This study reconsiders power dynamics and authorial style through a study of the structure of interruptions. By considering this everyday occurrence as an aesthetic phenomenon, literary critics can more fully understand the relationships inherent in drama, itself a relational art form. This dissertation illuminates how the everyday becomes aesthetic and how the aesthetic helps us to comprehend the everyday. Interruptions are ubiquitous both in everyday life as well as within literature. While sociologists and linguists have studied them in their quotidian occurrences, literary and performance scholars have almost completely ignored their aesthetic iterations. Some recent studies into this structure evaluate poetry and prose, but rarely consider drama, and even in the studies of prose and poetry, interruptions are deployed as a structure inherently understood. This dissertation offers a fuller consideration and evaluation by studying interruptions through their comprising elements and their distinctive types. This study examines early modern drama as an exemplary, influential moment of dramatic output, focusing on the works of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and John Fletcher. Through an informed neo-formalism, this dissertation reveals two significant aspects of interruptive structures. First, interruptions demonstrate dynamic power relationships not only among characters within a play, but also between an audience and a performer or a reader and a text. Second, interruption usages indicate aspects of authorial style, emphasizing a playwright’s use and control of a text and its implications/expectations. The chapters of the dissertation explore four types of internal interruptions, or those which an author writes into the text. Chapter Two examines dialogic microinterruptions, which are specific moments within dialogue where a conversant speaks out of turn. Through exemplary scenes within Volpone, The Tempest, and The Humorous Lieutenant, the chapter develops an understanding of both the shifting power relationships among the characters and how the playwrights approach those shifts in building character and community. Chapter Three examines another type of internal microinterruption, the self-interruption. By considering the methodology and rhetoric of stopping oneself on stage, the chapter reveals the emotional, manipulative, and comedic usages of the structure, while developing a reading of each author’s approach to interiority and character. The final two chapters focus on macrointerruptions, or those that disrupt larger governing structures within a text. Chapter Four explores dramaturgical macrointerruptions through audience expectations of structure. Through Jonson’s Grex in Every Man Out, Shakespeare’s surprise reveal of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, and Fletcher’s exposition in The Chances, each playwright explores the possibilities of rupturing dramatic structures and the effects that such ruptures create for audiences. The final chapter examines interruption of theatrical conventions, specifically through the convention of male to female crossdressing. As this type of crossdressing was not as prevalent as female to male in the period, it presents an already interrupted convention, that the authors, in plays such as Epicene and The Loyal Subject, further complicate through the relationship between the convention and the expectation. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2018. / April 10, 2018. / Dialogue, Dramaturgy, Fletcher, Interruption, Jonson, Shakespeare / Includes bibliographical references. / Gary Taylor, Professor Directing Dissertation; Kris Salata, University Representative; S. E. Gontarski, Committee Member; Terri Bourus, Committee Member.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_654762 |
| Contributors | Wagoner, Michael Martin (author), Taylor, Gary, 1953- (professor directing dissertation), Salata, Kris (university representative), Gontarski, S. E. (committee member), Bourus, Terri (committee member), Florida State University (degree granting institution), College of Arts and Sciences (degree granting college), Department of English (degree granting departmentdgg) |
| Publisher | Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, text, doctoral thesis |
| Format | 1 online resource (252 pages), computer, application/pdf |
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