Conceptual Considerations
Yearning for the Future : Victorian Women, Imaginative Travel, and Constructed Reality in Eric Overmyer’s "On the Verge"
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nancy Jones
This paper examines Eric Overmyer’s stage play, "On the Verge or The Geography of Yearning", a story set in Terra Incognita that explores the adventures of three prototypical Victorian “lady” travelers as they journey across time and space. The characters in the play seek adventure as an escape from their mundane or repressive lives at home, and are intrepid representatives for the Victorian Woman Traveler, bucking gender constraints as they construct a world of wit and fantasy. This project compares Overmyer’s play to the experiences and writing of the prototypical Victorian woman traveler, through an analysis of the interplay between the imaginative and physical journey and the relationship between fiction and reality. I look at the ways that, for these women, travel functioned as a tool of empowerment, as I examine the tropes that impacted each sojourner’s creation of a new identity. Moreover, I illustrate they ways in which a close reading of the play is deepened through the parallel consideration of historical sources, including primary source documentation of actual women travelers who provide a counterpoint to the plays characters and whose accounts offer a deeper interpretation of the play.
Familiar Settings: Common Knowledge in Thomas Norton’s 1477 Ordinal of Alchemy View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lisa H. Cooper
Alchemical poetry’s well-known obscurity presents something of a limit case for understanding what it meant to produce or receive practical knowledge—information about how to do something—in the later Middle Ages. Medieval readers eagerly sought out many different kinds of knowledge about the material world and its uses across a wide range of topics and genres, but one of the most popular was the way to change base matter to better and so ultimately arrive at the Philosophers’ Stone. And yet: English alchemical texts (and many of their continental counterparts) are for the most part symbolically esoteric and linguistically florid—that is, *difficult*—by design. It is against this broader context of the tendency to mystify that the everyday aesthetic of Thomas Norton’s 1477 *Ordinal of Alchemy* appears all the more remarkable. Norton’s regular recourse to common knowledge—including, at times, knowledge of the literal landscape of England itself—in order to convey information suggests that the Stone is achievable precisely because producing it depends upon recognizing the everyday and the ordinary as the path to alchemical success. This paper argues that Norton’s aesthetic choices celebrate both a familiar language and a familiar world, choices that can help us to continue rethinking the relationship of knowledge to the textual forms it takes.
Replacement and Resilience: Splitting and the Reimagining of Greek Myth in Contemporary French Theater View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Morgan Stinson
The splitting of characters has often been a device to provide comparison, to reconcile complex identities and to explore opposing notions of destiny and free will. Within the context of contemporary French theater, splitting often illustrates a lack of resources and the inability of modern society to provide for its citizens, as is the case for Rou and Poupon, boyhood friends in Xavier Durringer’s 1991 play, Une envie de tuer sur le bout de la langue. In the depiction of family structures however, the process of splitting and replacement unsettles our expectations of what family should be. These works ask us to reconsider our beliefs about merit, favoritism, our first intimate relationships, and the balance between familial belonging and individual agency. Through an examination of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ Mythe et signification, Hélène Cixous’ Le rire de la Méduse and René Girard’s theories on sacrifice and myth, I illustrate the ways in which two contemporary French playwrights, Jean-Luc Lagarce and Marie Ndiaye, echo Greek myth in their use of splitting and replacement of characters who have suffered family trauma. How does fragmentation of the character bond eventually lead to integration? I argue that Lagarce’s 1994 play, J’étais dans ma maison et j’attendais que la pluie vienne and Ndiaye’s 2011 play, Les grandes personnes may thus be understood as uncanny re-imaginings of Greek myth, where one main character takes the place of another, where one is thrust forward while the other recedes, and where splitting and replacement precede resilience and preservation.
