Browsing by Author "Sherman, Debora"

Now showing 1 - 19 of 19
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    “Be Again”: Exploring the Trauma of Separation through the Physical in Krapp’s Last Tape
    (2017) Woodruff, Carolyn; Sherman, Debora
    This essay deals with one of Samuel Beckett’s more narrative short plays, Krapp’s Last Tape. While many theorists have delved into the idea that Beckett’s plays belie a certain amount of difficulty and struggle when it comes to the attempt to narrativize, but this essay explores the ways in which this relates to the topics of psychoanalytic trauma, and extends this to a treatment of the body in the play. Drawing primarily from Cathy Caruth’s interpretations of Sigmund Freud’s writings on trauma in her work, Unclaimed Experience, and from Dominick LaCapra’s work with trauma in his article “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” I move towards understanding Krapp’s struggles with narrativity as a form of structural trauma experienced as the trauma of a lack of unity within his life and within his conception of his life story. Krapp’s continual re-narration of his life in the form of the tapes thus becomes understood as a physical representation of this trauma, which extends to the body as it is enacted on the stage. Moving from an understanding of the trauma present in the play, I work towards understanding how the movements of Krapp’s body onstage also constitute and represent this trauma, particularly the inherently repetitious nature of trauma. From this analysis, a new interpretation of the ending of the play emerges: that in his final confrontation with his past, Krapp comes to a sort of acceptance of death, which is a site of both extreme separation, but also a kind of resolution of this fear through the unity in finality.
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    Cloaking the Voice in Silence: Wilkie Collins’s Hide and Seek and the Textual Spectacle
    (2006) Dolich, Lindsey; Sherman, Debora
    Sound is not welcome in Wilkie Collins’ utopic, nameless neighborhood—a “no place,” or more appropriately, a “noiseless place.” Collins’ incredible attention to visual and aural detail in the opening pages of Hide and Seek quickly establishes the dialectic between image and word that becomes like Wordsworth’s “a sense sublime far more deeply interfused” throughout the text. By imaging a soundscape for the reader through his pen, by animating the scene at hand through the written word, Wilkie Collins becomes a metaphorical painter. Hide and Seek’s performance of what I call the “textual spectacle,” in which language may uncover, screen, or “play” with its form and substance, might provide us with an appropriate critical lens for examining these visual and aural structures. Collins’s modality of writing is figured as ekphrasis—the speaking picture, which not only paints the scene, but also paradoxically “mutes” the “unspeakable” sound as that which can only be contained and dissolved in the word. The lacunae left by these silences is a positive absence of sound, a metonymy that appropriately “names” and assigns space for deaf discourse.
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    Ecstasis of Ekphrasis: Dialectically (De)framing Self in John Banville’s The Book of Evidence
    (2009) Montalbano, Kathryn; Sherman, Debora
    John Banville's "The Book of Evidence" posits a tension between the narrator’s conception of language as that which is incapable of fully conveying the "evidence" of the text and his desire to acquire a unity of subjectivity and objectivity through a means outside of the insufficient signification system of language. Relinquishing his desire to stabilize his presence through painting signifiers that parallel the linguistic fallacy of unity, the narrator turns towards windows as a subliminal space neither inside nor outside edifice, a structure that attempts to demarcate a binary between the “natural” exterior world and the “artificial” interior realm of humanity.
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    Exploring the perverse body: The Monk and Melmoth the Wanderer
    (2004) Jacobson, Laura A.; Sherman, Debora
    Revenge. Obsession. Desire. Death. These are but a few of the dark and forbidding foundations pervading the genre of the Gothic horror. Though they arrive in different disguises and embodiments within the text, each awful trope is explored in ghastly detail by both characters and readers of Gothic stories. In Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer and Matthew "Monk" Lewis' The Monk, the body centers as the vehicle through which these disturbing issues are brought forth and examined. The body in its various roles and formations serves as a literary device of exploration, being a significant literal and figurative entity. Each novel is a fantastic and overwhelming passage into the darker elements of life, culminating in scenes of bodily destruction and devastation. My thesis explores the body, the Gothic, and the perversion of desire. Using theorists such as Michel Foucault and Elaine Scarry, I explore themes of perversion, pain, and death to deconstruct the body in words
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    In-Between Nobody and Somebody: Desdemona's Deconstruction
    (2008) O'Malley, Hayley; Sherman, Debora
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    “Ireland sober is Ireland free”: the confluence of nationalism and alcohol in the traumatic, repetitive, and ritualistic response to the famine in James Joyce’s Ulysses
    (2005) Baillie, Brian; Sherman, Debora
    Joyce deftly weaves the fabric of Irish life in Ulysses. One can easily picture his characters walking down the most obscure of streets and encountering the most immediate of acquaintances. The lyrical nature of Irish conversation provides the linguistic backdrop for the various challenges of language that Joyce embarks upon throughout the novel. From remembering the dead to requesting a pint amongst friends, a mimetic portrait of Dublin is created through the text. Perhaps the most stereotypical of activities in the Irish social fabric is drinking, which both produces and reproduces a nationalist rhetoric. The scene of a dark pub filled with men scorned by the English inevitably becomes filled with political rhetoric and rebel cries. The confluence of drinking and nationalist fervor occurs in the “Cyclops” episode of Ulysses; those imbricated discourses enact a stranglehold on the Irish populace. This drinking is social and not necessarily abusive, a fact noted in Joyce’s breezy language in the “Hades” episode, “Expect we’ll pull up here on the way back to drink his health. Pass round the consolation. Elixir of life.” This particular description embodies many of the elements within this stereotype. In that carriage, the Irish men view alcohol as the natural outlet for mourning and death; Bloom, however, stands far outside the society where, in the original Irish, usquebeagh is in fact the “waters of life”, or “elixir of life”. That space of death and misery in the larger historical context is, arguably, the source of a drinking culture.
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    “It’s wanting to know…”: The Troubled Matter of Stoppard’s Arcadia
    (2017) Bobbe, Chris; Sherman, Debora
    Common readings of Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play Arcadia take Hannah’s line “It’s wanting to know that makes us matter” as an unqualified affirmation of the quest for knowledge, even in the face of disorder and epistemic revolution. But a study of the objects in the play, drawing from Bill Brown’s thing theory and W. J. T. Mitchell’s account of the life of things in English Romanticism, casts doubt on this affirmation. It is true, as has been described, that the drama of Arcadia is rooted in a dynamic equilibrium between order and chaos, classicism and romanticism. Yet the scales have been tampered with: The play works within a romanticism that has been chastened by the removal of all suggestions of revolutionary deep time beyond the human scope. Although the characters are disturbed by catastrophic losses of culture, and by the deaths of individual people, they remain blissfully untroubled by the brevity of the entire span of human history and its insignificance among the frequent cataclysms of natural history. W. J. T. Mitchell identifies the emergence of this revolutionary temporality in the discovery of the fossil, which brings with it the haunt of species extinction. He places the fossil as a foundation to the Romantic Period and follows its influence through romantic historiography and such works as Frankenstein and Jurassic Park, in which dead material (literal fossils in the latter case) triggers a revolution by coming to life under human hands. Despite its obsession with objects and materials, Arcadia never explicitly ignites the fear of a similar revolution in the computing age that gives consciousness to matter. But by acknowledging the extent to which the play erases the indifferent violence of the natural world, as well as the drastic changes humans make to it, we can see a pervasive anxiety coursing beneath its surface. On the one hand, Arcadia forces us to contrast its idyllic timeless nature with the upheavals of the real natural world. On the other, it hints at what should be the terrifying prospect (at least for Hannah’s declaration) of Valentine’s computer, and machines like it, one day wanting to know.
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    Mionnan Aerach
    (2013) Culhane, Emmet; Sherman, Debora
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    “Poor girl!” : Feminism, Disability and the Other in Ulysses
    (2006) Flaherty, Patricia; Sherman, Debora
    The purpose of this study is to examine Gerty MacDowell in Nausicaa, Chapter 13 of James Joyces Ulysses, and how her overwhelming femininity affects her disability, and how that conflation of femininity and disability largely engages feminist disability theory. Gerty MacDowell prides herself on the active sexualizing of her own body. In the interaction between Bloom and Gerty, disability is recognized textually as her link to humanity. In recognizing Gerty's disability, Bloom is able to recognize as well as reflect on his own disabilities albeit figurative but still very integral in the way he views himself. By recognizing that disabilities are part of all human lives, Ulysses promotes a theory of disability studies that is extremely positive and helps to break down the stigmatizing of the disabled. Gerty's disability also helps further an argument relating not to disability, but rather to human imperfection. We come into contact with many transgressions on the part of the characters, and Gerty's disability reminds the narrative that disabilities/mistakes/transgressions are part of what it is to be human. This recognition helps ideas regarding disabilities in a way that promotes a more realistic idea about the body and makes the unrealistic and damaging ideal body untenable.
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    Re-Defining Meaning in Henry James's "The Beast in the Jungle"
    (2003) Bobé, Diandra; Sherman, Debora
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    Reading the "and" in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility
    (2009) Cox, Emma; Sherman, Debora
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    “Still, it was a kind of language between us”: Desire, Identity and Ethics in ‘Nausicaa’
    (2013) Cohen-Carroll, Natasha; Sherman, Debora
    This thesis examines the ways in which desire is constructed in the Nausicaa chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses, paying specific attention to how the characters’ past trauma or vulnerabilities inform these desires. Through their exchange, Gerty is able to control Bloom’s lust and be desired free from the shadow of her physical disability, while Bloom is offered the chance to reaffirm his manhood, an especially delicate matter due to the end of his sexual life with Molly. The experience in a sense mends these traumas, as it places them both sexual beings in the world, engaged in a reciprocal exchange. The episode testifies to a form of mutuality and communication, and, above all, to the acknowledgement that there was a “kind of language between us.” The encounter is furthermore characterized by Gerty’s attention to Bloom and by the fulfilling nature of their exchange, and can be seen as a moment of responsibility towards the other. While the exchange is undoubtedly imperfect, we might consider viewing it in terms of Levinas’s conception of alterity and responsibility. Using Levinas’s works, the thesis examines the ethical nature of their exchange: Bloom’s and Gerty’s alterity is preserved throughout, and is in fact the basis for their self-actualization. Through being recognized and acknowledged by the “Other”, both Bloom and Gerty leave their encounter with a more fluid and nuanced vision of their own identities. Indeed, Bloom and Gerty take an active role in shaping their identities and formulating their desires. Beyond the expression of their sexual desire, their encounter provides an open space of self-realization and mutual understanding, in which they can work through these traumas, and suture tears in their identities.
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    'The Moonstone' and the "Gentleman Project"
    (2003) Seward, Egan; Sherman, Debora
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    "Truer than the truth": Stories and Storytelling in Neil Gaiman's American Gods
    (2017) Yoon, Demian; Sherman, Debora
    American Gods is fundamentally a story about stories. The conceit of American Gods is that gods, deities, and other figures regarded as mythological are real, and exist in various incarnations in America, surviving or struggling in different ways in a land that is “a bad place for gods” (116). The old gods, like Odin, Anansi, and Anubis, are at war with newer, “American” gods, of “credit card and freeway, of Internet and telephone…gods of plastic and of beeper and of neon” (138). While the battle between old and new is a common trope in fantasy literature, American Gods upends this dichotomy. Disrupting standard conventions which frame the worth of stories in terms of their unshakable authenticity, American Gods makes the argument that the worth of a story is dependent on the effect it has upon the audience, and that the best-told tale is one that is subject to questioning and accepts the impossibility of remaining a fixed point.
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