School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemThe performance of perversion in Kafka's literature and its adaptations( 2019)The interpretation of Kafka’s literature has always presented major problems for critics, who have attempted to simplify the figures and metaphors contained in the stories by offering possible explanations. Starting from the view of Kafka’s perversions as logical absurdities in a specific time and place, this thesis interrogates their role as a dominant element in Kafka’s poetics. I argue that performativity and performance are central to representations of perversion in Kafka and its effects over the fictional characters. I use a predominantly psychoanalytic approach to Kafka’s life and a post-structuralist analysis of his stories and their filmic and theatrical adaptations. The frequent perverted elements and the predominance of perverse performances, particularly revealed through the presence and need of a spectator, are explained by the different stages of Kafka’s life. Through this analysis it can be concluded that Kafka’s perverted view of life originates in his relationships with other people, particularly figures of power. Perversions abound in Kafka’s literature, but here I focus on gender, animality and Law. I argue that gender, animality and law/punishment are strictly connected by the need for a performance to define them. My work establishes perversion as the originating factor of Kafka’s narrative. His intent is to challenge standards by performing their perversion and showing how this has nefarious consequences only when an audience is present. If there were no performative expectations based on arbitrary standards, there would be no perversions to confuse and shock the audience and no punishment would be needed for the perverted individuals.
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ItemPleasure revolution possibility( 2011)The early work of Bertolt Brecht is relegated to an inferior position in the canon often placed in the category of juvenilia and given the deprecating description of anarchistic or immature. This thesis examines three of the early plays—Baal, In the Jungle of Cities and the Life of Edward II of England―chosen for their open form of dramaturgy and for their subject matter. The aim of producing new readings of these plays is to assess their contribution to the understanding of the discourse on sexuality, race and class the rhetoric of benevolence and the performativity of power. Judith Butler’s work which reconsiders the basis for assumptions made about how gender is constituted is apposite for this assessment not only because her work challenges foundations but because I establish that there is an alignment between the analytical frameworks used by Butler and the dramaturgical methods used by Brecht. The creative work of the thesis draws inspiration from this alignment and attempts to develop a dramaturgy, a set of practices, informed by Brecht, Butler and the demands of the material. It is my contention that Butler’s theory of performativity, and its relevance to aesthetic contexts, remains under-developed for its potential to revolutionize practice. Further, I suggest that Butler’s theory and Brecht’s early dramaturgy comprise the modality through which the particular agency of theatre can be seen to communicate the complex processes at work in the way the social world is made. The creative work takes form as a script framed by a description of the developmental process and methodology, together with a possible treatment which incorporates techniques devised to problematize and challenge key theatrical paradigms. The framing also outlines the way in which the alignment between Brecht and Butler tests and defines the limits of Brechtian Gestus—which privileges the performer—the limits of self knowledge, and consequently, knowledge of Others. The title of the thesis refers not only to the pleasure of creative thinking and play with which the theory is approached but to the way in which foundational fictions and cultural sedimentation are dissolved. The concept of revolution is used to describe the expansion of analytical frameworks used by both Brecht and Butler in their ground-breaking and sustained efforts to explicate processes such as subject formation, agency and the processes of abjection. Possibility is perhaps the most difficult of the three notions to define. I advocate for the sense of the word which focuses not on utopian fantasy or science fiction but on the pragmatics of that which is actually negotiable or achievable within the mangle of power and knowledge.