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

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Gestural Ekphrasis: Toward a Phenomenology of the Moving Body in Joyce and Woolf University of Denver Digital Commons @ DU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Graduate Studies 1-1-2018 Gestural Ekphrasis: Toward a Phenomenology of the Moving Body in Joyce and Woolf Lauren Nicole Benke University of Denver Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.du.edu/etd Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Recommended Citation Benke, Lauren Nicole, "Gestural Ekphrasis: Toward a Phenomenology of the Moving Body in Joyce and Woolf" (2018). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 1401. https://digitalcommons.du.edu/etd/1401 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate Studies at Digital Commons @ DU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ DU. For more information, please contact [email protected],[email protected]. Gestural Ekphrasis: Toward a Phenomenology of the Moving Body in Joyce and Woolf __________ A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of Arts and Humanities University of Denver __________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy __________ by Lauren N. Benke March 2018 Advisor: Eleanor McNees © Lauren N. Benke 2018 All Rights Reserved Author: Lauren N. Benke Title: Gestural Ekphrasis: Toward a Phenomenology of the Moving Body in Joyce and Woolf Advisor: Eleanor McNees Degree Date: March 2018 ABSTRACT 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 The Voyage Out (1915), Orlando (1928), The Waves (1931), and Between the Acts (1941)—and James Joyce—particularly Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (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: 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. 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: 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. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the University of Denver AHSS Divisional Research Grant committee for funding to complete this project. I am also indebted to Scott Howard, Bin Ramke, Jan Gorak, Donna Beth Ellard, Sarah Morelli, Eric Gould, and Tayana Hardin for generous intellectual insights that helped shape this research and to Eleanor McNees for insightful, incisive feedback and investment in my academic and professional progress. Thank you to Patrick Gutman for allowing me to discuss your music, and for the generous gift of your time and energy in an incredibly enjoyable interview. I am grateful for the academic insights and friendship of Conny Fasshauer, Colleen Taylor, and Sarah Faulkner. Thank you to Tori, Jonny, and Oscar Shaw, Aaron Saunders and Jacqui Montgomery, Seamus O’Hara, Mary-Ellen McCartan, and Henry O’Hara, and Tom and Eileen Saunders for my second home and support network in Belfast. Thank you to Gabrielle Ligotke, the best friend in both good times and bad, who I’m lucky to know and continually inspired to emulate, Mark Benke, an unwavering example of dedication and a constant source of unconditional support (and fishing-tips), and Tyler Benke, for astute counsel, friendship, and much more than I deserve in a brother. Thank you to Marjorie Schaefer, who read every piece of writing I ever produced until this one, and who would have been first in line to peruse this. This dissertation is dedicated to Mary Benke—for a lifetime of inspiration, for the late nights and early mornings, and for the self-sacrifice and love that underlies all I do—and to Tom Saunders; your love and support is written into each page of this work and every day of my future, and I couldn’t be luckier that I found you. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures .................................................................................................................... vi Preface............................................................................................................................... vii Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 Ekphrasis from Rhetorical Exercise to Modernist Multimodality ........................ 14 An Abridged History of Gesture Studies .............................................................. 28 Toward a Definition of Gestural Ekphrasis .......................................................... 37 Performance/Performativity ...................................................................... 38 Gesture and Cultural Conditioning/Subversion ........................................ 43 Rhythmic/Musical Gesture ....................................................................... 44 Gesture and Phenomenology .................................................................... 45 Ode on a Gesture ....................................................................................... 49 Methodology ......................................................................................................... 55 Chapter One: Musical Gesture .......................................................................................... 64 Intermedial Innovation and Gestural Ekphrasis in Between the Acts ................... 74 Musical Ekphrasis “Sirens” and Between the Acts ............................................... 84 Modulations of Intersubjectivity ........................................................................... 93 Variation on Modulations of Intersubjectivity .................................................... 105 Spatio-melodic Landscapes ................................................................................ 118 Rhythm, Musical Gesture, and Augmented Temporality ................................... 127 Chapter Two: Ritual Gesture and (Inter)subjectivity...................................................... 142 The Gesture of Smoking an E-cigarette .............................................................. 149 Rhythms of Ritual in The Voyage Out ................................................................ 165 “As stage to set by ritual rote” ............................................................................ 184 Chapter Three: Language as Gesture .............................................................................. 204 Thought, Language, Gesture ............................................................................... 208 Language Origins and Syntactical Gesture ......................................................... 214 Self-aware Language-gestures in The Waves and Finnegans Wake ................... 218 The Gesture-gesturality Complex ....................................................................... 228 Syntactical Gestures ............................................................................................ 235 The Gesture of the Dash ..................................................................................... 238 Imagistic, Narratological, Allusive Gestures ...................................................... 246 Toward a Phenomenology of the Reading Body ................................................ 252 Chapter Four: Gestures of Process and Intermedial Ekphrasis ....................................... 256 Compositional and Editorial Gestures of the Wake, The Waves, and The Years 262 “Roaratorio” and Palimpsestic Processual Gestures ........................................... 272 Intermedial Rehearsal, a somatic circus on Woolf Works ................................... 281 iv Musical Composition Gestures and Joycean Melodies in Patrick Gutman’s Who Goes with Fergus ................................................................................................ 291 An Archive of Process: Completed and “Not-Choreographed” Intermedial Ekphrasis ............................................................................................................. 305 Chapter Five: Toward a Semiotic Archive of Gesture.................................................... 313 The Gestural Archive .......................................................................................... 316 Gesture as Archive in Orlando and Ulysses ....................................................... 322 Semiotic Invitations to Gesture Studies .............................................................. 330 Alternative Systems of Gestural Typology ......................................................... 334 Toward (and away from) a Semiotic Archive of Modernist Gesture ................. 350 I. Corporeal Typology ............................................................................
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