class and gender. To illustrate the nature of these vexed intimacies I explore Paul's sadomasochistic relationship with the young hustler, Belquassim, revealing the emancipatory nature of the expatriate's erotic and violent encounter with the Other. Conversely, I suggest the shades of Orientalism and exoticism in this relationship. While Adair is innovative in her representation of the male characters, I argue that she perpetuates racial and gendered stereotypes in her representation of the female characters in the novel. lane is re-inscribed in myths of madness and selfdestruction, while her lover, Cherifa, vilified and unknowable, is depicted as a wicked witch. This study interrogates the process of selection and representation chosen by Adair, which proceeds from her own intentionality and positionality, as a South African, as a human rights law lecturer, as a (white) woman and as a woman writer. These explorations reveal the liberatory re-imagining of new patterns of intimacy, as well as the limitations of being bound by the implicit racial and gendered divisions of contemporary South African society. / http://hdl.handle.net/10413/1286 / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2006.

by Tse Kwan-choi. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1992. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 181-185). / TITLE PAGE / ACKNOWLEDGMENTS / DECLARATION / ABSTRACT / TABLE OF CONTENTS / LIST OF FIGURES / LIST OF TABLES / CHAPTERS: / Chapter 1. --- INTRODUCTION / Chapter 1.1 --- The Constitutional Questions --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- Objectives and Significance --- p.2 / Chapter 1.3 --- Organization of Chapters --- p.4 / Chapter 2. --- THE REPRODUCTION THESIS IN SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION / Chapter 2.1 --- Controversies over School as an Agent of Socialization --- p.5 / Chapter 2.2 --- Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis on Education and Reproduction:What do schools do for capitalism? --- p.7 / Chapter 2.3 --- The Correspondence Principle: How do schools produce workers --- p.9 / Chapter 2.4 --- A Synopsis: the Formalization of Correspondence Principle --- p.11 / Chapter 2.5 --- Research on the Reproduction Thesis: An Overview --- p.13 / Chapter 2.6 --- Theoretical Criticisms and Evaluation: --- p.17 / Chapter 2.7 --- Setting the Research Agenda: Hypothesis for Test in the Present Study --- p.22 / Chapter 3. --- RESEARCH METHOD / Chapter 3.1 --- General Research Design --- p.25 / Chapter 3.2 --- Subjects and Sampling --- p.25 / Chapter 3.3 --- Procedures of Data Collection and Analysis --- p.27 / Chapter 3.4 --- Instruments and Measurements --- p.29 / Chapter 3.5 --- A Portrait of the 56 Schools --- p.39 / Chapter 4. --- "THE CONTEXT OF HONG KONG SECONDARY SCHOOL SYSTEM: DEVELOPMENT, DIFFERENTIATION AND INEQUALITIES" / Chapter 4.1 --- Political Economy and Education: The Structure and Development of Secondary Educational System Under a Colonial-capitalist Society --- p.42 / Chapter 4.2 --- The Differentiation of Hong Kong Secondary School System --- p.46 / Chapter 4.3 --- Differentiation and Inequalities --- p.49 / Chapter 4.4 --- Conclusion --- p.59 / Chapter 5. --- THE RESEMBLANCE THESIS / Chapter 5.1 --- Preamble --- p.61 / Chapter 5.2 --- The Dominate-subordinate Relationship between Teachers and Students --- p.61 / Chapter 5.3 --- Alienated Learning in School Life --- p.68 / Chapter 5.4 --- "Competition, Ranking and Evaluation" --- p.74 / Chapter 5.5 --- Personality and Reward System --- p.76 / Chapter 5.6 --- A Recapitulation --- p.81 / Chapter 6. --- THE FORMATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS THESIS / Chapter 6.1 --- Foreword --- p.83 / Chapter 6.2 --- The Formation of Personality --- p.83 / Chapter 6.3 --- The Orientation to Discipline --- p.88 / Chapter 6.4 --- Work Orientation --- p.91 / Chapter 6.5 --- Views on Knowledge --- p.94 / Chapter 6.6 --- Students' Educational Endeavour --- p.96 / Chapter 6.7 --- Meritocratic Orientation and Social Justices --- p.99 / Chapter 6.8 --- Students' View on the Possibility of Social Change --- p.101 / Chapter 6.9 --- A Recapitulation --- p.103 / Chapter 7. --- THE DIFFERENTIATION THESIS / Chapter 7.1 --- Preamble --- p.105 / Chapter 7.2 --- A Sketch of the Six groups of Schools --- p.106 / Chapter 7.3 --- Who Get Admitted --- p.111 / Chapter 7.4 --- Social Relationships in the Six Groups of School --- p.115 / Chapter 7.5 --- Social Consciousness of the Six Groups of School Students --- p.133 / Chapter 7.6 --- Review of the Chapter --- p.151 / Chapter 8. --- EPILOGUE:RETHINKING THE REPRODUCTION THESIS / Chapter 8.1 --- A Recapitulation --- p.153 / Chapter 8.2 --- Theoretical Discussion on the Correspondence Principle --- p.160 / Chapter 8.3 --- Limitations --- p.165 / Chapter 8.4 --- Research Directions --- p.167 / CHAPTER NOTES --- p.169 / BIBLIOGRAPHY --- p.175 / APPENDICES / Copies of Student's and Teacher's Questionnaires

This dissertation argues that Nella Larsen, Tess Slesinger, and Jane Bowles, in a set of novels published between 1928 and 1943, all deployed laughter—not humor or comedy, but laughter itself—to express a critique of the rigid prescription of female subjectivity. In a historical window of epistemic instability, between the earlier dominance of humanist individualism and the subsequent dominance of humanist universalism, these authors reacted against nominally liberatory political movements, such as first-wave feminism and Black “uplift,” that had not in fact challenged an ideal of the sovereign subject still modeled on the white male Euro-American individual. Their objections anticipated, by several decades, later critiques of the subject that emerged in second-wave feminism and post-structuralist theory. Laughter, as Larsen, Slesinger, and Bowles understood, reckons with difference, and not only identitarian difference: when we laugh, we recognize someone or something as different, other, and differently different, otherly other—not a defined other, but a fresh challenge to discursive taxonomy. Moreover, when we laugh, experiencing a material overthrow of subjective control, we encounter the otherness, the multiplicity, of the self ever different from itself. Laughter thus opens the self to difference, inside and out. But the “subversive” force of the laughter of the oppressed can also be coopted and reabsorbed by a dominant social order. This project takes up Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) as a case study in the limits of the “subversive,” before turning to Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), Slesinger’s The Unpossessed (1934), and Bowles’ Two Serious Ladies (1943) as exemplars of a more radical laughing objection to the prescription of subjectivity, and to the dualisms that undergird the subject’s construction: self and other, oppression and resistance, mind and body, thought and feeling, depth and surface. The latter novels laugh a “laughter of the middle”: a materially situated, present laughter, living in the in-between spaces of dialectical discourse; a laughter of the here and now, the ever-shifting ground of a self in pieces.

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