Jeffrey Yeager - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Jeffrey Yeager

ew Shakespearean films were so underappreciated at their release as Orson Welles's Chimes at Midn... more ew Shakespearean films were so underappreciated at their release as Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight. 1 Compared to Laurence Olivier's morale boosting 1944 version of Henry V, Orson Welles's adaptation has never reached a wide audience, partly because of its long history of being in copyright limbo. 2 Since the film's debut, a critical tendency has been to read it as a lament for "Merrie England." In an interview, Welles claimed: "It is more than Falstaff who is dying. It's the old England, dying and betrayed" (qtd. in Hoffman 88). Keith Baxter, the actor who plays Prince Hal, expressed the sentiment that Hal was the principal character: Welles "always saw it as a triangle basically, a love story of a Prince lost between two father figures. Who is the boy going to choose?" (qtd. in Lyons 268). Samuel Crowl later modified these differing assessments by adding his own interpretation of Falstaff as the central character: "it is Falstaff's winter which dominates the texture of the film, not Hal's summer of self-realization" ("The Long Good-bye" 373). Michael Anderegg concurs with the assessment of Falstaff as the central figure when he historicizes the film by noting the film's "conflict between rhetoric and history" on the one hand and "the immediacy of a prelinguistic, prelapsarian, timeless physical world, on the other" (126). By placing the focus on Falstaff and cutting a great deal of text, Welles, Anderegg argues, deconstructs Shakespeare's world by moving "away from history and toward satire" (127). To continue the critical conversation advocating for Falstaff's centrality in the film, I turn to a historical lens by reexamining the historiography shaping readings of the history plays in the middle of the century, namely E.M.W Tillyard's book Shakespeare's History Plays and Laurence Olivier's 1944 film Henry V, which came out of the same cultural moment as Tillyard's study, World War II. Although Welles's film predates the Vietnam conflict, the two World Wars themselves deflated the mystique of war with the rise of greater military technology. It is an understood premise among modernist studies that the cheapening F

This dissertation traces the debates concerning the professionalization of medicine in America ac... more This dissertation traces the debates concerning the professionalization of medicine in America across the 19 th-and well into the 20 th-century and explores how the debates concerning professionalization in any given moment affected popular literary forms. Using Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious as its theoretical framework, this dissertation's chapters on the gothic, realism, naturalism, and satire trace each mode's dominant hegemonic position on this issue while showcasing dissenting voices across this century-long discourse. This project's methodology is centered in the New Historicism. Unlike other projects before it, this dissertation focuses primarily on the historical problem of state laws either regulating or deregulating the professionalization of medicine; however, it also emphasizes close attention to literary form as it traces the dominant and dissenting voices of these popular literary modes. Authors surveyed across this project include

ew Shakespearean films were so underappreciated at their release as Orson Welles's Chimes at Midn... more ew Shakespearean films were so underappreciated at their release as Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight. 1 Compared to Laurence Olivier's morale boosting 1944 version of Henry V, Orson Welles's adaptation has never reached a wide audience, partly because of its long history of being in copyright limbo. 2 Since the film's debut, a critical tendency has been to read it as a lament for "Merrie England." In an interview, Welles claimed: "It is more than Falstaff who is dying. It's the old England, dying and betrayed" (qtd. in Hoffman 88). Keith Baxter, the actor who plays Prince Hal, expressed the sentiment that Hal was the principal character: Welles "always saw it as a triangle basically, a love story of a Prince lost between two father figures. Who is the boy going to choose?" (qtd. in Lyons 268). Samuel Crowl later modified these differing assessments by adding his own interpretation of Falstaff as the central character: "it is Falstaff's winter which dominates the texture of the film, not Hal's summer of self-realization" ("The Long Good-bye" 373). Michael Anderegg concurs with the assessment of Falstaff as the central figure when he historicizes the film by noting the film's "conflict between rhetoric and history" on the one hand and "the immediacy of a prelinguistic, prelapsarian, timeless physical world, on the other" (126). By placing the focus on Falstaff and cutting a great deal of text, Welles, Anderegg argues, deconstructs Shakespeare's world by moving "away from history and toward satire" (127). To continue the critical conversation advocating for Falstaff's centrality in the film, I turn to a historical lens by reexamining the historiography shaping readings of the history plays in the middle of the century, namely E.M.W Tillyard's book Shakespeare's History Plays and Laurence Olivier's 1944 film Henry V, which came out of the same cultural moment as Tillyard's study, World War II. Although Welles's film predates the Vietnam conflict, the two World Wars themselves deflated the mystique of war with the rise of greater military technology. It is an understood premise among modernist studies that the cheapening F

This dissertation traces the debates concerning the professionalization of medicine in America ac... more This dissertation traces the debates concerning the professionalization of medicine in America across the 19 th-and well into the 20 th-century and explores how the debates concerning professionalization in any given moment affected popular literary forms. Using Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious as its theoretical framework, this dissertation's chapters on the gothic, realism, naturalism, and satire trace each mode's dominant hegemonic position on this issue while showcasing dissenting voices across this century-long discourse. This project's methodology is centered in the New Historicism. Unlike other projects before it, this dissertation focuses primarily on the historical problem of state laws either regulating or deregulating the professionalization of medicine; however, it also emphasizes close attention to literary form as it traces the dominant and dissenting voices of these popular literary modes. Authors surveyed across this project include