Browsing by Subject "Baroque"
Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Baroque and post/colonial Sub-Saharan Francophone Africa: The aesthetic embodiment of unreason.(2010-07) Joslin, Isaac V.My dissertation approaches postcolonial African literature and political culture through the lens of a baroque aesthetic of spectacle and subversion. The basic premise is that the baroque, identified by Michel Foucault in Les Mots et les Choses (1966) as that pivotal transition between the Renaissance and classical episteme, is characterized by representational and rhetorical strategies that draw on the morbid-erotic and corporeal imagination to represent "reality" as an irrational, chaotic encounter of conflictive forces. From the notion of a "modern baroque" proposed by Christine Buci-Glucksmann in La Raison Baroque (1984), I develop a broad theory of the baroque that encompasses both art and critical theory, as well as material socio-economic realities of late or high modernity. Then, drawing from Édouard Glissant's discussion of a contemporary global baroque phenomenon in his work Poétique de la Relation (1990), my dissertation looks specifically at the baroque in postcolonial Africa, as a literary aesthetic, and as a political style of power and related subversive practices identified by Achille Mbembe in his work De la Postcolonie (2000). Through concerted analyses of select African novels by Yambo Ouologuem, Henri Lopes, Sony Labou Tansi, Calixthe Beyala, Ken Bugul, and others, I explicate the different characteristics of a baroque aesthetic practice in postcolonial francophone African literature.Item “Baroque Venetian Theatre: dialectics of excess and discipline in the sixteenth and seventeenth Centuries.”(2010-06) Daddario, WilliamThis dissertation analyzes the theatre practice of Angelo Beolco (aka Ruzzante) and the pedagogical strategies of the Society of Jesus (aka the Jesuits) in order to forward a theory of the Baroque as a space of critical tension produced by the clash of disciplinary regimes of governance and excessive artistic expressions. I read Venice through a sceno-historiographical lens and theorize it as a staging area from which acts of Baroque composition unfolded. With a dialectical and philosophical-historical methodology (derived from the work of Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Michel Foucault), I assemble archival traces of Venetian theatre prior to the construction of permanent theatre buildings in order to contribute to the writing focused on sixteenth and seventeenth-century Venetian theatre, of which currently little exists. Theatre, then, appears in this dissertation as more than mere entertainment; it becomes an active political practice embedded within an epicenter of cultural production in early modern Europe.Item Reconsidering the case of María de Zayas: readings through the optic of the monstrous(2014-01) Sanan-Estudillo, Alyssa RobynMaria de Zayas' status as a writer has been, for the longest time, a cold case. Only recently disinterred from history, literary critics have swarmed her textual body and have developed a bewildering array of leads for critical readings of her work. Is Zayas a protofeminist and social reformer, or rather are her views profoundly conservative and status quo? Is the sexualized violence in her work a deliberate and subversive technique, or just a way to cash in? Does she use her baroque sensibilities for particular ends, or does she merely use the prevailing norms? It appears that the recent academic criticism of Zayas has sought to pigeonhole her into one of these categories; these ideas will be further developed in chapter one of this study. Yet it is important for a reader to abandon these extreme views, and, instead of choosing one side or another, to challenge the binary thinking often underlying these questions. I see using the optic of the monstrous as a useful and distinctive tool to view the work of Zayas, especially considering the fact that Zayas herself has employed monstrosity to challenge common assumptions in her own day.