English Theses and Dissertations

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https://hdl.handle.net/1794/2042

This collection contains some of the theses and dissertations produced by students in the University of Oregon English Graduate Program. Paper copies of these and other dissertations and theses are available through the UO Libraries.

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Browsing English Theses and Dissertations by Author "Bovilsky, Lara"

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    Between Us We Can Kill a Fly: Intersubjectivity and Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy
    (University of Oregon, 2018-04-10) Macrae, Mitchell; Bovilsky, Lara
    Using recent scholarship on intersubjectivity and cultural cognitive narratology, this project explores the disruption and reformation of early modern identity in Elizabethan revenge tragedies. The purpose of this dissertation is to demonstrate how revenge tragedies contribute to the prevalence of a dialogical rather than monological self in early modern culture. My chapter on Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy synthesizes Debora Shuger’s work on the cultural significance of early modern mirrors--which posits early modern self-recognition as a typological process--with recent scholarship on the early modern dialogical self. The chapter reveals how audiences and mirrors function in the play as cognitive artifacts that enable complex experiences of intersubjectivity. In my chapter on Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, I trace how characters construct new identities in relation to their shared suffering while also exploring intersubjectivity’s potential violence. When characters in Titus imagine the inward experience of others, they project a plausible narrative of interiority derived from inwardness’s external signifiers (such as tears, pleas, or gestures). These projections and receptions between characters can lead to reciprocated sympathy or violent aggression. My reading of John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge explores revenge as a mode of competition. Marston suggests a similarity between the market conditions of dramatic performance (competition between playwrights, acting companies, and rival theaters) and the convention of one-upmanship in revenge tragedy, i.e. the need to surpass preceding acts of violence. While other Elizabethan revenge tragedies represent reciprocity and collusion between characters as important aspects of intersubjective self-reintegration, Marston’s play emphasizes competition and rivalry as the dominant force that shapes his characters. My final chapter provides an analysis of Shakespeare's Hamlet. I argue that recent scholarship on intersubjectivity and cognitive cultural studies can help us re-historicize the nature of Hamlet’s “that within which passes show.” Hamlet’s desire for the eradication of his consciousness explores the consequences of feeling disconnected from others in a culture wherein identity, consciousness, and even memory itself depend on interpersonal relations.
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    "Civil Wildness": England's American Dream and the Redefinition of the Pastoral Ideal
    (University of Oregon, 2015-01-14) Nance, Jessie; Bovilsky, Lara
    This project analyzes the intersections between idealized representations of nature in both pastoral literature and early modern exploration literature published before the establishment of England's first successful American colony at Jamestown in 1607. Scholars have often seen the use of the golden age trope by early modern explorers of the Americas as nothing more than propaganda. At the same time, in literary studies, scholars have not done enough to appreciate the symbolic potential of idealized landscapes. By examining the landscapes depicted in both types of texts, this project seeks to change how we view pastoral settings. These settings reveal more than just fantasy landscapes; they tell us about English attitudes towards humanity's place in the natural world. Rather than offering overly sentimentalized, naïve representations of nature, authors depict pastoral settings that idealize labor, including a georgic trope for its ability to shape and control the natural world. Labor, then, not leisure becomes the new ideal for pastoral works, as it is through cultivation and the establishment of "place" that the English feel that they can demonstrate power and sovereignty.
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    Love Is in the Air: Reading Desire as Field in Hero and Leander
    (University of Oregon, 2022-10-04) Steinfeld, Vincent; Bovilsky, Lara
    Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander presents rich opportunities for understanding early modern sexuality and emotions. In the poem, hyperbolic representations of desire between beings of varying ontological status convey a mechanics of interpersonal emotions alien to many modern conceptions of self-experience—namely those that view emotions as individuated, willed, and internal phenomena. In the poem, I argue, desire affects all kinds of beings in the form of an ambient field, creating an array of nonanthropocentric and nonheterosexual sexual encounters. Each encounter troubles the ways in which desire, seduction, and the fulfillment of pleasure often occur along predetermined socialized patterns. In this thesis I explore how Marlowe’s renderings of desire and seduction, while at times outlandish and hyperbolic, illustrate an underlying structure of emotion that is nonindividuated, external, and, ultimately, nonhuman.
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    Sense Perception and the Early Modern Social World
    (University of Oregon, 2023-03-24) Johnson, Abigail; Bovilsky, Lara
    In this dissertation, I analyze representations of the intersections between sense perception and sociality in early modern English literature. Literary texts from the late sixteenth through mid-seventeenth centuries illustrate the diverse modes through which early modern writers engage the complexly interrelated categories of sense perception and social life. Building on early modern scholarship’s increasing investment in the senses, my project shows the period’s interest in the limits of sense perception through depictions of extreme sensory overstimulation and deprivation. I show that Marlowe, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton represent individuals’ sensory perceptions as enabling or threatening their relationship to the broader social world. These representations reveal the phenomenological ties between ideas of community and isolation and the functions and capabilities of the senses. I argue that, in early modern literature, encounters with sensory excess and deprivation manifest as larger social catalysts, propelling individual acts of social retreat, action, or implosion which, in turn, alter the wider social landscape.