R-3 Repository :: Browsing by Author "Snow, Edward A."

Browsing by Author "Snow, Edward A."

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Arresting figures: Reading and theorizing Renaissance texts
(1992) Lin, Yuh-jyh; Snow, Edward A.
This dissertation analyzes three Renaissance texts vis-a-vis critiques of the theories that enable some readings of those three texts. The Introduction to the dissertation offers a critique of Stephen Greenblatt's "cultural poetics" through a close reading of a passage from his Renaissance Self-Fashioning. His "cultural poetics" is instigated as much by his anxiety about the text as by his concern with cultural patterns. The opening chapter deals with the problem of the narrative voice in the first episode of The Faerie Queene. Patricia Parker resolves the problem of reading this episode by treating the narrator's reading of the landscape as a vantage point above and beyond the text. This chapter, however, explores the way in which the text resists his reading and the way in which his reading becomes a kind of self-defense mechanism, betraying his anxiety about, and his self-estrangement from, the landscape. The next chapter takes up the question of male selfhood and its relation to female sexuality in Othello. While Marguerite Waller divests the play of its multiple perspective by installing Othello as a reference point and by taking Iago's malice as the answer to Othello's treatment of Desdemona, this chapter treats Othello's selfhood as an object of inquiry and analyzes the tension between his selfhood and Desdemona's sexuality. The last chapter opens with a critique of Stanley Fish's theory about the reading experience of Samson Agonistes. Fish postulates that the play encourages certain responses from the reader only to frustrate him. But this postulation betrays the critic's self-alienation from the text. While his desire for closure leads him to trivialize the reading experience of the play, this chapter proposes a mode of close reading that explores both the way language conveys a complex attitude toward every issue Fish tries to resolve and the way language generates psychological, ethical, and ontological ambiguities which persist throughout the play.
Imagining Unity: The Politics of Transcendence in Donne, Lanyer, Crashaw, and Milton
(2012) Yeo, Jayme M.; Snow, Edward A.
"Imagining Unity" investigates how an evolving concept of transcendence in early modern England, influenced by Reformation and counter-Reformation theology, created new ways of responding affectively and philosophically to emerging articulations of national identity in British devotional poetry. My project focuses on a series of politically disruptive moments in the seventeenth century--from the residual trauma of the Protestant Reformation to the Civil War of the 1640's--that troubled England's developing sense of national identity. In the shadow of these troubles, devotional poets reworked ideas of transcendence that they had inherited from medieval Catholicism to provide a sense of national cohesion in the midst of a changing political landscape. This dissertation explores transcendence as it is reconceived by four different authors: John Donne's work translates Catholic iconography to symbolize the ascension of a Protestant England; Aemelia Lanyer's poetry appeals to the exclusivity of religious esotericism as a palliative for the actual exclusion of women from political life; Richard Crashaw's writings reinterpret mystical union to rescue sovereignty from failure; and John Milton's work revises transubstantiation to authorize a new republic. By investigating how early modern poetry reimagines transcendence in response to political events, my project widens ongoing conversations in political theology and "the religious turn" of literary studies, which are often unilaterally focused on the influence that religion had on politics in the course of an inevitable secularization of culture. My contribution to this work, and the underlying premise to my argument, is that literature provides a forum for rethinking religious concepts at the heart of political organization despite the apparent impulse toward secularization. In doing so, literature serves as a cultural medium for testing the conceptual limits of transcendence--its viability as a tool for inspiring and maintaining social unity. This dissertation ultimately witnesses a concerted effort in the early modern period to extend the life of religious ideas within the political imagination through devotional poetry's insistent recasting of transcendence as central to the formulation of the body politic.
Jesting at scars: Shakespeare's skeptics and the problem of belief
(1994) Newton, Allyson Paix; Snow, Edward A.
Certain characters in Shakespeare share lineages grounded in thematic concerns. Tracing such lineages can create inroads into key Shakespearean issues that elude more straightforward approaches. Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, Falstaff in I Henry IV, Part One, the Fool in King Lear, Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra: whether we call them skeptics, cynics, "nay-sayers," demystifiers, or pragmatic realists, they share such a lineage. Even though these figures are among Shakespeare's most charismatic and psychologically complex creations, they involve us not just in characterological subtleties but in issues which have to do with the impingement of skepticism on the "illusion" of theatrical embodiment. Exploration of the "resistances" these characters maintain with such tenacity discovers what could be called a Shakespearean meditation on the nature of belief--in the other, in oneself, in imagination, in theater--and on the forces that compel belief into crisis--skepticism, disavowal of desire, distrust of theatrical display, fear of vulnerability and otherness. From play to play, the elements of male friendship and rivalry, sacrifice and scapegoating mechanisms, and the plain-speaking ironist almost painfully overinvested in the protagonists are reconfigured into a powerful exploration of the creation of belief in the very space made empty by doubt, distrust, grief, and loss.
Little men: Literature, anxiety, and modern masculinity, 1726--1788
(2002) Armintor, Deborah Needleman; Snow, Edward A.
This dissertation examines the unprecedented, and previously unanalyzed, proliferation of miniature men in male-authored literature of the eighteenth century. Through readings of canonical and lesser-known texts---ranging from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels to Henry Fielding's Tom Thumb plays and Joseph Boruwlaski's Memoirs of the Celebrated Dwarf---I analyze "little men" literature of the 1700s as representing a network of interrelated male identity crises that emerged in the nascent modern era. I argue that these various examples of diminutive men---typically featured alongside enormous women---encode anxieties about the emasculation of the "Englishman" in the arenas of marriage, science, and sensibility, as redefined by the rise of the middle class and the emergence of women as consumers in the new marketplace. By reading the explosion of little-men literature in the eighteenth century as a response to these defining aspects of the new British culture, I make a case for this strange trend as a key factor in the formation of modern masculinity.
Mark's sowing: The effacement and encrypting of Jesus
(1988) Larocco, Steven M.; Snow, Edward A.
In traditional hermeneutics and textual criticism, narratives are read in accordance with the trope synecdoche: parts of the narrative are related to the whole and the whole to parts. However, in my analysis, narratives produce textual effects which correspond to the trope metonymy: parts are related to parts with no natural thrust towards synthesis. When one reads the gospel of Mark metonymically, it ceases to function as a story articulating a coherent suffering Messiah Christology. Instead, two contradictory textual "logics" emerge: first, certain textual constellations and discourses suggest the need for the "effacement" of Jesus, the need to reduce his "presence" in order to allow the "introjection" of his message; second, other constellations and discourses suggest the need to retain his narratival "presence," to "encrypt" him in the textuality of the gospel, to "incorporate" his "presence" in a way which resists epistemic assimilation or identification. My analysis examines these differing "logics."
Narcissus in the other: John Donne, woman and the dynamics of recognition
(1993) Larocco, Steven Martin; Snow, Edward A.
John Donne's amorous poetry, from his most rapt paeans to mutual love to his crassest, most misogynous elegies, displays a pervasive desire for recognition. Much recent criticism of Donne's work has interpreted this desire as a masculine will-to-power which seeks to fashion or preserve an identity by staging verbal mastery over women and by soliciting the homosocial adulation of men. The love poetry, in this view, derives from a narcissistic drive for omnipotence and prestige which has been foiled and redirected by the stratified structure and historicity of Donne's social world. Shaping this analysis is an implicit assumption that the desire for recognition is the same as a will-to-power which finds its gratification only through the incessant imposition of hierarchical relations between the self and the other. As in the first stage of Hegel's Master-Slave dialectic, the self achieves recognition solely through domination. Donne's desire for recognition, however, is not founded on such a need for domination. Rather, it is the source of what I call a dream of symmetry. This dream, rooted in the intersubjective dynamics of early childhood, stems from the desire to engage with a powerful other who is attuned to and mirrors the desires of the self. In Donne's work, the dream of symmetry surfaces explicitly in Donne's great poems of mutual love where the twinning of eyes and tropes of mirroring suggest metonymically a more fundamental twinning of desires. This dream also drives Donne's rhetoric of seduction where the poet-seducer's primary wish is to induce a recalcitrant other to mimic his (or her) desires. Only when this dream of symmetry is troubled by the very subjectivity of the other which the dream itself requires or when the pleasures of mirroring yield to sexual anxieties does the desire for recognition begin to produce a misogynous rhetoric of power. It is in such moments, and only in such moments, that Donne descends into a poetics of domination and death in which the dream of symmetry slides beneath assertions of power and the desire for recognition loses its intersubjective savor.
Productions of the body: Embodiment in contemporary drama and performance
(1993) Thompson, Deborah Ann; Snow, Edward A.
"Productions of the body" refers both to produced plays which are "about" the body and to the ideological production of "the body" and of bodies (as well as to the bodily production of ideologies). Embodied performance can be the ideal place to study constructions of the body. The charismatic, live body onstage seems to promise a full presence--a promise it cannot fulfill, because the body onstage is inherently other than/to itself. The plays I examine--Othello, The Blacks, Funnyhouse of a Negro, spell #7, M. Butterfly, and the performance pieces of Karen Finley--exploit the otherness inherent in live performance to (re-)present the social construction and performative re-creation inherent in all body-identities. In particular, I discuss the ways in which these plays show race and gender to be fashioned, performed, and "made up," not only onstage, but in "real" life as well. Yet these plays also insist on the need to invoke "real," "present," and "natural" bodies in the political arena. All of these plays, even as they make explicit the theatricality and textuality which produce the body-as-other, still residually promise of a body prior to and directing its production. This promise of a body which cannot be represented and perhaps cannot be "had" at all, remains, for me, a promise as well as an object of suspicion. This dissertation aims to make the ideologies and occlusions which underwrite this promise as explicit as possible, and yet to preserve and clarify its necessity.
"...to do Rome service is but vain": Romanness in Shakespeare
(1999) Bruce, Yvonne; Snow, Edward A.
Shakespeare creates a Rome in which he brings together and reinvents Rome's political and military brilliance and the work of its greatest poets and historians. As Shakespeare's Romans have become to a great extent "our" Romans, the critical tendency has been to ignore his manipulations and read these plays as promulgating and continuing a unified tradition of "classical" values. But the line of descent is not so clear, and Shakespeare's Roman individuals are, in fact, diminished by this tradition. His Rome often seems to function less as a place name than as an incantation of history and ideology, while his individual Romans struggle to escape this cultural determination. They speak and act as though defining individual identity were simply a matter of defining this cultural entity, this "Rome," but reveal (in soliloquy, by juxtaposition with alternate social constructions, and through class conflict) their inability to construct cohesive private states of being. Shakespeare's Roman plays thus become tacit investigations into the core ethical foundations upon which Rome built its classical legacy. Romanness in Shakespeare connotes a divided quality of being; the cultural legacy shared by all Romans makes every Roman an avatar of the state, but individual Romans cannot fully translate their shared history into present action. The conflict is one between the passive acceptance of a generic and glorious past, and the implementation of this past at the expedient level demanded by the action of the plays: determining reasons to kill Caesar in Julius Caesar, transferring martial prowess into bureaucratic efficiency in Coriolanus, and interpreting masculine glamor through the critical perceptions of a feminine culture in Antony and Cleopatra . The plays are linked by the gap between Rome as a cultural entity and its citizens, who are searching for a practical and individual ethic. The chapters are organized as they illuminate this division. I introduce the major Roman plays with a general discussion of Rome's paradoxical status: as a system or culture it continually disappoints the citizens who turn to it for ethical instruction, while at the same time it produces individuals who identify completely with it. Next I discuss the stoicism of Julius Caesar as it is an emblematic philosophy of Rome's ethical failure. In Coriolanus, the nascent republic of Rome tries and fails to carve out a sphere of self-containment and self-renewal, a failure paralleled by Coriolanus' failure to adequately represent it. Antony and Cleopatra dramatizes Rome at its most powerful and most fragile. It is at the peak of its imperial efficiency, yet vulnerable to Cleopatra, and Shakespeare draws an imaginative and potential correlation between the apparently dissimilar states of Rome and Egypt. The final chapter looks briefly at Titus Andronicus and Cymbeline, as plays bracketing the major works (and Shakespeare's career) but sharing an ethical viewpoint that looks ahead to later seventeenth-century depictions of Rome.

Browsing by Author "Snow, Edward A."

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