Gestural Ekphrasis: Toward a Phenomenology of the Moving Body in Joyce and Woolf

<p>This theoretical project seeks to introduce a new critical methodology for evaluating gesture - both represented in text and paratextual - in the works of Virginia Woolf - specifically <em>The Voyage Out</em> (1915), <em>Orlando</em> (1928), <em>The Waves</em> (1931), and <em>Between the Acts</em> (1941) - and James Joyce - particularly <em>Ulysses</em> (1922) and<em> Finnegans Wake</em> (1939). Though gesture studies has developed significantly as an interdisciplinary field in recent decades and performance studies has elaborated on the moving body's significance to both text and performance, literary scholarship itself has not yet adequately incorporated possibilities for specific critical attention to gesture. Gesture is defined here as: <em>any movement of a body, human or nonhuman, which is carved in space and time and experienced (or has the capacity to be experienced) as an embodied, sensate phenomenon</em>. Drawing on interdisciplinary theories of gesture - psychological, psycholinguistic, musicological, and anthropological - this study moves primarily toward a phenomenology of the moving body in Joyce and Woolf. Its five chapters address musical gestures, ritual gestures, language-gestures, adaptation/process gestures, and archival gestures. In order to emphasize the intermedial capacity of gesture, I consider gesture within the framework of gestural ekphrasis:<em> the rendering of gesture - comprising quotidian lived gestures as well as gestural art forms - in another artistic medium and/or the gestures enacted by the artist as part of an ekphrastic process</em>.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Year dc:date.available

2018

Author dc:creator

• Benke, Lauren Nicole

Contributors dc:contributor

• Eleanor McNees, Ph.D.
• Tayana Hardin
• Eric Gould

• Ekphrasis
• Gesture
• Joyce
• Modernism
• Performance
• Woolf
• English Language and Literature
• Literature in English, British Isles

Statement dc:rights

• <p>Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.</p>

Language dc:language

en

Repository record dc:identifier

https://digitalcommons.du.edu/etd/1401

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:digitalcommons.du.edu:etd-2401