Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2015, Theatre and Film

In this study I argue that the crucifixion of Jesus is a performative event and this event is an exemplar of the Grotesque. To this end, I first conduct a dramatistic analysis of the crucifixion of Jesus, working to explicate its performativity. Viewing this performative event through various theories of the Grotesque, I then discuss its many grotesqueries to propose the concept of the Grotesque Cross. As such, the term “Grotesque Cross” functions as shorthand for the performative event of the crucifixion of Jesus, as it is characterized by various aspects of the Grotesque. I develop the concept of the Grotesque Cross thematically through focused studies of representations of the crucifixion: the film, Jesus of Montreal (Arcand, 1989), Philip Turner's play, Christ in the Concrete City, and an autoethnographic examination of Cross-wearing as performance. I examine each representation through the lens of the Grotesque to define various facets of the Grotesque Cross.

Committee: Jonathan Chambers PhD (Advisor); Eileen Cherry-Chandler PhD (Committee Member); Charles Kanwischer MFA (Committee Member); Marcus Sherrell MFA (Committee Member) Subjects: Performing Arts; Theater History; Theater Studies; Theology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2014, Spanish and Portuguese

This dissertation examines the relationship between the literary grotesque mode and the growing pains of Madrid during the first century of its status as Villa y Corte, capital of the Spanish empire. The six novels analyzed in this study – Guzman de Alfarache (1599, 1604), El Buscon (1626), Guia y avisos de forasteros (1620), Las harpias en Madrid (1633), El diablo cojuelo (1641) and El Criticon (1651, 1653, 1657) – are significant because their authors employ the grotesque mode to show their perspectives on the changes that they witnessed in Madrid. The central goal of this project is to examine the continued presence of the grotesque mode in these novels and how the use of this mode was motivated by the historical crisis that took place during the years following Philip II's decision to move the court to Madrid. In this vein, Philip Thomson recognizes that moments of change are particularly conducive to the use of the grotesque in art and literature. Using studies on the grotesque by Thomson, Wolfgang Kayser, Henryk Ziomek, James Iffland and Paul Ilie, this dissertation will present a definition of the grotesque mode as it applies to a carefully chosen grouping of seventeenth-century Spanish novels. This definition is based on three pillars. The first is the tension produced by the combination of the comic and a “sphere of negativity,” the term that Iffland utilizes to signify something that is incompatible with the comic. The second is the grotesque conceit, an exaggeration or distortion of the conceit as formulated by Baltasar Gracian. The third pillar of the grotesque mode is distortion of characters and their actions, which is accomplished through a variety of means. In the selected novels, the most frequent device used to distort the subject is zoomorphism, or the combination of elements of the human, plant and vegetative spheres to describe a single object. The first chapter of this study examines the grotesque picaresque images in Guzman de Alfarache. Usi (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Elizabeth B. Davis (Advisor); Jonathan Burgoyne (Committee Member); Donald Larson (Committee Member) Subjects: European History; Foreign Language; Literature; Urban Planning

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1960, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Fine Arts (MFA), Bowling Green State University, 2022, Creative Writing

Worm Elegies is a collection of poems that works through themes of grief, gender identity, family, touch, and rebirth of the body. Through the use of vivid imagery, sometimes grotesque, these poems blur the line between the beautiful and ugly. The themes of gender identity and rejection of the feminine body work below the surface through a series of imagery based in memories. The thread of a dead mother parallels the speaker's journey of self-discovery and rejection of their feminine body. While many may think of grief as something that works in stages, this collection works actively against this idea. We are always grieving, actively our whole lives, through longing for the love from people and things we are doomed to miss.

Committee: Larissa Szporluk MFA (Committee Member); Abigail Cloud MFA (Committee Chair) Subjects: Fine Arts; Gender; Language Arts; Literature

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2022, Art History (Fine Arts)

Physiognomy is the pseudoscientific study of the causal relationship between a person's exterior body and their inner character. Physiognomy was largely accepted in Victorian society and had a tremendous impact on both the arts and sciences of the period. One of the areas we can see evidence of this is in illustration, particularly in the way good and evil characters are designed. The fairy tale illustrator Arthur Rackham shows this strong contrast in the way that his characters are portrayed. His protagonists are serene and idealized, incorporating beauty standards of the Victorian Era. His villains are grotesque, often with animalistic features which make each creature seem like an evolutionary missing link. By incorporating principles of physiognomy, Arthur Rackham used a visual shorthand to identify which characters were good and evil in fairy tale illustrations.

Committee: Samuel Dodd (Committee Member); Jennie Klein (Committee Chair); Charles Buchanan (Committee Member) Subjects: Aesthetics; Anatomy and Physiology; Art Criticism; Art Education; Art History; British and Irish Literature; Criminology; European History; Evolution and Development; Fine Arts; History; Science History; Womens Studies

BA, Oberlin College, 2021, Comparative Literature

This paper traces the liminal hydro-geologies of the Underworld through the works of Homer, Virgil, and Dante with the intention of understanding the Western Underworld as an ecosemiosphere—a mythological place with a close reciprocity to a physical environment. I focus on the entrances and margins of the infernal realm, the places where myth and world merge most intensely. Located in the fluid interspace between the world and the Underworld, this project is fundamentally about permeable boundaries. Particularly because of the boundary-crossing nature of fluids, water guides this journey into the margins of the nether realm. The infernal realm is accessible through certain caves, sinkholes, lakes, and marshes, all of which are geological features generated by hidden groundwater systems. This paper approaches the liminal flows and orifices of the Underworld with the material ecocritical claim that “the ‘environment' is not located somewhere out there, but is always the very substance of ourselves” (Alaimo 4). Drawing upon Alaimo's notion of trans-corporeality, Kristeva's theory of abjection, and Bakhtin's grotesque bodily image, I assert that the wet and cavernous margins of the Underworld are bodily fluids and orifices that lead into the inner abyss.

Committee: Christopher V. Trinacty (Advisor); Janet Fiskio (Advisor); Stiliana Milkova (Committee Member) Subjects: Classical Studies; Comparative Literature; Environmental Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, English

My dissertation, Performing Brawn and Sass: Strength and Disability in Black Women's Writing, examines contemporary African American narratives to gauge how writers re-imagine, complicate, or even reject the trope of the Strong Black Woman. I define the “Strong Black Woman” as a standard that black women are assumed to inherently demonstrate. As opposed to the demureness of conventional femininity, the Strong Black Woman is portrayed as bold and outspoken. In addition to being physically strong and able to labor, she possesses the emotional and mental resolve that allows her to hold her family and her community together during hardship. The cultural endurance of the figure is a major problem I cite in my dissertation. Because the Strong Black Woman is such a cultural mainstay in African American literature and mainstream media, she has become a source of racial pride exclusively synonymous with black womanhood. However, I identify the Strong Black Woman as an ableist ideal that oversimplifies black female narrative voice and erases bodily variety. I argue that by rejecting the Strong Black Woman's ableism and investment in self-sacrifice while adapting her dedication to survival and independence, black women writers present black female characters less familiar than the Strong Black Woman, but more complex and human. I take a two-pronged approach to my methodology, placing scholarship from black feminist theory and disability studies in conversation with one another. Black feminist theory's investigation of race and gender, and the dynamics between black women and systems of power greatly informs my character analysis. Furthermore, disability studies critics have shown how normativity isn't an objective, universal measure, but is instead an extension of hegemony, marking and policing all bodies that exist outside of the white ideal. My dissertation uses this conceptual framework to explore how the representation of black women's bodyminds and behavior as inherently (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Andrea Williams (Committee Chair); Robyn Warhol (Advisor); Koritha Mitchell (Advisor); Treva Lindsey (Advisor) Subjects: African Americans; Gender Studies; Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1977, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1966, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Literature

M.A. (Master of Arts in English), Ohio Dominican University, 2016, English

Despite numerous theories over the last few centuries and ample scholarship exploring the sublime and the grotesque as independent elements in literature, scholars seem to have ignored linking these two elements in their analyses of and critical responses to the modern novel. Little scholarship exists to decipher and to support why together the grotesque and the sublime are essential characteristics of the modern novel—specifically, Carson McCullers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940)—and how they become necessary in tandem to illuminate the human condition, to personify the Other, and to evaluate Mick Kelly's Bildungsroman. In The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, McCullers cultivates these qualities to create the perfect amalgam of timeless despair and loneliness amidst the struggle to survive. The Other, like the sublime and the grotesque, highlights simultaneously the oppositions and the similarities in people only to suggest that people become the Other when this examination occurs, while the human condition, like the sublime and the grotesque, yields many definitions, theories, and differences, but as these conditions materialize, they significantly affect responses to stimuli and to people and provoke readers to consider why humans are the way they are and why they behave as they do. In order to establish these links and continue a discussion regarding their use in tandem, Chapter 1 explicates the theories of Victor Hugo and Thomas Mann, two writers who see purpose in the unification of the grotesque and the sublime in modern literature, and connects these theories in terms of McCullers's characters, landscapes, and situations. Chapter 2 focuses on the novel's female teenage Other Mick Kelly and the unpredictability of her adolescence and employs Hugo's and Mann's theories to inspect Kelly's experiences, uniting the grotesque and the sublime within Kelly's Bildungsroman. Chapter 3 briefly defines the Other and identifies some of McCullers's male cha (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jeremy Glazier MFA (Advisor); Martin Brick PhD (Other) Subjects: American Literature; Literature; Modern Literature

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2015, Art

I'm an introvert and I live inside my head, but through the process of making parts of me and my mind are able to exist outside myself. Some of my introverted tendencies stem from hypersensitivity: things that I experience, and my surrounding environment greatly influence my content and process. My influences expand, growing to encompass ancestry and culture. I am the center point around which these revolve. Using myself as source for my work, the bare body exemplifies vulnerability. I have found this to be the best form for self-reference and a vessel for communication through clay. In creating figurative clay forms I'm representing humanity's struggle to grasp our impermanent existence. Through the clay's rough, crude, and grotesque textures I'm referencing the human body's carnal reality. The bodies that most interest me are those that are not normally glorified. I like to reference a body that's an older body, a body that's hard to distinguish between female or male. I'm interested in the point in age where sex becomes ambiguous, where men grow breasts and women grow a belly. The primal tactility of clay, with its responsiveness and memory extends itself to my ideas of the body. My content and reasons for making are internal, my process reflects this experience. The tone of each individual day influences my work. Each figure that I make was a reflection of my emotion, moods, and even anxieties. The textures of drips, drops, and indents reflected the speed or slowness of the day, some days feeling that I'm working against time and some days working with the need to be compulsive. I use texture to extend the body. I want to create a surface that was similar to skin but that could be exaggerated and simplified. The textures of engobe can fill in a spectrum of life, decay, and transformation. The things that people have trouble acknowledging, the cycle of their body, the actuality of aging to their inevitable demise are the areas I want to explore. In my w (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Rebecca Harvey (Advisor) Subjects: Fine Arts

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2015, English/Literature

While many studies on T. S. Eliot's poetry focus on his representations of the self, in this thesis, I argue that the body as depicted by Eliot not only registers the cultural anxieties that modernity invokes, but is also employed by the poet as a vehicle with which to explore anxiety. I discuss how the poet's angsts about the modern urban life are mapped out onto the bodies he describes in his early poetry. I argue that Eliot's metaphysics of the body—his philosophical analysis and representations of the body—is a reaction to the culture of his time. In this study, I conduct a close textual analysis of poems from Prufrock and Other Observations and The Waste Land to illustrate that the body is a manifestation of the anxieties of modern life in Eliot's poetry.

Committee: Kimberly Coates Prof (Committee Chair); Bill Albertini Prof (Committee Member) Subjects: Gender Studies; Literature; Modern Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2011, Slavic and East European Languages and Literatures

This dissertation investigates the representation of the human body in postmodern Russian literature and visual culture, including painting, sculpture, performance, and film. As Russia has gone through political and social change from Khruschev's thaw to Putin's rise, the image of the body in literature and art has shifted, with an increasing emphasis on the body as an object in flux. Faced with advances in technology, new theoretical approaches, and the fragmentation of identity in postmodern culture, artists have brought into question what it means to be human. Bodies expand, multiply, and transcend boundaries. They blur the lines between male and female, single and multiple, partial and whole, human and animal, human and machine, and subhuman and superhuman. The image of the fragmented, multiple, and contradictory postmodern body challenges authoritative discourse and cultural myths, while, at the same time, artists reuse, cite, and quote the art and literature of official culture. This study will place Russian postmodernism within the context of global and historic trends in literature and art, while emphasizing the influence of the Russian avant-garde and formalist criticism on postmodern aesthetics. Viewing literary and artistic practice together will yield a more complete picture of the postmodern attitude towards the body at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the new millennium. My intent is not to give a comprehensive overview of the body in Russian literature and art, but to show the scope and application of the imagery of bodily transformation.

Committee: Angela K. Brintlinger PhD (Advisor); Irene Delic PhD (Committee Member); Yana Hashamova PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Slavic Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2011, English

Many late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novels utilize laughter as a social corrective, but this same laughter hides other messages about women's roles. As the genre's popularity widened, writers used novels to express opinions that would be eschewed in other, more established and serious genres. My dissertation argues that humor contributes to narrative meaning; as readers laugh at “minor” characters, their laughter discourages specific behaviors, yet it also masks characters' important functions within narrative structure. Each chapter examines one type of humor—irony, parody, satire, and wit—along with a secondary female archetype: the matriarch, the old maid, the monster, and the mentor. Traditionally, the importance of laughter has been minimized, and the role of minor characters understudied. My project seeks to redress this imbalance through focusing on humor, secondary characterization, and plot.

Committee: Clare Simmons PhD (Advisor); Leslie Tannenbaum PhD (Committee Member); Jill Galvan PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Master of Fine Arts (MFA), Bowling Green State University, 2010, Creative Writing/Fiction

The eighteen stories in The Preservation of Objects Lost at Sea are loose interpretations of three classic fairy tales: "Goldilocks and The Three Bears," "Beauty and the Beast," and "Hansel and Gretel." My fictions explore themes inherent in those old tales. In the first section, "Goldie and the Bears," many stories revolve around the loss or hoarding of material objects and the unwelcome insertion of one's self into the life of the other. "La Belle et la Bete" contains stories that focus on the relationship between an ordinary character and a grotesque character (a character monstrous or fantastic in the artistic tradition of grotesques). In "The Children and the Ogre," many stories deal with children who are literally or figuratively lost, who encounter danger or violence in trying to find their way home.The thesis moves back and forth, like waves, between short and long stories. This movement is meant to highlight the movement in the fictions between realism, magical realism, and fabulism. The flash-fiction pieces included serve as epigraphs for the longer pieces, highlighting a theme or image in the story that follows. My stories also move between first, second, and third person, sometimes utilizing multiple perspectives and points of view in a single story, a technique that proposes the multivocality that exists within one society, one community, one family, even one self. Overall, the stories progress from a single narrator experiencing loss to characters who seek to preserve something together, symbolized by the final image of amber pulled from the sea. Historically, stories have sought to preserve what is lost through time, and the title of my thesis and many of my stories point to that pursuit.

Committee: Wendell Mayo PhD (Committee Chair); Lawrence Coates (Committee Member); Theresa Williams (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; Fine Arts; Folklore; Literature

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2007, Theatre and Film

World War II continues to carry considerable “cultural weight” in the United States. Many movies, documentaries, and television mini-series about the Holocaust seem to try to make sense of what can seem like a senseless act. The field of performance studies offers another avenue by which we can examine those events and our responses to them. In this paper, I apply a construct of the grotesque body, based primarily on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva, to the prisoners of World War II Nazi concentration camps to examine the social networks at play in current understandings of the Holocaust. In chapter one, I analyze the relationship between prisoners, guards, and prison officials by means of the grotesque body in the official and clandestine cabarets performed by the prisoners. In chapter two, I examine the role of the grotesque body in the photographs taken by Allied soldiers after constructing the premise of viewing photographs as performance. I argue that the prisoners' bodies are integral in the maintenance of our collective memory. In chapter three, I track contemporary appropriations of one specific photograph of prisoners and the way the performance of reading the image has changed as the appropriations have become more politicized. The bodies of prisoners have gone from hidden to revealed to appropriated.

Committee: Lesa Lockford (Advisor) Subjects: Theater