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Instability of Character in Sam Shepard's Work of the 1970s
Lauer, Martin ; Wallace, Clare (advisor) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee)
The purpose of this thesis is to undertake a thorough analysis of Sam Shepard's approach to the character in a selection of his plays from the 1970s. Instead of approaching characters as compact entities with fixed character features the thesis focuses on their instability and changeability and attempts to ascribe characters' transformations to dynamic non-subjective forces and to identify ego-loss as a partially liberating process that nonetheless confronts the characters with the unknown and is accompanied by fear of self-loss. From the theoretical vantage point of the collaborative writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the thesis equates the transformations of Shepard's characters and their inability to locate the "self" with the schizophrenic experience. As a musical genre based on variability, jazz, as well as its inherent form of expression, improvisation, are utilized as points of departure in the analysis of characters' instability in plays Suicide in Bb and Angel City. Furthermore, in Angel City, the phenomenon of film in the USA and the desire for success and fame intensified by it are perceived as instruments of manipulation and illusion, which characters easily succumb to and which severely alter their sense of reality. Moreover, the environment of filmmaking is introduced as a...
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The self versus the other: an exposition of an individual's condition in the technological society based on Anthony Burgess's novels A clockwork orange, M/F and The doctor is sick
Lauer, Martin ; Armand, Louis (advisor) ; Vichnar, David (referee)
Based on the overall observations of human nature as presented in Burgess's novels the most accurate assumption seems to be that man is both biologically and culturally determined to live in a community. Seclusion is punished with coerced docility to the conventions of the society, as exhibited in A Clockwork Orange and in M/F, or with total rejection by the society in The Doctor is Sick. Freedom appears to be but an apparent, illusory creation of ideology to give the subject a sense of unlimited possibilities. Everything in the Burgessian world of fiction, even the most apparent manifestations of chaos are governed by some underlying structure, which, however cannot be decoded by the main characters. Burgess presents in his novels the condition of the individual, who is being unceasingly exposed to the pressure of the other and inevitably consents to conform to the social order and reinstates his body as a new entity with new relation to the world and social structures. The system, which originally appears as the hateful agency of the other, is finally constituted in the self. Technology, as an exteriorization of human mind, becomes a medium of this transition and as such offers a threat to the individuality of every human being. The loss of individuality, nevertheless, also marks the loss of plurality,...
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