The time machine and the ghost: Attending to life-and-death in literature, cinema, and theater.

摘要

My dissertation reads the time machine (in cinema) and the ghost (in theater) to produce a new understanding of modernism's space-time. Following these figures' movements, my readings reveal the material, untimely, and imaginative means upon which we rely to produce the past. In the first chapter, I revisit early cinema's experiments, the ways in which filmmakers reversed time's direction and reoriented its causal links, often as a means of suspending death. From its beginnings, cinema always blended and blurred seeming oppositions such as stillness-and-motion and life-and-death. In Chapter 2, I move to analyze the ethics of traveling through time by reading H. G. Wells's The Time Machine in light of George Pal's film version and Chris Marker's La Jetee. Informed by Gilles Deleuze's concept of the time-image, I argue that the profilmic time machine emerges as a revelatory double for cinematic practice and, by remembering time's material form, it renews the promise of overcoming death---even cinema's own. In the dissertation's second half, I shift my focus from the machine to the body, and from cinema to theater. In Chapter 3, I examine the ghosts of theory and theater, particularly in the work of Herbert Blau and Alice Rayner. While the ghost has been deployed to describe performance's phenomenological character---its here-and-there, its then-and-now---the theatrical ghost challenges haunting's rhetorical and conceptual use. With its substance and its agency, the ghost in theater not only describes something, it is something and it does something. In my final chapter, I then examine W. B. Yeats's plays of the 1910s in which he synthesizes an eclectic set of ghosts to produce what Edward Said calls an anti-imperial "culture of resistance." Inspired by his collaboration with dance pioneer Michio Ito, Yeats's dance plays recast time, space, and the body to produce an independent Irish theater and, incidentally, an autonomous Irish state. Across this project, the ghost and the time machine articulate the transitional positions that shape our thinking---the hyphens, the intervals---and in the afterword, I consider how photography further illuminates the character and the function of these sententious gaps.