College of Arts & Humanities
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item Embodied Performance: War, Trauma, and Disability on the Eighteenth-Century Stage(2021) LeRoy, Tamar Dora; Rosenthal, Laura; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project brings attention to the emotional work performed by plays about war from the Restoration and eighteenth century—how these plays position soldiers and communities in relation to one another and the state and in what ways they contribute to the work of negotiating trauma. War-themed plays of the period obsessively reenact tropes and devices that communicate particular affective scenarios or experiences of wartime. These affective scenarios include the temporality of soldiering and enlistment that locks the recruit in a state of inevitable injury and injuring; the longings for return of someone seemingly lost or displaced and the simultaneous fear of the outcome of this return (or no return); and a sense of rootlessness or displacement that unsettles surety in homeland, homecoming, or nation. The tropes and devices that convey these affective scenarios include devices involving the literal substitution bodies, such as bed tricks and dead tricks; an obsessive repetition of scenarios of recognition of identity, reunion, and the many complications of mistaken identity; and humor, joking, and comic tropes (like the soldier breeches role) that communicate a sense of the corporeal/temporal experience of war through the body. From these devices an experiential bridge is created in the playhouse between home front and warfront that positions the soldier as well as the grieving individual as part of a larger affective community. These figures are not isolated by their potentially extreme experiences of the battlefield, enlistment, waiting, or mourning: through the collective space of the stage, their extreme experiences are shown to be acknowledged by the larger group. From these plays, we see the affective experience of war at home from the community networks touched by military conflict.Item EMBODIED HAMLET: DISABILITY, ACCESSIBILITY, GENDER, AND SCIENCE FICTION(2019) Hands, Christine; Widrig, Patrik; Dance; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Hamlet” was a thirty-eight minute work of dance art premiered at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland on October 12 and 14, 2018. The work explored four pillars of research through embodied exploration: representation, accessibility, inclusion, and reinvention. These four themes are discussed in the following paper as theoretical points of inquiry. The first chapter discusses representation of peoples with disabilities. The second chapter explores the accessibility features for audience members which were available at the performance. The third chapter considers inclusion and challenges the canon of traditional white, male casting of the role of Hamlet. The fourth chapter discusses the use of science fiction to tie everything together by creating a space of transformative play-acting where people can exercise their imaginations to create a more inclusive and accessible society. Theoretical and scholarly research informs and then reflects the work onstage in “Hamlet.”Item Disability in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction: A Care and Justice Perspective(2011) Schotland, Sara Deutch; Cartwright, Kent; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study addresses a neglected question: how are the ill, the deformed, and the disabled treated in utopian and dystopian fiction? It might seem obvious that those with disabilities will fare better in an ideal society where they receive adequate if not generous care. However, from the beginning of utopian thought, there has been ambivalence about how to treat those who are impaired and can no longer contribute productively to the state. How can such care be justified in a society with limited resources? This is the first study that examines in detail the representation of individuals with disabilities in utopian and dystopian fiction. I apply a capacious definition to "disability" that includes not only physical or mental impairments but also significant illness and bodily deformity. I argue that in utopian and dystopian fiction, we are invited to appraise societies (in part) by the extent to which those who have physical or functional impairments are respected, and treated or neglected. I further argue that the perspectives of "justice theory" and "the Ethics of Care" can illuminate our readings of texts which utilize the trope of disability in utopia and dystopia to critique or reform social institutions. In utopian texts, generous care is provided to those who can no longer work productively. We see approaches that resemble today's Ethics of Care. In contrast, in dystopian texts, human beings are used as means to ends; their bodies literally disabled and sacrificed to achieve ulterior societal objectives. The concept of medical care is subverted--hospitals are slaughter houses, and medicines are spiked to increase the profits of the pharmaceutical industry. In dystopian worlds, vulnerable human beings are used as means to ends in violation of Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative. These dystopian texts send a warning about the dangers of applying utilitarian approaches to medical care and skewing the allocation of scarce resources and therapies to those who are, or seem, most valuable and productive.Item Whose Story Is It Anyway?: Constructing the Stories and Pathology of Madness/Mental Illness in the Contemporary U.S.(2009) Rector, Claudia; Caughey, John L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Personal stories are always told in the context of broader cultural narratives. Thus, in the contemporary U.S., stories of personal experience of illness and disability are usually informed by Western notions of health and illness, and a binary classification system of normative/non-normative bodies and behaviors. The emerging field of disability studies represents a socially progressive attempt to interrogate and reconfigure discourses that pathologize and medicalize non-normative bodies, challenging medical discourses with an alternate framework of evidence that emphasizes the personal experiences of individuals who have experienced disability or illness and who conceive of these experiences in different ways. Whose Story Is It Anyway? is an interdisciplinary examination of how the cultural authority of medicine compresses a range of individual experiences into narrow, standardized narratives of the experience of depression, for instance, or other phenomena classified as illness. Specifically, my study makes a three-part argument: first, that biological psychiatry has eclipsed psychoanalysis and that medical definitions of mental illness have become the culturally dominant way of determining what kinds of physical or psychological phenomena are classified as bad, e.g., pathological. Second, these definitions then inform and shape stories of personal experience with such phenomena, enough so that standard narrative formats emerge for describing "individual" experiences of both physical disability and madness/mental illness. The personal stories of madness/mental illness then become, in essence, universalized narratives of illness and recovery that reinforce notions of pathology. Third, this standardization of the personal story often aligns with medical narratives in a way that reflects the storytellers' disempowered position in the medical industry, in that telling the "right" story positions them to receive the benefits of working within the medical system, and telling the "wrong" story becomes an act of political activism. Such de facto coercion has substantial implications for intellectual projects, such as disability studies, that rely heavily on the articulation of personal experience as evidence for the need for change. Finally, this study argues for a re-examination of experience-based, identity-focused activism, and for an invigorated humanities project in science studies.