This dissertation’s aim is to reveal how essential economic mechanics were to playwrights when it came to depicting agency. Rising commercialization in the seventeenth century prompted playwrights to appropriate market behaviors in London as a new discourse for agency. Commerce serves as a metaphor for every part of daily life, and a new kind of “commercial” agency evolves that predicates autonomy upon the exchange networks in which a person participates. Initially, this new agency appears as a variation on the trickster. By the end of the century, playwrights have created a new model for autonomy and a new kind of hero to employ it: the entrepreneur. My chapters chart the defining points in the development of commercial agency, each with a representative text or texts. In chapter II, I analyze how the Jacobean gallant, a variation on the trickster, sells himself as a desirable commodity to gain wealth and influence, the conditions he needs to liberate himself and control his own destiny (Eastward Ho). Chapter III examines characterizations of businesswomen in seventeenth century drama, one of the primary shifts in tone that accompanied the development of commercial agency as playwrights became more skilled in its portrayal (Antony and Cleopatra). Frequently regarded as prostitutes in Elizabethan plays, entrepreneurial women are often seen in later periods as dramatic, even tragic, heroes. When the stage closed during the years of 1642-1659, the print market was playwrights’ main source of income, and it was soon adapted to promote drama and ensure its future production. Chapter IV suggests that the success of William Davenant’s The Siege of Rhodes was due to how its preface implicated customers of the print edition in its stage production. Chapter V marks the emergence of the entrepreneurial rake as a romantic and comic hero. The chapter argues that the egalitarian haggling that ends The Man of Mode and The Rover, which is conspicuously absent from The Country Wife, is presented as the ideal basis for any loving, successful, and profitable marriage.

Esta tese de doutorado contempla a investigação da impostura ou alazoneia no drama aristofânico. Trata-se de uma proposta de teorização acerca da pertinência do impostor ou alazôn para o enredo das comédias de Aristófanes, na tentativa de superar abordagens que se limitam a apontar a comicidade da figura do alazôn. Analisou-se, primeiramente, a ocorrência do vocábulo alazôn e seus derivados nas peças supérstites de Aristófanes bem como nos escólios e antigos comentários das referidas peças. Analisaram-se, secundariamente, as cenas típicas de alazoneia em que o vocábulo não é usado. A partir dessas análises, estudou-se o impostor na obra de Aristófanes como um todo, levando em consideração o que a literatura antiga e contemporânea postulou sobre esse tipo de personagem. Depois disso, sistematizouse o uso que Aristófanes faz da alazoneia e conclui-se que a impostura é mais importante para sua obra do que se considera geralmente. Finalmente, constatou-se que o alazôn constitui mais do que apenas um personagem típico, sendo, em vez disso, uma função cômica de muitos recursos. / This dissertation looks into dramatic imposture (alazoneia) in Aristophanes plays, trying to theorize how the impostor or alazôn fits the plots of Aristophanes comedies, and to go beyond approaches that just point to that figures comic function. First, it analyzes the use of the word alazôn and its related forms in Aristophanes extant plays as well as in ancient scholia and commentaries about the plays. Secondly, it examines scenes where alazoneia can be found although the word is not actually used. From such analyses, it studies the impostor in Aristophanes plays as a whole, taking into consideration what ancient and modern literature postulated about this stock character. After that, it tries to systematize Aristophanes usage of alazoneia, pointing to the fact that imposture is more important to his work than it has been acknowledged hitherto. Finally, it proposes that the alazôn is much more than a stock character; instead, it is a comic function that our playwright deftly uses in almost all of his plays.

The First Rule of Improv is a collection of fictional short stories concerned with loss, life’s unfairness, the weight of the past, and how people succeed or fail in coping. Each story explores these notions through its characters, who vary wildly in terms of both dramatic severity and success in the face of adversity, with the first rule of improv—to accept and build—being suggested by the author as the healthiest manner of approach, if not necessarily the easiest.

Despite the long history of stand-up comedy as a distinct form of popular entertainment, there has been little sociological attention given to its cultural significance. Comedians have arguably become legitimate and visible voices in many public conversations about social issues and social justice. This dissertation explores the cultural work of women’s comedy in popular culture. Specifically, I examine narrative representation and audience reception of women’s stand-up comedy through multi-method qualitative inquiry. First, I analyze stand-up performances by popular U.S. comedians Amy Schumer, Wanda Sykes, and Margaret Cho. Through narrative analysis, I focus on the ironic performativity of Schumer and the charged styles of Sykes and Cho, and I discuss how these women use humor (in different but overlapping ways) to challenge dominant cultural narratives pertaining to gender, race, and sexuality. Second, I conduct an audience reception analysis using focus groups in order to better understand how people consume and interpret stand-up comedy. Due to the polysemic nature of comedy and satire, audiences decode these texts in a myriad of ways. My analysis shows how different audiences perceive the comedian as unpacking social “truths” in comedy. I elaborate these audience decoding positions, discuss the layers of interpretation (i.e., intersectional positionality and interpretive frameworks), and discuss how participants negotiate symbolic boundaries around what is deemed funny or topically appropriate for comics to say. My findings further highlight the importance of identity in critical referential viewing by incorporating standpoint epistemologies. In particular, audience members of marginalized social groups experience a “bifurcated consciousness” (Smith 1974) in their interpretations compared to those from dominant identity groups, and women and minority audience members are more likely to interpret these performances as counterhegemonic texts.

<p>Titel: Friends – Vänskap i förändring? En studie huruvida en TV- serie förändras</p><p>Författare: Pär Källman och Rickard Karlsson</p><p>Dokument: C- uppsats</p><p>Utbildning: Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap, höstterminen 07</p><p>Institution: Sektionen för Hälsa och Samhälle </p><p>Högskola: Högskolan i Halmstad</p><p>Handledare: Eva-Lotta Frid</p><p>Examinator: Malin Nilsson</p><p>Sammanfattning:</p><p>Vi har gjort en utvecklingsstudie i syfte att ta reda på om dramaturgi, dialog och karaktärsdrag, i TV-serien Vänner förändrats under de tio år som den producerades. Utifrån en kvalitativ hermeneutisk utgångspunkt har vi gjort en textanalys av serien. Vi har hämtat inspiration från diverse c-uppsatser från tidigare år och från narratologin och hermeneutiken.</p><p>I vår frågeställning vill vi veta om dramaturgin, dialogen, och karaktärerna på något sätt utvecklats eller förändrats under seriens lopp. Vi fördjupade oss i tre avsnitt ur serien, ett från första säsongen, ett från femte, samt ett från den tionde och sista. </p><p>Resultatet av vår analys visar att serien utifrån våra forskningsperspektiv består, snarare än förändras. Vi hade en teori om att serien på något sätt förändrats för att kunna ligga rätt i tiden och kunna behålla sin publik men i huvudsak skedde ingen större utveckling.</p>

The author discusses three Soviet comedies from the 1970s: Moskva slezam ne verit (Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, Vladimir Menshov, 1979), Osenniy marafon (Autumn Marathon, Georgi Daneliya, 1979), and Ironiya Sudby, ili S lyogkim parom (Irony of Fate, Eldar Ryazanov, 1975), and how they relate to both conventions of romance and conventions of the mainstream traditions of the romantic comedy genre. The text explores the evolution of the genre and accompanying theoretic writings, and relates them to the Soviet films, focusing largely on the conventions that can be grouped under an idea of the romantic chronotope. The discussion includes the conventions of chance and fate, of the wrong partner, the happy ending, the temporary and carnevalesque nature of romance, multiple levels of discourse, and some aspects of gender, class and power. In addition, some attention is paid to the ways in which the films connect to specific genre cycles, such as screwball comedy and comedy of remarriage, and to the implications that a communist system may have on the possibilities of love and romance. The author argues that Soviet and Hollywood films share many conventions of romance, but for differing reasons.

Titel:Friends – Vänskap i förändring? En studie huruvida en TV- serie förändras Författare:Pär Källman och Rickard Karlsson Dokument:C- uppsats Utbildning:Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap, höstterminen 07 Institution:Sektionen för Hälsa och Samhälle Högskola:Högskolan i Halmstad Handledare:Eva-Lotta Frid Examinator:Malin Nilsson Sammanfattning: Vi har gjort en utvecklingsstudie i syfte att ta reda på om dramaturgi, dialog och karaktärsdrag, i TV-serien Vänner förändrats under de tio år som den producerades. Utifrån en kvalitativ hermeneutisk utgångspunkt har vi gjort en textanalys av serien. Vi har hämtat inspiration från diverse c-uppsatser från tidigare år och från narratologin och hermeneutiken. I vår frågeställning vill vi veta om dramaturgin, dialogen, och karaktärerna på något sätt utvecklats eller förändrats under seriens lopp. Vi fördjupade oss i tre avsnitt ur serien, ett från första säsongen, ett från femte, samt ett från den tionde och sista. Resultatet av vår analys visar att serien utifrån våra forskningsperspektiv består, snarare än förändras. Vi hade en teori om att serien på något sätt förändrats för att kunna ligga rätt i tiden och kunna behålla sin publik men i huvudsak skedde ingen större utveckling.

ABSTRACT "Music for the Mad: A study of the madness in Purcell's mad songs" Ester Lebedinski, Uppsala University, Sweden, Department of Musicology, 2009. Madness was a stock topic in seventeenth-century drama, and music a compulsory feature on the Restoration stage. Henry Purcell's contributions to the latter are abundant, and include the popular combination of madness and music in his mad songs for Thomas Durfey's comedies. This essay aims at exploring the depiction of madness through music, verbal text and dramatic context in Purcell's mad songs for Durfey's plays A Fool's Preferment (1688), The Richmond Heiress (1693) and part I and III of The Comical History of Don Quixote (1694 and 1696 re­spectively). Particular emphasis is laid on text illustration and the songs' placement in the dramatic context. Madness is discussed as a deviation from the accepted norm, as the anormal demarcated from the normal. Conclusively, Purcell's mad songs are characterized by their variousness e.g. rapid changes between keys, styles, moods and subject matters, as opposed to the relative conti­nuousness of songs not depicting madness, and their sometimes exaggerated word paintings. Purcell's music does not independently express madness, but the illustration of madness is linked to the verbal text and the dramatic context, highlighted and completed through Pur­cell's music.

This dissertation shows that early modern female playwrights were shaped by and helped to shape commercial literary marketplaces that were increasingly affected by the rise of credit, shifting exchange values, and unstable notions of trust, interest, and economic motivation. By looking at how their plays appropriated and responded to financial language present in popular forms of publications such as pamphlets, ballads, and accounting guidebooks, we find that female playwrights understood the discourse of credit in ways that were particularly important for female readers and theatergoers and employed it in their writing for the stage. My study illustrates how their plays represent credit as always inherently tied to the potential risk involved in the “business” of being a woman on the marriage market, a mother with a fortune to pass on, or a widow with a business to maintain. In this project, I analyze the city comedies of Aphra Behn, the pseudonymous Ariadne, Mary Pix, and Susanna Centlivre and conclude that their works constitute a narrative bridge between the financial discourse that appears before them in conduct books and advice manuals of the Restoration and after them in the eighteenth-century novel. Making these women and their London comedies a focal point, we can see how they employed the period’s financial discourse to highlight the problems associated with broken promises, counterfeit wills, and the supposed power of contract. My research demonstrates how these playwrights and their works play a critical role in accounting for the trajectory of financial discourse in eighteenth-century culture and literature prior to the “birth” of the English novel. “Risky Business” moves beyond a discussion of female investors or money in literature and, instead, offers a more nuanced understanding of the ways women writers were impacted by the rise of paper credit outside of and prior to fiction. The research presented in this project offers a new account of the way early modern female readers, writers, and theatergoers, were influenced by an increasingly complex financial discourse, a more detailed understanding of the relationship between economic and literary history, and a new way of conceptualizing the commercial female playwright.

After 9/11, American stand-up comedy includes an increasing presence of Arab and Muslim comedians whose humor engages some of the recurring Islamophobic stereotypes circulating in the United States. These comedians combine self-deprecating humor and critique of American society. In doing so, they continue a rich tradition of American ethnic comedy, first used by other minorities to negotiate positive recognition of their ethnicities in American society. Although Arab and Muslim American stand-up comedy continues to grow, there is little academic analysis of it. My research attempts to fill this gap. I examine two video-recorded comedy tours, Allah Made Me Funny and The Axis of Evil, and draw on my experiences as participant observer at the 8th annual edition of the New York Arab American Comedy Festival. In my examination, I explore Arab and Muslim American stand-up comedy after 9/11 as a set of performances that challenge Islamophobic political discourses and contest stereotypical representations of Arabs and Muslims circulating in the media and popular culture. I begin this thesis with a discussion that defines Islamophobia after 9/11 as a pervasive ideological formation and explores the relationship between Islamophobia and stereotypical representations of Arabs and Muslims in the media and popular culture. Second, I identify political activism, personal narrative, as well as both artistic and historical opportunism as complex and interrelated dimensions of this stand-up comedy. Third, I examine how Arab and Muslim American comedians use humor to navigate the poles of their hyphenated identities and negotiate their belonging in American society. Finally, I examine the ways in which stand-up comedy reverses the discourses and representations of Islamophobia by drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque.