Prosthetic Laughter: Feeling Disability Performance in Early Modern England Restricted; Files Only
Gulledge, John (Spring 2023)
Published
Abstract
This dissertation considers the comic dimensions of early modern performances of disability, particularly those that aim to provoke a feeling of wonder in the audience. In this consideration of performance alongside the printed text, I am invested in the conservation of disability that unearths how a premodern disability imaginary may be felt in the period’s aesthetic innovations and shifting political landscape. To conserve disability within the historical and literary record, this project highlights the ways dramatic innovation and cultural resourcefulness of body-mind difference before 1700 influenced dramatic experimentation and cultural permutations. Toward these ends, I consider early modern performances of disability, both on and off the stage, in an ongoing effort to recover pre-Enlightenment representations, experiences, and cultural structures of alterity. As such, the primary task of the project is to extrapolate from the period itself a method of energia, the poetic and rhetorical practice of creative feeling. Enabled by the recursive nature of such a method, I then turn energia back onto the period as a mode of critical inquiry. Philip Sidney equates energia with the poet’s “forcibleness” of vitality in the Defense of Poesy (1595), a power to animate the inanimate, while Stephen Greenblatt has referred to it as a kind of “social energy,” capable of producing, shaping, and organizing collective physical and mental experiences. What has gone unmentioned in scholarly discussion, however, is how indebted this cultural force is to aesthetics and experiences of disability, especially their shared program of incongruity, one aspect that I focus on throughout the project. By returning to this concept, this project reintroduces a mostly dormant scholarly conversation about artistic augmentation, but more than that, I show how this fundamental mode of creation carries within it a blueprint of disability. Rather than highlighting every corner of the historical record where disability life experienced immense oppression, stigma, exile, or social and political injustice, “Prosthetic Laughter” emphasizes a coexisting narrative of “disability gain.” What this deliberate move offers literary and performance scholars, as well as historians, is evidence of a profoundly-felt counterdiscourse during the pre- and early modern periods—one where disability flourishes and is rendered desirable despite its troubled and suppressed history.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Finding the “ah” in “haha”
Feeling Laughing
Enabling Energia
Feeling Premodern Disability Performance
Chapter Overview
Richard III: An Interstitial Heuristic
Chapter One: “Men Stutter Most at Greatest Things”: Wonder-Working and Laughter-Making
Finding Wonder in the Stutter
Energia, A Stutter
Polyphonic Presence
Contagious Speech
Disfluent Musicality in What You Will
Stuttering Sense in Wit for Money, or Poet Stutter
Stilted Speculations
Chapter Two: “Why Dost Thou Laugh?”: Unseasonable Humor and Speechless Feeling
Symmetrical Empathy in Titus Andronicus
Unseasonable Laughter
Liberated Laughter
A Correspondence of Sympathy
Chapter Three: “What’s the Whim Now?”: Feigned Beggars and Practiced Community
Legal and Political History of Disability-Inflected Action
Communities of Disabled Beggars in Early Modern Europe
Imagined Community in A Jovial Crew
Practicing Community
Chapter Four: “How Strangely Am I Metamorphosed?”: Simulated Bodies and Prosthetic Laughter
Laughing with/at the Other
Disability Performance in/as Prosthesis
Accessing the Other in Fair Maid of the Exchange
Prosthesis in the Performance of Disability
Toward a Theory of Prosthetic Laughter
About this Dissertation
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File download under embargo until 22 May 2029 | 2023-04-19 20:48:46 -0400 | File download under embargo until 22 May 2029 |
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