This study contributes to the ongoing exploration of the multiple ways visual and material artifacts perform. I take a look at how typewriters or rather how two representations of typewriters perform. I focus on two different images of working women, each rendered in terms of a popular female stereotype of the period. I selected the images because they bookend a period of time in which typewriters emerged to the fore as an efficient tool of reproduction in the business world. In turn, two different perspectives on the relationship between the typist and her typewriter, woman and machine, are provided. The study demonstrates how visual images, an advertisement from the early 1900s and a photograph from the 1920s, can be perceived and analyzed as performance events that tell us something about the cultures that produced and transmitted them and also about our current culture and how we perceive events we recall. Further, it shows us how practical performance methods contain conceptual-theoretical discourses that help us discuss how and why people perform. I undertake a critical historiography aiming to discover how the images perform certain histories. To do so, I focus on key elements in each image the typewriting machine in Chapter Two and the woman as typewriter in Chapter Three tracking and describing histories associated with each. In Chapter Four, I apply the stories and issues Ive collected to an investigation of each image, adding to the perspective mix the basic laws of theatricality as conceptualized by Vsevolod Meyerhold. Although Meyerhold developed and experimented with his laws within the same time period that concerns me, I do not intend to draw direct correspondences between the images and Meyerholds application of the laws. Rather, I find the laws helpful to understanding and articulating how the images perform. That is, the laws will determine what makes for performance in this case. They offer a vocabulary for analyzing the images as performance events and, especially, for discussing the double-sided complexities that emerge in those events.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LSU/oai:etd.lsu.edu:etd-06022009-143756 |
| Date | 04 June 2009 |
| Creators | Jackson, Sarah Kathryn |
| Contributors | Rachel Hall, Ruth Bowman, Michael Bowman |
| Publisher | LSU |
| Source Sets | Louisiana State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-06022009-143756/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached herein a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to LSU or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below and in appropriate University policies, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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