Camp, the canon, and a performative burlesque: Paula Vogel's plays as literary and cultural revision
Item
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Title
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Camp, the canon, and a performative burlesque: Paula Vogel's plays as literary and cultural revision
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:6f82843a5fb0:10487
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identifier
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10620
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Creator
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Mansbridge, Joanna,
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Contributor
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David Savran
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Date
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2010
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Theater | English literature | Theater studies | burlesque | camp | canon | feminist | Paula Vogel | theatre
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Abstract
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This dissertation examines the ways in which Paula Vogel's plays respond to and rewrite canonical texts, while simultaneously addressing contemporary concerns, such as domestic violence, pornography, pedophilia, and AIDS. Vogel's dialectical writing strategy encourages the audience to look at these cultural issues from a defamiliarized, historical perspective, so that they are seen less as sensationalized "issues" and more as historical questions that have accumulated meanings over time. In addition, since many of her plays rewrite texts by such canonical giants as Shakespeare, Edward Albee, Sam Shepard, and David Mamet, to engage with Vogel is to engage with the canon of theatre and literary studies, as it is restaged in a different historical context and recast with women at the center of the action. Responding to a predominantly male canon, Vogel shifts the focus away from an often universalized, truth-seeking male protagonist, placing women center stage, not as valorized heroines, but as conflicted characters who both enact and resist the discourses that constitute their bodies and identities. Thus, the overarching goal of this study is to examine the ways in which the dialectical structure and dramaturgical strategies of Vogel's plays offer another way of looking at the literary canon, social history, and contemporary American culture.;Since Vogel's plays rewrite canonical texts, position women center stage, present polymorphous sexualities, and mobilize humor to approach uncomfortable topics, her plays employ a dramaturgical strategy that I am calling a "performative burlesque." While camp is the broader aesthetic within which Vogel works, burlesque foregrounds an eroticized female spectacle. A performative burlesque, as it operates in Vogel's plays, describes: a writing strategy that strips bodies and texts of their accumulated cultural connotations; a comedic blending of high and low forms; a mode of performance describing the ways in which her characters expose themselves, psychically, emotionally, and physically; an extension of a historical theatre practice that continues to inform the cultural meanings around women in performance, both on and off stage.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
