The presence of disabled characters like blind Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice and epileptic Othello are handy physical metaphors for the failures of epistemology that occur in both plays. Disability is often construed as a sort of saboteur of knowledge—disability of all kinds inhibiting the ability to perceive the world as an abled person would. But disability also produces a new, necessary sort of knowledge in order to survive and thrive in an unaccommodating world. A disabled epistemology suggests that knowing is contingent on individual, specific experience of the world. Tied to this issue of disabled epistemology is the issue of care—the field's emphasis on issues of relationality and reciprocity gels with disability's concerns about autonomy, self-determination, and accommodation. The ways in which care succeeds or fails informs us of the ways that disability intersects with class, race, and embodied knowledge. Gobbo is operating within a system that cares about him. Disabled beggars are subject to suspicion but expected to receive charity, and the embodied knowledge required to perform disability to an audience grants him access to that charity. On the other hand, because epilepsy and Otherness are compounded in Othello's society, to embrace embodied knowledge of his epilepsy is to become too foreign. To openly acknowledge and work with his disability would make him more socially vulnerable than he already is, but in ignoring it, Othello makes himself physically vulnerable. The dominant ideology cannot allow Othello to understand himself as disabled.

L’Archivio Graziano Arici est une archive photographique d’un genre résolument singulier ; elle réunit des enjeux et ou assemble des finalités qui ne se rejoignent que partiellement. Archive courante des photographies de Graziano Arici (photographe né en 1949 à Venise, résidant actuellement à Arles, et toujours en activité), fonctionnant comme une base d’images permettant au photographe d’accumuler et de vendre ses productions, elle est aussi, dès le départ, conçue comme une forme-conservatoire destinée, dans son ensemble, par son auteur même, à représenter une époque, à rester comme un témoignage porté par un regard sur une époque. Par l’acquisition de fractions d’archives photographiques, la mise en place d’une politique de préservation des images, et par ses créations, son travail plastique, le photographe se fait tout à la fois héritier d’un domaine précaire, mais aussi son passeur. Dans ce cas particulier, en effet, le rassemblement qu’est l’archive photographique se trouve être, non seulement, un lieu d’origine, premier, mais également l’endroit et le moment d’une recomposition, d’un remontage de productions antérieures, donnant ainsi naissance à un art consommé de l’assemblage, dans un lieu devenu paradoxal. / The Archive Graziano Arici is a definitely unique photograph Archive of its kind. It concentrates issues, or combine objectives which only partially meet. The standard Archive of Graziano Arici’s photograph (Arici is a photographer born in Venice, now living in Arles and still working) first acting as a picture-base which enables the photographer to gather together and sell his productions, is also, from the outset, designed as a conservation device, and by its author himself intended in its entirety to represent particular times and bear testimony to individual perceptions of those times ; by acquiring fractions of photograph archives, and setting up a picture-conservation policy, but through his own creation and plastic work as well, the photographer becomes heir to a fleeting world, and his go-between, too, giving birth to an art of assembling, and his archive becoming a paradoxical place.

I designed the lighting for William Shakespeare's complex piece, The Merchant of Venice, which was produced by the UMass Amherst Theater Department. In this thesis paper, I will discuss the creative process from start to finish, including relevant lighting paperwork and production photographs.

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The Italian seicento has been considered a dead century by many literary scholars. As this study demonstrates, such a conclusion ignores important literary developments in the field of librettology. Indeed, the seventeenth-century operatic libretto stands as a monument to literary invention. Critical to the development of this new literary genre was the prologue, which provided writers with a context in which to experiment and achieve literary transcendence. This study identifies approximately 260 dramatic works written in Venice between the years 1637 and 1682, drawn together for the first time from three sources: librettos in the Drammaturgia di Leone Allacci accresciuta e continuata fino all'anno MCDDLV; the musical manuscripts listed in the Codici Musicali Contariniani; and a chronological list of seventeenth-century Venetian operas found in Cristoforo Ivanovich's Minerva al Tavolino. Of the 260 Venetian works identified, over 98 begin with self-contained prologues. This discovery alone warrants a reconsideration of the seventeenth-century Italian libretto and the emergence of the dramatic prologue as a new and important literary genre.

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This thesis evaluates the artistic contributions of convent women in Renaissance Italy during the period c. 1450-1550 with individual case studies in Venice and Prato. As the cost of the traditional marriage dowry inflated markedly over the course of the fifteenth century, an increasing number of girls from affluent family backgrounds were sent to the convent in an effort to spare their families the financial burden of marrying them off. Convent vocations were not only financially convenient for families with daughters but offered a socially respectable alternative to marriage that many came to rely upon over the course of the latter fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The heightened presence of highborn girls in Italian convents seems to correspond with a concurrent development in female monastic artistic production. This point will be demonstrated in my study through analysis of two objects: the illustrated convent chronicle of Santa Maria delle Vergini (c. 1523), now in the Museo Correr in Venice and the illustrated frontispiece of Beatrice del Sera's convent play Amor di virtù (1555), preserved in the Biblioteca Riccardiana in Florence. Both of the considered works complement a text also written by convent women during the same period that demonstrate their knowledge of historic and current events, in addition to contemporaneous developments in the visual arts. The corresponding texts will be examined in a supporting manner to aid in interpreting the subject matter of the illustrations. Subsequent to identifying the pictorial content of these illustrations, I will elucidate how the convent artists successfully assert a female identity through their respective visual representations, and determine what specific type of identity they were motivated to promote. / Art History