• About
    • Login
    View Item 
    •   Institutional Repository Home
    • Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    • Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    • View Item
    •   Institutional Repository Home
    • Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    • Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    • View Item
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

    Browse

    All of Institutional RepositoryCommunities & CollectionsBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsDepartmentThis CollectionBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsDepartment

    My Account

    LoginRegister

    Confessing Subjectivity: Power and Performative Agency in Early Modern Drama

    Wanninger, Jane Miller
    : https://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/etd-11302012-151125
    http://hdl.handle.net/1803/14928
    : 2012-12-11

    Abstract

    This dissertation traces confessional speech as a performative mode of social subject formation in English dramatic texts and non-fiction accounts from the early modern period. I explore the confessional speeches that pervade these works to illuminate a self-reflexive sense of the inherent intersubjective power invested in the term and idea of confession. I argue that inhabitations of confession’s conventional roles expose a sustained interest in the ways in which the power of this discursive structure might be mobilized. Long established in formal religious and legal practice, and predicated on ritualized configurations of discursive power, by the late sixteenth century, confession had developed a diffuse and complex social currency. My exploration of texts such as Heywood and Bromes’ The Late Lancashire Witches, Rowley, Dekker and Ford’s The Witch of Edmonton, Ford’s Tis Pity She’s a Whore, and Shakespeare’s Othello, illuminates how representations of confession expose the fissures in and dislocations of the discourses of power that animate them. This dissertation’s investigation of the interrelated dynamics of performativity, subjectivity, and power proceeds from a theoretical constellation informed by the work of scholars such as Austin, Butler, Felman, Foucault, and Althusser. I draw on this critical apparatus in terms of historically and generically situated representations of confessional interlocution to suggest that its subjective effects are constitutively multiple and simultaneous, revealing the dynamic interplay of configurations and reconfigurations of discursive power at work amidst the normative structures that delineate it as a social ritual.
    Show full item record

    Files in this item

    Icon
    Name:
    WanningerDissertation.pdf
    Size:
    9.051Mb
    Format:
    PDF
    View/Open

    This item appears in the following collection(s):

    • Electronic Theses and Dissertations

    Connect with Vanderbilt Libraries

    Your Vanderbilt

    • Alumni
    • Current Students
    • Faculty & Staff
    • International Students
    • Media
    • Parents & Family
    • Prospective Students
    • Researchers
    • Sports Fans
    • Visitors & Neighbors

    Support the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries

    Support the Library...Give Now

    Gifts to the Libraries support the learning and research needs of the entire Vanderbilt community. Learn more about giving to the Libraries.

    Become a Friend of the Libraries

    Quick Links

    • Hours
    • About
    • Employment
    • Staff Directory
    • Accessibility Services
    • Contact
    • Vanderbilt Home
    • Privacy Policy